COLUMN: Columbia House

I was wasting time on Facebook the other day when a funny meme sent me on an all-expense paid trip to Nostalgiatown.

"Don't forget," the meme said. "You still owe Columbia House 1 cent for those 13 tapes." The fact that 30% of our population probably has NO idea what that means fills me with sadness. 

Someone asked me the other day where I got my great love of music from. That's a tough question to answer. Well, actually it's an easy one: I owe it all to my parents. Just please don't ever tell them I said that.

I'm not willing to concede that my parents were in any way responsible for my exceptional genius taste in music. In that department, the odds were stacked against me. Actually, my dad listened to some pretty cool stuff when I was growing up. You couldn't pass his workshop without getting blasted by Chicago or Santana at unhealthy decibels. My dad was fairly rad in his day.

Mom, on the other hand, forced me to grow up on a steady diet of easy listening schlock primarily centered around the musical stylings of Barbra Streisand. With varying degrees of success, I spent much of my adolescence trying desperately hard NOT to let her horrible taste in music rub off on me. I think I ended up prevailing -- and I'm sticking to my story that those Barry Manilow and Neil Sedaka CDs in my collection somehow got mixed in by mistake.

She might not have done much for me musically, but my mother DID put me down an advanced path when it came to reading. My folks did everything they could to increase my appetite for reading. Little did they know that appetite would instead turn me into a music geek.

One year for Christmas, my folks let me subscribe to three magazines of my choosing. My first pick was Sports Illustrated (which clearly didn't stick.) The second was a magazine full of crosswords and puzzles called Games. The third subscription -- and the only one I've kept to this day -- was Rolling Stone, the best introduction to counter-culture a 10-year-old could ever ask for.

I read each issue cover-to-cover with reverence. I never understood the political writing, and I distinctly remember thinking Hunter S. Thompson was a loon. But when it came to the articles about musicians, I hung on every word. It was the gateway to a world of rebellion, alternative thinking, and insanely cool music. There was just one problem: the gateway was closed.

I grew up in Galesburg. The only place to get new tunes other than the radio was Musicland in the mall, and their selection was always lacking. Rolling Stone taught me biographies and interesting facts about any number of left-of-center bands. The only thing I couldn't tell you was what any of them SOUNDED like, because Musicland didn't stock left-of-center stuff. This was before Spotify, before the internet, and before we even had MTV.

Cue my parents again. Not only was I lucky enough to receive an allowance I never deserved, my parents never cared when I'd waste said allowance on foolish purchases. And no purchase was more foolish than a subscription to the Columbia House Music Club.

Their gimmick was hard to resist: "Get 13 tapes for a penny!" What pre-teen wouldn't salivate over an offer like that? Columbia House would send you 13 cassettes of your choosing for a mere penny -- provided you joined their club and agreed to buy 4 more tapes at their inflated prices over the next year. Every month, a new Columbia House catalog would arrive in your mailbox like clockwork, featuring their Album of the Month. If you didn't immediately mail back the accompanying reply card, ten days later they'd mail you the Album of the Month (along with a hefty invoice.)

Inevitably, you'd end up forgetting to mail the reply card, and the Tina Turner cassette gathering dust in my basement right now is testament to that. If you weren't diligent with the reply cards, you could get in a lot of trouble quickly. The internet is full of stories from people who were denied bank loans simply because they forgot to pay Columbia House for a tape fifteen years ago. It was a racket, plain and simple.

But that racket changed my life. I remember the day I finally convinced my parents I was responsible enough to join Columbia House. Choosing those 13 tapes was one of the happiest moments of my life. Since I had nothing to lose except a penny, I ordered 13 tapes from 13 bands I'd read about in Rolling Stone but had never heard a lick of music by. It may have been the single most important purchase of my upbringing.

I still remember most of them. The Cure. The Smiths. R.E.M. Elvis Costello. Siouxsie and the Banshees. Husker Du. New Order. Violent Femmes. One Bananarama tape, because even an aspiring mopey counter-culturalist likes to dance in his bedroom behind closed doors. Finally those articles in Rolling Stone had a soundtrack, and it was music that would shape my taste, my passion, and my hobbies for decades to come. And I owe it all to a scammy mail-order music company.

Columbia House closed for good in 2009, leaving behind a legacy of forgotten reply cards, unwanted cassettes, and ridiculous dents in our credit scores. But it also left me a better person with a higher appreciation for a world of music I might have never discovered without Columbia House, Rolling Stone, and my poor parents who suffered through a decade of my blaring stereo. 

I wouldn't trade any of those memories for a dollar -- unless you're willing to give me 13 tapes in return, in which case, let's talk.  

COLUMN: Chili & Cinnamon Rolls

 As we're all prone to doing from time to time, I found myself in Nebraska last weekend.

Wait, no. I don't mean I FOUND myself in Nebraska. I wasn't on a soul-searching mission to discover my true inner Cornhusker or anything. But I WAS in Nebraska last weekend for a visit. Well, technically a visitATION, but that was the bummer part of the trip. I'd rather talk about the WEIRD part.

We had just crossed the state line when I saw the first sign. "IT'S CHILI AND CINNAMON ROLL SEASON," said the friendly restaurant lettering.

The weirdness of what I'd read didn't really hit me until I saw ANOTHER sign. "CHILI AND FRESH CINNAMON ROLLS SERVED HERE!" Well, that's just kind of odd. Why were all these restaurants advertising chili and cinnamon rolls simultaneously? Did some bakery in the area have a dramatic overstock on cinnamon rolls or something?

Eventually, we decided to find someplace to grab a quick bite to eat. And when you need a quick bite in Nebraska, there's really only one correct choice. If you want the true taste of Nebraska, you need to stop at a Runza. The iconic fast food chain has 85 locations, and nearly all are in Cornhusker country.

The chain has scant locations outside Nebraska, but for a short time, we had one right here in Moline. One of the first restaurants to set up shop in the late, great Southpark Mall food court was a Runza. My best friend is from Nebraska, and when he discovered they'd opened a Runza here, I think it's the only time I ever saw him dance. Sadly, it was also one of the first food court failures. Maybe the Quad Cities just wasn't ready for the magic of a Runza sandwich -- a yeast-dough rectangle filled with ground beef, onions, and cabbage. At Memorial Stadium in Lincoln, they sell over 10,000 every time the Cornhuskers take the field. 

So there we were, waiting in line at Runza, when I spotted it. Combo #3: Chili and a cinnamon roll. A sign stuck to one of the windows proudly announced "It's chili and cinnamon roll time!" What the WHAT? And then it happened it front of my eyes. As we sat there eating, I spied a family gathered around a table full of chili bowls and plates of cinnamon rolls -- and I watched in horror as they eagerly tore off chunks of sweet glazed cinnamon roll, dunked them whole-heartedly in chili, and wolfed them down.

I'm all for cultural differences among peoples. I enjoy trying different cuisines and foods I've never eaten before. I love chili. Lord knows I love a good cinnamon roll. I have absolutely no issues with the two sharing a plate in front of me. But to take the cinnamon roll and dunk it INTO the chili? That's a crime against nature.

Just then, a perky teenaged Runza employee came round to clean a nearby table. I proceeded to irritate her.

"Soooo... chili and cinnamon rolls. Is that a thing?"

She looked at me like I was crazy.

"Because in Illinois, it's definitely NOT a thing."

Then she looked at me like I was crazy AND from Mars.

"Of course it's a thing. What else would you eat with chili?"

I could think of a dozen or so pairings less gross than cinnamon rolls -- but before I could comment, she was off, soon to be seen whispering to her co-workers while covertly pointing our way, assuredly telling them about the weirdos at table 13 who dare to eat chili without cinnamon rolls.

Upon getting back to Normalburg where good foods don't make gross decisions, I did some investigating. It turns out I'm not only one astonished by this odd pairing. Internet sleuths have long tried to trace the origins of the exotic mash-up. The general consensus is that it started in Washington state as a "logger's breakfast." Logging camps would take the leftover chili from the night before and dump it over cinnamon rolls for a calorie infusion to power their workers through the day.

As for Nebraska, the fad seems to have been spread by the trendiest of all people -- grade school lunchladies. Chili and cinnamon rolls as a combo showed up on Nebraska school lunch menus in the 1960s and spread regionally from there.   

I wondered if anyone else outside of Nebraska knew of this peculiar pairing, so I posed it to the collective hive-mind of Facebook. Most of my friends found the idea pretty weird. Some said they grew up with it. But then OTHER comments started drifting in that completely freaked me out.

"That's nothing," a distant Facebook friend chimed in. "I once had a roommate from Galesburg, Illinois. He used to eat chili with peanut butter sandwiches and thought it was completely normal."

Umm... that's NOT normal? Having grown up in Galesburg myself, I spent most of my childhood being fed chili and peanut butter sandwiches on the regular by the fine folks at Community Unit School District #205. Just the other day, I heated up some chili, pulled out some Wonder bread, slapped on some peanut butter, and called it lunch. I've eaten chili with peanut butter sandwiches my entire life. Not once, not until that very second, did I think it was weird. Its just how people eat chili -- isn't it?

Spoiler: It is decidedly not normal. And I had no idea. And now I've lost all sense of right and wrong and I'm in an existential crisis. Thanks a lot, lunchladies.

I'm thinking the moral of the story here can go two ways: Either (1) all of us are weird in our own way, whether it's our upbringing, our culture, or the state we call home, and maybe we should stop finger-pointing and just embrace our collective weirdness, or (2) grade school lunchladies were the original social influencers and FAR more powerful than any of us ever realized.

Should my illustrious faux journalism career ever end, maybe that's how I'll spend my golden years -- working in a school cafeteria and devoting my life to making little kids think that insane food combinations are perfectly normal. If one day my column disappears, and then soon after your child comes home from school asking for a sausage and banana pizza with extra mustard, my work will be done.

       

COLUMN: Adoption Story

It happens every January.

Whenever New Year resolutions reach fever pitch, I can always count on at least one overly dramatic post from a friend proclaiming the evils of social media and deleting themselves from Facebook. "I can't take all this negativity and hostility!" one post this year read. "I must remove this from my life and return to normalcy!"

I've never understood this grand gesture. To me, saying "I hate social media" makes as much sense as "I hate mail! I hate telephones! I hate communication!" Social media and the internet is just a new, efficient way of interacting with people. I guess if you don't like, take the next exit off the information superhighway because you WILL get run over.

Is there negativity, hatred, racism, and closed-mindedness on social media? You betcha. If you don't believe me, go send my uncle a friend request and enjoy his daily homophobic, xenophobic offerings unto the world. But just because negativity like that exists on the internet, why let it bother you? My mouse has a scroll button for a reason. If I see something stupid on Facebook, I scroll past it and don't let it ruin my day.

And sometimes? Well, sometimes social media can be truly amazing.

Last week I got a message from my friend Jenny. I think the last time we talked at length, I'd just graduated high school. A few years behind me in school, Jenny lived next door to a girl I had a massive crush on, and somehow I think she ended up with a crush on me (weird, I know.) I went off to college and she ended up marrying a classmate of mine and moving to Kansas City. Apart from the occasional comment on Facebook, we hadn't talked in years.

Jenny was adopted when she was a baby. Despite being raised by a loving mother, she'd always been curious about the identity of her biological mom. 

"I grew up with family I loved," she said. "But I never really felt a sense of true belonging."

For some time, Jenny toyed with the idea of searching for her birth mother.

"A few years back, Illinois passed a law that unsealed my adoption records," she explained. "I filled out all the paperwork but never turned it in. I guess I was worried about being rejected. Every year on my birthday, I'd pull that paperwork out and think about submitting it. Last year, I turned 45 and figured it was now or never."

Last week, she opened her mail to find a copy of her birth certificate listing the name of her biological mother. A quick investigation on social media revealed a woman in Illinois with the matching name. Here's where it gets weird. And more than a little confusing.

Jenny tried to message the woman, but her message went unread and unanswered. Undaunted, Jenny looked up the woman's profile and her list of Facebook friends. One of those Facebook friends shared a mutual friend with Jenny. That mutual friend was me.

Randomly, I was suddenly the middle-man in this mystery. Even MORE randomly, the friend we shared was Veronica, a former newsroom artist here at the paper. Veronica moved away years ago, but we still stay in touch and get together occasionally. So Jenny messaged ME to see if I could message Veronica to see if Veronica could message Maybe-Mom on Jenny's behalf. See, I told you it was confusing.

This put me into a sticky situation. On the one hand, I kinda know how Jenny feels. I was adopted by my dad as a wee Shaneling. He's the only dad I will ever want, need, or love -- I just don't happen to share his DNA. I never met my biological father (who died last year), nor did I ever want to. Through social media, however, I've discovered an entire brood of biological half-siblings I'd never met. A couple of them look just like me, which is kinda creepy. We've corresponded online, and it's been fun getting to know them.

On the OTHER hand, though, what if this woman didn't WANT to be found? Adoption papers are often sealed for a reason, and not everybody who gives a child up for adoption yearns for that door knock years later. What if my actions were about to ruin some woman's new year and send her life crashing down? Yikes. I didn't want that kind of responsibility.

Instead, I passed the buck to Veronica. I messaged and explained the situation. As it turned out, Maybe-Mom wasn't just Veronica's Facebook friend. She was, in fact, the best and closest friend of Veronica's mom. 

"Whoa," Veronica texted me. "I'm actually in the car with my mom right now. Let me talk to her about it."

Veronica's mom was certain Jenny had the wrong person. Her friend never mentioned putting a child up for adoption. Still, Veronica's mom wanted to speak to Jenny over the phone. After making sure Jenny's intentions were good, she went over to her friend's house and relayed the whole story.

It turns out that Maybe-Mom WAS Jenny's biological mother. She had gotten pregnant as a teen and her family sent her away to have the baby in secret. While she later shared the secret with her husband, her best friend (Veronica's mom) never knew. Her son, who grew up as an only child, never knew. With one message to Veronica, I just pulled one VERY large and perhaps unwanted cat out of the bag. This was better than a soap opera, unless I was the villain in the story.

Thankfully, I wasn't. Later that night, Jenny got the phone call she'd been waiting 18 years for. Since then, they've video-chatted daily. This weekend, Jenny's birth mother and family are heading to Kansas City to meet her. Her newly-found half-brother is flying out next month. It looks like a happy reunion is in the cards.

"It's so surreal but exciting," Jenny told me yesterday. "We just instantly meshed and it feels like we've always been a family. She told me her heart is full and she feels like a weight has been lifted. My half-brother told me I've brought her happiness back."

"I've always been searching for my real identity. Call it soul-searching, if you will. I've always felt like I didn't know who I really was. I know it sounds strange, but in a matter of days, that feeling has gone."

Meeting a stranger who happened to birth you isn't necessarily an instant key to self-identity, and a meet-up isn't going to instantly fill a hole in your life. But it sounds like everyone's heads and hearts are in the right place. If you're the praying type, give Jenny and her birth mom a shout-out this week in hopes their reunion goes well.

So next time you cast your New Year's resolutions and feel like social media is pointless, think about how much smaller it makes the world. Think about how it allowed Jenny to find her birth mom in less than a day. If the reunion goes well, it's all thanks to Facebook.

Wait, I take that back. Forget Facebook. If the reunion goes well, it's all thanks to ME. All hail Shane, Uniter of Families, Righter of Wrongs, and Master of the Cyber-Universe. Unless things go poorly. In which case, it's totally Facebook's fault.

  

COLUMN: Best of 2019 - TV

"The new golden age of TV" continued to deliver in 2019, with the sad asterisk being a whole lot of great shows came to an end this past year. With a kajillion new streaming services launching and more competition than ever, it'll be harder than ever for new offerings to become breakout hits. Will 2020 rise to the challenge? For now, let's look at my faves for one of the best years in television history: 

10. Riverdale (The CW) - Some shows are so over-the-top, you can't help but cringe and wonder what the producers were thinking. Riverdale, on the other hand, revels in it. It's the soap opera today's generation needs. It's Twin Peaks meets Days of our Lives meets comic books. From hooded killers and masked vigilantes to sinister cults and evil board games, Riverdale checks all the boxes you need for hammy fun popcorn drama.

9. The Good Place (NBC) - Mike Schur is a sitcom visionary, and The Good Place could well be his opus. It's funny. Really funny. Like, pee your pants funny. But behind the laughs beats a show with a massive brain and bold heart that holds a mirror to society and gets SERIOUSLY deep about what it means to be a good person in the modern era. At times silly and goofy, at times an emotional rollercoaster, there's truly nothing else like it. When it ends its run later this year, it'll leave a hole that won't be filled until Schur's NEXT project gets unveiled.

8. Life in Pieces (CBS) - Shame on CBS for never giving Life in Pieces a fair shake. This smart, sharp family sitcom was seldom given a good timeslot to shine, and when they burned through the final season in two episode bursts, the axe of cancellation was inevitable. What a shame, because it was a real gem. Originally written off as a copycat of ABC's Modern Family, Life in Pieces flourished while Modern Family floundered. I hope the reruns land on a streaming service where others can discover and love it as much as the show deserves.

7. His Dark Materials (HBO) - No matter how much the theme song and title credits may try to mimic it, His Dark Materials is not the natural successor to Game of Thrones -- but it's still awfully good. This year, HBO and the BBC gave the big-budget treatment to the acclaimed young adult novels of Philip Pullman, and it didn't disappoint. Stylish, dark, and full of wonder, it's a world you can lose yourself in, whether you're a young adult or a grown man-boy laying on his couch on an otherwise boring Monday night.

6. Silicon Valley (HBO) - HBO took a hit this year with the final bows of pretty much all its beloved shows. Silicon Valley was an especially hard loss, as I can't imagine a world where I no longer get to root for the hapless losers of Pied Piper as they wade through the pitfalls and trappings of the modern tech world. The finale (a word that still pains me to think of with this show) was especially perfect and poignant, but that's about all I can say without spoiling things. 

5. Game of Thrones (HBO) - Okay, so the finale wasn't everything we wanted it to be. But even at its worst, Game of Thrones flew fire-breathing circles around most everything else on TV. People don't get worked up over a show's ending unless the show was truly something special. In the wrong hands, Game of Thrones could have been little more than "hot babes on dragons." Instead, we fell deep into the world of Westeros and the greatest fantasy epic since "Lord of the Rings." Every episode was a mini-movie that cost more to make than your average theatrical release. The bar of television will forever be raised. Game of Thrones (as well as most of its characters) is dead. Long live Game of Thrones.

4. Rick and Morty (Adult Swim) - Despite having been renewed until basically the end of time, Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon only release new episodes of Rick & Morty when they're good and ready, and the wait always seems to pay off. With its trademark lightning-fast jokes within jokes within jokes that are actually meta-commentaries about television, society, and life, Rick & Morty remains the most inventive and clever show on TV.   

3. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (The CW) - Who would have thought that a light-hearted musical comedy-drama about mental illness would survive four seasons on network television? All credit must go to the CW, who listened to the critics and kept renewing Crazy Ex-Girlfriend despite cultishly low ratings. But what a cult to be a member of! Challenging social stigma through song and dance is a tough order, but co-creator and star Rachel Bloom somehow made it work. Despite a perfect finale, I keep writing fifth season plotlines in my head, but I can't carry a tune half as good as Rachel.

2. Los Espookys (HBO) - What on Earth IS this show? Created by stars Ana Fabrega and the hilariously deadpan SNL writer Julio Torres, Los Espookys was the weirdest thing on TV in 2019. Set in a never-identified Latin American country, the always subtitled half-English, half-Spanish sitcom centers around a group of down-on-their-luck friends who turn their love of horror movies into a business, providing lo-fi campy frights for profit. It's absurd gothic fun fueled by tenderness and charm. Somehow, some way, it got renewed for a second season and I can't wait.  

1. Sex Education (Netflix) - Not nearly as tawdry as the title suggests, the best show of 2019 was a sleeper hit on Netflix whose second season arrives in just a couple weeks. It's a coming-of-age story centered around Otis, an inexperienced high schooler who's smitten with Maeve, the class rebel. She's the only one who knows Otis' secret: his mom (played with glee and gusto by Gillian Anderson) is a famous outspoken sex therapist. Maeve hatches a plan to turn Otis' lineage into cash by making him the school sex guru, dispensing paid advice from a run-down lavatory. The subject matter gets a little racy, but it's a funny show with morality and a HUGE heart. Purposely vague in both setting and era (the kids are British, but the town looks like New England and they wear American letter jackets), it's the kind of show I'd imagine John Hughes putting a hearty stamp of approval on. It was the best thing I saw all year.

Dear 2020, bring it. Sincerely, your favorite couch potato.