Being Frank Read Online Free

entered high school. I should probably explain that during this time the South Bay, where I lived, had a sizable Catholic population, and those families who couldn’t afford parochial school sent their kids to the “gentile” public schools. I used to refer to Mira Costa High School, my alma mater, as “Our Lady of Guacamole.” Since nearly everybody who was on the South Bay Unified school board in the 1960s has gone on to better things , I can at last reveal the truth about the December Plot of 1969.
    It had been the custom in Manhattan Beach, ever since the time of Columbus no doubt, to install a nativity scene on the front lawn of City Hall during the Christmas season. This holiday device consisted of a plywood edifice with a fake thatched roof, beneath which papier-mache statues of Joseph and Mary and the Three Wise Men flanked a particle-board manger containing a bundle of rags that was supposed to represent the newborn Baby JC.
    On Christmas morning, I969, the townspeople of Manhattan Beach awoke to find that a few shifts had been made in the paradigm : in place of the manger there was an American Standard toilet on which was enthroned a life-size, naked dummy of Frank Zappa with his pants down around his ankles. (This was at a time when every frat house in the country had at least one copy of Zappa’s notorious “Phi Zappa Krappa” poster prominently displayed.) The blasphemy, when discovered, was hastily whisked away, although the manger couldn’t be found, which left a gaping hole between Mary and Joseph and made some wags ask, “Is He risen?” ( meaning Zappa from the throne ). The culprit was never publicly determined, but the folks at American Martyrs Church would have added me to their list of sainted sufferers if they had gone around to the back of my boyfriend’s garage, where the purloined holy fodder-trough had been gleefully dismantled and stashed.
    That year I was a sophomore at Our Lady of Guacamole, and in and out of several bands when I wasn’t in detention or explaining my latest misdeed to Miss Rissé, the girls’ vice principal. Other people who were in high school during the late 1960s may have been merrily trafficking in sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll, but at my high school all the historyteachers were John Birchers and the really cool thing to do after school was paint curbs for De Molay. Weekend surf gremmies were considered wickedly avant-garde. Why me, Lord??
    To compensate for my misery, I had moved on to electric guitar, and still under the Zappa influence, I was composing dismally ambitious works with titles like “Adolf Hitler’s Bunker and the Young Porsche” and “The Sun City Fertility Rites.” (One of my fellow musical miscreants was another Our Lady of Guacamole student, David Benoit, a descendant of William Jennings Bryan, Dave, who suffered from dermatitis, played piano in several of my anarcho-musical outfits, but he fortunately somehow survived my bad influence and went on to considerable financial glory in the twilight musical world where Henry Mancini meets Bill Evans and scores a total K.O.) I was also the first chair percussionist in the South Bay youth orchestra, where I spent my time snoring through Haydn and languishing for an opportunity to whomp the dust off my mallets with some Stravinsky or Bartòk. (I was relieved of this position after launching into a very loud jazz shuffle rhythm on the adjacent timpani during an otherwise quiet stretch in the annual Handel “Messiah” extravaganza.)
    During summer vacation my boyfriend and I began recording some of my songs on my father’s Viking stereo reel-to-reel tape deck. I played guitar, percussion (including an incredible four-octave toy piano I had found thrown out on trash collection day — both its black and its white keys were functional, and when operated with both hands it sounded like a cymbalom recorded on a wire