Listening to week before last's show. I wish Ben from Brooklyn had had a better phone so I could hear more about Ocean Grove. My father for a time used to go to a Methodist community called Ocean Park in southern Maine in order to take advantage of the nice tennis courts. I have fond memories of sitting with my mother in a cool clubhouse drinking Fresca with a scoop of lime sherbet in it, waiting for my father's game to be over.
Another Maine/New Jersey crossover: At another point in my youth, I worked for a few weeks at a horrible souvenir joint in Old Orchard Beach, which is a honky-tonk of a tourist town. Twelve hours a days, six days a week. An hour off for lunch, and an hour for supper. I made $70 a week. It was an awful job. I was fourteen.
Anyway, it says a great deal about the kind of town Old Orchard was (still is) that fairly often the store--Molko's Department Store, I'll have you know--would receive T-shirts emblazoned with "Wildwood, N.J." and some enthusiastic slogan, instead of the T-shirts printed with the same slogan and "Old Orchard Beach, Maine."
God, that job was awful. My only foray into retail.
P.S. This is the kind of exciting stuff you all would be hearing if I called more often. Aren't you lucky I don't?
