Closing a 40 year old loop with this shot.
"Ring Ma Bell". Two phrases that date me to my formative years in the 70s. Ma Bell was THE American phone company. Yes, back then, in the era of landlines, the gray haired will confirm that there were no Verizons, Sprints, T-Mobiles, etc.
There was only ONE phone company -- AT&T -- the original, the tried and true, the
monopoly, the maker of the corded desk phone whose brutish construction enabled an angry hangup in a rage and has been used effectively in acts of physical violence. AT&T was quasi-affectionately known as Ma Bell.
"Ring My Bell" on the other hand was a popular 70's era song by Anita Ward back when disco dominated the popular music outlets.
I'll let you figure out what the lyrics meant, to my 14 year old ears they didn't mean anything. But I'll tell you what did mean something to me. My junior high school buddy and I decided we'd take the graffiti covered subway to the gritty NYC district known as 42nd street which in those days looked like this.
We wandered around looking to get into a live "peep show". We had no idea what those were but at our age we were definitely interested in finding out. In front of each one of these was something of a carnival barker / bouncer type fellow and we had to muster up our game face to walk past him. We approached, I walked through but heard the bouncer block my buddy. At 14, blond, and with baby peach fuzz on his lip, he couldn't pull it off. But I had enough 70s pornstache to dissuade even adjacent cops in stop and go rush hour traffic not to ask for my drivers license. That however is a story for another time.
Leaving my hapless fellow intrepid explorer behind, I wandered around looking at all the different booths like a gambler in Vegas. I walked into one and popped in my 25 cents which was legit arcade game money back then, and a board lifted up to reveal a nude woman dancing to "Ring My Bell". She came over to my window and shook her money maker and then the board dropped down. The whole event lasted maybe 30 seconds. I remember there were two or three ladies in there. I remember her wearing jewelry around her hips. I remember her form jiggling in my window for about 10 seconds. And I remember on the subway ride back home I was so physically ill from a bad hotdog I ate earlier in the day, I literally thought about standing between the subway cars and hurling onto the tracks below.
Only out of a sense of civic responsibility that doing so on the elevated tracks would have dire consequences for the unsuspecting below was I able to contain my green faced composure. It wasn't the only time I've suppressed the overwhelming desire to hurl out of respect for others.
In any case, for years afterwards I got an awful, queasy revulsion whenever I heard the song "Ring My Bell". And for hot dogs. But strangely enough, not for the female form. You can suppress a man's desire for food. You can suppress a man's love of music. But some things cannot be suppressed. Not in this Latino at any rate.
Ring Ma Bell is available for purchase as a traditional static shot or in its multi-media active digital tablet form (video below), a delightful ever changing display that is sure to please and be the provoker of lively conversation.
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