The weekend is my time to give back to my community and my favorite institution within it–our local public library. I remember when I was young how much I loved Story Hour on Saturday morning. Kids would assemble in the library basement to hear a story read to us by Miss Sharp, the lavendar-scented bibliophile who was the gentle cop of the Children's Room beat; shushing us when our volume exceeded a library-voice level, looking the other way when we returned "The Witchcraft of Salem Village" two days late, cutting one's chewing gum out of one's sister's hair when one stuck it there. She was special.
"A book is your friend, you wouldn't wipe a booger on your friend–please don't wipe your booger on a book."
I'm not reading a story today, however. My job is to pick up Barney the Purple Dinosaur and his first wife Baby Bop, who will be participating in a "Use Your Imagination!" session for the kids of our town. If you have children under the age of say thirty-five I'm sure you know Barney, the sickly sweet tyrannosaurus rex who first appeared on public television in 1992.
Barney's 50 in t-rex years this summer, and his career has been on the skids since his show went on "hiatus" in 2009. Since then, he's joined the ranks of the "working famous"; actors from cancelled sitcoms, one-hit wonder bands and comedians who've been on The Tonight Show a few times but haven't made it big. For a while he was able to eke out a pretty good living doing so-called "skip and wave" shows at big venues like the Boston Garden, but it was a grind. Two performances a day, then hit the road to Cleveland, or Pittsburgh, or wherever he was scheduled to appear next.
But those gigs looked good when he was downgraded to the "B" circuit in smaller auditoriums like The Centrum in Worcester, Mass. The money wasn't as good, and he was forced to scale back, selling his condo in Cambridge, Mass. right across the river from the studios at WGBH, the public TV station in Boston that gave him his first break in educational show biz. He now lives in a crummy two-bedroom apartment in Allston, a grimy neighborhood in Boston that is best described as a college student ghetto.
I pull up to Barney's "triple-decker," a somewhat run-down example of the three-floored apartment buildings that make up much of Boston's older housing stock. On the front porch I see Baby Bop, the thirty-five year old triceratops who rose to fame with Barney, then divorced him when his personal life spun out of control. They have recently reconciled, but "Babe," as we all knew her back in the day, says she's not getting hitched again.
"Hey," she says as she comes around to my driver's side window. "I wanted to get to you before you rang the doorbell."
"He's hung over again?"
"Yep. He's having a cup of black coffee and a donut. He needs to shave, but at least he's up."
It's sad to watch a great artist in decline, but youth is fleeting, and with it the fickle favors of pre-school fans.
The other Purple One.
I look up and see The Purple One–not Prince, Barney–come out the front door. He's always been a trouper–I shouldn't have doubted for a second that he'd make it.
"Hey Barn–what's shakin'?" I say.
In happier times.
He winces visibly. "Keep your voice down, would you?" he says as he gets in the "shotgun" seat for the drive down the Mass Pike.
"You . . . party like it was 1999 last night?" I ask, teasing him gently.
"I don't want to talk about it," he says, holding his head.
"We had half a liter of tonic left," Baby Bop says. "He's so cheap, he didn't want it to go flat, so he had three more G&T's."
"Ouch. I did that one time, but I was going away for a week. Totally missed my plane the next morning," I say, trying to commiserate.
"Am I talking to myself, or did you not understand what I said before."
"Sor-ree!" I say, and drive in silence.
Thankfully, the toll booths on the MassPike have been replaced by electronic toll monitors so Barney doesn't have to hear me throwing quarters in the metal bucket. When we're out on the highway, he falls back against his window, sound asleep, and Baby Bop and I have a chance to catch up.
Screwed, just like Barney
"How's he doing?" I ask.
"Still bitter. He never got a dime's worth of royalties from the licensing deals."
"Like all the old doo-wop groups, huh."
"Yep. I'm trying to hold things together for him, but it's been hard."
"You're a saint," I say, and she gives my hand a squeeze.
"I love him, what can I say," she says with lump in her throat.
The big guy stirs as we hit the Weston exit.
"Sorry, pal, I had to change lanes and slow down," I say.
He grumbles a bit, but he appears refreshed. "I just needed a little cat nap," he says as he stretches. "What god-forsaken hell hole am I performing in today?"
"You're not going into the children's room of my local library with that kind of attitude, you dig?"
"'You dig?'" Barney says, mocking me in the sing-song hyuck-yuck-yuck voice that is part of his stage shtick. "What are you, a beatnik?"
"Just trying to get my point across," I say, but I figure it may be time for an intervention. I know from personal experience that there's nothing that works better with someone who's slid into cynicism, as I did in my twenties, than to confront them with the facts, as directly as possible. "Why are you so bitter?" I ask.
"Moi–bitter?" he says, a look of offended dignity on his face, but I know it's just a pose. He knows he's bitter–and he doesn't care.
"Who wouldn't be bitter?" he says after a beat. "'Use your imagination!' That's what I get paid to say, one Saturday story hour after another. But you should take a look at the parents who'll show up today. If any of them ever used their imagination, they'd call their accountant first to see if it was deductible, then their HMO to see if the imagination is covered in case they sprain it. They so rarely use them, they know they're out of shape."
I consider this, and have to admit he has a point. "There's nothing stopping you from changing your act," I say. "We have a pretty good library–lots of poetry, both print and audio books. The newer fiction is mainly best-sellers, but you can find the high brow stuff shelved by author in the Literature section."
"You're wrong–I returned 'Invisible Man' last Saturday–plenty of time to spare."
He purses his lips as if he's actually thinking about this, and looks out his window wistfully. "You just may have a point," he says. "I guess it's partly my fault, not adapting my act to changing tastes over the years." He pulls out a pack of Newport Lites and pushes in my cigarette lighter.
"I really wish you wouldn't smoke in my car," I say.
"We're on local roads, I'll roll my window down," he says as he fires up. "It relaxes me before I go on."
I turn onto the road by the reservoir, hang a left past the community farm, then pull into the parking lot.
"This is it. It's not Madison Square Garden, but the road back has to start somewhere," I say.
"Okay," he says, and he is transformed suddenly from the crabby mope he's been for most of the ride into the consummate performer that he is. Think Elvis in Vegas, Richard Pryor on Sunset Strip. I can tell from his stride past the book return box that his hair's on fire and he's ready to burn the place down, as we say in show biz.
We stop in the vestibule where we're met by Patricia Dineen, head librarian. She can't restrain herself from the sort of star-struck gushing that Barney gets wherever he goes. "I've been a big fan of yours forever," a dubious claim since she's a fifty-year-old who would have been in grad school when Barney first came on the air. "Would you mind autographing something special for me?"
"Write 'To Trish–my favorite head librarian.'"
"Sure," Barney says. He holds out his hand, expecting maybe a VHS tape of "Barney & Friends," when he sees Dineen lift up her blouse to reveal a white camisole.
Barney looks at me, and I shrug my shoulders with a look that says "The customer's always right," but Baby Bop intervenes.
"I have some autographed 8 1/2 x 11 glossies–take one," she says sharply, then pushes Barney forward to a waiting crowd of fifty or so infants and toddlers.
"Yay–Barney!" one little boy screams, touching off a near riot. The kids crowd around, and it is all that Baby Bop and I can do to form a flying wedge and push our way up to the dais. I feel like a Hell's Angel at Altamont.
"I love you . . . you love me!"
Barney launches right into his act, assisted by a boom box with his sound track that Baby Bop takes with them on the road. He has the kids clapping and singing along and, after he brings his big hit "I Love You, You Love Me" to a conclusion, he turns it down a notch for the spoken word segment–the important part of the program.
"You know boys and girls, you don't need a TV or video games to have fun."
"We don't?" a precocious little boy down front asks.
"Nope. Each one of you has something more precious than any electronic gizmo, right in . . . here." He taps his big purple head on the temple.
"What is it?" a girl asks.
"It's your imagination. You can use your imagination to go anywhere you want. When your friends are off skiing at Gstaad over Christmas break, or on Nantucket for the whole month of August, and you're stuck here in town–just use your imagination and it will take you anywhere you want to go!"
The kids are spellbound. Nobody's ever put it to them this way–no one's ever even taken the time to try. They hustle around like FedEx delivery men from soccer, to piano lessons, to hockey, to Scouts, to play dates. Nobody's ever told them they can sit on their butts like zoned-out drugheads and just . . . imagine things.
And then comes the turning point–the moment when Barney transformed himself from the Jerry Lewis of the kids comedy circuit, all sappy, treacly schmalz, into its Lenny Bruce. "And you," he says, turning to the parents. "You can use your imaginations too, if you have any left after all the getting and spending you do." I'm impressed. I didn't know Barney knew any Wordsworth.
The moms and dads in the back row shift uncomfortably, not used to having their lifestyles put under the microscope by a fuzzy purple dinosaur. "When have you ever picked up something totally crazy, like Edgar Allan Poe, when you came to the library with your kids? No, it's stupid sports biographies for the men, and for the women, chick lit that's one step up–and a very little one at that–from bodice rippers."
There is a murmur of dissent from the adults, but no one wants to prolong the discomfort, so they say nothing that can be heard down front.
Joris-Karl Huysmans
"Try a little J-K Huysmans, fer Christ sake," Barney says. "That's using your imagination. Or how about Les Fleurs du Mal, by Baudelaire. That'll rock your world in a way that Jodi Picoult won't."
I had no idea that the Barn Man had become such a litterateur in his years of obscurity. I guess he had more time to read without a one-hour episode to tape every week.
"Yes, Barney, thank you for calling attention to our somewhat underutilized Literature collection," Dineen says, trying to pour some oil on troubled waters. "Why don't I lead the parents on a tour of the stacks while you continue with the children?" She may be star-struck, but she's still got her sensible shoes on.
The parents nod in agreement and follow the librarian out of the room, and Barney quickly downshifts to the happy-talk patter he's perfected over the past two decades.
Baby Bop gives me a look of relief, and we step outside into the sunlight.
"Does he go off like that very often?" I ask.
"Not since he's back on his medication," she says.
"What's that?"
"Nesquik Chocolate Milk, in the convenient one-pint Grab 'n Go bottle."
Available in print and Kindle format on amazon.com as part of the collection "Everyday Noir."
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