From the Introduction to The Second Official Manly Manual





I am forty years old. I reached that most wonderful age on September 1, 1994, in Liverpool, England, birthplace of the Beatles. There is no bigger Beatles' fan on the face of the earth than yours truly. I was accompanied by my lovely fiancee and soon-to-be-bride, Gina. I had a wonderful time. I saw Ringo Starr's childhood home. Touched the walls of the house where George Harrison was born. Looked up at John Lennon's bedroom window and had my picture taken in front of Paul McCartney's house where he lived until he was twenty-one. I visited Strawberry Field and I went to Penny Lane. I had my haircut in the place where there's a barber showing photographs of every head he's had the pleasure to know. Gina cashed our traveler's cheques at the bank where the banker never wears a mac. I walked the streets where the Beatles' walked and drank beers in the pubs where the Beatles drank. Not to mention spending a lot of time on Matthew's Street where the Cavern Club used to be. (There's a re-make of the Cavern Club there now but it's not quite the same and it's full of American's too young to remember "that night" on Ed Sullivan. Plus, they were in England and were drinking American beers for crying out loud!) However, it was a birthday I'll never forget. After Liverpool, Gina and I took a seven-day horse trip across the entire country of Wales. I was given a horse named Treacle. Treacle was a Welsh Cob. Welsh Cobs are like bulldozers on hooves only dumber. They can climb up anything and they are as solid as brick walls. Unfortunately, no one told me that Treacle was also scared to death of tractors. On our third day out in the Welsh countryside, Treacle got spooked by a tractor and took off through two hedges with me still on his back. The branches grabbed and clawed at me and tore a nice little cut across my chin before Treacle jumped back up on the road, flipping me over his back where I landed on the asphalt road on my head. (Thank god I was taught to always wear my hard hat!) Well, I got my bell rung to put it lightly. Everything turned pale white and seemed to glow. I saw blood on my hands and I asked Gina where she parked the car. Normally, this would have been a totally sane question except we were in Wales at the time and our car was parked 10,000 miles away in Austin, Texas. I got hauled off in an ambulance to get my noggin checked. It turned out all was fine except I had badly bruised my butt and both elbows, chipping the right one. I was OK but the rest of the trip was accomplished in limping pain. (I finished the damn horse trip, though!)

We then spent about three days in beautiful Yorkshire, England, with some friends and after that shot up to Scotland, namely the city of Edinburgh. If you've never been there, there is nothing quite like Scotland. And after spending a little bit of time there you will also find out that there is also nothing quite like English being spoken there, especially when lots of alcohol consumption is involved. I took Gina across the Firth of Forth from Edinburgh to a little village called Inverkeithing. This is the place where my ancestors woke up one morning about 100 years ago and took a good close look at their surroundings. They must have had a rare instance of sobriety because it caused them to up and come to America. Any at all, as far as I knew I was the first of my ancestors to come back since that time and now here I was with Gina. I walked with her through the village, past pubs and restaurants (one of them Chinese?!) and down a side street toward the water. We walked across a soccer field and then further on to the water's edge where I got down on one knee and formally proposed to her-asked her to marry me in the very village from whence my ancestors hailed! To say she was surprised would be an understatement. And when I pulled out the engagement ring and slipped it on her finger, well, if I had suddenly sprouted wings and horns and had flown off into the air she couldn't have been more surprised. Yes sir, old Romeo here really pulled that one off! We toured Edinburgh and Glasgow for the next three days and then headed off to London where we had to unexpectedly spend the night in an incredibly expensive hotel because of a train strike. Well, London town was a tad cool and raining buckets but we had a "smashing good time," as the Brits like to say before we had to fly back to the States the next day.

So, you ask, why am I telling you all of this? I have no earthly idea except that this is the beginning of my second book, The Official Manly Manual Volume II and I am going to be given to literary wanderings like this from time to time. I was never really happy with my first book. After trying in vain to find a publisher I finally decided to publish it myself and dashed the thing off on an old Macintosh SE-30 computer. I just downloaded scripts from the radio show, left it all in upper case, slapped a cover on it and started selling it around the country. I never could have expected it to do as well as it did. So, this time I decided to add a little more spice to the pot by giving insights as to where each episode of Mr. Manly came from along with any other comments I think might be appropriate. In other words, I'm trying to make this book a little more than "the bathroom reader" that so many people called my first book.

I couldn't go any further than this, though, if I didn't extend a special thanks to the all of the people without whom, etc., etc., ... Starting with the school teachers who were always underpaid but still decided to take a job where they taught morons like me how to read. The cops who never arrested me when they should have. The People of Taiwan and Japan who let me spend my formative years up into my mid-twenties with them. Living in their countries gave me a perspective on the world that would have been impossible to obtain any other way. Thank you, folks, I'll always love you. The ghosts of my youth couldn't ask for a happier place to spend all of eternity. Plus, I was really pleased to find out that the French are pretty much despised in your country just as much as they are in ours and in that we'll always have a common bond. Friends that I had who stuck with me, believed in me and let me tell them lousy jokes even when others didn't. The United States Navy for letting me have a really cool time in the submarine service. It was a great adventure for a young man! The radio station DJ's, the men and women across America who are my real heroes. They're the ones who make all this possible for me, and finally, my parents. In this day and age when two people who stay married to one another and raise a bunch of normal kids are considered nothing less than circus freaks, I would especially like to thank them. If I'm anywhere near as good as parenting as they were, my kids will be all right. They raised nine of us kids and hauled us all over the world. They taught us right from wrong and also taught us how to properly use our eating utensils which might not seem like much until you start taking a look around the next time you eat in a cafeteria. My mother is the woman all women should aspire to be. Mom, I really didn't mean it when we had all of those stupid arguments when I was a teenager and thanks for not slapping my face into the next county especially when I deserved it. You always told me that you thought I should be a writer. Well, for better or for worse, here it is, but I guess if America gets all bent out of shape about all of this then they really need to talk to you about it. And to Dad: My father's little words of wisdom should be required reading in college. He's gone now and I miss him dearly but if I can pull just half of the stunts in my life that he did--and get away with it--then I'll be doing OK. Dad said something to me once that I have never forgotten and, in fact, I've made it the Credo by which I live my life everyday. You can interpret it and apply it any way you want and may it serve you as well as it has me:

--The year was 1971. My father's business as an engineer had taken us to Taiwan where I was in high school. The Taiwanese were furiously upset with Richard Nixon for going to China. There were stories flying around about anti-American demonstrations taking place all over Taipei city where we lived. Dad was instructing me in what to do if I should happen to encounter one of these riots. Surely, I was saying to him, surely the local police would protect me. After all, I was an American! (My naivete in retrospect was so astounding.) Well, we argued back and forth until finally he said, "son," and I always knew I was about to hear some sort of witticism whenever he started off a sentence this way, "son, if you ever find yourself newly arrived in a foreign country and there's a bunch of people running around wearing blue arm bands and they're screaming slogans and waving machetes in the air, and everywhere you look on the ground are bunches of dead people with severed limbs with red arms bands on them, well, you better find yourself a blue arm band store!" Thanks, dad, to this day I still make sure to always know where the nearest blue arm band store is.


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Published By:
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Copyright(C) 1995 Mr. Manly (R) Productions, Inc.

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