Frank Zappa Laughed in Scorn:
Or I Most Certainly Did Not Organize My First Small Demonstration

I had a friend in drama class, Suzanne. Her family ancestors, she said, had once held the original land-grant from the King of Spain giving them in perpetuity all of the land from what was to become the lucrative oil fields near Long Beach all the way into the golden acres of speculative real estate in Los Angeles proper, but a relative had lost it many generations prior in a prolonged drunken gambling game described by descendents as having been played on serapes thrown on the sand. When that episode of family history was mentioned, which it rarely was by them, they would merely sneer in disgust, and the grandmother would wring a dishtowel she always seemed to carry and heave a long suffering sigh. Suzanne I learned was a vegetarian, and that was a little odd even for the early 60’s. But she was a creative girl, and serious enough about drama to spend her weekends and evenings rehearsing for an Ionesco thing.

The theatre of the absurd was being performed here and there at that time, Ustinov was big in the Rhinoceros, and here another Ionesco piece was being performed by an amateur little theatre company in Pomona. I remember reading a piece of literary criticism at the time that basically said that while an interesting trend, absurdity was a temporary phenomenon and those expressions never lasted as they lacked inherent substance.

While even Time magazine was featuring talk pieces with existential philosophers and pondering on the cover if God were dead (as if the answer would be supplied by the pages within), in keeping with the spirit of the time I thumbed through copies of "Waiting for Godot" and "Krapp's Last Tape". I'd also read a book called “The Jungle,” by Upton Sinclair, and I'd actually met the author on a bench in front of the public library after he had finished lecturing on campus. He was quite an old man by then and had to wear a wool coat despite the mild weather.

There were a lot of people coming and going in that little village, lots of lectures and events going on. People sometimes were trying to stretch people’s limits by inviting people to speak who did not always hold a popular view. Some of these were really leading edge thinkers and wouldn’t become famous for some time to come and some had already been famous and fallen from favor. The idea being that no matter what their political affiliation, they might be saying something that was true and of value. So the lecture series were always a possibility of an evening’s edification.

But that wasn’t happening everywhere all the time, not even in our precious village.

As this was a small village, and small in population numbers, fewer than a thousand people, and (have I said this enough) with not much going on, almost everything hit the local paper. And because this was a small village and with not a lot going on, you’d really have to work to amuse yourself; which meant sometimes in desperation looking through the local newspaper to find them touting anything remotely interesting to do.

This was in the era that “celebrities” would rent themselves out to celebrate grand openings. I'd been dragged to see Jayne Mansfield cutting the ribbon in the women's wear department at Buffum’s in Pomona. So we didn't get Jean-Paul but who needed him when Captain Jet would show up at a supermarket opening?

Suzanne and I read that another celebrity would soon be making a pre-publicized appearance at the brand new Supermarket, in fact the very mercantile that had once forcibly ejected Frank Zappa. So of course we decided to go.

We were there waiting as Little Oscar was chauffeured in to the parking lot in his long strange celebrity limousine that was fashioned to look like a giant hot dog on wheels. You might not remember him, but Little Oscar was rather small in stature and not much taller than a child himself. His diminutive appearance was carefully selected by an ad agency to present a friendly non-threatening appearance to young people to encourage them to ask their parents to buy them some hot dogs to eat. He was wearing his trademark chef’s outfit with the white kerchief tied in a square knot about the neck of his white eight buttoned double breasted chef’s coat which topped his black-and-white checkered chef’s pants. And on his head was his well-known puffy white chef’s hat. As the vehicle bumped up into the driveway and pulled into the lot, he was waving to the kids from the passenger side window in the front seat.

Everyone in the small crowd waved back at Little Oscar. Suzanne and I were mixed in with the crowd of eight and ten year olds and their parents while the celebrity limo adjusted itself in the parking lot for the personal appearance. Little Oscar popped out of the special hatch in the top of the Weinermobile and was still waving and smiling at the kids.

Well, Suzanne surprised even me by suddenly running at the Weinermobile shaking her fist, yelling, “Oscar Go Home!”

Little Oscar looked a little scared and appeared to be genuinely startled. As a reporter also happened to be there for the event, that one made the local paper.

That one, a spontaneous demonstration as performed by Little Oscar and the Originals, way back there in 1962.

Truthfully, Frank Zappa inevitably minimized my efforts, though he found them genuinely amusing, perhaps just to keep me from taking things too seriously. In this instance, he wondered aloud why little girls would tell Little Oscar to go home if he had such a great big dog. “Girls!” he’d laugh.

Where Little Oscar is at now.  ¶ 11/04/2003 02:44:00 PM