bedheadchicken

I was out fairly late this past Saturday night. Sometime around 4AM or so my friends and I drunkenly decided we were gonna get up the next morning and go to Coney Island for the opening of the Cyclone. I planned to blow it off, of course, but at 10:30 AM my phone started ringing and so I went and met my friend Brooke and a few others at noon in Manhattan. It was gray and rainy but we got on the train anyway and went over the Brooklyn Bridge and way out to Coney Island.

When we got off the train the station was empty. The only person we saw was a guy with a tuba-yes a tuba-standing on the corner. Just hanging out. The wind was blowing and we were all hung over anyway so we went directly to Nathan's hot dogs. It's like the first Nathan's hot dog stand in the history of ever-a historical landmark. And it's a complete dump. But I loved it. And they had lobster on the menu. Lobster! I loved the idea of going to a hot dog stand and ordering lobster. So I did. But they said they didn't have any in yet.

After that we walked around a bit. Coney Island is such a throwback. It's got an eerie, old-world carnival feel. It's got a freakshow, the rides are run by carney-looking people who are missing teeth. There was an old man in a top hat and an organ grinder playing to nobody. The fact that nobody else was there and it was so gray and cold only added to the atmosphere.

We came upon this mannequin named "Miss Coney Island" in a glass box. A slot next to her promised that if we dropped in $.25 we'd fall in love. So we did. And Miss Coney Island "danced". Her eyes lit up and her arms and one leg moved back and forth. One leg remained attached to the ground, however, so she looked a bit like I imagine Heather Mills looks like on "Dancing With the Stars". Oh! And the weird part (well weirder part, anyway) was that she danced to "The First Cut Is the Deepest"-the plaintive Cat Stevens song about never healing from a first heartbreak. Really odd.

Oh, and not far away was a monkey head in a glass box. We were too scared to see what $.25 would do to that.

So we walked by the empty bumper cars, and tilt-o-whirl to the Cyclone. You have to experience the Cyclone at least once if you never have. It was built in like the World's Fair of 1908 or some nonsense and it feels like it's going to fall apart at any time. It creaks and clacks and it's entirely made out of old, splitting wood. A few lopsided, hand drawn signs warn you to remove your hat (or wig) before you get on, and warns fat people against riding. There's only one car and it's run by a guy who is about 106. But once it starts it whips you around like your spine is gonna be permanently distorted. The hills aren't high, but it moves faster than any roller coaster I've ever been on. It's insane. When we stopped Brooke immediately jumped out to throw up and our friend Kara screamed "That was HORRIBLE!" I was jumping up and down I was so excited.

After we collected ourselves we heard something from the boardwalk and decided to walk over and check it out. When we got there we found about 100 people gathered by the ocean. At least 30 of them were musicians. But not the kind you'd think-we saw mostly drums, trombones, saxes, and tubas. (So THAT explains the tuba!) and they were playing this cool New Orleans-style jam. In fact the whole thing had a whole freaky Mardi Gras-style feeling. Both musicians and spectators were dressed in costume-as animals, in top hats, on stilts. Whatever. The jam kinda went whever it wanted to, but they were pretty good. And super weird.

That's kinda what I liked most about the whole day-it's weirdness. Coney Island seems to be from another time-from a time before everything was sanitized for our protection. Before everything was Disney safe and Starbucks generic. My grandmother used to go to Coney Island when she was a girl. She's take the train out there on a summer day when the beach was thriving and ride the ferris wheel and have cotton candy. At night she'd go see a band uptown in Harlem or over on the west side. Not rock bands, either. Big bands-40 musicians and a singer big. Or she'd go to the old movie house on 86th street and see a newsreel, a short and a movie for a quarter or something. And the movies were bigger than the bands-Erol Flyn, Bogart and Cagney big. "Gone With The Wind" big. Things are smaller now, and safer. And I think we've lost something.

That's my thought for the day, anyway.