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Show Acting Alone pa g e 121 a gangly sullen redheaded boy holding up a giant sign that said PAT SUCKS DICK in huge dayglo-green letters. And it made Sam cry, right there in front of his three inquisitors. Why? For lost times? Well, yes. Because those times had been lost even as they'd taken place. But he wasn't really crying for the Good Old Days. You never cry for things that were good. You never cry when you hear the cut from "Sgt. Pepper" that was your favorite back in highschool - because the Beatles' songs are good. They stick with you forever. They don't leave you. However, you do cry when you hear a Mamas and the Papas tune from the same year-because the harmonies are so trite, the intonations so sickeningly off, the words so stupid that it reminds you of your own lost stupidity, your own lost lack of taste, lost innocence. Young Sammy was politically innocent back then, as you can tell from the famous slogan he chose to print on his sign. (It didn't exactly cut right through to the more subtle organizational foibles of that particular presidential administration, one has to admit.) As a matter of fact, whenever Sammy watched the president on TV in those days, he really tried to see some evidence of the hideous bloodsucking monster that his mom and everybody else always said Nixon was supposed to be, deep inside. But, all young Sammy saw was a person with a pair of dark eyes that looked as though they might have had, at one distant time or another, a sense of humor inside them. (This was a whole decade before Sam would migrate to Kansas and have first hand experience with smiling charismatic sociopaths, like the people in the English department who'd allowed those pictures of the |