A Twisted, Twistin' Memorial Day

My first post, four years ago. And I even made a playlist!

There was a kid with the same last name (but spelled Robbins) and the same birthday, in my junior high classes at Valley Stream North High School. Many of us had been together since fourth or fifth grade, a select bunch divided been high achievers and high potential, as shown in standardized (I.Q.) tests. Guess which part of the divide I was? When Bruce Robbins he showed up at a class reunion with his mother at 2013, we exchanged pleasantries. He was a tenured English professor at an Ivy League university. He got his B.A. and M.A. at Harvard. A surprising number of my classmates from the class of 1967 at a seemingly ordinary middle-of-the-middle class public high school on Long Island, had gone to Ivy League schools. In fact, so many had gone to classy New England universities and stayed to make their lives in the area that the reunion party was held at a hotel, in 2013, in the suburbs of Boston. The 2013 get-together wasn't an official VSN class of 1967 reunion; it was just for us, "The Class," with which I had been reuinted after 50 years. I believed I had been sent out as a scout in 1963: I went to the microphone at the dinner to report back.

Other Robbins remembered the report card incident, when his report card was mailed to my house, and vice versa, but he was not eager to discuss it with our friends, for whom it had become a nearly 50 year old meme. (In that “I wanna be a hood” attitude to which I aspired, mine was full of failure, while his were all high 90s.)

Once the Robbins family and the Robins family got the report cards straightened out, my parents were called in to talk to the guidance counselor about my grades. My parents were asked if all was well at home. "Oh, just perfect." (Liars, but...) The guidance counselor asked me. "Yeah, it's OK, it's good." I did not tell the guidance counselor that my only immediate ambition was to get suspended from school for smoking on school grounds, so that my name would appear on the "suspended" list sent to every home room. "Suspended" was my idea of honor roll. Once eighth grade was over, and I was promoted out of pity, my family moved to a new house in a different school district. At Herricks, beginning in ninth grade, they didn’t know anything about my potential: I was enrolled in a lot of shop classes, where one of the teachers called me “Wally Wood-butcher.” I was on the assistant principal’s “expected to drop out at 16” list.

Other Robbins had remembered me as a good dancer. I was not a good dancer, I don’t think: I’d had polio the summer between fourth and fifth grade; I walked with a limp for about a year, but I worked hard at physical therapy, and had a crush on my therapist whose name, oddly, was Ms. Robb. The limp went away through working hard on rebuilding my atrophied lower right calf muscles, but psychologically, I thought I was always dragging the leg. It made me a slow runner, but the ninth grade gym teacher didn’t care: I had to run extra laps for lagging. Then my leg hurt.

But I was adequate, even fearless, at The Twist. Fortunately, the Twist era lasted almost three years, sixth grade through eighth grade. Here is John Travolta and Uma Thurman doing The Twist in Pulp Fiction:

My father told the Valley Stream North guidance counselor that the previous semester, I had been working very hard on my bar-mitzvah that Dec. 1, 1962, which was true, and now I would be able to apply myself to school again, which was not true. Ten years later, when I returned home after college, my parents were divorcing.

My Bar-Mitzvah: Now that was something. At a Bar-Mitzvah, the 13 year old Jewish boy is inducted into adulthood, and has the full responsibilities of a Jewish man. I did study hard: I learned to read my Parshah portion from the Torah scroll, and then did the required reading of the Haftarah, that week's reading from the Book of Prophets. There is also a speech, in which the Bar-Mitzvah boy usually fills in the blanks of a pro forma talk that the rabbi has already written. Thank you Rabbi, teachers, synagogue Sisterhood, Brotherhood, parents, grandparents, relatives, friends.

I told Rabbi Zivitz of the Franklin Square Jewish Center I wanted to write my own speech, and since I was a good student despite some behavioral issues (like downing as many cups of the small cups of sweet kosher wine as possible at the kiddush after the Saturday morning services before they were taken away), he let me go for it. In fact, I had spent the best part of the year working on my Bar-Mitzvah plot, and so I went to the lectern, nobody knew what hit them.

I started to wail: "I feel all, all, alright!" With me on the bimah, the stage, a curtain opened, and the Isley Brothers and mini-skirted dancers rose from an orchestra pit.

They sang responsively: "Yeah yeah, yeah yeah, ooh!"

I chanted, as the Isleys do: "Since I met you baby, you've been so good to me." Rabbi Zivitz's glasses begin to fall off his nose, his bald head is beaded with sweat, he doesn't like the way this is starting.

Then the mini-skirted dancers are mooning the audience as the Isley Brothers and I sing: "You know you me want to Shout, Shout, ooh Shout, a little bit softer now, a little bit louder now, woo! A little bit softer now, a little bit louder now..." I'm doing splits, the Isley Brothers are doing somersaults, the dancers are shaking their tail-feathers...

I see that my grandmother Molly Rabinowitz, had fainted. My father's mother, so devout that she insisted on walking more than a mile to synagogue. That is why we had scheduled the bar-mitzvah for two weeks before my mid-Demember birthday, in the hope of catching the last warm wave before winter. Her devotion was rewarded: That day was the warmest December 1 on record until that point, the temperature well into the 60s.

But she was in trouble now. My brother David, then 9 years old and deeply attached to the family, starts to cry, catches my eye and I can read his lips: "You just killed grandma!" Her husband, my grandfather Harry, seemed shocked, but I thought I saw a twitch of curiosity, a curl of a smile. Various uncles and aunts start shouting, "shame on you, shame, shame," and they begin tearing up the envelopes with their bar-mitzvah gift checks, and one of those uncles wonders aloud, "Who are those schvartzes!" (Derogatory Yiddish term that translates literally as “black.”)

Some try to leave, but I had my hoodlum Catholic school friends, recently expelled from St. Catherine's of Sienna across the street, keep the door bolted from the outside.

The Isleys keep singing, like a voodoo incantation: "a little bit softer now, a little bit softer now, a little bit louder now, a little bit louder now...Whoo!" My friends, sitting in the front row, had been clapping along, the girls—Mona, Nancy, Nancy, Ellen, Ellen, and Ellen, get up, take off their shoes, waving their scarves; my friends, Alan and Eliot, Marc and Jeff, take off their neckties, wave them in the air, as they toss their yarmulkes heavenward. Fistfights break out among cousins from opposite sides of the family. Divorces are requested and accepted.

Sirens get louder coming from Franklin Avenue and Hempstead Turnpike, smoke has been spotted, and the Franklin Square Jewish Center starts to spin, breaking free of its foundation, elevating, twisting towards the clouds, higher and higher, I look down and everything looks like "Chagall Over Vitebsk" before normalcy is restored.

My parents, Marty and Phyllis Robins, keep staring straight ahead.

"I don't see anything, Marty, do you?"

My father, "What do you mean? What's to see? It's a lovely bar-mitzvah. I'm very proud of him."

"Yes, I am too." By the time the smoke has cleared, the shul returned to its foundation, the Isley Brothers disappeared, my grandmother back to life, I continue reading from my speech: "Thank you, once again, Rabbi Zivitz, parents, grandparents, teachers, friends, for these wonderful gifts, the traditional fountain pen. . .and we'll see you at the party tomorrow night."

It was like “Men in Black” using their neuralyzer blasters, which was what home life was like. A year later, the Beatles would cover, and in my opinion match, the Isley Brothers’ “Twist & Shout.” Why? Because the Isleys, when you watch old videos, seem to be grumbling through “Twist and Shout,” like: “I can’t believe they got us doing this twist shit.” When you watch John Lennon’s face in videos of the Beatles singing and performing “Twist & Shout,” you see the sheer delight of the rock and roll that would save most of our souls. At the top, click on the playlist of some very underrated records from the Twist era.