The Worst
I was walking through the Home Depot parking lot for the one billionth time yesterday when a guy yelled out, “Are you smart enough to go in there?” which struck me as an odd question for a stranger to ask. Turns out he was a fan and was referring to my Mensa membership which is even weirder that he could roll that bit of trivia into a conversation starter.
So I stopped to talk with him and he asked me a question no one’s ever asked me before: What is the worst column you ever had to write?
You could take that a lot of different ways. Writing a column in tribute to my dog Ellen who got put down wasn’t exactly cheery, it’s the only column that I typed, hit send, and never proofread.
To this day I’ve never read the column.
The one I got in the most trouble for was my Miss Michigan column where I put odds on the contestants based on their picture. No one was too congenial after that one ran.
But I think the guy was referring to assigned columns that were, for lack of a better term, a pain.
So here are the top three in reverse order:
#3 - Christmas Lights. I drove around looking at freaking Christmas Lights for two weeks. Here’s the thing about Christmas lights; they’re out in the winter and they only look good after dark. I’d get out of work and get a list of people who wanted their lights “reviewed” and next thing you know I’m driving in a blizard to some farmhouse in Montague 500 miles off the beaten path and they’d have some lame string of lights on their garage. Most of the houses I looked at weren’t even the best decorations on the street let alone West Michigan.
After a few dozen houses my will to live was sapped, I opened a vein and just unloaded on these lame-ass displays of Christmas joy. “You can’t put a plastic candle next to a snowman ... Why is there a penguin in Santa’s sleigh? Penguins live at the south pole not the North Pole...What idiot puts an orange bulb on Rudolf’s nose?”... and so on and so forth. People loved it, I hated it.
#2 - Taste of Muskegon. I’m not exactly a foodie, so why they wanted me to be a judge and write about “Taste of Muskegon” is beyond me. I was supposed to visit 50 food booths and pick a winner, it was about 600 degrees outside and after booth two I was stuffed. Add to that it wasn’t broken down into categories other than “food” so I’m trying to judge if a burrito is better than a pancake is better than an apple pie is better than a deep fried Twinkie. I was in such misery I was handing food to strangers and begging them to tell me what they thought. How I didn’t chunk I’ll never know.
#1 - “Super Sucker.” I had just gotten the dream gig of driving around the State of Michigan with five friends and reviewing ALL the casinos. It was pretty sweet and everything was comped. But before I could go I had to agree to review a concert at the LC Walker Arena. It was a triple-bill: The Ramones, White Zombie, and Super Sucker. I think I knew two songs by the Ramones and that was it.
Oh, and it was Thanksgiving Day.
No big deal, I’ve reviewed plenty of concerts where I wasn’t exactly familiar with the artists catalog. I brought my friend Chris Bolema along to help me out because he at least knew the bands.
Whoever set up the speakers turned them to twelve and whoever set up the pyrotechnics thought we were outside. Add to that people could smoke inside back then and it was quite the treat. The music was so loud I actually couldn’t understand a word and that included the songs I knew. There was so much smoke and fire you literally couldn’t see the stage; occasionally someone would walk in front of a light and you could see their silhouette through the smoke but that was it. They could have put a tape on, the bands could have left, and no one would have known. There was ear-splitting music, smoke and fire everywhere, and lunatics beating each other up in the mosh pit. It was as close to Danté as you’re going to get. But hey, I got paid, Chris didn’t, and the next day I was off on a gambling adventure. There are certainly worse ways to earn a little ... paper.
Printed by permission of the author. Email him at Lorenzat large@aol.com.
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