The Oppenheimer Report - 1/1/18

I’m beginning this report on New Year’s Eve, and if the car will start, I’ll head over to the Katrine Community Centre later for some live music. The folks at our local Katrine General Store were planning to hold this their first New Year’s Eve event outdoors, with live music and fireworks at Midnight. With the crisp clear night and the “super” moon, this party sounded like a slam dunk. Alas, at -25F, it was a no go. I heard on the news that cold weather nixed many of the outdoor First Night celebrations scheduled here in Canada. Ottawa had fairly well scrapped their big 150^th Anniversary sendoff, and Toronto scaled back the live music considerably. You can have your ball drop in Times Square, or your guitar drop in Nashville, or your slipper drop in Key West (complete with a transvestite named “Sushi”) – give me the Katrine General Store gig any day. Katrine is party central. Along with a monthly music jamboree at the local community center, and a winter festival held in February, Katrine is where it’s at. The running joke here is that there are rarely any spectators for the annual winter festival parade, because the residents are all participating. One year, I took a photograph that fairly well sums up the excitement that parade generates: a single marcher, bundled up in skidoo attire, trudging down the street in a blinding snowstorm, and carrying a giant stuffed fish under her arm. I call it pluck.

Last week, a Buffalo legend passed on, and almost anyone from Toronto to Buffalo knows who Irv Weinstein was. The popular news anchor for WKBW, Buffalo’s local Channel 7, died of Lou Gehrig’s Disease at the age of 87. I grew up watching Irv and Channel 7 news in Buffalo, and while some on my Canadian friends from Toronto joke about Irv’s emphasis on murder and arson, two regrettably common events in my hometown city, I loved Irv’s sardonic delivery. From the 60s to the 80s, and largely because of Irv Weinstein, WKBW was the channel to watch in Buffalo. I grew up on Rocket Ship 7 and Commander Tom and I also remember as a little boy visiting the WKBW station with my dad. He was participating in a community welfare broadcast, and he thought I might enjoy seeing a live TV broadcast. I was ecstatic, until I saw the set for Rocket Ship 7, and realized how cheap all the props were. “Promo”, my beloved Rocket Ship 7 robot, was little more than a refrigerator box, spray painted silver. My favorite robot was made out of a Frigidaire box; it was a horrible epiphany! It was like learning the truth about Santa Claus (you know, that he drinks), and it was the first of many broadsides to my eroding innocence. Heavy sigh. “Commander” Tom Jolls (which must have been some truncated Polish name) was the Channel 7 weatherman, and he doubled as a children’s show host in the afternoons. I think Rick Azar was the sports guy. Simpler times, where did they go?

I say good riddance to 2017! 2017 was that boorish oaf at a cocktail party; the guy you can’t get away from, and who just keeps talking about himself, even when you begin to become vocally antagonistic. 2017 was that slimy little penis-like alien who bursts out of the guy’s chest in the movie “Alien”, terrifying everyone, then scampering off, only to reappear and wreak havoc at will. I’m ready to eject that little bugger into outer space and start fresh. How about you? America, you made a mistake. It happens. Take off your red baseball caps, put on your big boy pants and move forward. Everybody stumbles. Democracy is not perfect. Exposing the foul underbelly of hatred and ignorance in one’s society can be a good thing. May love and understanding emerge miraculously from the ruin of 2017. I believe it will. Focus on the heroes and the bums will hang themselves.

As Irv would say: “It’s Eleven O’Clock … do you know where YOUR children are?”

      - Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c 2017 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED