I saw USC beat Oregon State last Saturday.
I had never been to a college football game in my life, although I’ve lost a lot of money betting on them many a Saturday afternoon. My alma mater, Brooklyn College, didn’t have a football team, and in the two years I attended at night, I never once heard a football cheer.
Football is a religion at USC, and it was great fun watching 90,000 drunks staggering into the L.A. Coliseum. We sat in the student section, and I was lucky. The student who sat in front of me stumbled into his seat, fell asleep before kick-off, and didn’t wake up until the game was over.
My wife, the beautiful Judy Licht, was not as lucky, and a drunken kid sitting in the row behind her came within 10 inches of vomiting on her head. I’ll say this about Judy, she scrambled faster than the USC quarterback when the kid started heaving. She was pushing me so she could move out of his way, but I was having trouble moving, as I was laughing so hard.
After every USC touchdown, six totally drunk kids would pick up this tiny girl who must have weighed all of 90 pounds (five of the pounds were beer) and they would toss her up into the air for each point USC scored.
When they had tossed her up 42 times to match the USC point total, I couldn’t help but wonder what the girls’ parents were thinking she was doing at that time. My guess is they probably thought she was studying at the USC library.
It was a great weekend. We stayed at the Beverly Hills Hotel, which was the scene of an incredible amount of wild fun back in the old Mad Men (and Mad Women) advertising days. At night we went to the hotel’s fabled Polo Lounge. My liver remembers the Polo Lounge even better than I do. My terrific son Michael and my beautiful daughter-in-law Laurie joined us for a drink. When the drinks arrived, we clinked our glasses, and the toast by someone in our group (not me) reminded me of why I think my family is very special.
“TO SOUPY SALES!”
“TO SOUPY!” we all said.
Soupy, who was a comedian of 1950s and ’60s who kept generations of kids giggling with his pie-in-the-face antics, passed away last week.
Back in the 1970s I took my parents to the Beverly Hills Hotel for a vacation. My dad was walking alongside the pool, slipped, went down like he had been shot, and just lay there. Soupy Sales, who was standing near my dad, thought he had had a heart attack. He was the first person to his side and was about to do CPR, or maybe even mouth-to-mouth.
We all rushed to his side and, along with Soupy, got him up.
“What the hell was that guy trying to do to me?” my father said.
“Dad, that’s Soupy Sales. He was trying to help you.”
“Soupy? Soupy? What the hell kind of a name is that?”
On Sunday my son Michael and his family came to the Beverly Hills Hotel pool to say goodbye. I handed my grandchildren Jack, 13, and William, 9, each a $50 bill and told them: “This is for you, but it comes with one rule. This is only to be spent on things that are fun. You must not spend it on anything that is ‘good for you.’ You’ll sometimes find that things that are good for you are not always fun. And things that are fun are not always good for you. This is money that you must spend on fun.”
The look of my son and his wife rolling their eyes back was fine.
The look of the little smiles on my grandkids’ faces? Priceless.
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