While insomnia scrolling late last night, or early this morning depending on your point of view, I chanced across this thread from Joshua Marshall on BlueSky, and it focused me for the first time really on something I’d noticed long ago, and yet didn’t really look at. That saying of Orwell’s that To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle is more truth than I would like at times.

I had no idea he was German. This guy…

The one I’ve been telling A Coming Out Story about all these years.

Back then I just assumed he was Brazilian because that was what he always emphasised to me. I just figured he was descended from Portuguese settlers since he didn’t look like a native Brazilian. Then his family moved away and I learned they have left the country and I was devastated. I figured he’d moved back to Brazil. When a fellow classmate said they’d probably moved back to Germany I was confused. Why, I asked. He’s German came the reply. Really? That classmate looked at me like I was a clueless dolt, which back then I probably was, and said His father’s name is Wolfgang!.

Oh.

Many years later I managed after much searching to reconnect with him again, and now he’s working in Epcot Germany as a waiter, and I go visit Disney World for the first time after he encouraged it…

Come on man, it’s your heritage…baseball, mom, apple pie and Mickey Mouse…what’s wrong with you…

…and I go to Epcot Germany to see him for the first time in 34 years. And there I’m immersed in Disney Germany where Epcot World Showcase brings young adults over from the host countries to work in the park. And I finally get to see him again after so long, and I notice but don’t notice how I’m hearing a lot of German accents in there…but not from him. His voice sounds like it always did back in high school and that thrills me so much I don’t ask myself why he doesn’t have that noticeable German accent the others in there do. In the back of my mind I just assume it’s because he spent most of his young adult life here in the States, and he picked up the American accent because he was immersed in it.

Which, as it turns out, is probably the case…

The BlueSky thread I was reading this morning was about Elvis Presley’s manager, the infamous Colonel Tom Parker. Parker always claimed to be a southern good ‘ole boy born in West Virginia, but it was a carefully fabricated act. He was actually Dutch, born in the Netherlands as Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk and he came to the US at about the age of 20 by way of simply walking off a ship he was working for while it was docked in New York City. That age is important because it meant he had to work at disguising his Dutch accent.

Marshall notes this was probably why he claimed to be from West Virginia instead of the deep south, where his accent would have given him up. Locals know instantly who is one of them and who isn’t by how you speak the language, just ask the Ephraimites.

A Shibboleth is any custom, tradition, or way of speaking that identifies someone as a member of a particular group or marks them as an outsider.

Here in Baltimore Maryland the locals here know instantly I wasn’t raised in Baltimore the moment I start talking. That working class bawlmer accent is pretty recognisable here and elsewhere in the state. Saying he was from West Virginia gave Parker just enough distance from the deep south that his accent could be believable by the good ‘ole boys and still be accepted as one of them. Sort of. As Marshall says…

This whole issue of language acquisition has always fascinated me in itself. Your brain at 10 is not the same as your brain at 20. Certain aspects of your brain fix at different ages. And even though you can learn new languages through he ability to integrate these very subtle intonations that make up a native accent elude all but a very, very small number of people if they learn the language past that age. In any case … Tom Parker! How’d he do it? I needed to figure this out so I went down a bit of a rabbit hole this afternoon and the answer, to me at least, is as interesting as the question. He kind of *didnt* hide it.

He had a reasonably good accent. And what he did was affect and give people to think that he had a bit of a lisp or some kind of speech impediment. And I suspect he said that he was born in West Virginia – despite the fact that his professional life was around Mississippi and Louisiana and Tennessee because A) it’s a bit of distance from those states around the Mississippi River AND B) because there are all sorts of odd-sounding (to us) Appalachian regional sub-dialects.

So if anyone ever thought well, Colonel Tom speaks a bit funny, dont-he? well thats because he has some sort of upcountry hillbilly twang from somewhere in West Virginia where was born and also he’s got some kind of lisp. So just let it go. So basically how he hid his accent is that he didn’t. arker apparently spoke a variety of Lower Mississippi English with the kind of mild Dutch accent you’d expect from someone who by the mid-50s had lived in the US for about 25 years. But he had this cover story of Lisp/West Virginia accent you don’t know about. And it worked.

It seems once upon a time that the cover story of the object of my teenage crush was he was from Brazil…which he was…but not to tell anyone but close friends that he was actually a German. In retrospect that was probably because he got a lot of teasing from the other kids about the war.

Fact is the first thing he did when we met again after 34 years was try to suss me out about my feelings toward Germans…

You know what Germans are famous for…right?
Beer?
That too.
Pretzels?
That too.
Gummy bears?
That too.
Complaining?
***

And when he sent me that Christmas postcard with the Christmas greeting on it in both English and German I felt a wave of shame over all the WWII German jokes my childhood friends of mine and I told each other over and over again, and for accepting Hollywood’s German stereotypes. I can barely watch one of my favorite movies, Casablanca, without cringing at the stereotypical evil German, Major Heinrich Strasser, played to the hilt by Conrad Veidt (who was himself a German refugee having fled the fascists with his Jewish wife). It’s hard for me to watch any of those movies now without thinking of the guy I once thought hung the moon and the stars, and how it must have made him feel living here since he was a kid. He would have had to endure all of it.

David Low, master of the political cartoon art form, for all his forceful anti Nazi imagery (he was put near the top of Hitler’s list of people to be hunted down and arrested after a Nazi invasion of Britain) also pretty forcefully reminded the victors not to blame all Germans for what the fascists did…

So to me, the oddball art kid who couldn’t stop gawking at him, he emphasised his Brazilian birthplace at first. Why his family lived in Brazil long enough for their youngest to be born there was something I never asked him about. I figured it would be a pretty sensitive subject. But I have never doubted that he is a good man. Had we more time together and the ability to talk to each other sincerely, with trust and no worries, I think he would have eventually shared more of himself with me. Because he kept flirting with me I like to think we could have become boyfriends, although it was 1971 and not a good time to be gay, even in liberal Montgomery county Maryland. So that’s probably a fantasy on my part. I have often wondered if mom, who loved her boy to the day she dies, I have never doubted it, would have thrown me out of the house if I ever came out to her. At least two of my senior year classmates were almost certainly boyfriends I think, because of how close they were, and how you never saw one without the other.

That was the world gay kids lived in back then, and in some places even still. I’m pretty sure his family put a stop to his spending time with me when they found out that he was talking with queer kid from school. Bavaria was and still is a very conservative and insular part of Germany. So it never happened. Then they moved away and I was heartbroken. But it never occurred to me to question why he had no German accent, which was how I didn’t know until I was told that he was German.

I see it now. He was immersed in American English at a young age. I know this because I have all the old high school yearbooks and he is in there from what would have been age 12 at least, and he may have been here well before that…

So I’m pretty sure he speaks German correctly among other Germans, since he would have learned it from his own family who were originally from Munich. Perhaps other Germans would know as soon as he opens his mouth that he is Bavarian, just as the locals here in Baltimore know I’m not from here, and if you have the ear, that my family (mom’s side, the side I grew up with) were central Pennsylvanian. But he spoke American English among us without the German accent because he was immersed in it young enough to absorb it that way without having to work to overcome the German fricatives. When you’re a kid you pick up the manners of speech from the world around you and your voice muscles naturally adapt to it. When he was young he learned German from Germans, and American English from how that is spoken here in the Mid Atlantic states.

But not Bawlmer. Obviously. No hon…I’m not from around here…

So, a wee update on that new photo gallery I’m working on…

I found a roll from 1975 I really need to scan in. It involves our work installing a monster TV antenna on a friend’s house. Back in the day, before cable TV was everywhere, a directional antenna on the roof, mounted on an antenna rotor, got you the best picture, and maybe even good signal from other cities like Baltimore or even maybe possibly Harrisburg. And my classmate-friends were all in with bigger is better.

The project…had an unexpected outcome.

I saw these shots in my archive contact sheets and knew I had to include them in this first new gallery. But there is a problem. The film is Ilford, which I wasn’t used to using over Tri-X. And according to the catalogue I developed it in D76- 1:1 as a one shot. It looks like I over developed. Probably because I just blithely assumed that since the Ilford roll was ASA 400 it developed just like Tri-X.

So these negatives are very dense. The scanner can handle that and give me something I can work with. But lord have mercy it takes a long time to scan. The first set of 12 negatives took sixteen hours to scan.

So I’ll be scanning this roll in for the rest of today too. And I have four more rolls (that should scan normally) with shots on them I want to include that I need to scan. So maybe by the weekend.

But when this roll is done I’ll throw a couple shots from it up here as a teaser. I can think of three or four classmates on here who will remember it well.

A classmate embarked long ago on a career as a blues keyboardist and singer. These days he goes by the stage name Reverend Billy C. Wirtz and last night I got to catch his act live for the first time, along with another classmate I hadn’t seen in ages. First of all, the Reverend is Amazing. He does a great blues keyboard with a side of comedy and servings of blues history. I would definitely go see him again when he’s in town, and I think you should too.

The spot I saw him at was a small restaurant bar venue in Bowie Maryland, and it turned out that Reverend Billy was the between sets act for the main event which was an almost big band blues group named The Rick Jones Music Emporium. I would definitely go see them again too, but with a set of earplugs because their sound guy likes it LOUD. They played a set of blues songs, some of which were pretty risque to an older and obviously heterosexual crowd that just ate it all up. They were having a good time. Meanwhile I did what I always do in those situations, mentally swapping out a pronoun here and there to make it something I could relate to.

There was one song in particular that gave me some ideas for sexy drawing, along the lines of the one I did following California Rep Ted Hickman’s crack about skin tight short-shorts and go-go boots…

I was going to get down to it today, but first I wanted to read the lyrics again. What I discovered was it was a Randy Newman song. I came to know and appreciate Randy Newman through his wonderful movie scores for Avalon and Pleasantville, but I knew he also did pop songs. I would not have recognized this one as one of his, but then it was hard to hear the lyrics in that venue because the room was small and their sound guy just blasted us with it.

When I read the lyrics I saw a passage that spoke to me as a gay man and I didn’t expect that. So I re-read the lyrics again as if they were speaking directly to me. Well…not Me specifically since I have no boyfriend and never have. But to something I actually thought I might have someday when I was a younger man. And yes…actually reading the lyrics you could see it was a Randy Newman song. And it could just as easily have spoken to a heterosexual who’d found their other half despite what the rest of the would thought of it. Or anyone in a variety of sexual and romantic spectrum. Which I think is what really made it a Randy Newman song. He isn’t about shutting people out of life’s joys. People who got pissed at “Short People” weren’t paying attention.

I’m not going to name that song just yet…if you already know which one I’m talking about, fine, but for those of you that don’t I’d rather let you discover it just the way I did. I thought I was just going to do a one-off sexy riff on this song, mostly on its title. But now I have to do another one-off multi-panel cartoon on it. Probably can’t post it to my Facebook page when I’d done because as I said the song was kinda risque. But that’s why I still maintain my own website. And I’ve been wanting to do more of this sexy guy anyway. I’m thinking it along the lines of a page Robert Crumb did, that so I’m told he hates now because it’s been copied and misunderstood for decades…that Keep On Trucking one. Each panel of it is captioned with a single line from a song by Blind Boy Fuller. Something along those lines. Not the entire song, just maybe four panels with a line or two from the song and a drawing above it that says how the song made me feel about the joy of love and sex and life that lots of us of my generation might have had in a better world that never was. You can loose yourself in a song, in the world it spins for you, and believe for a moment that it was real.

This may take a few weeks. Let you know when it’s done and posted. I might even post some of the pencils while I work, like I did for that retort I made to Ted Hickman.