Act 1 Scene 2 - Prom Night - The Next Morning

Act 1 Scene 2 - Act I Scene 2 – Prom Night – The Next Morning

Still in the black tuxedos, their ties hanging lose around their open shirts, we were four high school seniors heading to the Jersey Shore after dropping off our dates.

We were  headed to Ocean City, New Jersey, where my parents had recently bought a house, and traveling  via the back roads through Berlin where Mark would stop by his house to pick up some clothes. The house is dark, everyone’s asleep, so it was a quick in and out for Mark Jorden. Then it was back on the road, Jerry Montgomery driving, as usual, since he was the first to get his license and a car, so he just assumed that role.

Bob Katchnick was asleep on the other side of the back seat from me as we headed down the pike – the Black Horse Pike towards the shore, then taking the back roads past the old deer hunter’s roadhouse with the carved wood sign that read DOAKS. Past the deserted plastics factory, Donny’s Mays Landing Inn, across the creek and a sharp right takes you along Somers Point road that hugs the river.

Sunshine Park, the first nudist colony in America is probably the biggest landmark on the Somers Point-Mays Landing Road, but there are a few old, colonial era houses and a Catawba where a family died of suspicious circumstances, possibly murdered a century ago. Then there’s Jack’s Grove all night café under the trees before the marina and bridge to Somers Point.

With the golf course on the left and Kennedy Park on the Highbanks and bay on the right, you sneak up to the Somers Point Circle from the south at nine o’clock on the dial and pass Your Father’s Mustache, the Crab Trap and Circle Liquor before heading over the Ocean City causeway bridge.

While the Point Diner on the circle just across from Your Father’s Mustache is the most popular all night cafes, there were two other diners, one relatively new one on the south side of Ninth Street and Bill Brown’s Diner just off the alley behind the Italian joint at West Avenue.

Bill Brown, they say, was a Camden guy, like we were, so that’s where we pulled in and parked in the small lot next to the diner. It was still dark, the sun wasn’t up yet, but the bright neon lights of the diner made Katchnick squint as he work up when the car stopped moving.

Bob was strikingly Troy Donahoe handsome but shy, thoughtful and quiet. His younger sister was beautiful hippie and his best friend Bob Lodge was a tall, lanky artist who saw something funny in everything. The two Bobs.

Jerry liked to laugh too, and they all laughed at me and Mark when we talked politics.

That’s how we met, as the year before I was a volunteer for Gene McCarthy, the anti-Vietnam war candidate, whose showing in New Hampshire forced LBJ to resign from the race, leaving the door open for RFK to get killed and the riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, that I was a part of.

If Chicago radicalized me against the political system, I don’t known what radicalized Mark, but he went from basketball team jock at a prestigious prep school to CCHS – Camden Catholic High School, giving up sports all together and earning a scholarship to NYU – the hippest college on the East Coast in the heart of Greenwich Village in the City – New York City.

Unlike the other two diners that were really busy at this time, Bill Brown’s was half empty even though it was a small place – six stools on each side of two counter and three booths on each side of the door, each with a flipping juke box that cost a dime a song – three for a quarter, playing three tunes while listening to the hit songs others have played including "Hot Fun in the Summertime," "Grazing in the Grass" and "Wedding Bell Blues." 

The talk at the table was not about music, or college, but what they were going to do that summer. I knew what I was going to do – work at Mack & Manco’s pizza joint on the boardwalk at 9^th Street, and offered to try to get hem jobs too, but they all wanted to do something else.

Around the same time, sitting in a Madison Avenue advertising office in New York City, two young men in jeans and t-shirts talked with a group of men in suits and ties, convincing them to match their multi-million dollar investment in a music festival to be held late that summer near Woodstock in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York, an even that would affect everyone in some way or another, especially the four of us sitting in a booth in Bill Brown’s Diner in Ocean City, New Jersey at five o’clock in the morning on the day after the prom.

Next: Act 1 Scene 3 - Flashback - from Somers Point to Woodstock