My Midnight Paradise
Of all the many shades of gay that have affected my life-way, it is Seven Shades of Gay—the gay of pampering oneself with a panoply of planned pleasures, a multi-course evening of funs—that has held the most sway. On any given night during every summer from 1984 – 1993, you would find my gay(7) ass (1) tiptoeing around the kitchen making hors d’oeuvres, (2) arranging said morsels on the table in front of the couch, (3) filling “Pip” with cannabis grown at the University of Miami hydroponics lab, and (4) watching B-movies as I toked and snacked.
I would watch these things and absorb their insipidity as I coddled the famous Pip and snacked. It was the same thing every time—smoked turkey with Swiss and deli mustard on Sociables. Eating choicest fancy feasts, smoking pot, and luxuriating either in (a) an old shitty movie on Night Owl Theater, or (b) something recent and decent on Showtime.
The Big Wilson era
These movies varied. In the early days (and before Pip) I would watch Big Wilson and watch whatever crap he would be showing on that night’s Night Owl Theater.
Big was the caretaker—I mean, The Caretaker. The guy who effected this:
Big Wilson! This guy:
By everything empirical, he was a cheeseball. Yet he was the Prince Priest Peter Pan of all nightgaunts, meaning cool in the Gandalf-Ackerman way.
What did Big show? Anything that was either unknown or crappy. Shitty stupid western? CHECK. Boring “hard-boiled” crime thing? CHECK. Disgusting chattering go-nowhere drama with some love affair friction and a bunch of nothing? CHECK. Secondary (post-1939) Universal Monster movies? CHECK. What he showed, in short, were the same shitty movies that you would see (and skip) in the Shittiest of All Movie Time Slots—namely, Sunday afternoon. All were black-and-white and utterly boring to the average 10 year-old.
The Showtime era
But we got cable when I was 12 or so. Which meant that Showtime was an option. Or I could watch something on one of the specialist channels. Disgusting feel-good movie starring Dolly Parton and interesting to no one (except Dolly Parton)? CHECK. Tolerable new-ish stuff like Rocky waking up in the future, getting a high-tech machine-gun, and leading a revolt? CHECK. Great and life-changing stuff like The Visitor, Doctor Detroit, and Evilspeak? CHECK-IZZLE.
What I always ate
Pip and Nabisco Sociables with smoked turkey, sliced Swiss, and Ba-Tampte.
Yeah, I said Nabisco Sociables. They had a unique and slightly repulsive odor, with notes of burnt industrial oils. Sociables are the bologna of snack crackers
Friend of Pip and Sociables.
Surely the gayest(1) name in all of trademarked food name history. It’s not a cracker, it’s a sociable. Is that like “a” green and “an” excited?
The above box is too old. The Sociables of my younger cohort looked like this.