Mardi Gras in Massachusetts: Jordan’s Furniture

NOTE: As of early 2016, the Natick Jordan's is no longer Mardi Gras-themed.

May 27, 2013 — In the Boston area, when you want to have a real IMAX experience, you head to a furniture store.

It’s called Jordan’s Furniture, and it’s obviously way more than that. Most of the stores are full-out entertainment experiences.

In shell shock over what happened at this very spot.

The one I always find myself at is in Reading. You enter into this massive open space that has a Fuddruckers, a Jelly Belly station, trapeze lessons, a water feature choreographed to lights and music, and a massive Green Monster coming out of the wall. Then you either buy furniture, watch an eight-story-tall movie, or both if you’re the efficient type.

Basically, that means I’ve given a lot of money to a furniture store without ever buying a stick of its furniture.

And I never thought about it as OTIS fodder because I’m just so used to going to it. But then, two days ago, I threw away a soggy mess of rain-soaked plans and checked out the Natick location for the first time.

There were two things I knew about the Jordan’s in Natick. One, that it’s Bourbon Street-themed and, two, that it features animatronic singers. Turns out, that was the equivalent of knowing nothing about the Jordan’s in Natick.

It feels weird to give a spoiler alert for a furniture store, but if you want to visit and be surprised, skip this article.

We entered the store and were immediately handed Mardi Gras beads. Looking around, it was more enclosed than the open space of the Reading store. We had two directions to go. One was to the in-store restaurant, Kelly’s Roast Beef. We went the other way, down a narrow, mock-Bourbon Street where New Orleans house facades opened into furniture departments.

The street went only a little way before dead-ending at an open space, surrounded by more of the furniture-filled facades. A cardboard sign said that the next show started in 10 minutes.

I didn’t know what to expect, but we sat down on a bench and waited. Suddenly the main lights went down, music started, colored spotlights flew across the floor, and children who had been waiting at the edge of the space for the show to start jumped into the middle in a dancing mosh pit of tiny violence.

An upstairs wall of one of the facades rolled back to reveal a movie screen. This is the story it told: The two store owners (Barry and Eliot Tatelman), dressed as the Blues Brothers, hang out on a couple of their nicer recliners in the middle of Bourbon Street, unknowingly holding up the Mardi Gras parade. The mummers get mad and start chasing them. The pair jump into an old police cruiser, still Blues Brothers-style, and take off.

On the ceiling above us, the undercarriage of a helicopter, looking for the escaped furniture purveyors/human roadblocks glides across the ceiling throwing a spotlight onto the floor and a video feed of all the dancing kids, amused parents, and confused furniture shoppers onto the screen.

The House of Blues façade opens with a crash, and the beat-up front half of the old police cruiser juts through, manned by life-sized bobble-headed animatronic versions of the owners-as-Jake-and-Elwood.

And then a party starts.

On the upper levels of the facades all around, dummy versions of famous entertainers start dancing and singing. And by dancing, it looks like they’re being marionetted by a mechanism from behind that I’m just now realizing I never tried to figure out. I just like the magic, man.

Anyway, we’re talking the Supremes, the Village People, the Beatles, Elvis, and a massive fiberglass Louis Armstrong who is lowered from a corrugated aluminum-covered recess to a terrifying 45 degree angle above the crowd.

Also, Richard Simmons somehow.

After a few minutes of these shenanigans, we get the finale… a giant parade float that had been hidden to that point creeps across tracks in the ceiling, overshadowing the entire floor space. It was shaped like a pair of motley fools, one at each end and in positions that I assume would be the natural ones for flying jesters. I felt like I was in a Batman comic, about to be supervillained by one of the Joker’s over-the-top schemes.

I’m doing a bad job describing how awesome this last bit was. The fiberglass float, nay, work of art was lighted, massive, colorful, and the best and most surreal part of the whole experience...even with Richard Simmons.

And then, less than ten minutes after it started, the show was over. Everything retreated into their recesses. The furniture store was calm again. And that last sentence is my favorite of 2013.

We grabbed some food at the Kelly’s, which was carousel-themed, with large fiberglass horses scattered about the restaurant. Then we checked out the IMAX. To get to the movie lobby, we had to go up an escalator, the walls of which were painted with cartoon paparazzi. Actual strobe lights had been embedded into the walls where the camera flash bulbs were painted and blinked at us while a soundtrack of people calling for our attention played from speakers. Made me realize that escalators are much better than mere red carpets. The Academy Awards should do this.

Eventually, we made it back for a second show, which happens at the top of each hour. This time, the crowd was more sedate, less miniature moshing and more families just sitting on the floor watching. There were also a couple of employees with tambourines mastering the ceremonies.

Then we left, passing under large statues of the owners dressed as motley fools, towering over the exit and bookending the phrase, “Thank you for being the world’s smartest furniture shopper.”

Of course, this was totally not the way I should have done this Jordan’s. I should have been shopping for a chaise longue, picked Jordan’s without any prior knowledge of the place because it looked big enough to have a nice selection, and walked in at about five minutes past the hour.

And walked out a changed and dazed man, completely chaise longue-less. As I should be.

Chewing on Dinosaur Babies

 I Put Off Everything on My To-Do List to Write About a Single Piece of Candy

May 23, 2013 — You’re going to get some big victories in life, I promise you. But, unless you’re a college kid with coding skills and a trendy social media platform, you probably won’t be able to live off them. That’s what the little victories are for. Survival.

Today, my little victory involved a piece of gum the size of two golf balls.

I’ve been going to my local Toys R Us here for about five years. I’ve had a kid for three. The place is a nice enough representation of the chain. Bright, well stocked. They play Jesus Jones a little too often and devote too much space to infant apparel, but those are minor complaints, as well as commentaries on time and life.

Upon leaving the store, I have to pass by the normal gauntlet of claw machines, vibrating rides, and toy and candy vending machines. But one of those vending machines has always drawn my attention.

Because it’s full of massive dinosaur eggs.

So massive, in fact, that the machine doesn’t fit in the normal rack of classic red vendors. It needs its own customized, stand-alone bubble-top.

These candies have been sitting in the foyer of this toy store for the entire five years that I’ve lived in this town. Who knows how far back they actually go. Possibly, they deserve National Historic Site accolades. I do know that they never replenish the candy. Because the level of dinosaur eggs has never gone up, only down…and that, very slowy. Today, there are but three dozen or so eggs just barely covering the bottom of the tank. When I first laid eyes on this seductress, there were only maybe twice as many.

But I’ve never been able to get one.

The problem? You need a dollar. Actually not a dollar, but four quarters exactly in a cashless society that I’ve embraced with all four of my limbs. So for years I’ve just passed it by on every Toys R Us visit like some past lover where things didn’t work out but went far enough to be awkward.

Until tonight.

It was a normal Toys R Us trip for me. I was feeling a little down, and while that sends most people to the bar, it sends me to the toy store. I perused at random the different aisles, looking for some new toy advance or entertainment property to drag me from the sloughs. I saw a three-foot-tall Superman figure, a set of Ewoks, and a Dolph Lundgren figure from The Expendables (Who is that market? Besides me). When I left, looking only half-interestedly into the depths of the toy torture device that is the claw machine, I hit my pocket casually.

It jangled slightly.

I checked my billfold, and there deforming one of its flat pockets was exactly four beautiful silver discs whose reverse featured Midwest states that I’ve never visited.

I don’t know where I got this change. Part of me thinks it’s left over from some city jaunt where I thought I’d have to park at a meter. Another part of me thinks I might be cheating on my washing machine. But all that doesn’t matter. What matter is I felt as if I’d just won on a slot machine with a glorious row of severed George Washington heads.

So I squared off with the Dino Eggs vending machine. Honestly, I’d never really investigated these dinosaur eggs too closely. I didn’t know if they were jawbreakers or candy shells hiding toys or what. I’d always been too embarrassed to spend time in a toy store vestibule looking longingly at something I couldn’t buy like some random nine-year-old in the action figure aisle. I’m in my thirties, for goodness’ sake. I should be able to buy anything in a toy store that I want.

I still embarrassed myself, though. The machine is right by the automatic doors, which kept opening and shutting every two seconds while I crouched down and fumbled with the alien physical currency while simultaneously trying to figure out how to stick four quarters into two slots. I got looks from every single cashier.

After I got the quarters inserted, I turned the dial with a satisfying metal clank followed by an even more satisfying soft plunk. I opened the hatch and was dismayed to find shards of broken candy dinosaur egg pouring into my cupped palm. Of course they were too old to maintain their integrity through whatever magical wormhole got them from the tank to my hand.

But then my egg fell into my hand. A pristine, whole white egg with blue, yellow, and red flecks. The exact colors and pattern that I’d always wanted the outside of my house painted.

The broken pieces were from the egg of some other poor schlub who had gone through Herculean tasks to dig up four quarters only to get the rubble of a prize. His dream had shattered, but mine was intact.

The candy egg was comfortably large. I couldn’t close my fist around it. But it wasn’t heavy like a jawbreaker. It was light, and rattled when I shook it. I looked more closely at the label on the machine. It showed a dopey green T-Rex and a dopy khaki-clad paleontologist. Friendly, orange letters explained that it was a bubblegum shell filled with dino-shaped sour bits.

I was cool with that.

“Can I have one?” asked the daughter I’d forgotten was there and who was looking disdainfully down at her pathetic blue raspberry Push-Pop.

“You think I’m made of quarters? Get a job.”

I buckled the egg carefully into the passenger seat, jammed my daughter into her car seat, and went home to enjoy the taste of dreams-come-true.

But I couldn’t crack the freaking egg. I tried my teeth until the pain registered slightly under that of stainless steel fork shards penetrating my enamel. I then ruined our bread knife on it. Finally, I tried our orange-handled Furi chef knife, the Nuclear Option of our kitchen.

It still did nothing but scar the egg.

Five-plus years had turned this dinosaur egg into an honest-to-God fossil. And I was planning on putting this through my digestive system. That’s okay, though. Candy can age to perfection, too.

Finally, I was able to pry the top of the egg off using a combo of knife and teeth that, if what physicists say about the universe is true, should have left me with a punctured palate.

It wasn’t just age that had made this egg a hard one to crack. The bubblegum wall was a good quarter of an inch thick. Had there been a real dinosaur baby in there, it would never have made to eventual extinction.

Inside the egg were 14 extremely tiny candy T-Rex’s that were as hard as BBs. That’s fine. I’d already mentally prepared myself that this was the kind of dollar investment that could yield thousands of dollars in tooth damage. I ate them first, and then turned back to the egg.

It took me over the course of two Regular Show episodes to gnaw that thing even halfway down. What I learned was that bubblegum is still the best flavor ever invented by either man or nature, and that gnawing is a pleasure we really lost when we evolved past the bestial.

As I tried to chew the thick wad of gum that had previously been shaped into the perfect architecture that is the egg shape, I reflected back on the days when a prize like this one would have been the end-all of life for me. A piece of weird candy and some equally weird cartoons. I really miss last Friday.

But eventually my jaw started aching, and I had to leave the egg half-consumed. It’s now an artifact in my study. At least until tomorrow night, when two glasses of port make anything edible fair game.

But I got my little victory, and it will carry me through this rainy Memorial Day weekend. Even if I can only eat through a straw for the next few days.

Gigantic Gumshoe: The Dick Tracy Statue

May 19, 2013 — The three things I know about Dick Tracy from living in a world cancerous with popular culture are: 1) He makes yellow overcoats masculine. 2) We have an entire society of pissed-off people because we still don’t have his watch. 3) One time in the early 1990s, Warren Beatty produced, directed, and starred in a film version of the property. It was during his Madonna years. I watched it back then, but only remember primary colors and disfigured villains.

So I’m not a Dick Tracy aficionado. Nothing against him, just not a hardboiled detective story kind of guy. So you’d think a bronze statue of him in a random town in the suburbs of Chicago wouldn’t interest me too much. And you’d be right. But it does interest me just enough.

Because oversized bronze statues of fictional characters are right where I like to make stands and/or have picnics. Like Dr. Suess’s menagerie. Or King Neptune. Kermit the Frog. C.S. Lewis.

But a post needs a proper introduction. So here’s what I know about Dick Tracy now that I’ve visited his statue and need to sound authoritative. If you’re ever on Jeopardy! remember to phrase your answers in the form of a question.

Dick Tracy was the main character of an eponymous newspaper comic strip that began in 1931 and whose newsprint can still be pulled off with Silly Putty to this day. It was created by Chester Gould, who was born in Oklahoma but moved to Chicago for college and career. It was while at the Chicago Tribune that he came up with Dick Tracy, which ended up debuting through syndication in the Detroit Mirror. I realize that none of this backstory involves a random suburb of Chicago.

The city of Naperville jumps into this story basically because, since 2010, it has a nine-foot-tall, 2,000-pound multi-hued bronze statue of Dick Tracy in its Riverwalk Park. Gould isn’t from Naperville. Nor is Tracy. Bob Odenkirk is, but that’s a digression.

There are two reasons that this big, bronze fighter of crime overshadows Naperville. The official one, and the one I learned from visiting the place.

The official connection between Dick Tracy and Naperville is that it’s the current home of the guy who has off and on been illustrating the comic since the 1950s and also carrying writing duties since the 1980s, after Gould’s retirement. Getting the statue up was his crusade for justice. That’s a legit connection, sure, but not in my mind gigantic-statue, associate-the-character-with-the-town legit. But vague connections don’t stop Illinois cities. Just look at their sibling town of Metropolis, which just because of its name, erected a massive statue of Superman as its marquee attraction.

Like I said, that’s the official reason. The real reason that Naperville embraced the idea of a metal comic character in its midst is that Naperville loves bronze statues. In the few minutes of driving around the city, I saw a dozen full sized figural bronze sculptures that range from civil servants and sports players to veterans and citizens. Apparently, it also has a few Dr. Seuss characters. The place just might not have a cemetery, though, and deals with its dead that way. I didn’t really ask anybody.

But the statue is its own validation.

Dick is located on the edge of the DuPage River behind the Naperville Township Office on Water Street, right beside a covered walking bridge that spans the river.

The statue is a dramatic one, to be sure. They’ve treated his flogger to give it a yellowish cast without leaving the bronze spectrum, and said coat is swept back as Tracy talks into the wrist radio wrapped around his ham of a fist, I assume responding to a message about some poor stiff behind a flophouse with a slug in his gut from a hatchetman who’d clammed him up after some botched box job. A dame with great gams was probably involved. He looks as superhero as an average Joe in a yellow fedora can.

Mostly, the statue interests me because it kind of makes Tracy look like a monster…or one of the grotesque villains that he chases. That’s because the hard lines of his features look somewhat Frankensteinian when overscaled to this size. It reminded me of Sin City’s Marv, who probably only exists because of characters like Dick Tracy and who probably has a more direct connection that I don’t know about since I’m out of the crime story loop. There’s also something sinister about the statue’s thin-lipped smile. But that’s the thing about these hard-nosed, job-obsessed investigators, they’re always a flat-footed step behind the crooks…which means they’re always a step behind the crooks.

And because the life of a street detective is soul-tainting, it’s nice to see the old gumshoe hanging out at such a beautiful spot on the river, laughing at all of us for putting cool tech into our phones instead of our wristwatches.

I cropped this from Google Maps. It's from a golf course in Wheaton, Illinois,
seven miles north of Naperville. If golf courses did more of this stuff,
I'd be more interested in the sport. Just kidding.

Alien Architecture: The Space Needle

May 13, 2013 — Every major city has a Signature Tall Thing. For most of them, it’s usually just a relatively boring office building. In Seattle, Washington, it’s a tribute to extraterrestrials built by Satanists.

I realize that the Space Needle seems more mainstream than the oddities I usually focus on, but, truthfully, the White Tower of Seattle is an absolutely bizarre sky piercer.

For while I’m outright lying about the Satanist part (the company that designed and built the Space Needle was called the Pentagram Corporation), I’m not even exaggerating about its UFO connection.

It was built as part of the 1962 World’s Fair, also called the Century 21 Exposition. The fair was space-themed and future-themed, so they wanted the top to look like a flying saucer. After all, it was going on all the posters.

And remember, this isn’t just a random building erected on the side of a highway to attract parched and swollen-bladdered travelers to buy gewgaws. It’s the official symbol of Seattle. Its brand, to phrase it in a soul-shrinking way. And making a UFO the center point of your reputation is fine for small towns that need to grasp at anything to stand out in the town-eat-town world of tourism, but one of the largest cities in the country?

The saucer is 138 feet wide, and it rises to a point 605 feet from the ground. That’s high for a building, low for a UFO. At least for one not in abduction maneuvers. Actually, it’s not that high, either. Not these days. It was the tallest thing west of the Mississippi back then. Today, it’s short compared to most of the Signature Tall Things elsewhere in the world. Heck, it’s not even the tallest structure in Seattle, despite the Frazier logo.

At the top is an observation deck, a restaurant that rotates thanks to a tiny single-horsepower engine, and a gift shop full of gewgaws.

The view is spectacular and varied. Walking around the outside deck on a bright, but slightly hazy day, we saw the entire city, Puget Sound, and a couple of mountain ranges. Unfortunately, and if I remember correctly it was because of the time of day, we couldn’t make out Mount Rainer, that large, startling, and city-overshadowing rock that in other people’s pictures seems for all the world like a white-topped petrified god awaiting a group of horny teenagers to accidentally awake it from slumber to consume the planet. I’ve read that if the weather is clear enough to suffocate a small child, you can even make out Mount St. Helen’s.

The saucer of the Space Needle was originally painted gold, and they’ve painted it different colors over the years for events and anniversaries. The default is white. It took only a year to build, at a cost of $4.5 million. I don’t know how much it would cost to build an actual flying saucer for comparison.

But let’s stop with the stats. Back to the science fiction. Calling it the Space Needle was a completely descriptive and apt move, but to me the phrase makes me think of alien probes and other uncomfortable extraterrestrial abduction experiments. Still, it’s a better name than Decades-Old Amusement Park Ride. Which it also kind of looks like to me.

But the saucer-shape wasn’t just for show. It was for history. I’m not sure whether on purpose or not, though. Turns out, the first officially acknowledged UFO sighting of modern times was next door at Mount Rainer in 1947…two weeks before the Roswell Incident and nine years before Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (RIP, Ray).

A private pilot named Kenneth Arnold saw a formation of shiny disc shapes, which got translated in the media as “flying saucer,” bringing a phrase into the parlance that half a century later still hasn’t worn out its welcome.

Today, the Needle even shades the Science Fiction Museum (or, more accurately, the EMP Museum since it covers more than SF), an amazing collection in a crazy looking building that’s one of my favorite sites and one of my greatest sins for never writing about it on OTIS.

The only outstanding question to me about the whole Space Needle is why it hasn’t been featured in some giant monster movie yet. I would love to see it beheaded and floating in the Pacific, the survivors trying to keep it afloat while fighting off a 900-foot-tall alien lizard treating it like a food dish (RIP, Ray).

I don’t have any real story of my time at the Space Needle. We went up, we looked around, we came down. We mentally crossed it off a checklist.

But it’ll always be about the aliens for me.

Reflected in the hull of the Science Fiction Museum.

These Colors Run: The Bloody Lincoln Flag

May 8, 2013 — Local history museums are the attics of entire towns. Everything old and weird and that people don’t want to throw out but don’t know what else to do with ends up there. And with so many people across the generations sharing that attic, you really never know what you’ll find in there. Like the blood of Abraham Lincoln or the noose of an executed wife murderer.

I have this feeling, that if you tally up all the blood on every blood-stained artifact from Lincoln’s assassination, you’d come up with more than could fit in the 16th president’s wiry 180-pound frame.

On the plus side, if we ever get this cloning thing down, we could see the rebirth of one of the top four presidents of the U.S. (Mount Rushmore is still up-to-date, right?). Unless we heed the warnings of Jurassic Park. Presidents and people weren’t meant to mix.

Anyway, we all know the ending of the Abraham Lincoln story. Daniel Day Lewis went back in time and took the place of the president while the real Lincoln was transferred to the planet Excalbia to help James T. Kirk beat a sentient pile of rock and Genghis Khan, but not before a quick stop in San Dimas to help a couple of promising lads with their history homework. Both Lincolns were killed, the one on our planet at a theater thanks to an actor who was a bad loser. Blood went everywhere. People grabbed everything it touched for a souvenir.

And one of these morbid souvenirs ended up in a local history museum in Milford, Pennsylvania, a small town in Pike County, which shares borders with both New Jersey and New York up in the northeast corner of the state.

The Columns Museum is housed in a mansion that dates back to 1904 and contains two floors of artifacts that range from the relics of major wars to strange and mundane objects of yore. But the place knows why you’re really there. Says so right on the sign: “Home of the Lincoln Flag.” Which, of course, undersells the blood-drenched piece of cloth because the place can’t go full-ghoul. That’s for people like you and I.

The Lincoln Flag was one of the decorations in the box at Ford’s Theatre where Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth on April 14, 1865. It was torn down and used as a makeshift pillow beneath his bleeding head until the president was moved across the street to the house where he died not long after.

And now the Columns Museum has it, and the thing is so unmissable that it’s almost glorious. The flag measures just about 13 feet long and is more than 8.5 feet tall. It’s displayed with both ends rolled inward to highlight the bloody bit and giving the piece a towering verticality inside of its custom glass case. The blood stains are easy to spot, brown, circumscribed  and astounding, even against the still-vivid read stripes that represent the colonies Lincoln had such a time presiding over. Because of its size, the artifact is extremely dramatic, much more so than if it had been a handkerchief or a surgical implement. It says, kind of more than any other Lincoln assassination artifact that I’ve ever read about, “This was a big deal.”

And they listed the chain of ownership right in the exhibit knowing that you’re going to be doubtful how a county museum could have such a piece. Basically, it was nabbed by the stage manager, whose daughter was starring in the play, and then passed down through the family, who moved to Milford, until somebody threw it in the town attic, where it’s been for the past 60 years.

The museum has had both the blood and the flag tested, and that plus historical testimony makes for what seems a pretty strong case that the flag is, in fact, stained by the blood of Abraham Lincoln. But we won’t truly know until we clone him.

The Columns Museum also offers an opportunity to get even more ghastly than the Lincoln Flag. After all, presidential blood is almost too historic to be truly morbid.

In the next room over from the Lincoln Room, we discovered a glass case full of things connected to the execution of one Herman Paul Schultz of New York City.

You can read the story here, but the Internet-attention-span version is that in the Fall of 1896, Schultz’s wife Lizzie was found in Pike County dead in bed with a bullet to her head. Her husband claimed it was suicide, but later on a jury decided it wasn’t. The story was basically that she was trying to get away from him, he tracked her down from the city, and then he put her down. Schultz was hanged in December of 1897 until he strangled to death, still proclaiming his innocence. He even requested that his wife’s skull be buried with him. It had been exhumed for evidence.

It was the only execution ever carried out in the county. So of course you keep mementos.

In this case, those mementos were the actual noose from around Schultz’s neck, the murder weapon itself, bullets from the gun, shackles for the prisoner, and various documentation. There was even a newspaper clip about the ghost of Herman Paul Schultz.

But that’s okay. I assume the ghost of Abe Lincoln is there doing the noble thing and keeping the ghost of this wife-killer at bay. I mean, if he helped Kirk and Spock, Bill, and Ted, then of course he’d help the good people of Milford, Pennsylvania.

I feel like I make the same pop culture references over and over.

Also, because it’s relevant and because my advertisers pay by the page impression, here are pics of a skull, noose, and other artifacts from another executed wife murder that I visited in some other town’s attic in New York.