Up until I was in junior high school, we always lived in suburban neighborhoods; each house elbow to elbow with a neighboring house. We lived in suburban Pittsburgh, Chicago and Columbus, but then in 1976, after my freshman year, we moved to the farmland on the southwest outskirts of Toledo Ohio.
It was an old farm house… the original house that laid claim to the surrounding 150 acres. Through the years, the property was whittled down to an acre and a third. This sort of setting was completely foreign to us, but exciting none the less. Behind the house, there was a garage (upon which we added a basketball hoop almost immediately), a tool shed behind the garage, another tool shed in the back yard, an old 2-seater outhouse, and a big chicken and horse barn. There were lots of places to explore!
I helped my sister (4 years younger) convert the other tool shed into a “playhouse” for her and her friends. They would hang out there, giggling over pictures of boys in teen magazines and trying to avoid getting tormented by my brother (2 years younger).
The tall part of the barn was the main room, with a dusty old loft up above. At first, my brother and I thought it would be cool to hang out up in the loft, but soon discovered that no matter how often you swept up, it was always dusty. And of course, it was steaming hot up there in the summer months.
The main room was really something… a long room with a bar and an oven at one end. The walls were cinderblock and the floor was concrete. It had a big gas heater too. The previous owner had been courteous enough to leave a little black and white photo of a topless pinup girl on one of the wood support beams. Whooooo!
For the first couple years we lived there, we didn’t really do much with the barn. We put our old living room couch out there, when the parents upgraded… we had a ping-pong table and some old hook rugs, but there really wasn’t much to do.
Side note: there was also a gas heater in the workroom, with which I learned a valuable lesson. To wit: when you have to light a gas stove, always light the match BEFORE turning on the gas. I got my ass blown across the room one afternoon when I turned on the gas and then started fumbling around with the matches. By the time I got one lit, a nice little gas cloud was waiting for me to stick the match into the pilot light area. KA-BOOM!
Somewhere along the line, I began meeting some people at school. I met Rik in Spanish class, Mark, from down the street and John from the bus. I found out that Rik knew John and Mark, but he didn’t know that they knew me. We all had hung out individually but never realized that we all knew each other. We all started hanging out and saw that we all just fit together.
I’d been pretty much of a square in school. My buddies most definitely were not. But we came to a happy medium… they loosened me up, and I calmed them down. Together we found a happy medium had some great times.
A year or two later, we met another guy, Billy, who was in my newspaper class, senior year. He was a mellow guy like me, but was just hilarious… the best guy I ever met at coming up with crazy shit for us to do at the drop of a hat. He seemed to be the final piece of the puzzle.
The spring of our senior year, everything came together. As spring fever hit, we started acquiring sofas and stuff to outfit the barn and make a place to congregate. We covered the walls with posters, got a stereo out there and started wiring speakers into the ceiling beams. We tore speakers out of transistor radios, TVs, cars… if it had a speaker, we wired it up in the ceiling. It sounded crappy, but it gave us a sense of accomplishment. Once I started working at the local record store, I had access to all kinds of decorative swag, and a ton of it ended up out there. We also scored a number of beer lights from various sources. We also used Christmas lights as well. The whole place was just the coolest little “clubhouse” that you could ever hope to have.
At the time, you could buy beer that was 3.2% alcohol (or “low” beer) at 18. The age for regular beer, wine and liquor was 21. So getting beer was never much of a problem. And as I learned, my folks didn’t mind if my buddies and I had a few beers as long as they knew where we were. They figured if we weren’t drinking there, we’d just be out driving around drinking and causing trouble. (Which is funny because that’s exactly what we had been doing before setting up in the barn.)Through the course of that summer, our little group kind of sucked in the kids from the neighborhood. We would get a couple of cases on a Saturday night and just sit around in the barn talking and carrying on. Especially fun were the nights when we’d break out the cassette tape recorder and record our bull sessions. That’s where Billy would just go nuts… master of ceremonies, group therapist and improve artist.
My mom used to say we became a tribe out there. I can’t say she’s wrong. We had the elders, the soldiers, the medicine man and the young bucks. That summer is when the barn became The Barn.
We had our first Barn Party in September of 1979, as a goodbye party for Billy, whose family was moving to South Georgia. It was the start of an epic string of Barn Parties that are legendary to this day.
We had New Years parties, bachelor parties, football watching parties… we’d converted most of our neighbors into Steeler fans through nothing but our sheer enthusiasm. Of course, the alternatives were the Lions and the Browns… who else would you choose?
We ended up with 5 couches out there, so there was always a contingent of people that would just stay the night. In the morning, we’d let the dog in to go wake everyone up. I had the advantage of home court, so I could always crawl up the stairs to my own room. Then I’d wake up to the smell of cinnamon buns and coffee. I’d come downstairs and survey the human wreckage sitting around the kitchen table… dudes with bedhead huddled under blanket, nursing their coffees. Then would come the spirited game of “I Did What??”
Mom’s cinnamon buns cured a lot of ills, I’ll tell you. My parents never minded our having the parties, as long as they were home. They say they just wanted to keep an eye on things, but I think the real truth is that they had as good a time as we did. And we never had a single auto accident after a party due to drunk driving. There was one accident… the girl was stone sober, but she just had a fight with her boyfriend. (Yeah, there was a lot of THAT.) But we never had anyone get hurt or get in serious trouble (other than with their boyfriend or girlfriends).
It’s kind of sad to me that this kind of scene would be pretty much impossible today. My parents would have gotten arrested in no time. Some parent somewhere would have had a hissy fit about their kid drinking and send the cops. But back then, it just seemed like the smart thing to do. The Barn kept us pretty much out of trouble.
It wasn’t always the big parties I remember so fondly. Most of the time, it would just be me, a buddy or two and a couple of sixers. We’d put on the Christmas lights and some music and just shoot the shit… solving all the world’s problems or complaining about our non-existent love lives. It was just a great place to unwind and be ourselves. And my parents must have figured, any chance to get a teenager out of the house but still be nearby, it’s a go.
OK, I can see that I’m running way long and I’m really just getting warmed up. It looks like I’m going to have to keep revisiting The Barn.
It doesn’t really matter what the issue is… if the Obama administration is “fer”, the Republicans, led by the waterheads at Fox News are “agin.”
Next, a panel of straight white conservatives ask questions like:
Now over to the O'Reilly Hack-tor: 
Bow-Tox
OK, it wasn’t quite that big, but it was bigger than the usual 5-piece beginner set.
It would not have been appropriate for the James Taylor/Eagles songs they were playing. So I was subtle and under-played, with a couple of small runs and light cymbal crashes. They actually did me a favor by keeping the songs simple… That way, I got to appear competent.
We used to play along to songs on the stereo. (This wasn’t any ordinary barn, but that’s a future blog post in itself.) I wasn’t any good, but it at least taught me where things were and what my limitations are. And to wear gloves with knuckle pads. So I guess a lot of that came back, mixing in with a lifetime of paying attention to the construction of songs. It also helps that you don’t have to read music or recognize notes or chords or anything. You just have to beat on stuff. I can do that!
“We’re getting the bahnd back together!”
* We were able to keep them from running for most of the game, and we seemed to have some running room, but for some reason we chose not to run. Mendenhall was doing OK… not spectacular. Moore had a couple of solid runs. Willie Parker ran hard for 7 on the one carry he was allowed.
These 2 were from Liberty Reservoir, just west of Baltimore. These might have been better if sun was out.
They got us last time when Limas Sweed dropped a sure touchdown pass that the drummer from Def Leppard could have caught.
They’re facing a different team this week than the one from Week 3. Rocket Rashard Mendenhall is running like a man possessed. Troy is back, Lawrence Timmons is back, and the subs for Aaron Smith are holding their own. Look for the defense to get after Carson Palmer like a pack of mad dogs.
It seems that this particular MILF stands for the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and they took custody of a 
The unintentional humor continues when the article goes on to expound on the nature of MILF: 
* The Broncos came out with a good game plan. They used a lot of play-action to make the Steeler linebackers stay up on the line and threw quick timing patterns behind them. Orton was getting the ball out immediately, before the rush could get to him. The defense would bend but not break, but I was worried about the ease with which they were moving the ball. In the back of my mind, though, I knew the coaches would figure things out and adapt their tactics.
Jon Gruden dismisses that whole mess about the 
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