ASBURY PARK - SUMMER OF '63

It was the best of times.  It was the worst of times.  It was 1963.

My friend Joy and I had decided to waitress in Asbury Park, NJ, that summer.  We hoped to have an adventure and make a great deal of money.  Having heard that folks with big old houses they could no longer afford rented out their top floors to college students during the summer hoping to make enough money to heat those houses in the winter, we soon found a pleasant lady who rented us a huge hot bedroom on the third floor for $30 a week which Joy and I would split.  Then we found waitress jobs in restaurants on the famous Boardwalk.

                        

All day we lay around in our unbearably hot room in our underwear reading library books.  We had no money, no TV, no phone, no radio, no car and  personal computers were still in the distant future.  Later in the afternoon we pulled onto our  sweaty bodies the required girdles, stockings and slips.  "No one wants to see jiggling buttocks!" we had been told.  The truth was that half the population wanted to see jiggling buttocks, but we denied them that pleasure.  Our outfits were completed by donning extremely unattractive white uniforms and white shoes.  Joy and I now looked like heavily perspiring nurses as we trudged along the steaming sidewalks to our respective jobs.  Every afternoon we passed a huge sign in front of a club advertising their headliners--a gentleman and his wife who was only 18 inches tall.  We wondered aloud what their act consisted of and how did they have sex?  Neither Joy nor I had as yet done the dark deed, but we knew that such a size differential would make things....uh....difficult.

At work the hours crept by.  The large amounts of money I had counted on making never materialized, mostly because as a waitress I was incredibly inept.  I was slow; I couldn't carry the heavy trays; I was too young to serve drinks; I got panicky in the hot crowded kitchen and couldn't find my orders.  Worst of all, I did not have a line of snappy patter for the customers.  I felt overwhelmed all the time.  I prayed for my shift to end.

What saved us that summer was the music and the invention of the Sixties' Coffeehouse.  Music of social consciousness was big.  Joan Baez and her guest Bob Dylan came to Asbury Park and sang to a hugely appreciative crowd.  Jazz was hot and Dave Brubeck's Take Five was played every night at the coffeehouse where Joy and I sat at tiny tables eating delicate sandwiches and drinking cup after cup of coffee.  The crowd was hip and conversation was fascinating.  Best of all, the place was air conditioned.  A new young singer had appeared in New York and was beginning to make a name for herself--Barbara Streisand.  In a couple of years she would take Broadway by storm in Funny Girl.  Who knew?

To Be Continued