"And you thought The Clash was loud."

Exactly twenty-five years ago, in a messy office at the end of a university union that no longer exists, not far from the site of an old gym that was torn down, but where it still snows just like it did in 1984, my buddy Ron Klempner banged those words out on a Smith Corona typewriter.

It was long into the wee hours of the morning--the latenight, as we called it-- and the office of Pipe Dream, the school paper on the campus of the State University of New York at Binghamton (SUNY-B, to the natives) would have been abuzz. X-acto knives a-cutting, hot wax a-simmering, and, without a doubt, somebody making out in the stat camera room.

A few hours earlier, the Division III SUNY-B Colonials had lost an overtime thriller to Albany, 62-60, in front of 2,150 people, the largest crowd in school history. And while we may not have come out on top, the crowd was so uncharacteristically noisy, so alive, it's no surprise that Ron's lede centered around the concert that had just taken place in that same gym.

(It's still astounding to me that "Clash" and "SUNY-B West Gym" could ever appear in the same sentence.)

After a short trudge across campus in sub-freezing temperatures, past the hideous modern science classrooms and past the ugly 1950's Library Tower (sadly, there was no middle ground at Binghamton), Ron and I would have gotten down to business, he in the back, conferring with fellow sportswriters Jay Levy and Stephen Lichtenstein, and me down the corridor in the darkroom, the smell of stop bath and fixer only slightly out pacing the smell of beer and chicken wings from the adjacent Campus Pub.

That the school is no longer called SUNY-B (it now prefers the more genteel Binghamton University), that the team no longer goes by Colonials (they're now the Bearcats), that they play in Division I instead of Division III, that the school paper changed its named from The Colonial News to Pipe Dream to make a statement during the Vietnam era but the Bearcats changed from Colonials a few years back to sell more merchandise, that we lost instead of won that night, and even that 2,150 seemed like a big deal to us back then has everything to do with why I'm sitting here writing this tonight.

You see, tomorrow at 11:00 I will gather at a bar in Arlington, Virginia with, hopefully, a few strangers from my alma mater (maybe Tony Kornheiser, Class of '70, will join us) to cheer on the Binghamton Bearcats (if that is in fact their name) as they play for the championship of the America East league. With a win over UMBC, Binghamton will advance to the NCAA tournament for the first time in school history. One win.

And so, in the words of the Grateful Dead, the band that once played a legendary concert at Harpur College (believe it or not, what Binghamton University was called even before the SUNY-B days), I can now type with some authority, What a long, strange trip it's been.

Strange, because after a quarter of a century of waiting for this moment, I'm not even sure if I know the team I'm rooting for. This team, unlike the ones I knew, comes in on a hot ten-game winning streak and is actually favored. This team packs thousands into a new field house, unlike the meager crowds I remember. And, sadly, this team comes with a rap sheet.

I can't name a single player on the current squad, though I can tell you that the New York Times recently featured a front page story on Binghamton Bearcats basketball and it wasn't a pretty sight. A lot of universities turn a blind eye to player misdeeds when the basketball program is involved and Binghamton is apparently no different. According to the Times, grading standards have been overlooked, criminal records ignored, and professors bullied.

The new coach stands accused of having recruited players from a shell of a prep school in Philadelphia, one that handed out diplomas like cups of Gatorade. Even crazier, the team center fled the U.S. back to his native Serbia after pummeling a fellow student into a coma.

Charming, eh?

Outside of sports, the university I attended has become unrecognizable to me. The Village Chef, whose menu featured "brain" muffins instead of bran muffins, was carted off in toto to a diner museum. The Campus Pub was closed years and years ago, victim of an increased drinking age. This year, Newing College, where I lived for my first couple of years, is being torn down to make way for new dorms. (It's a bit odd for a university much maligned for lack of history--forget ivy--to go out and destroy the only really old buildings it has.) Hell, my fellow Pipe Dreamer John Dieffenbach just called a few minutes ago to tell me that College in the Woods, thanks to rabid development, isn't even in the woods anymore.

Maybe this is the reason that every other night, right around dinner time, when the phone rings with some fresh-faced student staying, "Hi, Mr. Mendelsohn? I'm with the Binghamton University Foundation..." thoughts of strangulation pop into my mind.

But in the interest of fresh starts and nostalgia, I will try and ignore all of these things as I sit at The Liberty Tavern in Clarendon tomorrow. I'm not well-versed enough in the controversy surrounding the team to make any definitive judgements. (From what I've read, the other coaches in the conference made a statement by not naming any Binghamton players to the all-conference team.)

Instead of cheering for that which I can't quite grasp, I'll instead holler for the memory of that which I can.

I'll cheer for players like Derek Pankey, shown above blocking a shot in that 1984 overtime loss, as well as Marty Young, Greg "Spider" Pollard, Greg "Clyde" Fleming, and Mo Salama. Unless I'm reading it wrong, Pankey still holds the all-time Binghamton record for rebounds in a game at 31. These guys never got to play on ESPN2, where tomorrow's Bearcats' game will be televised. In fact, they often played in front of empty gyms, with only a couple of hundred die-hard fans watching.

I'll cheer for guys like Colonial Bill and Colonial Woody, students who first tried to create some kind of major college hoopla. There were nights when I remember feeling sorry for them and their megaphones. But they never gave up trying to ignite that very first spark of excitement. I'll think of friends like Tom and Nan Pasquarello, who would sit in those empty stands, along with Peggy Gray, Tommy Garland, Brendan O'Hara.

I'll cheer for coaches like Tim Schum and John Affleck and Dave Archer, guys who gave so much to the university back then and did it on shoestring budgets.

But most of all, I'll be cheering for my fellow Pipe Dreamers, like Karen "Scoop" Schwartz, who always encourages me to write, and Gerry Mullany who's been at the New York Times for decades; Adam Wiepert and Ken Brown, who went on to the Wall Street Journal; Ken Funk, the funniest man alive, William Salit and Jeff Knapp; and people like Mike Waters, Hank Goldsmith, Adrienne Spota and Dave Zensky. I'm getting old and I can't remember everyone.

As for Ron Klempner, arguably the best sportswriter in Binghamton history, well, he went and got himself all growed up. For years the Associate Counsel for the NBA Player's Association, Sports Illustrated once ran a photo of Ronny lecturing Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls about an upcoming collective bargaining agreement. So I might not cheer for Ronny as much as ask him for some money when I'm done typing this.

No matter what happens tomorrow, it'll be a great day. If we lose, it's clear we'll be back knocking in years to come. And if we win? Did somebody say road trip?

I'll close with a snippet of an editorial from that January 20, 1984 issue of Pipe Dream, the one following that tough overtime loss. It reads:

While sports has never ranked higher than the Pub in importance to the average SUNY-B student, there is undeniably a certain magic at those schools united behind a team, no matter what the sport.

Perhaps sports is trivial compared to world politics. Perhaps our time is best spent in study rather than on the razor-sharp edge of excitement as that last shot sinks in for two points. But that one instant of unity, that one thought of shared glory...

What we will remember from our years here are the vivid moments, not the chapter in that dusty old textbook: that wild party, that all-nighter, that one friend, and now, thanks to the SUNY-B basketball team, maybe even that one game.

Go Colonia....I mean Bearcats.

Matt

Obtuse. \äb-ˈtüs, əb-, -ˈtyüs\ adjective. lacking sharpness or quickness of sensibility or intellect: insensitive, stupid. Not clear or precise in thought or expression.

Synonyms: unfeeling, tactless, insensitive; blind, imperceptive, unobservant; gauche, boorish; slow, dim.

I know I'm supposed to keep this darn blog photo-centric, but sometimes we feel the need to veer off course.

That need came this morning at a photo shoot in downtown Washington, where I bumped into my old friend Kim Giammaria. Kim is the Washington area's best make-up artist and we've been running into each other for a decade now. Kim has a big heart, whether she's worrying about the well being of her friend Judith's daughter, Lindsay, a young woman in Richmond who lost her arms and legs to sepsis in the aftermath of routine intestinal surgery, or the memory of another young woman, Krista Thompson, who passed away from a brain tumor on October 24, 2008.

Kim and her son Carson were close with Krista right up until the day she died. "She was like a daughter to me," Kim told me today. "She called me Aunt Kim. In the sixth grade she and Carson started this sweet little crush. Then one day we got the phone call: 'Did you hear that Krista's in the hospital?' She had a golf ball size brain tumor--the kind that Ted Kennedy has-- and she started losing her hair. You could only go so deep to cut it out and we thought the surgery was successful."

Though Carson and Krista would eventually break off their young relationship, a bond had formed that was indestructible. During seventh, eighth and part of ninth grades, the two attended Hayfield Secondary School in Fairfax County.

"He was always there for her," Kim says. "I remember they had cut all her hair off, she comes over throwing up and falls asleep on Carson's head. He wouldn't move cause she was sleeping on his shoulder. One day Carson was even dancing in the rain with her and that little shaved head."

That shaved head would sometimes lead to petty insensitivity, the first sign that dogmatic adherence to zero tolerance rules can muscle out a bit of humanity in the process. "Teachers would stop her in the hall and tell her that she couldn't wear a hat," says Kim. "'Take it off,' they would say. She's a thirteen year old girl who was tired of telling people her story. You're going to hassle a kid with a brain tumor about wearing a hat?" she asks incredulously.

Well, some of that obtuseness apparently still lingers at Hayfield. On March 9, Kim sent the principal there an email asking if the school would mind putting up some flyers about the upcoming Race for Hope, an event planned for this coming May 3rd to raise awareness about brain cancer. (Proceeds from the event benefit the National Brain Tumor Society and Accelerate Brain Cancer Cure.) Kim, not surprisingly, is part of Team Krista. (That's Krista in the little photo up top.) Here's the email she sent:

Dear Dr. Oehrlein,

I hope this note finds you in good spirits. I'm not sure if you know me but you may know my son, Carson Giammaria, who is a student at Hayfield, a wrestler and a football player. My older son graduated from Hayfield 3 years ago. I love Hayfield and I love the staff. We are so fortunate to have the teachers, coaches and admin that we have.

Coach Pugh and Coach Hill have made such an impact on my son Carson, he was just accepted to the summer program at West Point, and I believe the support and ethics that he has learned from these fine men are part of the making of the young man that he has become. So for this I want to thank you.
Regardless to what your answer is to my question I do want you to thank you and tell you how much Hayfield and the staff mean to me. I was right on the border when we went through the changes with South County....and I was determined to keep Carson at Hayfield no matter what I had to do.

Krista Thompson, Carson's first little girlfriend, also went to Hayfield but moved to South County when boundaries changed. Krista passed away October 24th after battling a brain tumor for 4 years. Some of the boys on the teams have worn the buttons that we have put out in honor of her.

We are putting on a run to bring awareness to brain tumors in young adults. Krista ran the race ....this will be the first year she won't be there with us. Many students from Hayfield, some who went to elementary school and middle school with her, will be running in the race to remember Krista.

So my question is would it be possible for us to post flyers at Hayfield to make the race known to other students who may want to run. South County has turned us down after telling us we could. I am not sure how you feel about posting flyers but I assure you this is a very well meaning effort so no other family and friends will have to go through the loss of a young person like the Thompson and all who loved Krista have gone through.

I will attach a copy of the poster and also a link to the race so you can see how big and important it is.

Thank you for taking the time to read this Dr. Oehrlein.

Sincerely,
Kim Giammaria

Don't 'ya hate when you write a heartfelt personal message and you get a form letter in response? As if no one was actually listening to a thing you wrote? Well, here's the email Kim received back from Principal Oehrlein:

"Hello and good morning. Yes, it is so tragic when young lives are lost so early. I think the Race for Hope is a marvelous undertaking. However, our reality in this tough economy is that I am contacted, almost daily, by non-profit and well-intentioned groups wanting to use some or all of our student body to participate in raising funds for their non-profit organization (your email is the third in the last five days). The high numbers of such requests coming to principals actually lead the School Board to pass a regulation indicating that students should not be accessed to raise funds for outside organizations. These efforts also take away time and energy for students who are fundraising for school clubs, co-curricular activities such as band and chorus, as well as, athletic sports teams. I am happy to personally contribute though.

Best wishes to you and the Race for Hope efforts, B. Oehrlein

Paging Dr. Oehrlein, human being. Yes, we get the point. Do a good deed for one dead child and you have to do good deeds for every dead child. Your email is the third in the last five days. Such a drag. (Each time I read those particular words, I get angrier. As if he's responding to an annoying Nigerian bank scam email rather the actual one you just read.)

We all know that schools have gone a little crazy in the head these days with regards to zero tolerance, but Dr. Oerhlein's response deserves a place in the Missing The Forest For The Trees Hall of Fame. While it is thoughtful of him to offer to contribute, it's hard not to notice the utter aloofness in his response, the rhetorical equivalent of not looking someone in the eyes. In this tough economy... Takes time and energy away... Yes, it's so tragic... Um, Dr. Oehrlein? Krista went to your school at one point, for goodness sake. It would have been nice to see him dispense with the bureaucratic blow-off in favor of a more heartfelt reply.

Look. Schools are all about rules, I understand that. And I can understand not wanting to allow a school to become an oversized billboard for one event after another. But this isn't a Domino's two-for-one offer. It seems incomprehensible that a ban on posting flyers for outside charity events could be so inflexible as to not allow for helping preserve the memory of a student from that school. Tough love indeed.

I'm certain Dr. Oehrlein is a great educator. All signs point to it: he was named Middle School Principal of the Year recently. And he can't be expected to remember every student. (My junior high principal knew every loser by name but couldn't identify one honor student if his life depended on it. Maybe that just goes with the territory.) And finally, even if his response is the we-must-be-fair-to-everyone way to go, and I'm dead wrong here, I can still understand why Kim was so hurt. We write about a vibrant young woman and get a form letter back.

The school is missing a real opportunity. Participation in charitable events, whether they are breast cancer walks or AIDS rides, is far from the time suck that Principal Oehrlein alludes to. Playing Wii and PlayStation all day, now that's a time suck. Taking part in a brain tumor event in memory of a fellow student is a lesson that might guide young people for the rest of their lives. It might inspire them to become doctors, researchers, educators, humanitarians.

For sticking to school policy, which is no doubt crafted to protect students from commercialism, I'll give Principal Oehrlein an A. But for sensitivity and compassion on this particular issue? I'd say an F is in order.

Matt

p.s. To contribute to Team Krista, please click here.

Wait for me, okay?

Yes, I know that once again I've been a terrible blogger. You go to Vegas for a week and your whole life falls apart. Well, not really but it sounds like a good excuse. Truth be told, we've been trying to catch up on a lot of things during the hibernating period that falls between Valentine's Day and 78 degree days like today. And I can officially report that we're now almost at the point where I can say with certainty that not so much has been caught up. C'est la vie, n'est-ce pas?

But I don't want to delay anymore on one particular wedding that did get caught up in the rush to get caught up. One of the reasons is that the couple in this case, Gabrielle Garcia and Simon Beaumont, live across the Atlantic. And I know they've been waiting ever so patiently over there in England and I don't want them to wait any longer, particularly Simon's immediate family. The second reason is that Simon, like me, is a total Bruce Springsteen fanatic. And it's probably a good rule that you should always be kind to your fellow Springsteen fanatic. You never know when you'll need a ticket.

In fact, it's through Bruce that I first knew Gabi and Simon were my kind of people. We were doing an engagement shoot around the Mall a few months back and we started talking music. Listening to the car radio paly Mark Knopfler's Telegraph Road led to talking about Springsteen's Seeger Sessions, which of course led to Matt pulling out his iPhone and showing off the clip of his daughter singing Thunder Road when she was just four, something all my close friends are completely and utterly tired of by now. This is how it goes with me--one comment leads to another and suddenly we find we're musical twins.

Simon and Gabi were married at two of the loveliest places you could ask for, historic St. John's across form the White House, and the St. Regis Hotel, which looks beautiful after a long renovation. To give you an idea of how important St. John's is to this city, it just hosted President Obama for a private service on inauguration weekend, a tradition dating back to Franklin Roosevelt's presidency.

I've been on a lucky streak of sorts: the weather was absolutely perfect, with beautiful backlight in the late afternoon. I wondered if Simon's friends and family got the notion that every February is like that here. And we even had a brief moment of levity as Gabi and her dad exited the Sofitel practically on top of another bride and groom leaving for their own wedding

After the ceremony no limos needed, as the newly married couple walked down the block on a gorgeous winter evening. Bonnie Schwartz, wedding planner extraordinaire, made sure everything looked absolutely beautiful. (By the way, Gabi and Simon's first dance was, not surprisingly, by a certain guy who hails from New Jersey.)

Anyway, it's good to be back and I hope I'll keep the time between posts a bit shorter from now on.

For a mini-gallery of Gabi and Simon's pictures, click here.

Now there's a beautiful river in the valley ahead
There 'neath the oaks bough soon we will be wed
Should we lose each other in the shadow of the evening trees
Ill wait for you
And should I fall behind
Wait for me
Darlin I'll wait for you
Should I fall behind
Wait for me

Matt

As the news of Alex Rodriguez’s steroid use reverberated around the country two weeks ago, I may have been one of the few people in America whose thoughts immediately focused on a quiet patch of land off Round Swamp Road in Old Bethpage, New York, where baseball lovers of all ages have been gathering for years to watch the game played in its earliest, most innocent form.

But then, that’s the kind of impact the Old Bethpage Village Restoration has always had on people. A fixture on the school trip circuit of our childhood, the OBVR, for those of you who aren't Billy Joel, is a collection of buildings from Long Island's past. Staffed by history interpreters in the period dress of the nineteenth century, a trip to the restoration has always been a way to get far away from the nearby Walt Whitman Mall and perhaps a little closer to, well, Walt Whitman. Think Colonial Williamsburg without the crowds or neighboring amusement parks.

Nestled on some 165 acres, the village has always been a mirror—maybe even an antidote—to the problems of the current day. Gridlock on the Southern State Parkway? Go watch the blacksmith make horseshoes at the village. Kids playing Wii all day on the couch? Go help milk the cows at the village. Commercialization of the holidays got you down? Go to the village and listen to the carols by candlelight. And talk about timely: baseball players taking performance enhancing drugs? How about taking in a bare handed period game between the New York Mutuals and the Flemington (N.J.) Neshanocks.

When I learned this week via Facebook, a decidedly modern tool, that Nassau County was thinking of closing this historic living museum because of revenue shortfalls, I found myself instantly taken back through time. Not to the 1860’s, mind you, that butter-churning era the Village Restoration has been faithfully capturing since it first started collecting endangered buildings in 1963, a year after I was born, but rather the mid-nineteen seventies of my youth.

I grew up a mile from the Old Bethpage Village Restoration and it remains one of the central points along my own nostalgic map. The school trips, the olde tyme money, the sheep, the birch beer, and, of course, all that butter. We would run through the woods that separated the Old Bethpage Grade School from the village and build forts among the trees. Going to the OBVR has always been a rite of passage for school kids across the island, but for us it was just an extension of our backyard.

I remember my weekly trips with Ian Kaden to measure stream temperature for our earth science class. We would walk down a dirt road, past the Noone Inn, past the women in their frocks, feeling like we were in a scene fromWestworld, a popular film of the time.

Other days, I would go to see my trumpet teacher, Dr. Kirby Jolly, Long Island's very own Herb Alpert, perform the Old Log Hut March (and other songs with strange names) with his legendary Old Bethpage Village Restoration Brass Band. My brother found one of their albums on eBay recently and I scooped it up. After all, Jolly was a contributor to the Ken Burns' Civil War soundtrack and I thought it might be valuable someday. (That same brother, Eric, staged parts of his first feature film, Judy Berlin, starring a pre-Sopranos Edie Falco, at the village.)

I even remember endless debates with my schoolmate David over why the historic Little Red Schoolhouse, located just down the road, was demolished rather than moved to the village. “It wasn’t the right period!” he would argue, to which I would respond by saying 1900ish was probably close enough. The Village Restoration had unwittingly made us conservationists ahead of our time.

The restoration was near the center of my kid universe but the other points are worth noting. At one end of Round Swamp Road stood Myer’s Farm, a working spread in the heart of Long Island’s rapid growth. I would ride my bike past the stand selling pumpkins and corn and think I had crossed into Iowa. Meyer's Farm felt like the last thread of a quilt about to come unraveled.

Those marks are unrecognizable to me now. Though I haven’t lived on Long Island since 1980, my parents still live in the same house I grew up in. Meyer’s Farm, like Mattinecock Dairy, another rural fixture of my youth, is long gone, replaced by a massive housing development. (Just tell me it’s not called something like The Reserve at Meyer’s Farm.) Adventurer’s Inn is still there, but Route 110 is just a tad more congested. Just a tad.

The Old Bethpage Village Restoration, of course, remains an ever-fixed mark. I’ve heard people say that there’s no there there but that’s the point. It’s always been an oasis of quiet and simplicity in a noisy, modern world. It’s gone from representing Long Island history to being an essential part of Long Island’s history. And you simply can’t close history.

Update, 2/23/09: Apparently the vote to either close or keep open the Old Bethpage restoration is today. I'll keep you posted. In the meantime, check out the funny clip from Conan O'Brien's final show last week.