The Mutant Micro Venice Zoo (Hippies Included).

Now, that Chewbacca fell in love with this "miracle cat," Lazarus, our house was only getting wackier and wackier.   Along with our motley tribe of long-haired hippie-types (AKA the Wolf Pack), the dreaded Veloci-Rooster in the backyard, the snakes held captive in the cages on the third floor, the mice we bred for snake feeding, a Mynah bird that cussed like a drunken sailor in the front entry, a billion guinea pigs, turtles, a giant frog,the Iguana Del Diablo (blog 8/1/13), a bazillion rabbits (that kept multiplying), chickens, and Poochie the Wonder dog - we now had this ugly, black, almost-hairless, scabby cat that was now added to the menagerie at my house.

We had a micro-zoo of mutant animals - including my brothers who were becoming more and more full-fledged hippies!

Someone accused us of stealing one of the monkeys that we let out of the zoo and thought we had smuggled it home, but that wasn't true.  The monkey we presently had came from the new neighbors across the street. Somehow it was turned over to me and was now baby sitting the thing indefinitely.  Monkeys were kind of cool - because not everyone had one, but this one sat on the wainscot ledges around the first floor. The monkey was a boy and was obviously happy that it was a male. The depraved - naked little primate, flaunted his male parts to everyone who dared entered our house.   "Gross!"

By feeding the nasty looking cat (that had cheated death) on the kitchen table, and allowing the ugly thing to walk all over the counter tops - Chewbacca surrendered complete authority and power to the insidious cat to rule over the rest of us mere mortal human beings.  I think Chewbacca's brains had become a conduit to the planet where the far superior Cat Species were sent to earth from - to subject humans to their rule. It might have had something to do with the tinfoil pyramid that Chewbacca wore on his head while smoking the leaves from the "Mexican Tomato Plants...out in the hippie cave in our backyard called "Wall Drug!"

My brothers thought all this was groovy - while, I on the other hand, was down right embarrassed. Embarrassed by the monkey with dangling male parts; embarrassed by the zombie cat that walked unhindered on the top of the table and had absolute authority to lick the butter and open containers of sour cream; embarrassed by the swearing Mynah bird; the mess and junk and stacks of National Geographics magazines; embarrassed by the cars outside on blocks and boats parked on the lawn; and by the fact that the police department made routine visits with warrants in hand - but this was my family and my house and my story and I had to make the best of it.


The good news for my brothers was that with the Fraternity House burned down to the ground, which meant that we had inherited more parking for our armada of hot rods, trailers, boats, broken down cars and old trucks we used as trash barges.  

Hum...? Possibly a motivation for arson - BUT I don't think my brothers burned down the fraternity just so that we could park more of our cars.

All the hippies were accounted for and had alibis - so, I still have to find the perpetrator of his horrible crime - that could have easily been murder.

I understand all of this might be hard to imagine... and that I often compare my house to The Addams Family or The Musters, but there really is no comparison!  This was the 60's, this was funky Venice California, this was hippie-ville... this was my house... this was the Dahlins...where truth is indeed stranger than fiction.  

To turn a chapter...With all this going on at home, I thought that maybe I would take a try with the Boy Scouts in order to escape from time to time. I was inducted into my older "way-overachieving-Eagle-scout" brother's troop.   Troop 32.

By the time I joined the troop in 7th grade - the troops only two eagle scouts had graduated away and we resembled something that look more like F Troop (a show on TV).  At Camporees and camp outs we were a band of notorious little thieves that cut the tent strings of other boy scouts and pelted our enemies with dirt clods.

My Family:

The Lennons who lived across the street.

 

As you can tell, we were definitely not normal... by any stretch of the imagination.  Next time "The pit of despair!

                   EXTRA EXTRA read all about it!

My Apologies...and Arrested Developement!

Everyone I apologize...for leaving you on the cliff hanger.




I've been running crazy and am working on making another Video for this blog, which I am shooting in the morning. I will be telling the "LA Zoo" story in front of a live audience. This is the story where my family managed to let all the monkeys out.    Blog Post 4/29/13  








Oh, and I guess it is better to be telling the zoo story in front of a live audience instead of a dead one! Right?

As soon as I come back tomorrow, I will continue the story of the tragic and horrible accident that happened at the McIlliot's pool.





It involves an older brother, my younger sister and the baby Lennon girl  - Annie. She is pictured to the right circled in red. Of course she's not that young...she's my baby sister's age, who is 9 at the time of terrible tragedy that took place at the McIlliot's pool.  Trust me - the tragedy is not the horrible trick that my coarse older brother pulled to make me vomit... NO! It was simple tom-foolery that involved slippery, wet bodies and a large glass wall just adjacent to the pool.

By this time in 1968 a couple of the Lennon boys had begun to migrate off the Lennon family compound and had dared venture into the Dahlin backyard...with the snakes, the alligator, the snapping turtles, the chicken-eating giant bull frog, and the dreaded Veloci-Raptor - attack rooster. 

Those Mexican tomato plants must have some powerful magic to get the hippies to fend off the rooster for their horticulture project.

I don't know why it was... but Annie began to come home with Kjersten for lunch - TO OUR HOUSE!
It just didn't make any sense! After all those years of parents being Hüber-protective...now either they didn't know about this or Annie just threw all caution to the wind and passed by her own house (that I'm sure had real food) and joined me and Kjersten at our house for lunch where we would have to scrape the moldy penicillin off our Pioneer sour-dough bread.   I thought I would throw in "Hey Jude" for the sound of 1968.

 Hey Jude by The Beatles

  
Annie and Kjersten were friends and tomorrow she would join me, Tommy, Urich and Ralph for the fateful day at McIlliot's pool.

Mark Twain said, "Familiarity breeds contempt - and children."  

and let me tell ya... between us and the Lennons we had a lot of kids on Harding Ave and at our house a lot of "arrested development".


 

God Bless You - More tomorrow!



 

Cloakroom Caper Disaster pt 2

Okay! So, I'd have to admit that it would be kind-of-weird to find some kid (in a hand-me-down Catholic school uniform with with blood stains on the collar) wriggling on the ground in the middle of an empty hallway. I guess, what I had to realized is that Marilyn might not have been the one with the problem in this scenario. Anyway, I do think I sold the bit about how I was rehearsing my role as a shepherd, rolling around on the ground in abject fear of those celestial visitors (continued from last Blog Post).

Hopefully, she wouldn't tell all the girls at recess. I already  felt like a dirty Zombie walking among the living and didn't need any more problems than I already had. Rick Arredondo already had a mustache and I figured that I was probably about 12 years away from puberty... judging by the amount of hair in my arm pits(or lack of hair). I just didn't have a whole lot going for me and I wanted to believe that I had a chance with the ladies...one in particular.

I needed to escape school because the squealing from Sister Edith's music lesson was destined to kill me. I looked down and saw the blood on the collar of my shirt and had to feel around
my ears to make sure they weren't bleeding.  That's when I remembered that the blood was left over from the arrows I had been shot with, which my brothers had made by taping sewing needles to the tips of old bamboo they cannibalized from the curtains in the attic.


That was a relief!  Not the arrow part, but the part where my ears weren't bleeding.

I really did think about going back to the infirmary, after all those years, and assuming the "stick-bug-of-ultimate-humiliation" position - when the flash of brilliance flooded my little gray cells. "If you can't beat them, join them." I reasoned and thought about a way of bringing down the entire class. There was only one problem though...it involved the cloakroom.

Regular kids had their Snoopy and Star Trek and their cool Flying-Nun lunch boxes and brown paper bags that their mothers had packed for their lunches. You know that that meant? It meant that I would have to endure the awful smell of Liverwurst, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and smooshed bologna that had begun to ooze with bacteria - mixed together with the smell of all those kid's school sweaters and B.O. from the boys who sweated at recess, which made those "cloak-rooms" smell like the Hyperion sewage plant in El Segundo.

 "Ewww and double gross!"  

I don't even know why this thing was called a cloakroom anyway. Who wears stinking cloaks anymore? Wasn't that something people wore back at the time of Jesus. Didn't he say something about giving someone your cloak also, when that someone asked for your coat..."Gross!" that meant a cloak was like someone's underclothes...

Geezers, my brain was already on overload before thinking about the groady underwear of 12-year-olds.

The way I looked at it, the nuns probably called those coat-closets - "cloakrooms" because many of the nuns at Saint Marks were around at the time of Jesus. I mean Sister Edith probably helped 'O Mary change the diapers of baby Jesus some 2000 years ago.  She looked that old - not joking.  

Anyway, the ceiling in the classroom was very high and the cloakroom wall behind Sister's Edith's desk didn't go all the way to the top. And there I was in the "pooh-pooh recycling plant" squeezed between the lunches and the sweaters in the cloakroom BEHIND Sister Edith who was yelling "head - tones" at the squeaky mice that had forced the dogs in the neighborhood to commit Hari-Kari and drove old man Snyder criminally insane.

I climbed on up on the hook that held Terry Ballentine's sweater and towered invisibly over the top of Sister Edith.  Without her being aware of my presence, I mimicked her every move.

"Head tones"  I mouthed behind her back lifting my free hand over my head like she was doing with both of hers.

This got everyone's attention...as they were suddenly alert and looking forward to the clown doing his act behind the ambitious nun.

Sister Edith thought she had a miraculous breakthrough with the apathetic 7th graders. She was Julie Andrews (every nun's dream)! By golly, she would lead these squeaking mice in a rendition of  "Doe, Ray, Me, Fall... female dears...rays of sunshine... and names we call ourselves..." She did it! She had finally gotten through to her listless students as if stardust was falling from heaven itself.

Soon laughter broke out!  I had an audience and they loved me! I was a hero and had my own stage where people seemed to liked me. This time I wouldn't have to share the stage with Ulrich like I did at the Zoo when he took over and dance on the edge of the cage before falling in (Blog Post April 29, 2013).

No. Instead, this was all me.

As it turned out, according to plan, it wasn't heavenly stardust after all, but a curse Sister began to think as the laughter swelled and she began to lose control of the class.  I was doing a good thing by saving the all the dogs within a 2 mile radius and possible changing Mr. Synder's darkened heart.  I had disrupted the singing which was the best possible thing at this moment in history! This was almost better than getting Soviet missiles out of Cuba.  This just could be one of the miracles I might be remembered for...when my name comes up for sainthood.

As Sister swung around wildly to look behind her, I stooped behind the half-wall and hid out of sight. She continued again and I popped up and continued to mimic her - which brought the class to its knees in laughter.

Think of the dogs I'm saving...think of poor 'O Mr. Synder - there is hope for him, because of this. Why, I'll be right up there with Saint Nickolaus and Saint Christopher.

She turned around again - I ducked and now the "cat and mouse" game made this entire performance even funnier as I popped up and down like a prairie dog with impeccable timing behind her back.

Yes... I brought the torturous singing to an end  - everyone was delighted except Sister Edith and Anthony and I did not have to make a trip to the dreaded infirmary.  Laughter with tears...UNTIL.

Until... my foot slipped and I fell to the floor of the cloakroom and bonked my head. Unconscious, a couple of the sweaty, bigger-boys dragged my body out from behind the wall and when Sister realized what had happened... she began to throw her chalk erasers at me -as usual. And boy let me tell you... the Dodgers should have signed her up... because she had a right arm that could strike out Pete Rose! 

Anyway, she sent me off to the infirmary and guess who was working? Yep! Mrs. Putziger. Dismayed and dazed, she didn't even wait until my two escorts left until she demanded that I grab my ankles and made me assume the "Stink-bug-of-ultimate-humiliation" position...

...whack slapped the stick from Sister Superior on my stretched out rump.  

Oh well...I guess it was all worth it, because the music stopped - dogs lived and Mr. Synder could now find kindness buried somewhere deep inside. 

God bless us all every one!

THE ZOO Part 2: "THE VIKINGS"

Building from yesterday's episode where we escaped from Venice... I want to quickly draw your attention to a popular cigarette commercial at this time in the 60's. If you're old enough, you might remember it. If you're too young, then you might not know that there was a time that they allowed cigarette commercials on TV trying to convince dummys that smoking was actually cool.  It was a Salem ad (Kids DON'T SMOKE) I still remember it, the popular jingle went like this... "You can take Salem out of the country, but you can't take the country out of Salem."   

Is anyone already getting the connection? (Raise your hand if you think you might know where I'm going with this.)  Stick around and see if your correct then give yourself a pat on the back. SIMPLY: "You can take the Dahlins out of Venice but you can't take the Venice out of the Dahlins." Did you get it right? Anyway, let me say it differently... The Dahlin brood pulled out of Venice, but it didn't mean that we were escaping their inner Viking. NO WAY 

In the words of Bill Cosby, "We were off to the zoo." In the thought bubble of our dog Poochie, "It was bound to be a disaster."

When the overstuffed station-wagon (that's a type of car families drove in 60's) pulled into the parking lot everything (the smell, the noise, the violence, the name calling, the attitude - all of it) squeezed out of the car like Crest oozing out of a tube of toothpaste under pressure.         Watch out world HERE WE WERE!

 

When we got there the boys scattered in a million direction and began climbing over fences and squeezing under the turnstiles.  The Dahlins had arrived and the zoo would never be the same.

Gustav - the oldest, immediately went out on a hunt for girls. Hormones had set in and he didn't care a lick about the animals, He was a teenager on a mission.  When the older boys (along with our additions) scattered to the four winds my mother felt the zoo might have been safer that way. 

When Mom, the two girls and I finally made it to the monkey habitat. I was excited to see the cute little critters. 

But the winds began to change - like a warm Santa Ana wind, blowing in from the east. It was an OMINOUS SIGN that something bad was just ahead (like Dorthy in the Wizard of Oz). The Dahlins - all of them... all 92 of them (okay I'm stretching that a little - but that's what it seemed like) converged at the monkey habitat as if strange ill fate brought us all back together. "Mad Dog" (one of the older boy's nickname) made some snide remark about them being our relatives and "Flea-Bait" (another nickname) began jumping up and down on the ledge of the dry moat mimicking the monkeys.

This was his big chance. Bouncing up and down, he pretended to eat an invisible banana with one hand and scratched his side with the other. One by one, people began to gather to watch his dumb act.  As he   mimicked the monkeys, the monkeys mimicked him. This was his stage and the people loved him (of course I was jealous) but I knew I could do a better monkey (Sister Godzilla told me when she caught me climbing over the cloakroom wall to make fun of her behind her back). 

Flea-Bait did not want to let the vast crowds down that had assembled to watch his show. The more they clapped the bigger his performance grew, the wilder he got the bigger the applause. He had the frantic monkeys and the throngs of visitors eating out of the palm of his hand - "disgusting!"  He kept creeping closer and closer to the edge of the dry moat that separated zoo visitors from the monkeys below that were unable to make the 20 foot leap to freedom. 

Mom wanted him down and invoked the clause. "The-Under-Pain-Of-Mortal-Sin" clause. What that means to a good Catholic is - that if you don't immediately respond, then you are subject to a mortal sin and will likely spend another million years in Purgatory.  MOM SHOUTED, "Flea Bait, under pain of mortal sin get down right this instant." Only Flea Bait couldn't hear mom over the thunderous approval of his audience and the screeching of the agitated monkeys below in the pit. 

What you got to understand is - is that mom had invoked the clause in order to get the older boys into the car this morning in the first place. We took it serious, very serious! Knut (not the first born, but still an older brother that had a bit of first-born police-keeping in his compulsive personality), thought he would enforce "THE CLAUSE."   

Knut went over and gave O' Flea-Bait a slight shove to scare the Purgatory out of him just as Flea-Bait was spinning off balance on one leg. Yep, you guessed it... Knut sent Flea-Bait over the edge. 20 feet below the anxious monkeys had received him as if a prophecy had been fulfilled in their midst. 

(I'm sorry, but I'll have to come back to the gruesome and hilarious details of this event that went from bad to worse). 

May God keep you and bless you and may you never break "THE CLAUSE."