My buddy Tara had her name misspelled at Starbucks, and now I can never stop thinking of her as Terra of the Teen Titans.
She’s also an editor, so I occasionally add extra spaces in sentences to make her nuts.
Sometimes I think it’s challenging for people to be friends with me.
My 6th grade classmates and I would have gone to Adventureland even before this ad was made. (I am linking here to Jay Lifton’s Youtube channel; he writes that this ad aired around 1987 … my friends and I went there after graduating from grade school into middle school.)
I’ll never forget the fun we had. I rode The Gravitron! But those giant rotating swings — the kind you can find at just about any carnival — were my favorite.
Adventureland is still around. It hit its 60th birthday this year.
Tragically, Wikimedia informs me that there were two ride-related deaths — which really surprises me, because I remember the rides as being pretty tame stuff. Both deaths occurred within a week of each other in 2005, and the details are pretty horrifying. Wow.
I actually had a hard time picking out the best shot of the moon yesterday up at the north edge of town. These might have been the better shots.
Virginia.
Looking north.
“Renaldo!” I wrote this story in the 7th or 8th grade. It was my attempt at an organized crime thriller.
The story has everything!! Ziti!! Cocaine!! A main character whose name is “Scab!!” Famous cops who go by a single name — like Madonna or Prince or something!! The phrase “genius detective, pride of the police force!!” Possibly a degree of confusion about when the Great Depression occurred!! (I chose to set the story in the 1920’s, for some reason, and confusingly stated that “jobs were scarce” at the time. Hey — I’ve told you people before that I was never the smartest kid in the class.)
Anyway, enjoy (?) this antique Nolan prose. Thanks once again to Carrie Schor for passing along vintage stuff from the Longwood Central School District in New York.
Postscript: admit it — you saw the headline “7th-grade crime story” and thought this would be about me committing a crime in the 7th grade, didn’t you? But I gotta find out about a couple of statutes of limitations before I write about those.
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 