THE BAD NEWS

THE BAD NEWS:

EVERYTHING IS PERFECT!

Do I hear boo’s?

Do I hear cheers?

More one than the other?

So what?

The bad news does not care if you like it or not.

The fact that everything is perfect,

And you don’t think so,

Is definitely your problem.

Fortunately there is a remedy;

That’s what we’re selling here,

The scape-goat that will heal everything:

“The All-Powerful GOD!”

Blame everything on “The All-Powerful GOD”

Then everyone else is off the hook.

If you don’t like the way it is,

BLAME GOD!

But not just for the BAD

You gotta blame GOD for all the GOOD too.

Balancing the BAD and GOOD achieves harmony,

The PEACE that lasts.

In this Universe,

You have to expect the BAD with the GOOD

And the GOOD with the BAD,

Or you’re just fooling yourself

THE BAD NEWS:

THIS IS PARADISE

AND EVERYTHING’S

PERFECT.

THAT’S ALL THE NEWS AND IT’S ALL BAD.

TEARS

Tears are cheers to GOD,

Praise for a perfect Creation.

Tears of gladness celebrate Gain.

Tears of sadness appreciate Loss.

Every teardrop validates creation’s Worth.

Yesterday glimmers with beloved Ghosts,

Tomorrow simmers with dreams of Hope.

Today is just another perfect day to pray or play for Tears.

Welcome to the bittersweet Paradise!

The launchpad to Eternity.

If you’ve been Here,

You’ll be There:

I guarantee It!

Simply Simon

SHE LIVES!

SHE LIVES!

She that was dead now lives! Someone who had been dead for 22 years was brought back to life. Not her corpse but her living spirit was unveiled to her relatives, including a grandchild who was only 5 years old when her Grandmother died.

A week before Xmas in 2003, retired filmmaker Simon Gribben got a message on his answering machine from someone calling herself Courtney Olejack claiming that she was the grandchild of a dearly departed friend of his who he had made a film about many years before. She wondered if it was possible to get a copy of it for her father as a Xmas gift.

Courtney Olejack had only “blips of memory” of her magnificent grandmother and that was long before home videotapes were so available. She would like to see her in physical motion and witness her aliveness in an award winning film made in 1969 and that none in her surviving family had ever seen.

Courtney heard about the film that starred the pizza bar run by her grandparents, Frank and Theresa Olejack, from her Uncle Louis, the younger child of the couple. Courtney’s father, Frank, JR, was their older son. Uncle Louis told her about a filmmaker named Simon Gribben and his close connection to his mother. She and Gribben had adopted each other, what we now call an “extended family”; she was his second mother, he was an older son.

It all began for Gribben in 1953 when he and his neighborhood friends Dave Parker, Dick Somers and Jack Cameron were on a quest to find the best pizza in the Lehigh Valley. Gribben was only 14 but Parker was older and had access to a car and they discovered this out of the way bar in West Catasaqua, a suburb of Allentown, PA, that had this enormous sign over the door that said “PIZZA”.

They entered and discovered the best pizza they’d ever tasted. The Olejacks owned and ran this place called The Fairview House: she, the charming barmaid; he, the silent chef and bartender. The clientele were eclectic, blue collared, white collared, old and young. Instruments were there for those who played to entertain them all.

Traveling to this out of the way pizza oasis eventually became a weekly pilgrimage for Gribben and he and Theresa became as close as mother and child. He never drank beer there until his 21^st birthday when it was officially legal to drink in Pennsylvania. He drank elsewhere but not at his second Mom’s place. She even evaluated the girls he brought there like a real Mom.

When he was going to college, she would quiz him on his lessons and get his college courses for free. He ended up teaching her what he needed to learn and that’s the best way to learn anything: teach it! They loved each other as only a mother and child can, adopted or not.

She was barely educated but had life smarts and a great enthusiasm for learning. She was a great conversationalist, someone who would draw you out and not steal the spotlight. She loved studying his French lessons. She was an avid antiquer and was into astrology and music, She tried painting and over Gribben’s desk today is one of her paintings of one of her bar patrons.

When he grew up and went away, he would always visit her when he came home. The excuse was pizza but the real reason was that great fondness that some call love.

Gribben became a sports filmmaker who wanted to do anything else because he was not a sports fan. He was taking graduate courses at Temple University’s night school and a film course required him to make a documentary. The only documentary he wanted to make was about his beloved second mother, Theresa, and her pizza bar.

He wanted to call it “A Night at Theresa’s” but the instructor, Ernie Rose, wanted the class to have an overall theme for their films like the 7 ages of man. He was assigned the mature years and told his title was “I Am”. Gribben accepted the title but would go on to make a film about a person and a place that he loved.

Because of a technical snafu, the wireless microphone that would have candidly captured her gregarious spirit wouldn’t work. He got snatches of her conversation off of a hand held mike but it was not the same as letting her forget she was miked and being her totally engaging self. He had to rethink his overall approach in the editing room.

Instead of “A Night at Theresa’s”, it would become more general, more about an entertaining evening at a rural pizza bar in Pennsylvania. Instead of being the subject of the film, Theresa became a standout player in a kaleidoscope of people and pizza, music and laughter. And it all looked real, like the people didn’t know there was a camera present.

When Gribben finished the film, he was going to throw it in a drawer because it didn’t do what he thought it should. The student who was the director of photography, Galen Longwell, asked if he could enter it in film competitions and was told to knock himself out.

The 10-minute film went on to win many honors as an art film but never made it to television and a mass audience like many of Gribben’s films. He showed the film once at the bar to Theresa and most of the participants. Who wasn’t there were her 2 children, Frank, JR, and Louis and the grandchildren yet to come.

To watch a film made in 1969, you needed a 16mm projector. Not many people had one and the idea of giving Theresa a copy of a film she couldn’t watch seemed cruel to him. Years passed and Theresa died in 1981 at the age of 59. The bar was sold and he lost touch with the family and that seemed like that.

Gribben stopped in at the old place once but everything had changed. Theresa took the secret of her fantastic sauce and generous toppings to the grave with her. Occasionally he fantasized about marketing great pizzas, “Simple Simon’s Pies”, but, without her sauce, it would always be second rate to him.

He even thought of contacting Frank, JR, who he had been close with to see if he had the recipe. Gribben searched the Internet for his phone number (how many Frank Olejacks could there be in the United States?) but he wouldn’t pay for the number from a site that required payment. He thought that maybe someday he might.

So, enter Uncle Louis telling Niece Courtney about a film that featured a grandmother she barely remembered. He gave her the filmmaker’s name and she searched the Internet for him and came up with an article, “Rip Van Gribben”, that he wrote for his hometown paper about his return to live in Allentown after 40 years away.

Courtney called Gribben and left the message asking for the videotape as a surprise Christmas gift. He didn’t think he had one and put a call into his old friend Jack Cameron who was making copies of his films that were in the Museum of Modern Art which included the bar film. Jack responded quickly, he too had been a loyal customer and friend of Theresa’s, and hastily sent the tapes.

On the morning of December 26^th, 2003, Francis (that’s what Frank’s Mom called him) phoned his old friend Simon and invited him to have lunch with his family: wife Cindy, son Brenton and daughter Courtney. Francis and he hadn’t seen each other in over 40 years and theirs was a warm reunion.

After a quick lunch of Brass Rail cheese steaks, they went to Gribben’s apartment. All four of the Olejacks sat on a large sofa and watched the black and white film. Gribben had always had that problem with appreciating the film; it seemed to have no plot, no narration and not enough of Theresa’s treasured personality.

Sitting with the Olejacks, he realized it had a plot, didn’t need narration and there was just enough of Theresa’s personality to give an audience a sense of how much fun she was. Even though he wrote, directed, edited and co-produced the film, it took the Olejack family for him to really appreciate his film for the first time.

They got all the nuances, the little jokes, as if he had made the film just for them. They all cried. Sitting on the floor at their feet, Gribben cried along with them. He had finally served that special someone who had served him for all those years by turning her memory into a reality. All of the family, by blood or love, were grateful. Theresa was alive and well in the film and in that room. She was a Xmas gift to them all.

She lives!

SATISFIED CUSTOMER

SATISFIED CUSTOMER

I am a satisfied customer.

I have tasted the fruit of good and evil

And I couldn’t tell the difference,

Both were bittersweet.

I finally got what I always wanted,

Me.

I allowed myself to absolutely love me

And left my bittersweet judgements behind.

Loving me sets me free to love you

Free of the fear of harm from you.

For now I know only I can hurt me

And now that I love me, it’s all in the bag.

I am a satisfied customer.

I am enjoying this wonderful heart stopping

Merry-go-round ride we call life.

What a blast at last to be satisfied.

The 23 rd Psalm is now my reality.

I see myself being shepherded,

(Whatever I did good or bad, it was God’s guidance)

My cup runneth over.

(Seeing abundance in my life by always seeking blessings)

Since that is true then the last promise must be true too:

Eternal life dwelling in God’s House forever (and for free)!

Not shabby at all.

I am a satisfied customer.

.

SANTA LIVES!

SANTA LIVES!

Santa lives! And so do his Elves! It took me a while, more than 50 years to figure it out, but Santa and his Elves are for real! Honest!

As a child I believed in Santa 100% until that fateful day in the early 50’s when I was at the Allentown Fairgrounds and Santa arrived without his reindeer in a red helicopter. He was bound for Hess’s department store and they had a sleigh on top of a truck to carry THE MAN to the store.

To add to the “photo op” they stuck some kids next to Santa on his sleigh. I was one of those kids! I sat right next to Santa. And, horror of all horrors, his beard was false! There was a wire holding the damn thing on! He was a fake! Santa was not real!

I was now 100% certain that I had been lied to not only by my parents and teachers, but everybody in the world was in on this conspiracy. Make room, Mr. Scrooge; I’m on your “Bah! Humbug” team.

This attitude went on for years. I bought the presents, joined the conspiracy, but never for an instant forgave the world’s populace for foisting this lie on to us gullible kids. But as I grew older and saw the greediness and fear that seemed to rule this world, I had a second look at Santa.

Santa is not a thing, it is a human impulse given shape; the impulse to give rather than to receive. How do you give shape to an impulse, a feeling that doesn’t have a shape, just an inner directive that shouts: GIVE!! GIVE even when you may not have anything left to give.

The desire is real, even if its shape is unknown. So we make up a shape to make an invisible feeling visible. We enter the land of poetic imagery, what T.S. Eliot called “the objective correlatives”, words that conjure up pictures that universally evoke a feeling.

So, we came up with a fat old guy with a beard, a totally non-threatening clean Dude, who we’d let invade our homes while everybody’s asleep. A kind and generous grandfather figure dispensing gifts, gifts that are an expression of an inner feeling that we call love.

Love is a feeling and has no shape or size. How do you picture something that has no shape or size? You invent a shape and size that could symbolize that feeling. Voila, Santa is just a shape and size that symbolizes Love. So, every time we give or get a gift, Santa Lives! Love Lives!

So who are Santa’s Elves? We are! We are the helpers who manufacture and deliver the goods. Some of us are green, with envy, over the love we think others get and we don’t. There is an antidote for that feeling of being unloved.

GIVE and you receive the gift of love. Not from the receiver of the gift do you always get love, sometimes you get rejection. But you always get a gift from yourself that you gave to yourself. You have fed that inner need to GIVE! A feeling of inner satisfaction is the result. You can really pick yourself up by your own bootstraps.

GIVE AND YOU RECEIVE! GIVE AND YOU OWE NOTHING! GIVING OPENS ROOM FOR RECEIVING! GIVE BECOMES ANOTHER WORD FOR LOVE!

Soon you discover that you are surrounded by love and Santa Lives! 365 days a year Santa Lives! Peace and Joy are everywhere! And you are one happy Elve.

Simply, Simon

RIP VAN GRIBBEN

RIP VAN GRIBBEN

My name is Simon Gribben and I was born and raised in Allentown and just returned to retire from a career in television news and sports. I feel like Rip Van Winkle who came home not after a 20-year sleep but a 40 year one!

So much has changed! Where's Hess's? That three-ring circus of mammoth sales, chic style and Mom’s favorite restaurant in center city is gone! But then, so is Mom.

“ALLENTOWN HIGH SCHOOL” is the name of the place I graduated from and played football for. What’s this “William Allen” stuff? I know he was the founder of Allentown (I did a class visit to Trout Hall and loved the old guns there) but I felt disenfranchised when they changed the name of my high school. It’s like my high school diploma is counterfeit!

I am glad they named the stadium after Coach Birney Crum; It just used to be the “ALLENTOWN HIGH SCHOOL STADIUM”. Birney was the coach of my junior varsity squad, the last year that he coached for “ALLENTOWN HIGH SCHOOL”, and he taught me the one lesson I took into life. He would scream endlessly, “Pursue! Pursue! Pursue!”. So I pursued this emotionally unavailable woman for 20 years and never caught her. Maybe I should have learned a different lesson?

The Colonial Theater at 5^th and Hamilton, that slick first-run movie house, is boarded up. I can’t count the great movie experiences I had there that transported me out of Allentown and into the exotic lands of the imagination. One of my magic carpets is grounded.

My alma mater, Muhlenberg College, has grown like Jack's beanstalk; not only in tuition but all those new buildings that are hiding my old playgrounds when I was the Morning Call paperboy. They built the Trexler Library over the spot Dave Parker told me we had discovered “the remains of a fairy fire!” I believed that for years until I realized it had been dried up animal dung.

And the people. Who are they? These gray-haired fuddies lumbering around

were the playmates of my youth. I see younger versions of them but I have to translate age in my mind like one would have to translate a foreign language into English. I'm one of the old fuddies now too like those geezers who used to collect tickets at Dorney Park. It's all very confusing but, oh, so normal. As an old friend used to say, "Growing old is not for sissies!"

And Dorney Park itself! It has grown too! They’ve changed almost everything and quadrupled the rides. And the Water Park! All we had was Cedar Beach in that end of town. I thought I might retire and be a ticket taker at “The Old Mill Stream” but one price tickets destroyed that dream and made Dorney like the fabled “Steeplechase” in Coney Island where I used to go to visit Grandma Gribben when I was young, oh, those so many years ago.

But I love my hometown. There are changes but not all are bad. I went to the art fair at Muhlenberg Lake and was impressed with the multi-cultural shift in the population. It used to be strictly a white bread community but now it’s more representative of the rest of the world and I like that and feel comfortable with the change.

I was born and raised in Allentown and left in 1963 when I graduated from Muhlenberg College as an English major and Education minor. I had a wife and two kids and we moved to Norristown while I worked as a management trainee for JC Penney at the King of Prussia mall. That’s where I was when Kennedy was shot and the store emptied out by 3 in the afternoon.

I only lasted a year there and moved to Philadelphia to teach junior high English for 2 years before taking a summer job as a gofer for a Philadelphia film company that made syndicated television sports films, Tel Ra Productions. I had never been a sports fan but always a movie buff and this was a way to learn “the business”. They liked that I was a schoolteacher and hired me full-time as a film editor/writer at the end of the summer of ’66 and I never looked back.

After describing a professional football game as a parody of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Raven”; I was hired by a relatively new company called NFL Films as a writer/producer/director/editor---a filmmaker. The first film I made for them was a 5-minute football ballet to the music of Tchaikovsky that I called “The Headcracker Suite”. It aired on CBS and became an instant classic and ended up in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).

The following summer I was asked to create a half-hour TV film on “anything I wanted”. It became “The Football Follies”, considered by some as “the most popular sports film ever made” and was also accepted by MoMA. The film spawned a series of imitators and has become a genre.

That fall of ’69 I made a short starring my son John, a child’s football fantasy, that is in MoMA too. I also was attending film classes at Temple University and made a documentary, “I Am”; about my favorite Catasauqua pizza bar and it won 1^st prize in documentaries at the University Film Association, a Cine Eagle and is in MoMA as well.

I left Philadelphia and my marriage in 1970 to try my luck in New York. Other than a 10 minute film on joggers that I made for public television in 1972, “The Joggers” which is in MoMA, I didn’t have much success and accepted a job at ABC Sports as a film editor and occasional writer. I worked on “Wide World of Sports” and “The American Sportsman” winning an Emmy and several other industry awards.

I had a disastrous second marriage in 1971 and do not recommend marrying someone 3 weeks after your first date. It didn’t last a year and sent me to a shrink. After 2 years of that and discovering that the doctor couldn’t heal me, I had to change my behavior myself, I left the shrink and sought God because I was incapable of controlling my stupidity.

Because I was a rebel and a free thinker I found a religion that suited me perfectly: American Sufism. Sufis are impossible to describe and they are not only Muslims, especially if they come from “the land of the free” who can create a religion out of a mix and match spiritual bowl.

So I’m racially a Jew who follows Jesus and is not a Christian. I am a whirling dervish who was ordained in 1976 in a church built by the Muhlenberg family in New York and my clerical name is Reverend Simon-Peter. When I left New York, I ceased being a whirling dervish and became a wandering one.

Basically my religion is cheap and simple. It’s a practice like learning how to type, to dance, or ride a bike. It is not easy but far from impossible. I just blame God for everything, good or bad, and avoid all guilt and swelled-headedness.

I also believe that God’s got our future’s all figured out. Whatever happens is God’s will and always “Poifect!” whether I realize it or not at the time it happens. If I honestly turn my cares over to the Big Macha, I feel immediate relief. It is in this Peace that I can experience joy.

Back to the mundane. In 1977, Post-Newsweek Television Stations in D.C hired me as a news producer. The first hour special I produced and partially wrote won an Emmy. The station moved to Detroit and another hour special won an Emmy there. I also got to do my own feature reporting. The news director and I conflicted over several issues and I was fired in January of 1980. That was my last staff job

However, the Museum of Television and Radio in New York started collecting my works, and, if you go there and put my name in their computer, you can see dozens of my films and videos.

I went to Los Angeles and tried selling scripts for movies and specials but nothing sold and I went through a period of 7 years of bad luck before finding free-lance work as a videotape editor in New York at ABC and CBS News. I did that for 15 years before the events of 9/11/01 burned me out and I went on unemployment.

I had a massive heart attack on September 15^th, 2002, and died for 4 minutes. Upon recovering, I took an early retirement from Social Security and focused on restoring my health. New York was too expensive for my fixed income and that was why I decided to come home to Allentown in April of 2003, one month shy of 40 years after I left.

I have some very supportive relatives here: my nephew, Lee Gribben of “Lee Gribben’s Fine Gourmet”, found me a place to live, my first on my own in 20 years. My cousin Al Gribben, president of the Jewish Community Center, found me a great, cheap car: I haven’t had a steed of my own in 17 years. Laurie Shenkman. a 2^nd cousin and a marketing consultant, suggested I contact The Morning Call, my old employer, and tell my story: this tale is my first employment in almost 2 years.

I have climbed the press ladder: an assistant paperboy to Dave Parker at 5, a full-fledged paperboy at 11 when he went off to college to study chemistry and other fairy tales, and now, I’m nakedly a writer: not hiding behind juggling pictures and enchanting sounds. It’s fun.

I have lived for extended periods of time in different parts of these United States and I have a mental road map full of streets and memories of each one of them. But Allentown, my hometown, has the most complete maps and memories of all my past residences. The entire place is haunted. I can’t take a ride anywhere without a memory poking up. Often it’s the same memory, time after time, and I never tire of it, like a child who delights in hearing the same story over and over again. As I draw closer to the end of this life, and my heart attack gave me a peaceful glimpse of my mortality, I am happy to be home, surrounded by the past, enjoying the present, and unafraid of the future.

Simply, Simon

THE PINOCLE LOVER

Ani showed me a new way to love. Unfortunately, she died before I realized it. She and her husband, Andrew, had taken me into their home during a homeless period, a 7 year money drought where I lost or sold all my stuff.

So when I showed up sleeping on the floor of her office, her nurturing compassion rescued me from another kind stranger who took me in for a year and now hated my guts. I have that affect on people. Once you get to know me, you hate me.

I’m not a villain, I’m just a guy who seems to have no limits, no boundaries, and that scares people. They really think I’m wild but I am tame. It’s just that my boundaries wander off into metaphysics and sometimes never make it back to earth. This is a problem. It looks schizo, smells schizo, and walks like a schizo, so guess what? I’m not schizo. I am a one eyed man in the land of the blind. The kingdom I rule is myself. God is my Co-Pilot, consigliare, and Best Friend.

My task is to see only One in all this variety. To reduce everything down to One. To hear and see only The One. To see and hear only the Puppet Master behind the screen, not what’s foremost but that which is everlasting, the Truth with a capital T.

So what does all this have to do with “The Pinochle Lover”? Before I was sober about sex, I thought there was only one way to love a woman. With a certain appendage. So, if I wasn’t making love with my nether region and I was really attracted to a woman, I was a walking failure. A big time loser who couldn’t make it with the woman of his current fantasy because she was married and unattainable, just what I love. An unavailable woman so that I won’t have to commit to intimacy.

Ani loved to play games, any game you could name, she could play it. I used to play pinochle when I was a teenager and now, generally, hate games; they are wastes of time when one could be curing one’s own insanity. But Ani coaxed me into playing and stopped me from staring into my navel trying to see God among the belly-button lint.

I am very violently competitive when I play games. Even in a non-contact sport like cards, I try to intimidate my opponents with my bulldogged aggressiveness. I slam the big winners down! I’m a Drama Queen! Good gracious! And I love to win. Ani read me in a moment and started deliberately losing. I couldn’t lose and she always did. That was no fun. She just turned up her stomach and surrendered to my every advance. On the cardtable.

It is only now, after she’s gone, that I realize she had made love to me on the cardtable. I was just too fixated on winning and losing to actually play a game where “it ain’t the game, it’s the company” that makes the game fun, not the outcome. Winning isn’t everything, it’s irrelevant and immaterial. It’s being with the ones you love while playing life’s games. You don’t have to be silly loser like Ani, but maybe she was right.

It’s the one’s you love to play with that really count.