HUMOR

MILT THOMAS 

I try to stay up to date with changes in our culture, but it is no easy task. My time was the 1960s and although I wasn’t necessarily ‘hip’ (that’s a 60s term for you youngsters), I was in the music business and had plenty of peripheral exposure to it. They say if you can remember the 60s, you weren’t part of it. I can remember everything about the 60s – finishing college, raising a family, making a living, but I depended on Walter Cronkite and Arlo Guthrie to tell me what was really happening.

The reason I bring all this up, is because the other day, a department head at the city told me one of his employees thought I was “the bomb.” I am embarrassed to say I wasn’t sure if that was a compliment or a criticism. That person could have been referring to some of the columns I have been writing for Inside Vero. To some at the city, Mark Schumann and I might be perceived as a bomb threat in the middle of all those current crises facing them. But since the department head said it with a laugh, I assume it wasn’t anything really serious. On the other hand, maybe it was a nervous laugh…

I do travel to the Middle East frequently, and a few years ago, as my wife and I went through U.S. customs returning from Italy, the customs agent looked over my passport and said, “you sure travel a lot to the Middle East. Why?

” My wife, who had gone through before me, heard the comment and looked like a deer caught in the headlights of international espionage.  I hesitated a moment, because these guys don’t ask questions like this with a smile, not even a nervous one. Then I told him I was a travel writer. He looked at the passport, thumbed through it once more, then handed it to me and welcomed me back home.

So, no, I don’t think I was called the bomb because of a vague terrorist reference. So then I thought about the many times I have given talks, interviews, toasts, told jokes. I have certainly ‘bombed’ on occasion. So, I mentioned that to the department head, and he said, “So have I, but that’s not what she is referring to.”

Then, much to my embarrassment, he told me it was a compliment. Now I remember back in my youth, when use of the word “bad” meant only one thing – something kids like to do but their parents won’t let them.  Then in the 60s, it could also mean someone was so good, beyond normally accepted terms for greatness, that they were Bad. Like, the Grateful Dead were bad, man, to borrow the vernacular.

So, whether you think I am bad, or the bomb or any other misinterpretable reference, I will take it with a smile…a nervous one…but a smile nevertheless.