Hearty

Well, the latest bowl word is “hearty”. Predictably, my hubby and I have a completely different take on such a basic word. I will admit here and now that I am bowing down to my husband’s imaginative and whacky mind. Written in news reporter fashion (in his past life, he was, in fact, a newspaper reporter) he has created a piece that brought a hearty laugh to my lips and laughter tears to my eyes. Out of the cobwebs of my mind comes yet another walk down memory lane and regales a group of wonderful characters from my past. To really do justice to these friendships, I should be writing a book – not a blog! Anyway, enjoy our latest offerings! (Next word…guilt/guilty – fertile material for Baby Boomers!).

BAH-HA-HA-HA

I’ve recently reunited with another one of my high school friends through that great connector of lost friends – Facebook. Those days, long past, have been playing in my mind since this latest reunion.

My parents had picked up our family of 8 over the Christmas holiday of 1969 dropped us in middle of nowhere – or that’s what we thought. We left a booming metropolis of 50,000 people to little, bitty Algoma, which just barely tipped the population scales at 4,000. I was in my second year of middle school before the move and wound up in my last year of grade school after the move as Algoma had two schools – grade school and high school. No middle school. No dignity.

it was a difficult period in my life. I had no friends in this new town, a new step dad and everything familiar was gone. I made it through that last year of “grade school” with a feeling of doom and shuffled through the summer dreading the thought of starting high school alone, shy and extremely insecure.

I walked through the hallowed doors of Algoma High School scared to death. My older sister quickly abandoned me and left me floundering on my own. I don’t remember who I met first, but somewhere in the middle of all that angst and insecurity, I gathered a circle of friends that would fill my high school days and nights with laughter, love and an incredible amount of fun. When I close my eyes, Wubby, Nell, Debbie Jer, Moon, Nake, Piette (a/k/a MacGruder) and I are sitting in the commons planning our next adventure.

Wubby (real name Debbie) was at the center of it all. She was one of the Catholic school girls along with Nell, Nake and Piette. Wubby had a laugh that was hearty and infectious. It would start with a ‘Bah” closely followed by “ha, ha, ha” with a finishing “heeeeeeeee.” When Wubby laughed, her face would turn bright red and she would begin fanning herself to turn down that internal thermostat that was threatening to blow the top of her head off. Her laugh took on a life of it’s own and would explode from her lips without warning – often during class. My face breaks into a wide grin to this day when I think of Wubby’s infectious chortles.

Nell was my partner in crime. Mary Nell was her name, but we tossed first names to the curb in high school and she remains Nell to this day even though she’s been married for 40 years. Nell and I started smoking cigarettes together. We smoked pot together for the first time in the bathroom behind the skating rink…emptied out filtered cigarettes refilled with a minute amount of pot. “Do you feel it,” we asked each other. “Oh yeah.” “Me too”.

Debbie Jer hailed from the Lutheran school along with Moon. She was a petite little thing, but had a laugh that seemed to surprise even her when it erupted. She was shyer than the rest of us, but when you got to know her, she was outgoing and hilarious. I recall that of all of us, she had the strictest parents. I think there was one party at her house all through high school and she and her sister got busted by her parents because the chairs weren’t tucked in straight under the dining room table.

Vickie Starr (we called her Moon) was one of those friends that was more in our group for the first couple of years of high school, but then got that dreaded thing called a boyfriend and left us. She was the first of us to get a learner’s permit. One weekend, my parents left their teenage daughters home alone (along with the keys to the family roadster), and my friends and I thought it would be a good idea to take the family station wagon (Vickie obviously driving since she had the learner’s permit) and drove to a county bar/pizza joint. Oh my gosh, how brave and very stupid we were. I also remember sitting Vickie’s basement singing Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s Our House, but instead of the standard words, we started each word with a B. Bour bouse bas a bery, bery, bery bine bouse. We laughed until the tears were sliding down our cheeks.

Nake (a/k/a Lynn Bair) was another friend that wove more closely in our group during the first couple of years than in the later years due to that boyfriend thing. The parties at her house were almost as legendary as the parties held at the Hutton house (my house) as she had a sister a year older just as I did. Obviously it was always the older sister rather than the innocent younger ones that had the parties. The Bair girls had the best albums and I developed my love of Crosby, Stills and Nash (4-Way Street) sitting in the corner of their living room during one of those social events.

Piette was another Catholic schoolgirl who formed the core of our group. Somewhere during the Nixon years and the Watergate scandal, Teri and I took to calling each other MacGruder. Maybe it just struck us as a catchy name. Maybe some big revelation hit us during Civics class and Jeb MacGruder became our hero. Maybe we were just nuts. All I know is that if I would see Teri tomorrow, I’m sure I’d greet her with a hearty, “MACGRUDER!!!!”

I am Facebook friends these days with all my old cronies other than Moon and if I’d get that random friend request from her, I’d accept it in a heartbeat. The friendships that were forged over Mr. Wadz typing class or bottles of Boones Farm Tinkle Me Pink (which we always called Pickle Me Tink) or nights spent “riding around”, were carefree and memorable. They filled us each with a lifetime of Bah-ha-ha/Heeeeeee’s. I would have sworn on our graduation day in June of 1974 that we’d be friends forever although decades passed without a word of contact. Through the beauty of Facebook, however, that has prophesy has come to pass and old friendships have been renewed. Who knows, one day we may cross the internet superhighway and come together to relive old memories and make new ones. While our conversations may revolve around grandchildren and our latest aches and pains, the center of it will be based on our repertoire of events such as “remember when the party at Krohn’s Lake got busted, and we hid in ditches as we walked back to your house…” Bah-ha-ha-ha. Ah, Memories.

Hearty Hit with Lawsuit

(New York, N.Y., Friday) — Media icon Hearty Harharre will be taken to court next month in a civil suit filed here today by his brother, Hale.

The action alleges that Hearty has unfairly capitalized on the “Hale and Hearty” image established by both brothers more than 50 years ago and has failed to equitably share the revenue generated by that image. The suit seeks a total of $11.6 million in compensatory and punitive damages.

Industry experts have expected legal action on the issue for decades.

“The surprise, here,” observed Beatrice Kale, CEO of the Eat What’s Good for You or Else Conglomerate, “is not that Hearty is being sued by Hale, but that it took so many years for it to happen.”

Some speculated that the closeness of the two brothers made the issue too emotionally charged for action until now. Others theorized that the death of their mother, Hedy, last month may have triggered the action. Their father, Hardy, died in 1996.

The brothers had been extremely close from birth. As identical twins, they didn’t have much choice at the starting gate.

They were inseparable while growing up in rural Vermont, becoming the very epitomes of robust young men in that healthy environment. Both got into body-building in their teens, and it wasn’t long before advertising agencies discovered the brothers and came a-knockin’.

A brand was born.

Soon, everyone wanted to be Hale and Hearty. Their images appeared on breakfast cereal boxes, soup cans and a variety of feminine hygiene products. The last didn’t do very well, but you can’t blame an ambitious advertising agency for trying.

No one knows exactly what happened, but in 1987, Hearty decided to strike out on his own. Perhaps he had noticed that no one ever referred to a substantial meal as “hale.” Hearty had become a standalone, household word, whereas Hale seemed to have virtually disappeared from the American lexicon.

“It was a logical move,” Kale said. “Hale had more or less just been along for the ride for quite some time, so it made sense to dump the baggage.”

Hale was blindsided and devastated. He tried to sell the Hale brand, but found no takers. Spelling-impaired focus groups associated the word with iceballs falling from the sky or yelling for a cab, neither of which were going to move goods and services. A rare exception was the Hale and Hearty Soups chain in New York, but Hale was not getting a cut of that action.

Hale sank into depression, becoming addicted to alcohol, Altoids and Candy Crush. He never spoke publicly of the rift with his brother, but those close to the Harharre family said that Hale never lost hope that he and Hearty would be reunited.

Each year on their birthday, insiders reported, Hale invited Hearty to celebrate. Hearty never accepted, leaving Hale alone with his symbolic single-candle cake.

“My client is only seeking what he deserves,” said Sharky Shyster, Hale’s attorney in the lawsuit. “He bears no malice toward his brother.”

“Hale was always a follower,” Hearty boomed in his trademark megaphone voice. “Going solo was as much ‘tough love’ as anything.”

“We are just twins, for God’s sake, not Siamese twins,” he finished with a hearty laugh.