Musings on topics of small or large importance. Especially partial to subjects that include baby boomers, public figures, friends, Corporate America, the Denver Broncos, NASCAR, my previous home towns of New York City and Columbia (Maryland), stupidity (mine and others'), diets and health and who knows what else!

Thursday, April 17, 2008

Target #8 and Love Potion #9

Earlier this week, my neighbor and co-conspirator Cathy and I were chatting with one of the two fabulous high school kids we're mentors for in our Knowledge To Go mentoring program at a local high school. We asked him what he was going to do this summer. He said he might get a job. He's 16. Good for him!

So of course she and I got to reminiscing about our first jobs. My very first job at 16 was as a cashier in the ticket booth at the Valley Drive-In Theater in Denver. It was in Southeast Denver on E. Evans and S. Monaco, as I recall, which wasn't yet a thru street. The Valley Drive-In is looooong gone now. That was quite a summer. That job was a movie lover's dream. I got to see all of the movies in the Wolfberg Theaters chain for free all summer. (Scroll down to the comments section when you click on the link.) I pretty much only went to the movies at my own drive-in, and that was after my shift was over. In those days, the drive-ins replayed the first movie after the second movie ran. Ah, double features. And a cartoon first. A long lost mem'ry.

My manager, Dave M. (I'll not use his last name to protect the guilty) was just 24, which seemed very old to me at the time. Well, very mature, at least. Ha! He loved to catch kids who sneaked in by hiding in the trunk. He was always suspicious of a car with just one person in it, and, sure enough, he caught many by just nailing the one-person cars.

He also loved to catch lovers in the act. One of my fellow high-schoolers would come to the drive-in nearly every Saturday night with her boyfriend, and Dave was laying for her (so to speak). Finally one night, he struck it rich. He caught them -- he told me he wanted to tell the guy to move over so he could take a turn -- and hauled them into the office and gave them a serious talking to. He knew he wasn't going to turn them in to the police -- he just wanted to scare them. He really got a charge out of doing that. Dave also drove me around in his red Mustang and showed me where the used condoms were on the ground -- I'd never seen a condom, new or used -- and he'd lament if he hadn't caught the wearers. I don't know if he was some kind of a pedophile or just a horny 24-year-old. I certainly didn't think about it at the time, innocent and wide-eyed as I was. (I didn't share anything in this paragraph with my high school mentee.)

The next summer, between high school graduation and the start of my freshman year of college, I worked at Target. I was a "floater," someone who filled in for people who were on vacation or out sick or worked in departments that were short-handed. I worked in nearly every department in the store that summer and got to know where everything was. Men's was probably the most fun department, even though many more women shopped in Men's than men. Wigs was the worst department because it was so dead. Working at Target that summer was fun. I flirted with one of the stock boys, who was also there for the summer before starting college. His name was Lanny, as I recall. He flirted back, but we never progressed beyond that.

Target had really cheapo clothes back then, so I didn't stock up. It's come a long way.... I go to my neighborhood Target quite a bit, though still not for clothes.

A friend of mine accused me of making it up that I worked at Target back then, since she insisted that there were no Targets back in those oooooold days. Well, I knew I did work at a real, genuine Target (same distinctive logo all these years). I ran into a construction exec from Target shortly after that and told him what my friend had said. He said that store, on Colorado Boulevard in Denver, was Target Store #8. So there, Michele!

Oops...I just remembered what my very first job was. I was probably around 9 or 10, 11 at the most. I sent away for Parchment Charm All-Occasion Cards and sold them door-to-door in the neighborhood. In those days, you could do that, even if you were just 10. I was not good at sales then. I think my pitch was something like, "You wouldn't want to buy some Parchment Charm All-Occasion Cards, would you?" Aaaaargh!

By the time I sold Avon door-to-door at the Coronado Club singles apartment complex in Denver when I was 21, I had a little better sales pitch. I consistently sold a whole bunch of Wild Country men's after shave and cologne (which, amazingly, they still sell) but just a handful of other products, and my district manager wanted to know why. It was quite simple. I really liked Wild Country -- I thought of it as Love Potion #9 -- and the guys in the complex figured, "If it has that effect on her...I'll try it." Sales -- and life -- were so simple then. But no, I wouldn't want to go back to that era. I'll take now.