About 6 years ago I was raking leaves in the fall when a pack of boys Carly’s age came walking down the street tossing a football.  I heard my mom’s voice, “Please play touch. No one needs to get hurt.”  The truth is any time a group of boys get together someone may get hurt.  It has nothing to do with sports.  If there are five boys in a room full of feathers one of them could end up with a quill sticking out of his eye.  We played touch if the game was up near the house where parents could see.  We always played with three rules.  Defense had a five apple rush and no blitzes.  The offense couldn’t use running plays.  Running plays led to an endless string of touchdowns which took all of the challenge and fun out of the game.  A five apple rush is this; you have to count out loud, one apple, two apple, three apple, four apple, five apple, before you rush the quarterback.  It made up for no blocking.  Those are really universal rules for any sand lot game, any where in the country.  The count may change from apples to Mississippi’s, but everything else is the same.

Playing football in a house full of ballerinas just doesn’t happen.  My girls love to watch it, but that is where it ends.  I felt the need to get grass stained and sweaty.  When they made it to our yard I said, “Are you done playing or going to play?”  They said, “Waiting on some other guys before we play.”  I really wanted to play. I went straight for the justification. I can rake these leaves Monday evening. So I said,” Come get me if you need another player.”  One of them said, “Mr Phelps, you’re funny”.  I said, “Seriously, come get me if you need another guy.”  They never showed.  The following week there were even more of them walking down the street with football in hand.  Again I was raking.  Again I felt the tugging of childhood. So I threw out the offer...again.  They stopped, “Seriously?”  I said, “Yeah!  I wouldn’t offer if I was kidding.”  “OK Mr. Phelps we’ll call you before we play”. They agreed just because they are nice.  I had just finished raking when my wife came outside saying, “Some boys from the neighborhood want to know if you can come down and play football?”  She thought it was cute.  I thought it was cool.  I’ve known them since they were in preschool.  Now they were old enough I didn’t have to worry about hurting anyone.  On my way out the door she said, “Honey, please don’t play tackle.”  It had come full circle. 

Our neighborhood has a creek that runs along one border.  The homes that line that creek have perfect back yards for football.  I walked down there wearing a T-shirt about ballet, jeans, and tennis shoes.  I wasn’t even thinking about it.  That’s what I was wearing to rake leaves.  They were all dressed in NFL jerseys and athletic shorts.  I could tell by the looks it was like showing up wearing black socks and dress shoes.  Half the kids were from our neighborhood and the other half were school friends who rode their bikes or were dropped off by parents.  I think our neighborhood kids were embarrassed.   “Ballet shirt?  Jeans?”  Wisdom taught me that at this stage of my life, point shoes at $85.00 a pop, are a better investment than a Polamalu jersey.  I was picked last.  Truth be told I was picked at all because they felt sorry for me.  The dad who lived there came out and tried to convince me not to play.  He was permanently on the “Physically unable to perform” list.  Said another way, he was too old to play.   He wanted me to be too.  He tried to talk the kids into making me the all time quarterback so I wouldn’t get hurt.  I knew him.  I like him.  I said, “Bill I’m not ready for the wrinkle ranch.  I came down here to have fun.”  He mumbled, “Make sure you guys play touch,” and went back inside.  I had a blast.  Mr Ballerina shirt could still play ball.  They saw me as something more than a stale dad.  I came home dirty, wet with sweat, the knees ripped out of my jeans, and the feeling of youth in my heart.  It sounds funny, but I was happy to be accepted.  I hadn’t been one of the guys, since college.  Carly thought it was funny.  They talked about it on the way to school Monday.  “Your dad can play!”  From that point on I was on the list.  Friday night we went to the high school football games and every Sunday the phone rang.  My wife would answer, smile, and say, “The boys want to know if you can play.”  For the last five years we played.  This year it ended.  Most of them have responsibilities that come with getting older.   Others went in a less productive direction.  For a while I was given a second chance at childhood, another opportunity to be one of the boys.  It was cool.

Tags: Comedy Humor Culture Family Life Oprah High School Daughter Parenti

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Tags: Comedy Culture Daughter Family Growing Up High School Humor Indianap

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I was at an Indiana Pacer Game with a friend back in the nineties.  They asked everyone to rise for the National Anthem.  A young kid with leg braces and crutches shuffled out onto the court to sing.  He had the confidence of a pro.  He belted out that song with such emotion and power that it made me cry.  Women are great with crying.  If a Hallmark ad hit’s them the right way – BAM – tears.  I can count on one hand the number of times tears came to my eyes in the last decade and still have fingers to spare.  Yet here I was at an NBA game with a buddy and I couldn’t look his way because I was sobbing.  I couldn’t use the, there’s something in my eye ploy because it was both eyes!...like sprinklers.  So I covered it by acting like I was looking all around the arena.  He was talking to me and I was talking to him, but I couldn’t make eye contact until my face was dry.  Watching that little boy sing was just one of those perfect moments that will live with me forever.  Those times are so special to experience. I think about how grateful I am to be there.

Last Friday the Butler Ballet had an open call for young dancers.  The Ballet was casting parts for the party scene in the Nutcracker at Clowes Hall.  Most of the cast is filled with Butler Ballet students.  Some years Clara is a Butler Ballet student, other times it’s a younger ballerina.  For young dancers in Indiana a part in this ballet is an honor.  Getting the part of Clara is the Holy Grail.  Clowes Hall seats a crowd of 2500ish.  There are eight shows and most are sold out.  Grace went to the open call on Friday evening and made call backs on Saturday afternoon.  After the call back you’re told… don’t call us we’ll call you.  They said we wouldn’t hear anything before Tuesday.  I mentioned the audition to that friend who went to the Pacer game.  To give you a little background on him, his exposure to culture takes place at the doctor’s office or when he walks down the world foods isle at Meijer to buy pasta.  His only interests are hunting and fishing.  The day they stage a deer hunting ballet with camouflage tutus and antlers is the day he MIGHT attend a ballet, but only if it’s realistically portrayed….if it’s interpretive…forget it.  He said, “Could she get a speaking part?”  I said “No it’s a ballet, not a musical,” which made him defensive.  “Why are they doing the Nutcracker again?  They did it last year.  Can’t they get a little more creative with their show selection? What about A Christmas Carol” He grumbled.  “That’s not a ballet.”  I said beginning to see where this is headed.    Do you ever have conversations that start well and then they slowly suck the life out of the moment to the point you make something up just to get off the phone?  I did that.  "Let me call you back.  I think I ruptured my spleen".   Then I tried to shake off the funk like a dog that was caught in the rain.

We didn’t hear anything on Tuesday.  Wednesday morning I wondered if we’d get a call then quickly forgot about it because I was so buried at work.  So when the phone rang and the ID said Butler University I thought it was work related.  The guy said his name and that he was with the Butler Ballet and I thought, “Cool, they want us to do some DVDs” He said, “We’d like to offer Grace the part of Clara in the Nutcracker.  I was puzzled….I remember thinking that has nothing to do with DVDs.  I said, “What?”  Still trying to figure out how this was a work related call.  He said it again and it started to sink in.  I said, “She’ll be thrilled and so am I.  That’s when it hit me.  My daughter was going to be a featured ballerina at Clowes Hall.  I started to cry.  I have no idea what else he said.  It didn’t matter.  It is one of those moments I’ll never forget.

Tags: Comedy Humor Culture Family Life Oprah Daughter Parenting Teens In

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This summer I vowed to change the way I start my mornings.  I would drink coffee and watch the News.  At first it was a way to get the weather forecast.  Then it became cups of coffee while hearing about murders, stabbings, robberies, and the weather forecast.  Based on the headlines, regardless of the weather it’s always gloomy on the east side of Indy.  After eight years of that routine it dawned on me…call me a slow learner… I was not getting an uplifting start to my day.

Now I sit on the porch and have coffee and feel the morning vibe.  Then I ride.  My bike is not one of the fancy, Lance Armstrong Super Dee Duper bikes.  It’s a touring bike with a spring seat!  I like the spring.  It has some obnoxious number of gears, like eighteen.  Who needs eighteen gears, aside from truckers?  I use five or six.  I wear a helmet.  I don’t like to.  My wife worked in the Neurology unit of a hospital.  Basically she scared/guilt tripped me into wearing it.  As a kid I jumped off a million ramps on my stingray and never needed a helmet.  None of my friends suffered brain injuries as the result of a bike wreck.  Apparently there are plenty of people who are now permanently drooling on themselves because they weren’t wearing one.  So for my wife and family I wear one. 

The neighborhoods around us are quiet.  I can ride for miles on streets lined with big trees, no traffic, and no pack of Lance Armstrong pretenders with the fancy bike, matching uniform, and attitude.  Sorry if you are one of those guys.  Actually I’m not sorry.  I have been stuck behind you in my car for miles because you don’t get out of the middle of the road.  You may not be a jerk, but you come across as one.  I’m not saying you don’t deserve part of the road.  I am saying you don’t deserve all of it.    Do you really need the uniform to train for what ever tour de jour?  Do you really have sponsors to ride your bike in traffic?  I wear a t-shirt, shorts, and tennis shoes.  I work up a sweat.  I feel great when I’m done.  I stay balanced.  Granted my t-shirt material flaps in the breeze like Ruth Gordon’s triceps, but that’s OK.  I’m not trying to sit on the pole for the Hilly Hundred.  If you were smart your sponsors would be companies who specialize in stress relief because the line of motorists who are stuck behind you have plenty of time to read the ads, over and over and over, until they find enough room to pass you.  They are stressed…thanks to YOU!  Did I get off topic? Sorry.  Did I make my point?  Hope so.

They just started doing road work in one of the neighborhoods I ride through.  I feel judged the minute I ride by the collection of construction workers all huddled together.  “Helmet?  What a dork!  Don’t get hurt!” I know that’s what they are thinking. 

Today I decided to cross the main road and hit another network of older neighborhoods.  I encountered my first Armstrong clone.  We were both stopped waiting for the traffic to clear before crossing.  He looked me up and down and then focused…on being the best bike rider of the morning…or what ever it is they think about.  Once the traffic cleared I went straight across.  He did some type of big sweeping motion, banking right and then swooping onto the road effectively putting him behind me.  “Is he drafting,” I wondered?  Then I thought about blocking him, giving him a dose of his own medicine.  Making him read my, Led Zeppelin World Tour 1972 t-shirt, for miles until I turn off the road.  That’s right Led Zeppelin sponsors my morning ride.  So do Folgers and Bayer…they are more like silent sponsors.  I blocked him for about 20 yards before moving out into the center of the road to let him pass.  He begrudgingly thanked me, and then kicked it into gear number nineteen.  The kid in me thought, “I may not look cool, but I’m drinking milk…”  The adult in me thought, “I need to blog about him”

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I have a friend, Dr. Charles Shinaver, who is a Psychologist.  He’s a great guy who is passionate about helping his patients.  You can find out more about him here, www.charlesshinaveriiiphd.com

He and I need to sit down and have a little chat about my head and what happens to it when I fall asleep. 

I dream in color.  They are vivid and strange.  Last night was no exception.  Pop some pop corn, grab a soda, sit back and read last night’s installment of…Greg’s Psycho Theatre…

My wife, Keely and I were walking in Broad Ripple were we ran into Tom Griswold from the Bob and Tom Show.  He told me he reads my blog, likes it, and thinks we should do something.  He invited me back to their studio to talk.  We drove to the studio where I ran into the back of his car.  I totally forgot how to park.  I would pull forward, hit his car, roll backward, stop, hit the gas, drive forward, hit his car, roll backward, stop.  That happened four or five times.  He finally climbed out and gave me a pissed look while surveying the damage.  I just turned off the car and went in.  Kristy Lee was walking past the front door.  Her hair was four feet tall.  It was so tall she was wearing lattice to support it.  Bows were tied around her hair securing it to the lattice.  I sat and studied her ensemble while we talked.  It was amazing.  I told her that I’d never seen anyone with hair so tall that it required lattice.  Roses yes, grapes probably, but hair…never.  She was truly surprised.  She strapped the lattice to her back like a back pack and it rose to the heavens from there.  Her hair was in layers like the old Victorian wigs except hers wasn’t white it was brunette.  To me it was a wonder of the world.  I couldn’t keep my eyes off it.  There was some space on the lattice that wasn’t taken up by hair so she decorated it with framed family photos.  There were at least 5 framed photos and I’m not talking wallet sized photos either.  They were 5” x 7” or larger.  Some were landscape and some were vertical.  She used very ornamental wood frames on each one.  I was so caught up in her hair I forgot about Tom and our conversation about my blog.  I thought, “How does she sleep with that?  How does she get that into a car?  I wrecked into Tom’s car and I have full vision.  She has to see around that massive head of…display gear to simply pull into traffic.  She finally left my view.  I never did see Tom again.  As I was trying to catch up to Kristy my phone rang.  It was a customer.  She wanted us to duplicate and package a presentation.  The content was information for a medical conference.  She could get us the master and art work.  We needed to duplicate it onto the head of a cauliflower, package it, and deliver to California in 4 days the quantity was 550.  I was worried.  I wasn’t sure our CD duplication equipment could burn information onto the head of a cauliflower.  If it could I wasn’t sure we could do it that fast.  My partner assured me we could, but by the time the last of the cauliflowers had been duplicated the first batch had begun to rot.  I was faced with replacing the bad ones, repackaging, and delivering them all in time so we didn’t lose that client.  Very stressful!

By that point Tom Griswold and Kristy Lee’s hair was a distant memory.  I wasn’t concerned with my blog or the fact that my wife had disappeared.  I just needed to get the cauliflowers duplicated and deliver them to California.

I hadn’t done any drugs or alcohol.  I didn’t eat anything out of the ordinary including the worm at the bottom of a mescal bottle.  I just went to bed and tripped.  Dreams like this happen every night.  So Dr. Shinaver…what’s up with me?

Tags: Dreams Tom Griswold Bob & Tom Humor Comedy Kristy Lee

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The girls and I were watching the Colts preseason game last week.  A commercial came on that featured a man and a woman.  Carly looked at me and said, “Is this one of those boner pill ads?”  I wanted to laugh out loud.  I did laugh out loud.  It was a credit card ad.  The thing you use to pay for the boner pills.  I’m glad she is comfortable asking me questions like that.  I see she inherited my straight forward approach to life.  There was no beating around the bush…no pun intended.  When I was seventeen I would never have asked my parents that question.  I turned inside out if a tampon commercial came on when I was watching TV with my family.  We just didn’t have that kind of relationship.

When I was in Jr. High my mom walked into my room and gave me a book called, How Babies are Made.  She asked me to read it and if I had any questions I could ask her. 

Thanks to Playboy, Penthouse and weekly conversations with friends I had a grasp on that concept without the aid of paper mache illustrations from her book.  Yep, she put her teenage son’s sex education in the hands of a book that depicted chickens made of construction paper “doing it”.  To think my wife wonders why I’m weird.  I don’t even remember if there any pictures of humans.  I flipped it open just to see what they had to say.  To…see what there was to see.  Were there any pictures of naked women that were better than the Playboys we had stashed in our tree house?  When I saw paper mache chickens I closed the book and never opened it again.  No matter how hard I try I can’t get those images out of my mind.  That brief encounter with her book had the opposite effect.  Though I do prefer chicken over beef when it comes to meals…and I love the feel of down filled pillows...I mean I really love them.

When I was in high school my dad took a stab at educating me.  We were driving to my grandmother’s farm.  OMG she had chickens…no wonder I loved going there!  Any way he asked me if I had any questions about sex.  I said no and asked him if he had any that I could answer.  He said no and that was the end of that.  Those two brief conversations were all they offered me. 

I vowed it would not be that way when I had kids.  I wanted them to be comfortable asking me anything.  So their education started when they were small.  When Carly was in first grade I was driving her to a sleep over.  We were talking about something unrelated when out of the blue she said, “Dad I get that a woman has eggs and a man has sperm, but how does the sperm get in there?  Does it crawl across the covers and hop in while the mom is sleeping”?  I said, “Only when I get home really late at night and I’m the one who crawls across the covers.”  Kidding I didn’t say that.  I took a deep breath and told her the truth.  We finished that talk about the time we arrived at the sleep over.  I asked her to please not make this a topic of conversation that night.  Then I gave the host mom a heads up about our conversation.  She was less than thrilled.  I think her idea of car ride conversations revolved around radio Disney play lists.

Back to the ads, how did they come up with those plots?  Who approved them?  A couple on a beach at sunset, each has their own bath tub.  The tubs are close enough they are holding hands.  Bath tubs on the beach?  Really?   Call me naïve, but I fail to see the symbolism.  Then again my education came from Hugh Heffner.

Tags: Comedy Daughter Family Growing Up High School Humor Indianapolis Lif

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When I was young I listened to The Dr. Demento Radio Show on Sunday nights.  Dr. D played only comedy songs.  The show was on late enough that I fell asleep listening to it.  Monty Python’s Spam sketch was on his regular play list.  The members of Monty Python need to issue a new version of the song and instead of serving spam, eggs, sausage, and spam they could serve spam, Viagra, Cialis, and spam or spam, cheap watches, gambling, and spam. 

My junk folder is overflowing with…spam.  I sift through it several times a day just in case a customer’s e-mail is mistakenly filtered as spam…spam, spam spam!…Is any money generated by the cheap watch offer?  Are people really ordering E.D. drugs from these bogus emails? 

Last week the people who make decisions about relevant emails decided that any email sent from my company was spam.  I found that out with the first email I sent Monday morning.  It bounced back to me like a brick on a trampoline.  Nothing says, “Welcome to the work week” like a hassle before you’ve finished the first cup of coffee.  Who decides what email is real?  Is it Al Gore, inventor of the internet?  Does he also double as, Paul Blart, spam cop?  We send the email and he with the help of little elves scan it and rout it based on a continually updated book of lists?  The elves all look the same, messy hair, Star Wars shirts, and black jeans.  They mumble to themselves as they scan each email…this is legit….this isn’t.  Then they play Dungeons & Dragons at lunch.

I checked with our web people.  Apparently we had been black listed and they were working to resolve the problem.  Black listed!  That sounds terminal.  What’s next, crabs?  I asked if someone hijacked our e-mail account.  The short answer was “No”.  They don’t divulge a lot of information.  Our company shares server space with other companies and one of the companies was either spamming or their email was hijacked.  So the server was black listed.  It took me an hours to drag that little bit of information out of them.  In the last week I have learned that IT guys are a different breed of smart guys with their own language and power.  They give you vague information in spurts as if it’s some type of prescription medication.  Too much and you OD. They also have a habit of being….socially unavailable.  They’re a little like lawyers without the polish and etiquette, (apologies to my lawyer friends). 

Our problem persisted throughout the day…one day led to another which became the whole week.  Each morning I would test the waters with an e-mail.  Each morning it would bounce back with a message saying, “The message was rejected because it contains prohibited virus or spam content.”

I’d been checked and I was clean of bugs and my content had nothing to do with, “What every woman wants”, unless she craves a firm… purchase order for print.   I began to realize how easy it is to jack with people.  Note to self: make a list of all the business people who are over the top mean.  Keep their information in a black book.  It could be called the black book of black lists and I’ll be the black knight.  Next I’ll brush up on my Dungeons & Dragons and learn to speak in code so I can join the network in charge of the network. 

Something’s wrong when Ashton Kutcher could tweet about breakfast to fans around the world and I couldn’t email a PO across town. 

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Tags: Comedy Technology Humor Business Dr Demento

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