Hi, this is Frank Flaherty. Welcome to Park Slope, Brooklyn, for another weekly episode of “Dad, Interrupted.”
My friend Jim and I have been breaking in a new bar for our weekly drinks. It’s called McMahon’s and it sits right across Flatbush Avenue from Barclays Center, where the Brooklyn Nets play. The bar is midway between our houses, so it’s a fair spot for both of us, and another good thing is that we can amuse ourselves by trying to guess what’s happening at Barclays that night by checking out the people at McMahon’s. The Disney on Ice crowd has a very different vibe from the Bad Bunny crowd, for example. During basketball season, of course, the bar is usually packed with Nets fans.
On this particular October evening, McMahon’s is bustling and the barstools are full. We squint and stare meaningfully at some young Nets fans until they start fidgeting and mumbling to each other. They eventually relinquish their seats to us aging boomers. The slight limp I had when they were watching us magically disappears.
After we settle onto our stools and order our Coney Island Mermaid beers, Jim tells me about his dad’s slide shows.
Jim’s dad was an engineer at General Motors, and he traveled overseas on business often. It being the 1950s and 60s, when he returned home to Mountain Lakes, N.J., he would gather friends and family in the living room and treat them to a slide show of his trip. Given the tourist customs of that era, temples, monuments and palaces probably popped up as much as people did on Jim’s dad’s slide projector.
I never met Jim’s dad, he died when Jim was 12, but I know about tourists who want to share their enthusiasms with others. One of my cousins, a retired electrician, is very fond of bridges, dams, canals, aqueducts and other infrastructure, especially stuff of historical importance.
One of his favorite trips was to The Iron Bridge in Shropshire, England. This bridge, built in 1781 across the River Severn, was apparently the world’s first significant cast-iron bridge. It is widely regarded as one of the big sparks that set the Industrial Revolution on fire. My cousin swoons over this bridge, and he’s happy to discuss it in great detail with anyone who will listen, or even half-listen.
Of course, in the same way that not everyone swoons over infrastructure, not everyone in Jim’s dad’s living room swooned over slides of the Eiffel Tower. But Jim’s dad had thought about the problem of audience engagement, and he had a very smart solution.
Like many midcentury families, Jim’s dad had a slide projector, probably the standard one with the circular carousel you loaded the slides onto. They could usually hold about 80 slides. The dad, who would usually be the narrator back then, would have a little handheld button that he’d click to shunt the slides along.
Now, when Jim’s dad inserted the slides for a show, he’d slip into one of the slots a picture of a nude or provocatively dressed woman. She had nothing to do with his trip.
Jim’s dad called this slide the “waker-upper.” He’d place it in a middle slot so it would pop up in mid-show, when his guests’ attention was starting to flag. When the slide landed on the screen, there’d be a gasp or two from one of the awake people, and then all the heads that had been nodding asleep would snap back up to see what the commotion was about. Then everyone would laugh and go freshen their drinks.
And that’s how Jim’s dad would have a revived, lively crowd for Part II of his slide show.
Back at McMahon’s, I myself was slowly nodding off as Jim told this story. But when he got to the waker-upper part, it woke me up just like it did his dad’s guests.
I was impressed with Jim’s dad’s clever idea. “He wasn’t only an engineer,” I thought. “He was a social engineer.”
This interested me because, frankly, I need a waker-upper of my own. As the years go by, my primary audience — my wife Jeanette — is slowly nodding off when I tell her things. In the early days of marriage, she’d not only happily listen to my ideas, she’d even ask questions about them. But just when I retired and began to have more time to share my thoughts with her, her attention began to dwindle.
How do I get it back, I wondered, for Part II of our own marital slideshow? As I thought about it, I realized that the waker-upper strategy is a lot more common than you think. My father-in-law, Doc, was the target of another very good one.
Doc was 6’3” and 240 pounds and loved to eat. His appetite was not only family legend; it was local legend. When his brother drove to Covington, Ky., to visit Doc, they would gobble down 50 White Castles at one sitting. This happened more than once. Doc was also banned from a local all-you-can-eat lobster buffet when he ate 15 lobsters.
Doc, who was a doctor, was also a world-class workaholic. He had a solo practice and no fewer than six exam rooms, so he’d zip from one to the next in a blur. That was the problem for one of his many patients. She was a smart, methodical person who would routinely write down the questions she wanted to ask him at her appointments. But whenever she fished her notes from her bag and looked up, he would be gone, his examining stool still whirling at 40 rpm. He was off to see the next patient.
But this patient knew Doc loved food, and so at her next appointment she came armed with a big box of chocolates. When Doc was about to dash out the door, she produced the candy and asked if he’d like one. Long story short, all her questions were answered, and they even did a bit of gossiping, too. The box of candy of course was empty by the end of their chat.
Between Jim’s dad’s sexy waker-upper and Doc’s patient’s candy waker-upper, I was ready to design one for Jeanette.
Now, her obsession is not food. It’s juicy celebrity news. So if I wanted her full attention to my thoughts on, say, why baseball’s pitch clock rule is bad, I would need not a box of chocolates but a box of tasty morsels of gossip.
So one afternoon when she was telling me why Prince William was called “wombat” as a kid, I decided to test my idea out. I was planning to build a few raised vegetable beds in the yard, and while Jeanette knows a good deal about plants she’s not so much into garden construction.
So I baited my hook this way: I said, “Hey, here’s a very weird thing I just read about Meghan Markle’s father. Apparently … Oh shoot, I almost forgot! I have to order lumber for the raised vegetable beds today. What do you think of this layout for the best sunlight?” I laid my open laptop on top of her open laptop.
“You were saying about Meghan Markle?” she non-answered my gardening question. Jeanette often non-answers questions she deems unessential. But notice she did hear the words “Meghan Markle.” Boldface names are catnip to her ears.
“Oh, yea, crazy thing,” I said. “Markle’s father was … It’s kind of an involved story. Let me just tell you about the raised beds first.”
“Then Meghan Markle,” she said.
“Okay,” I say, smiling on the inside…
The test was a success. I now have a waker-upper of my own. Thank you, Jim’s dad.
The Waker-Upper