Double dating with Frank Sinatra

Here's another excerpt from the book I'm writing about growing up in the 60s. Note: After the AMERICAN IDOL finale I will post a review of the entire season.

But for now, let's stagger back to September, 1965... ...Meanwhile, willowy 19 year old actress Mia Farrow began dating a “real” senior – Frank Sinatra. He was 49 at the time. It would have been great to double date with them. Maybe go to the Friday night Taft football game, and grab a pizza at Shakey’s. You know what else Frank would like? A popular activity among popular kids was TP'ing someone’s home. That meant showering the house in streams of toilet paper. I can just imagine Frank tossing a roll, saying this house looked vaguely familiar and then realizing, “Hey, this is where the kidnappers held my son!”

School rivalries were big in the San Fernando Valley, especially in the fall when football reined supreme. Taft had two rivals – Canoga Park High and Birmingham High. Canoga was our nearest competitor. They had an older stucco campus and a much rougher crowd. The rivalry would have been bigger had we not been afraid to go to the Canoga games.

So we needed another rival more our socio-economic level. Birmingham High in Encino fit the bill. Good football programs and instead of knife fights you just had Jews taunting each other that their temples had inferior lecture series.

The fall semester was also basketball season. Having suffered through basketball boot camp in the spring I intended to get my just rewards and actually “play” the damn game. I was assigned to the “B” team, which is essentially junior varsity. And I was terrible. Only if there was twelve seconds to go in the game and we were leading by at least 65 points would the coach send me into the game, and usually with instructions to just stand underneath the basket and let myself get fouled. After maybe three games I was cut from the team. But the coach had a proposition. How would I like to become the varsity manager? I would collect the balls after practice. That seemed very demeaning to me, insulting even. Until I learned it would satisfy my P.E. requirement. Sold. I was team manager for three years. And for the next two springs I was manager of the varsity gymnastics team (same coach) where my chief responsibility was to hand out chalk. Not many people can say they lettered in two varsity sports and never once took a shower.

One very big perk of being a manager during basketball season was that I got to be the P.A. announcer at home games. Since I always wanted to be a sportscaster this was just my dish. But I was fired from that too when I caused a major incident during the big Taft-Chatsworth game. I thought I saw a Chatsworth player signal a ref so I said, “And Chatsworth wants a time out.” The ref heard that and charged a time out to them. Well, the signal was apparently for something else (Ooops. My bad.) and the Chatsworth coach went ballistic. This resulted in a technical for our team. Now our coach was livid. In short order everyone was screaming at everyone else. Chatsworth made the technical and eventually won the game… by one point. (Ooops. Reeeeeally my bad.) I spent the rest of the games icing ankles.

Thus concludes the section on my vaunted athletic career in high school. Or any other time in my life .

AMERICAN IDOL season finale review tomorrow. Hint: I hate Kara's songwriting almost as much as I hate her judging.