WEDNESDAY, JUNE 22, 2011
‘Jackass’ star’s last call
Beer and shots were flowing at the bar, pal of doomed Dunn says
BY MICHELLE RUIZ
The last night of Ryan Dunn’s life was a booze binge complete with at least four whiskey shots, a continuous flow of beer and a revelation about his former addiction to prescription drugs, a drinking buddy of the “Jackass” star told Flash in an exclusive interview.
Thaddeus Kalinoski, 34, spent nearly five hours downing drinks with the doomed daredevil at Barnaby’s bar in West Chester, Pa., Sunday in the hours before the fiery crash that killed Dunn and his passenger Zachary Hartwell, 31, a former Navy SEAL who served three tours of duty in Iraq.
“He was shooting picklebacks — whiskey shots chased by pickle juice,” said Kalinoski, an acquaintance of Dunn’s who lives in the area. “The shots were coming right to him. They were all over the bar.”
Kalinoski said Dunn mixed “at least four shots” with “a number of beers” from 9 p.m. to about 2 a.m. As the local bar filled up, Dunn became the life of the party.
“[Dunn] was drinking quick. He ordered for the entire bar,” Kalinoski said. “The crowd was just pouring in. It was a massive party, with people everywhere, drinking.”
A coroner’s report released yesterday said Dunn and Hartwell died from the impact of the crash and the flames that subsequently engulfed Dunn’s Porsche 911 GT3. Hartwell had been married to his wife Rachel for less than a year.
Hartwell had served as a stunt car driver on fellow “Jackass” star and close Dunn pal Bam Margera’s film, “Minghags.”
Toxicology reports to be released in four to six weeks will help determine whether alcohol played a role in the crash. While a manager at Barnaby’s told WCAU-TV in Philadelphia that Dunn “didn’t appear drunk” before leaving the bar, Kalinoski said his alcohol-soaked night with Dunn left him “severely intoxicated.”
“I could barely walk,” he said. “I couldn’t drive home so I passed out in my car. That’s the type of environment it became.”
Photos from the evening show a flush-faced Dunn leaning in to kiss Kalinoski, who said the “Jackass” star told him he was addicted to prescription drugs at the time of their last meeting in Baltimore in 2006.
“He said back then he was having some problems. He was addicted to Vicodin and Adderall,” Kalinoski said. “He said he was really in bad shape.”
According to Kalinoski, Dunn spoke of his addiction in the past tense, and in the final hours of his life was urging friends to watch his new G4 TV show, “Proving Ground.” He was also speaking animatedly about his new home in the area of his native West Chester and how proud he was of his longtime friend Margera.
“He was just so excited for the future,” Kalinoski said. “He was talking about all of these good things that were happening — and then it’s over.”
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WAR, ON DRUGS
Pentagon resists monitoring as troops take more meds than ever
BY KATIE DRUMMOND
Men and women in the U.S. military are more medicated than ever — and their doctors don’t even know who takes what.
The Department of Defense doesn’t keep track of medical prescriptions doled out to service members in combat, despite ongoing pleas from federal officials to do just that.
Last week, a report on the military’s 2012 budget from the House Appropriations Committee remarked that the prescription of pain management drugs is handled inconsistently — especially in battle.
The report also handed down an ultimatum: Within two months of the budget’s approval, the committee wants concrete information on “the required steps and potential obstacles toward electronic transmission of prescription drug data.”
Estimates of active-duty drug use are stunning: A 2010 Army study found that 14 percent of soldiers had been prescribed an opiate painkiller, with 95 percent of those prescriptions for oxycodone, a notoriously addictive pharmaceutical best known by the brand name OxyContin.
And since 2001, military spending on prescription meds has skyrocketed. Orders for antipsychotics like Seroquel are up 200 percent, and demand for anti-anxiety drugs like Valium has increased by 170 percent, according to Defense Logistics Agency records.
This is not the first time Congress has urged the Pentagon to do better when it comes to drug data. Last year, the Senate Armed Services Committee derided the military for its inability to offer hard numbers on prescription medication.
Many of the antidepressants, antipsychotic drugs and anti-anxiety drugs prescribed are highly addictive. Potential side effects include dulled reaction times, irritability and a heightened risk of suicide.
“The medications they use shouldn’t be so heavily prescribed in combat,” Dr. Judith Broder, a psychiatrist and founder of the Soldiers Project, a nonprofit counseling service, told The Daily.
“But they can’t afford to send anyone home. They need the bodies — health and welfare are secondary.”
Side effects are hardly the only problem: Without a tracking system, troops can readily abuse medications and even share and swap.
“They’ll often have a medicine cabinet full of drugs, and they’ll pass them around,” Broder said. “That this isn’t being tracked is terrible. Absolutely terrible.”
Whether or not the military tracks prescriptions, there’s no easy answer to managing mental health in combat, said Dr. Frank Ochberg, an expert in post-traumatic stress disorder and the former associate director for the National Institute of Mental Health.
“Of course it makes good sense to track prescriptions, but without access to these drugs, what’s a soldier’s plan B?” Ochberg said. “It’s alcohol, and that’s certainly not good.”
Another problem for the military: The drugs that can impair performance or trigger addiction and overdose are also the best way to keep ailing service members patched up.
“There’s the ethical question: Should there be any combat participant taking antidepressants or psychotropics?” Ochberg said. “And then the practical matter, that it’s simply imperative for a troop to be able to function, to wind down or even just to get a good night’s sleep.”
BY THE NUMBERS
$16 million
The amount the Department of Defense spent on antipsychotic drugs, such as Seroquel, in 2009 — a 200 percent increase from 2001.
17 percent
The share of active-duty troops taking antidepressants, according to estimates released by the Army last year.
25-35 percent
The share of wounded soldiers who are addicted to prescription and illegal drugs while they await medical discharge.
180 days
The length of some prescriptions — including antipsychotics and narcotics — handed out by battlefield doctors, along with a 180-day refill.
73 percent
The share of accidental deaths in the Army attributed to prescription medications in 2010.
Katie.Drummond@thedaily.com
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Kreayshawn theory
‘Crazy white girl from the hood’ is on hot list – and hot seat
BY JEFF JOHNSON
On the heels of Tyler, the Creator and Odd Future’s quick rise to ubiquity, you would think the last thing the world needs is another hype-fueled, underground West Coast rap collective. But Kreayshawn and her White Girl Mob are here offering just that.
The 21-year-old Kreayshawn (a play on the word “creation”; her real name is Natassia Zolot) hails from the Bay Area and now lives in L.A. In May, she uploaded a video to YouTube for a song called “Gucci Gucci.” In the song, Kreayshawn raps in a deadpan voice over a swirling organ and stuttering high-hats about “basic bitches” whose unimaginative, label-centric fashion sense offends her. In less than two months, the song garnered 3 million views.
Though she has only performed live six times and has one official mix tape out, she recently signed a $1 million contract with Columbia Records and is making famous friends quickly. “Snoop hit me up on Twitter,” she explained. “He was like, ‘Yo, DM [direct message] me. I really love your song.’ So we met up, hung out and recorded a song with my sister, V-Nasty.” Other fans include Diddy and, puzzlingly, MTV comedian Andy Milonakis.
“All of the attention is a big surprise,” she said. “I’ve always had eyes on me before. Growing up, I was just a crazy, little white girl in the ’hood, so I was always dealing with that, but this is definitely different. There’s a whole bunch of eyes on me.”
A recent LA Weekly article described Kreayshawn’s style: “If [Lady] Gaga is the coolly elegant Madonna from ‘Vogue,’ Kreayshawn is the gritty downtown Madonna with a girl posse from ‘Borderline.’ ”
This is true, except “Gucci Gucci” is far from “Borderline” in content, sound and attitude. Madonna, for instance, never had a lyric about “swag” pumping out of her ovaries. And members of Kreayshawn’s girl posse proudly tweet photos of themselves drinking “syrup” (a mixture of prescription cough syrup and soda). And at least one of Kreayshawn’s girl posse, East Oakland’s V-Nasty — not Kreayshawn’s actual sister, but a friend she met when they were both 15 and who recently served time in jail — repeatedly uses the n-word in her occasionally coherent raps. Since their rap collective is known as the White Girl Mob, this has caused some consternation in some Internet circles.
When asked whether or not the controversy surrounding V-Nasty’s use of the racial slur is taking attention away from “Gucci Gucci,” Kreayshawn sighed.
“Yeah, it definitely has. I mean, I don’t use it,” Kreayshawn said. “Because of [V-Nasty], I have to answer all of these uncomfortable questions.”
“There’s stuff that V-Nasty does that holds her music back, and we all know what that is. And we all know that if she can work on that she has great potential to be just as big. I don’t think it’s holding her back to the point where it’s going to affect her in a negative way,” she added, then trailed off, “... even though it is.”
“I don’t know what I am trying to say,” Kreayshawn, now a bit flustered, added. “We’re definitely different. I love V-Nasty’s music. I was one of the people who forced her to rap and forced her to make her mix tapes just so I could listen to her music.”
The girls met in East Oakland, where they both grew up in tough neighborhoods. Kreayshawn is the daughter of Elka Zolot, a former guitarist and vocalist for many ’90s punk-surf bands, most notably the Trashwomen. “She used to take me to all her shows,” Kreayshawn said. Still, according to the LA Weekly story, it wasn’t a completely placid childhood. Kreayshawn dropped out of high school, had her own apartment and worked at Ikea by age 16, before a stint in film school. V-Nasty is a mother of two young children, and the third member of the White Girl Mob, Lil’ Debbie, is also from the East Bay. She deejays and, according to numerous posts on her Twitter feed, is attractive to people of both genders.
All the real-time criticism has forced Kreayshawn to become more articulate about who she is, and how it might affect who is listening to White Girl Mob music.
“I hope, like, girls like me who probably felt like they may have never had a voice before [and] can look at me and be, like, ‘Oh, you know, maybe I should be more confident.’ I’ve had girls hit me up on Twitter and tell me, ‘You’ve given me the confidence to walk around my school proud,’ and that makes me feel happy. I’m not trying to force anyone to like me by saying this stuff — this is just who I really am.”
And who she is today might totally change tomorrow. “One of the big things I wanna do is make a punk band,” she added. “I wanna do everything. I wanna make all kinds of music. I grew up listening to all kinds of music, so it’s not like I’m perpetrating or anything.”
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PLAY FOR PAY
How one college athlete received cash or benefits while at USC
BY LONNIE WHITE
Lonnie White went from Asbury Park, N.J. to USC in 1982. While there, he set a single-season record for kickoff return yardage in 1986 that stood until 2010. White played under John Robinson and Ted Tollner. He earned his degree and went on to a career as a writer at the Los Angeles Times. White also wrote a book on the UCLA-USC rivalry. For the first time he reveals he received money while playing at USC:
Imagine an empty lot with a young college football player sitting alone in a parked car late at night. After a few quiet minutes, a luxury sedan arrives and headlights flash.
That’s the sign for the athlete to move. He starts an uneasy conversation with the driver but that chat does not last long before the two exchange bags and part.
Once back in his own car, the player smiles when he looks into a small brown bag filled with money. It’s $5,000 cash and it could not have come at a better time.
Sounds like a bad movie. It isn’t. It was life for me when I played college football at the University of Southern California in the 1980s. I wasn’t old enough to drink legally, yet if I was caught, my actions would have had an impact on thousands connected with the program.
To this day, it’s something I’m ashamed about. Rent was overdue and my household bills were delinquent. I needed the money to live. So accepting the $14,000 in different forms of “benefits” over my college years three decades ago was an act of survival.
Bending rules to benefit a player has a long history in college football.
According to my father, Elwood White, a two-sport high school standout at Montclair (N.J.) High, it was a problem in the late 1940s when he played at Morgan State, a historically black university that dominated competition under coach Eddie Hurt.|
It was an issue when colleges recruited my brother, Tim White, a two-sport All-American at Asbury Park (N.J.) High, in the 1970s, and it was still a concern when I went through the process in the early 1980s.
In many ways, it’s really not that difficult for college football players to establish connections to outside money sources. It starts with an upperclassman who takes new players under his watch, forging relationships connected to playing the same position on the field to being from the same hometown.
When I enrolled at USC as a freshman in the fall of 1982, my main upperclassman role model was my brother.
As a crafty fifth-year senior, Tim was a true connection to tradition at USC. He played on two Rose Bowl winning teams and was a member of a national championship squad.
But Tim also knew about the other side of college football.
By the time Tim began to be recruited in the late 1970s, USC’s football program already had a negative reputation for “pushing the envelope” when it came to following rules. As a result, two of the five seasons that my brother played for the Trojans, they were blocked from appearing on television and in bowl games due to NCAA or Pac-10 penalties.
It didn’t take long before I noticed that my brother seemed to have a great relationship with a wealthy USC football supporter. Whenever Tim had a financial problem, his answer man usually responded.
Unlike other upperclassmen, who often assume roles as deal brokers within a program (keeping first-year players from meeting their benefit sources), my brother loved taking me along to meet our “money man.”
We would use the meeting as a joyous occasion but for most of my freshman year, I didn’t exactly know how the process worked. This was before cell phones, and my brother kept me in the dark when it came to details. I just remember taking a variety of items, from signed footballs to player-issued season tickets, to our benefits source in exchange for money, usually cash.
Even though I knew what I was doing was wrong, it seemed like everyone I knew who played college football enjoyed some type of extra benefits as a player.
My money source was season tickets. Every scholarship player was given four home game tickets and the option to purchase an additional four.
These tickets often sold for more than face value and that’s how I ended up alone in the parking lot waiting for a brown bag drop off.
By then, I was a senior who had learned this side of college football from my brother and his classmates.
It must be noted that all this went on without the coaches’ knowledge. That seems hard to believe. It is true, though. At major programs, the pressure to win and the time commitment the coaches put forth toward the program itself leaves major opportunities for players to interact with people who have a different agenda.
For example, my senior year I had a strong game at Washington State, scoring a touchdown and building up solid kickoff return yardage that left me ranked in the top 10 nationally.
The following week, a fledgling agent began to wine and dine me, because he felt I was a sleeper NFL prospect.
He would give gifts — sneakers, sweatsuits — and paid household bills. He would also pass along cash, not major money but “get-around” money.
He ended up dropping me, wouldn’t return calls and, instead, wound up representing my former roommate, Ron Brown, a late-round pick by the San Diego Chargers.
With today’s media in love with scandals, people would have a field day with some of the “unknown” things that happened within college football programs decades ago.
Everything from $100 handshakes (when players are slipped cash during meet-and-greet events) to sponsored party trips (often featuring women, sex, drugs and alcohol), would be exposed.
Even my recruiting stories would have been interesting. For example, the amount of tickets and free transportation offered by Rutgers would certainly have had a couple of days life as an internet story, and the private plane Notre Dame sent to fly me to South Bend would at least be blog material.
(After I declined to commit to those schools, their attitudes changed — immediately. Instead of driving me to my home after my trip to a Rutgers game, I was dropped blocks away and my father had to pick me up. And, Notre Dame left me snowed in at an airport when it came time for me to return to New Jersey.)
It also should be noted that I understand that every college football player’s experience is different and there are many athletes who never receive money or illegal benefits. But it would not be wise to think that it doesn’t happen or that it only involves cut-throat successful programs. Or that it has stopped.
I know at least five athletes, who are either a relative or close family friend, who played at the BCS level last season. And they all agree, there’s more rule-breaking going on than people know.
It’s the “dirty secret” of college football that will continue to grow as money and power is connected with the sport.
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Tobey Maguire Sued Over Multi-Million Dollar Illegal Poker Game; DiCaprio, Affleck & Damon Involved
By Dylan Howard - Senior Executive Editor, Star magazine
Spider-Man star Tobey Maguire is among more than a dozen high-profile Hollywood people being sued in connection with a mega-millions illegal gambling ring that ran high-stakes underground poker games, Star magazine is reporting exclusively.
DOCUMENTS: Tobey Maguire Sued Over Illegal Poker Game
Maguire, 35, won more than $300,000 from a Beverly Hills hedge fund manager who embezzled investor funds and orchestrated a Ponzi scheme in a desperate bid to pay off his monster debt to the star and others, it's alleged.
An FBI investigation into Brad Ruderman, the CEO of Ruderman Capital Partners, uncovered how he lost $25 million of investor money in clandestine poker games held on a twice weekly basis in suites at the luxury Beverly Hills hotel, Four Seasons, and the Viper Room on Sunset Boulevard.
Tinsel town A-listers Leonardo DiCaprio, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon also played in the no-limit Texas Hold 'em games which had a buy-in of $100,000, multiple members of the ring told Star. DiCaprio, Affleck and Damon are not being sued.
Leonardo & Blake Lively In Italy
Others who were part of the secret society and are facing hefty lawsuits include billionaire businessman Alex Gores, The Notebook director Nick Cassavetes, Welcome Back, Kotter star Gabe Kaplan, Paris Hilton's infamous sex tape partner, Rick Salomon, record label owner Cody Leibel and Las Vegas nightlife entrepreneur and real-estate developer Andrew Sasson, among others.
DOCUMENTS: Read Lawsuit Against Alex Gores
Now, as Ruderman sits in a Texas jail until 2018, convicted on two counts of wire fraud and two counts of investment adviser fraud, lawyers for the clients whose funds he embezzled are filing a series of civil suits against those who won big in the illegal poker dens, in the hope of recouping some of their lost savings.
Stars Arrive At Spider-Man Opening Night
The games were "exclusive events, by invitation only, and that there was a regular roster of players consisting of wealthy celebrities, entrepreneurs, attorneys and businessmen," according to the lawsuit filed against Maguire in the United States Bankruptcy Court, in Los Angeles.
Ruderman lost $311,300 to Maguire, including one losing hand of $110,000, on July 30, 2007, it's claimed.
The Ponzi mastermind used clients' money to "pay for gambling losses at clandestine, high stakes poker games that were operated without any licenses or permits," the suit said.
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"As part of the scheme, funds invested in (Ruderman) were transferred to persons such as Defendant (Maguire), who received the funds on account of Ruderman's gambling losses and on account of Defendant's gambling winnings."
In their attempt to win back Ruderman's losses, the trustee has claimed Maguire is "not entitled to receive the transfers from the Debtor, which transfers were compromised of improperly-diverted investor funds."
In a deposition of the alleged ringleader of the operation, which took in tens of millions of dollars beginning in 2006 through 2009, Maguire is described as a "very, very frequent player," in the games, which ended in 2009.
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Maguire won as much as $1 million a month over a period of three years, one source told Star, which is on newsstands Wednesday.
"That means he could have made up to $30 to $40 million from these games," the whistle-blowing card shark predicted.
Under California law, it's illegal to play for money at underground poker clubs, although it is a crime rarely prosecuted. None of the participants are under criminal investigation, Star has been told.
Matt Damon & Ben Affleck: Boys Poker Night
Indeed, it's understood Maguire has hired an attorney to strenuously defend the allegations against him, who will argue the games were not illegal.
In a world exclusive investigation, Star detailed how the A-list aces used secret passwords to play in the covert games that were so intense, the door was manned by armed guards in bulletproof vests.
Inside the rooms, tucked away in different locations around Los Angeles, high-rollers laid down wads of cash on felt-top tables presided over by professional dealers who were part of the operation's hierarchy.
Bar Refaeli At Cannes Beaver Premiere
One of the participants, Dan Bilzerian, told Star that he regularly played against DiCaprio, Affleck and Maguire.
Damon, according to Bilzerian, played irregularly.
While Affleck, who won an Academy Award for his screenplay Good Will Hunting, impressed players with his poker skills, both DiCaprio and Damon did not fair as well, Star reported.
"Matt never won,’’ another whistle-blowing player told the magazine.
A-Listers Before They Were Stars
"In truth, Leo is a tight ass. When he lost $50,000 the look in his eyes was obvious he was crazy."
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Coquette: MOVE ON!
Dear Coquette,
My girlfriend was supposed to move in with me a month ago down in Florida. We have been together for almost a year now and she suffers from borderline personality disorder. My reason for being down here is that I had got into some trouble and lied to her for four months about it. She has been great and stuck by my side through everything. Came to visit me every month and was so excited to live with me. The week before coming down she decided not to. I reacted a little inappropriately due to my fear of losing her. Said some things I shouldn’t have and she broke up with me. Said she needed to get her priorities straight. However, due to her BPD she lives in constant fear of losing people closest to her and her constant insecurity about herself has forced her to seek attention from another man. We were so in love. She told me I was different than any guy she had ever been with. Said she wanted to marry me and everything. I have never been so in love with another woman but I just don’t know what to do anymore. Myparents don’t want anything to do with her and are telling me she is crazy. I can’t just sit by and watch someone I love keep hurting themselves. She has been in so many horrible relationships, so she says. I just want the love of my life back and I want her to get help for her BPD. Unless she does something she will keep repeating the same patterns over and over again. I have decided to move back to NJ in two weeks. I am still so hurt and angry at the way she handled everything but at the same time it is partially my fault. She doesn’t even think or realize that she is doing anything wrong. Basically what I have been trying to say this whole time is how do I get the love of my life back? Did the distance get to her? People with BPD can turn on the people they love in the blink of an eye. I just want to know if I have a shot at this or is she doomed to this life of failed relationships? How can I get this lost soul to realize that this man cares and loves her unconditionally. I love her for her even with all the craziness she creates around her.
The love of your life? Dude, shut up. You’re in your early 20s at best, armed with the emotional maturity of a drunken teenager. You haven’t made a life yet. All you’ve made is a string of poor life choices.
Your ex-girlfriend isn’t a “lost soul.” She’s a whacked-out bitch who uses an otherwise legitimate diagnosis to absolve herself for wildly inappropriate behavior. Oh, and did you notice what I called her there? That’s right. She’s your ex-girlfriend. Do you know why I called her that? Because she broke up with you.
Do you have any idea how creepy it is when dudes talk about past relationships in the present tense? It makes you sound like a potential stalker. You may have been together for almost a year, but you are not together anymore. Get it through your thick skull that the relationship is over, and quite frankly, it should stay that way.
I really can’t put my advice any more plainly than this: Forget her and move on. One more time for the cheap seats: Forget her and move on. Not that it matters how hard I hammer you with it, because I know damn well that nothing I say can stop you from swooning into another series of horrible decisions with this girl. You’re a lovesick chaos junkie. I might as well tell a crackhead to just quit smoking all that crack.
You’re addicted to the swirling drama she creates in your life. Her borderline personality disorder is your drug, and you keep coming back for more no matter how miserable she makes you. The best thing she ever did for you was kick you to the curb, but you’re still neck deep in your crazy phase without enough self-respect to cut your losses and walk away.
You’re not being romantic. You’re being pathetic. Get it together, man.
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PIMPOLOGIST
Physicist who ran online brothel was a slutty professor: police
BY KAREN KELLER
A New Jersey physics professor has been nabbed for helping people pay for chemistry.
David Flory, 68, ran an online prostitution ring in New Mexico, police said.
The academic said the three-year-old business was a “hobby” and that he merely wanted to create a safe environment for johns and prostitutes, according to police.
The married father of two daughters and a stepdaughter, and grandfather of four, was arrested Sunday at a Starbucks in Albuquerque, N.M., and slapped with 40 counts of promoting prostitution. He has taught at Fairleigh Dickinson University, New Jersey’s largest private university, since 1969.
“Our community is saddened by the news of the arrest of David Flory and is concerned about these serious charges,” the school said in a statement obtained by The Daily yesterday.
Flory’s job status is “currently under review,” the school said. Flory was being held on $100,000 bail yesterday.
The alleged pimp’s password-protected Web site, Southwest Companions, lists 200 prostitutes and had a client base of 2,000 members, police claim.
The site’s author seems to hedge against legal troubles by writing on the homepage — still viewable yesterday — that all reviews are “purely for entertainment purposes” and the company doesn’t endorse “ANY service providers listed on this site.”
The site categorized johns into three levels: Probation, verified and trust.
“In order to get off probation, you had to sleep with one of the prostitutes on the website and she in turn would tell the moderator [Flory] what acts occurred, how much they paid and any comments,” Albuquerque Police Lt. William Roseman told the Associated Press. “Once you got into verified status, that opened you up to different girls available.”
The ringleader partook of the sexual services his Web site advertised, police said. Law enforcement got tips from johns and hookers about the sexy site and spent six months investigating.
On a personal Web site, Flory — who lives in New York City with his wife, a specialist in eating disorders — says he’s a fan of scuba diving and theatrical lighting design. He also boasts he and his wife have a vacation house in Santa Fe called Casa de Los Arboles, or “house of the trees.”
The alleged prostitution hub apparently didn’t rake in the cash.
“He said he was not in this for the money,” Roseman told the AP. “He flat-out told us his thing was he wanted to create a safe place for prostitutes and johns to get together. He called it a hobby.”
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Oh, my, ‘Sharona’
1979 song has a Hollywood resurgence ... again
“My Sharona” is back on heavy pop culture rotation.
The seemingly unkillable 1979 hit by The Knack is played twice in “Super 8” — and there are rumors that Justin Bieber is going to record a cover of the new wave anthem once parodied by Weird Al Yankovic (“My Bologna”) and sampled by Run DMC (“It’s Tricky”).
In 1994, “My Sharona” — which inspired commercials for Taco Bell (“My Chalupa”) and Toyota (“My Toyota”) — re-entered the Billboard charts when it was featured in the gas station dance-off scene in “Reality Bites.”
Sharona Alperin, who was 17 when she made Knack singer Doug Fieger’s motor run, is now a successful real estate broker with Sotheby’s in Los Angeles. The mother of two, who is married to an electrical contractor, played herself in “Anywhere but Here,” in the scene where Susan Sarandon and Natalie Portman crashed an open house.
Fieger, who died of cancer last year at the age of 57, remained friends with his Sharona, even after she dumped him after three years of touring the world with The Knack. “I don’t think there is a more possessive, or obsessive, word in the English language than ‘my,’ ” Alperin told Flash yesterday. “He thought I was his soul mate. He was my groupie — I wasn’t his groupie. I didn’t chase him. It was time for me to be ‘My Sharona.’ By the time I was 21, it was over.”
reality bites - my sharona
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The 10 Most Plaintive Cries Of “I Hate Everything”
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The not-so-wild, wild West
One of Idaho’s legendary rodeos struggles not to get bucked
BY MICHAEL AMES
MACKAY, Idaho — People say the Mackay Rodeo ain’t what it used to be. Talk to just about any cattle rancher or whiskey slinger in this high-mountain, cottonwoods-and-camper-van, Rocky Mountain town and you’ll hear the same concern. The locals are worried about the future of “Idaho’s Wildest Rodeo,” a 66-year legacy of days of high-wire bull taunting and nights of hard boozing in this isolated, difficult, beautiful place they call home.
At 10 a.m. Saturday, a big white water tanker wet down the rodeo ground’s dusty dirt. Byron Pehrson, 60, was pulling up in his 18-wheel P&P Rodeo Company stock trailer, just as he has every June for the last 30. In the trailer stood 49 stock animals: 10 team-roping steers, 10 bull-dogging steers, 15 head of calves, 11 bulls and three bucking broncs. All were marked with the Pehrson family’s Lazy Y-O brand (“lazy” because the letters are lying down, like this: >—O). This stock was fresh, meaning most hadn’t been to town before, Pehrson said as he prodded them out to do the day’s work. Pehrson’s rodeo role is manifold: He is a member of the Mackay Rodeo Association; a producer, with his brother, Loy, of its rodeo and several others; and a board member of the Intermountain Professional Rodeo Association, which sanctioned the Mackay rodeo this year.
The night before, in Ken’s Club and Perk’s, bars that have survived a respective 65 and 95 years in their adjacent Main Street homes, expectations were low.
“I heard there’s only five bull riders coming tomorrow,” said Brandon Woodruff, a Mackay native who lives in Idaho Falls with his wife and two baby girls. He’d been given a weekend pass for the rodeo, to join his 23 classmates from the Class of 2001 for their 10-year reunion. Eleven years ago, the town’s population was 566; Custer County has dwindled to just under 4,200 people. It was getting on toward the end of what used to be a night of high anticipation, and the bar was mostly empty. A few younger kids dropped shots of Amaretto into glasses of beer and orange juice. Woodruff looked down at the pine bar burned with the double M’s and lazy L firebrands of nearby ranches, and shook his head. “It’s kind of sad, to be honest with you.”
A decade ago, the rodeo events that now barely fill an afternoon would span three days — a draw that was, by most recollections, the state’s most loved. “We’d have 1,000 people in town just to watch the rodeo,” said Terri Pehrson, Byron’s wife. “It was a big, big deal.”
Pehrson and his brother drew crowds by staging wild, cash-prize tests of courage like Bull Poker, which was open to any man brave or dumb enough to enter. The rules: Entrants are seated at card tables set up in the arena dirt; a bull is let loose; the last man seated wins. Seven years ago, a guy went and got hurt, and Bull Poker was discontinued in Mackay. Several years of cold June rains followed, then came “this economy,” and soon enough, the entire weekend had become a shadow of its own memories.
“I really think it’s kind of dying out,” Terri said. “There’s not a whole lot going around here. I’d hate to see it completely gone.”
As he unloaded his animals, Byron Pehrson walked slowly and deliberately. If he had any worries about whether the bleachers would fill up on what looked to be another blustery, gray day in the Big Lost River Valley, they didn’t show. He surveyed his stock, bulls named Full House, Vision Quest and Justice, massive, muscled animals bred to buck, their eyeballs blank and their tails twitching over manure-smeared hind flanks. As he walked, Pehrson’s hands hung heavy and solid at his sides. His are not the fingers that type and tweet day and night. His are tools made of leather, wood and rope, rather than flesh and blood.
Pehrson breeds and sells some of the best rough-stock in the West. His Lazy Y-O bulls have even competed in the National Finals Rodeo, held each December in Las Vegas. This is no small business. Bulls can fetch anywhere from $2,500 for a calf to $65,000 for a mature bucking bull. A single straw of cryopreserved bull semen can sell for $6,000 and, with the help of artificial bovine insemination, breed “60 head of good, ripping, bucking calves,” Pehrson said. In mid-June, he sold 37 bulls to a ranch in Albuquerque. “You’ll probably see them bulls on TV.”
Pehrson doesn’t know why his hometown rodeo is dying. One problem is how “these young kids want to get on motorbikes instead of getting on a bucking horse or a bucking bull,” he said. But for those men willing to sit on top of an uncontrollably angry, 2,000-pound animal, or even just do some fine-finesse rope work from horseback, the dividends are actually pretty good. Sponsorships are lucrative and prize money is substantial. Pehrson noted one early-season competition in which 16 bareback bronc riders vied for $15,000 between them. At big rodeos, like the Calgary Stampede or Rodeo Houston, million-dollar purses are the new norm.
But on Saturday in Mackay, Pehrson struggled to fill a single bull-riding draw. Six of the 11 scheduled riders bailed on the event entirely. “These damn cowboys don’t even show up,” he said. Meanwhile, in Casper, Wyo., about a nine-hour drive to the east, more than 400 young athletes gathered for the College National Finals Rodeo. The New York Times reported that the event’s champion bareback bronc rider, 19-year-old J.R. Vezain, earned $3,216. His counterpart in Mackay, 22-year old Kolton Kimball, took home $345.60.
On rodeo morning, Pehrson was focused on more immediate challenges. His “pissiest” bull, a bluish-black stud named Blue Night, was staring hard at a group of young children playing on the other side of a scanty rebar fence.
“Hey, tell those kids to back away!” Pehrson yelled to Shane Haggard, who was painting his nose blue in the passenger-seat vanity mirror of his 1996 Cadillac Seville while his kids played outside.
Despite his title, the rodeo clown is no joke. Bullfighters, as they prefer to be called, have the most demanding, dangerous and inglorious job at the rodeo. They fill a dual role as both the crowd’s comic relief and the cowboy’s first line of defense, distracting hot-charging bulls from going after the tossed and the injured. Haggard, 38, has been clowning since he was 12, but the reigning Intermountain Professional Rodeo Association’s Funny Man of the Year still knows fear. “If you’re not nervous,” he said, “you’re gonna get killed.”
Four hours later, after the annual parade of antique tractors on Main Street, after Perk’s had sold its last $3.50 Bloody Mary of the morning, Haggard stood in the middle of the arena in his cleats and his oversized suspenders and told a joke.
“Do you know what the definition of mixed emotions is?” he asked his emcee partner, the cowboy Martin to his clown Lewis.
“Well, no, I don’t. What is the definition of mixed emotions?” came the reply.
“Mixed emotions is watching your ex-wife drive off a cliff in your new car.”
This was about midway through the rodeo, not long after something called the “Kid’s Calf Scramble” (which should really be called “Cash Calf”). Ten greenbacks are clipped onto a cute little calf. It wanders into the arena, calm until it sees 30 wild-eyed children running straight at it, at which point it breaks into a frightened gallop. Hysterics ensue.
The second non-event event was the much-discussed Wild Cow Milking. Here, teams of two compete to collect a “measurable amount of milk” from a “wild” ranch cow. The cows — which have never been milked by humans and are big enough and strong enough to make this a serious challenge — do not comply.
As this hilarity wound down, the bulls were led into their chutes. Guns N’ Roses’ “Welcome to the Jungle” came on over the PA, and five young cowboys paced, cursed and did whatever they do to prepare for the momentary insanity that awaited. Energy crackled in the air as the bulls shifted and the young men tied their arms to the beasts’ backs. The gates opened.
Too quickly, it was all over. If a rider is tossed before eight seconds are up, it’s a “no score.” Two cowboys scored points. Three were tossed, and a couple got pretty banged up. All headed directly to the bar.
I.T. Perkins, or Old Man Perkins, opened his eponymous bar in 1916. Its grand carved-wood Brunswick bar was ordered from a factory back East and shipped around South America’s Cape Horn to San Francisco en route to central Idaho’s mine camps. It has survived two major fires (1917 and 1958), one serious earthquake (a record 7.2-magnitude event that leveled several buildings in 1983) and countless bar brawls.
Perk’s is informal. Drinking in your pajamas will be neither forbidden nor judged. Last Saturday night, as the milling crowd waited for honky-tonk Rocky Watson to take the stage, and gray-haired ladies in sequined sweatshirts lit Native brand cigarettes, the cowboys sat together.
“In rodeo, there’s no time-outs,” said Jerome Leguineche. A few hours earlier, the 27-year-old had been lying on his back in the dirt after getting thrown by Ice Man, the biggest bull of the day, an ugly white beast with a gnarled block of neck muscle the size of a chaise. Before he even hit the ground, Leguineche knew that he had re-torn an old groin injury. As he hobbled out of the arena, his right leg spasmed uncontrollably. At Perk’s, with a beer in hand, he knew he would be laid up for most of the season.
“I’m plum-bucket pissed off,” he said. “But this is rodeo. You take them lickin’s and you go on to the next one.”
As shots of whiskey arrived in plastic cups (no glass in the bar on rodeo night) and local girls pulled their cowboys onto the dance floor to sharp whistles and high hollers, Leguineche told a story about Byron Pehrson. The old cowboy was corralling his bulls, 10 of them, when they turned and rushed him as one. Pehrson, the story goes, stood firm and held the swinging iron gates shut with his bare hands as the bulls bore down on him.
It’s generally understood, but never said outright, that if the rodeo doesn’t survive, Mackay won’t last either. In this part of central Idaho, ghost towns dot the map. Villages bigger than this have simply dried up and emptied out.
Leguineche had a theory about the trouble with today’s Mackay rodeo. “Generation to generation, we are getting weaker,” he said. Children of ranchers are leaving without learning how to do things with animals. Ranching is literally dying. But as long as the Pehrsons are alive in the Big Lost River Valley, Leguineche is optimistic.
“Pride in the business. That’s the difference,” he said. “He wants to make the next great bull. Everyone knows that when you come to a Byron Pehrson rodeo, you’re gonna come get on a bucker.”
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The History Page: Sect’s appeal
Christian Science attracts ardent followers and bitter foes
BY EVAN KINDLEY
The American intelligentsia has long had a special obsession with its nation's homegrown religions. Recent examples include Lawrence Wright's 24,922-word article in The New Yorker on Scientology and Trey Parker and Matt Stone's hit Broadway musical "The Book of Mormon." At the turn of the century, it was Christian Science that attracted the fascination of the chattering classes.
Christian Science's founder, Mary Baker Eddy, was born Mary Morse Baker in 1821 in Bow, N.H. Raised in a strict Calvinist household, Mary gravitated toward the "New Thought" movement, a kind of predecessor to "New Age" that blended American transcendentalism, Indian philosophy and the "science" of mesmerism (better known today as hypnotism) derived from the teachings of German physician Franz Mesmer. In marked contrast to Calvinism and its inflexible doctrines of "total depravity" and "unconditional election," New Thought emphasized the power of the individual to shape and control the universe around them through sheer force of mind.
Eddy absorbed these arcane influences and transformed them into something new and, to her many followers, irresistible. The core idea of Christian Science was that physical pain, illness and even death did not truly exist: All were mere projections of the human mind and could be overcome by communication with the divine. At its most extreme, this entailed a wholesale rejection of secular medical science in favor of the power of positive thinking and prayer.
Eddy was an unlikely figurehead for a religious movement. Frail and chronically ill, plagued by economic misfortune and a series of bad marriages, she built a following beginning with the first publication of her magnum opus, "Science and Health," in 1875. The First Church of Christ, Scientist, was organized in Boston in 1881, with Eddy as its official pastor (though many Christian Scientists took to calling her "Mother," apparently against her wishes).
Christian Science was immediately beset by controversies. In 1879, Eddy's husband, Asa, and a man named Edward J. Arens were charged with conspiracy to assassinate a fellow Christian Scientist, Daniel Spofford. (A year earlier, Spofford had himself been accused by Lucretia Brown, another Eddyite, of worsening her spinal injury through mesmeric suggestion.) Many of Eddy's early followers broke with her over her obsession with "malicious animal magnetism," or mind control. Others accused her of plagiarizing from a faith healer named Phineas Parkhurst Quimby.
The media took note of Christian Science's surging popularity and scandals. Around the turn of the century, a spate of articles in publications like the New York World and McClure's magazine (which published an in-depth investigation ghostwritten by future novelist Willa Cather) sought to expose Eddy as a tyrannical, money-hungry charlatan.
Christian Science's most eloquent antagonist was Mark Twain. In 1899, Twain wrote a fictional sketch for Cosmopolitan (then a family news magazine) that begins with the narrator falling off a cliff, breaking his arms and legs, and being treated unsatisfactorily by a Christian Science practitioner. Two years later, Twain published another story — often cited as one of the earliest examples of American science fiction — called "The Secret History of Eddypus, the World-Empire," which imagined "Her Divine Grace Pope Mary Baker G. Eddy XXIV" ruling over a worldwide dominion.
In 1904, Twain followed these early sorties with a series of more serious reflections on Christian Science's rise in the North American Review. He pilloried Eddy directly for her inconsistencies, her "money-passion," her control over her flock, and especially her "inborn disposition to copyright everything, charter everything, secure the rightful and proper credit to herself for everything she does, and everything she thinks she does, and everything she thinks, and everything she thinks she thinks or has thought or intends to think." He mercilessly mocked her writing style, claiming that "any kind of literary composition was excessively difficult for Mrs. Eddy … When [she] tries to be artful — in literature — it is generally after the manner of the ostrich; and with the ostrich's luck."
Notwithstanding the wit of his critique, Twain took the phenomenon of Christian Science seriously. "Is it insanity to believe that Christian Scientism is destined to make the most formidable show that any new religion has made in the world since the birth and spread of Mohammedanism, and that within a century from now it may stand second to Rome only, in numbers and power in Christendom?" he asked. Despite his harsh remarks about Eddy's character, Twain actually had far more sympathy for Christian Science than most of its critics. "No one doubts — certainly not I — that the mind exercises a powerful influence over the body," he wrote in 1899. While he remained skeptical about Eddy's church, he never denied that its beliefs had a certain validity. "I am not combating [Christian] Science. I haven't a thing against it," he wrote to fellow Eddyphobe John Frederick Peabody in 1902. "Making fun of that shameless old swindler, Mother Eddy, is the only thing I take any interest in."
Yet Twain's disgust was mixed with an admiration for Eddy's achievement: "In several ways she is the most interesting woman that ever lived, and the most extraordinary," he wrote in 1904.
At any rate, Christian Science did not prove to be as powerful a force in American life as Twain feared. Membership peaked at somewhere around 268,000 in the 1930s, a couple of decades after Eddy's death, and has been declining ever since. In 1992, the New York Times suggested that "there are more Roman Catholics in North Dakota than Christian Scientists in the United States." Some recent membership estimates are as low as 85,000. But it's still possible to see, in the contemporary exposés and satires of popular religions like Scientology and Mormonism, the same combination of skepticism, contempt and awe that Twain felt for Eddy's empire.
For writers and journalists who often feel cut off from the mainstream of American culture, the influence of popular religion can't help but be a source of envy, an attitude summed up by Twain's wistful admission: "When we do not know a person … we have to judge his size by the size and nature of his achievements … Measured by this standard, it is thirteen hundred years since the world has produced any one who could reach up to Mrs. Eddy's waistbelt."
Evan Kindley is managing editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books.
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Wimbledon Executive: We'd Like Less Grunting From Players
by EYDER PERALTA
Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
Victoria Azarenka of Belarus returns a shot to Slovakia's Magdalena Rybarikova during their first round match at the All England Lawn Tennis Championships at Wimbledon Monday.
The head of Wimbledon is wading into a decades-old debate in the tennis world. In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Ian Ritchie, the chief executive of the All England Lawn and Tennis Club, complained about players grunting, saying "fans were also becoming frustrated with loud players who they believe are spoiling the game."
The Telgraph reports:
Mr Ritchie, a former television and news agency executive, admitted that officials would "prefer to see less grunting".
"The players have an ability to complain about it, if one player is grunting too much and the other player doesn't like it and it is distracting, they can complain to the umpire," he said
"We have discussed it with the tours and we believe it is helpful to reduce the amount of grunting."
"We are one tournament in a global circuit. But we have made our views clear and we would like to see less of it."
At this year's Wimbledon it's Victoria Azarenka, of Belarus, who's been making the most noise. The Telegraph reports her "wails" hit 95 decibels and lasted more than 1.5 seconds every time she hit the ball.
If you've never heard the player, here's a sampling from a 2011 match between Azarenka and Maria Sharapova, another grunter:
As we noted, this debate is nothing new. In 1992, Time Magazine ran a piece titled "Stop That Grunt!" and in 2005, the BBC declared Sharapova "the loudest grunter so far," when her vocalizations hit 101 decibels.
Perhaps the first player to get noticed for her grunt was Monica Seles. She told WNYC in 2009 that nobody taught her to grunt:
"I've grunted pretty much from day one," she said. "Because I was very tiny, I was always on the smaller side, and I put every single ounce of my energy into that ball."
Seles also noted that it was Jimmy Connors who first popularized the grunt and no one made a big deal about him.
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Next Wave with Gary Vaynerchuk: Social Climbing
Gary V. argues that Facebook's new play into the music space means the social media giant is taking on a bigger, more established tech titan. —Video by Alvin Patrick and Cat LoBuono
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Sun Salutations in Times Square
On the longest day of the year, thousands of yoga enthusiasts packed Time Square in New York to strike a post.
Credit: The Daily (www.thedaily.com)
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