Getting down to the young roots of a little local culture in somebody’s front yard

I spent Sunday in my rocker watching football. It was the first Sunday this season I had given up to the game.

When I’m watching football on TV by myself, without the contagious cheering of friends, I feel guilty. I keep thinking of the constructive things I could be doing.

I usually keep the Sunday paper in my lap and try to read it between plays. But the paper tends to engage my mind, and the next thing I know I’ve missed a couple of plays and lost the rhythm of the game.

Sometimes afterward I feel empty, drained, as if I’d been comatose for three hours. Sometimes I can almost agree with those who despise football and say it has nothing to do with culture.

I felt especially deprived of culture last Sunday. The Rams were being drubbed in Philadelphia, dropping passes and fumbling the game away; and the Raiders were barely winning in the Coliseum (under the silly rules of the NFL, the game was blacked out on local TV).

Maybe they’re right, I was beginning to think, Southern California is a cultural wasteland.

I had lain down for a nap when the doorbell rang.

It was three small boys from down the street. They were dressed in T-shirts and jeans or shorts. Their faces were colored with chalk. They said they were putting on a show. They wanted my wife and me to come see it. It was 10 cents for the show and 5 cents for lemonade.

“It’s a great show,” one of them assured us.

Both of us were wearing our Children’s Museum sweat shirts. I was wearing dirty jeans. My wife was wearing shorts. We were hardly dressed to go calling.

The boys pleaded with us. They said they were trying to make some money and had already made $4.

I was reminded of that old movie in which Mickey Rooney says, “Hey, gang, let’s put on a show!” and they line up all the major talent on the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lot and put on a show in a borrowed barn and make a bundle.

We decided to go see the show. I told my wife, “It will probably be the only culture we’re exposed to today.”

The theater was the shallow front yard of a house about a furlong down the hill. The action centered on a short walk that led from the front porch to the sidewalk. A low cement-block wall stood on one side of the walk. Four or five adults were standing around or sitting on the stoop. I dropped two dimes in a box and they served us lemonade in paper cups, for which I paid a nickel each.

Besides the three boys, the cast included two little girls. One wore a short, yellow terry-cloth jump suit; the other wore a black lace blouse over a yellow T-shirt, black tights, a pink scarf, a shocking-pink bow at the back of her hair, white stockings, fuchsia socks and black tap shoes. Her face was heavily rouged. A preteen Madonna.

The girl in the yellow jump suit announced the show over a mike that was connected to a small blue plastic loudspeaker. “I hope you like it,” she said.

A round trampoline sat on the walk between the low wall and a pile of three blue gymnastic mats. The boys stood on the wall. One by one they leaped down on the trampoline, then sprang up and flipped over on their backs on the pile of mats.

I wouldn’t say any of them earned a 10, but their agility was impressive. Each time they flipped over I caught my breath, expecting a broken neck or at least a dislocation. They seemed to be flexible enough not to get hurt.

Then the girls jumped. Rosann, for that was the name of the girl in the jump suit, landed on her hands first, after bouncing off the trampoline, and flipped from a handstand over on her back. Well, Mary Lou Retton had to start someplace.

The boys were named Yanco, Augie and Jon. I wasn’t sure which was which. They began doing their flips again and one of them did a complete flip, landing on the mat on his feet.

Then the girls held out a stick with eight pastel balloons tied to it and the boys were supposed to flip over it. One of them kicked the balloons on his way over and the girls abandoned the exercise.

Then the girls lay down side by side between the trampoline and the mats and the boys flew over their prostrate bodies. It seemed to me there must be some philosophical significance in this stunt, but I hesitated to define it.

Finally the girls did a dance to taped rock music. The usual gyrations, finger snapping and toe tapping. Their energy was more impressive than their technique. But Ariana, the girl who reminded me of Madonna, had obviously been watching her heroine on TV.

Across the street I saw that three dogs and a cat were watching.

Suddenly the show seemed to wind down. Rosann picked up the mike again and said, “I hope you had a nice time. We’re going on a little while longer, and then. . . .”

“Bedtime,” her mother said.

“Yeah,” she said without enthusiasm.

“We had to quit applauding,” a mother told us. “They were getting too creative.”

It was a lot more creative than the TV movie we saw that night about a married woman whose sexual fantasies become real.