4 — Wednesday, March 4, 1992 ~ North Shore News Fallout shelter: MY WIFE azd I were out on an antique-hunting expedi- tion when I steered: her over to a place that was not, strict- ly speaking, an antique shop. More like a junk shop, but very Period Junk, stuff from the ’50s and °60s mixed together with con- temporary cheap, sleazy stuff, what you might delicately describe as being of an, er, ‘‘manly’’ nature. The shop had big neon beer commercial signs in the window. Inside there were old metal Coca-Cola signboards, pre-video shooting galleries, framed whisky commercials showing the bodies of birds, animals and fish stacked up beside expensive guns, a stuff- ed moosehead, jukeboxes, old lacrosse sticks, Elvis parapherna- lia, clocks with psychedelic lights, glitzy bar equipment, Andy Warhol-genre stuff. A few steps deeper into the shop and the style of the material plummeted to soft porn depths: items like those sexist beer ads saying ENJOY A TALL RED ONE, and, sure enough, several of those life-sized cardboard cut-out stand-ups of the Swedish Bikini Team having finished building a giant long-necked beer Bob Hunter on STRICTLY PERSONAL I have to actually gulp. A strange tickle afflicts my soul, if | may put it that way. Of course, my mother would have called them shameless floozies, and, quite frankly, ! can’t think of a better description. They aid and abet the process 464 Think about it! Here we are, in the Post-Armageddon Era, settling down to live happily ever after. 99 bottle, without, thank God, hav- ing gotten a single fleck of sand on their flesh, and believe me, you’d know if they had, if you get my meaning. Beirig at heart a mature and . Progressive liberated modern dude, I naturally have trouble “- with the Swedish Bikini Teain, apart from the trouble I have breathing while looking at them. a of objectifying women. They make it easier, presumably, for males to think of females as being sexual playmates first, and phi- losopher or psycho-mathematician second — if, indeed, at all! I struggle, of course, to tear my eyes away from the cerdboard cut-outs of the Swedish Bikini Team, but it isn’t as easy as you rationalists might assume. ROBERT GENN Recent Paintings Exhibition and Sale - Thursday March 5, 1992 7:00-9:30 p.m. The Exhibition continues until March 21 Artist ir; Attendance _HUMBERSTON EDWARDS i360 Marine Drive, West Vancouver fee ans 922-7934 The second team-member on the left actually seems to have a sparkle of intelligence in her eyes, now that I am (however briefly) examining her features...Help, I’m starting to think of them as indi- vidual human beings, not as a, gasp, unit! Anyway, it’s not looking too promising in terms of anything ! can take home and stick up on the wall in the family room, or, as I secretly prefer to think of it, the pool room and bar. There are some vaguely- interesting heavy metal British street signs and a Sgt. Pepper-Era Beatles poster, but | mean not even [ would put up a Beatles poster nowadays. Ah, yes. A flash of nostalgia. Remember that weird little time zone when the Beatles were in full flight and more of us than would be willing to admit it now were actually wearing flared Paisley jeans with peace symbol medallions around our necks and, ohmigod, headbands! it is 10 blush furiously, thinking back to those days. At the back of the shop, my wife spots something and gestures me over. I squint. And there it is — a geunine meta! FALLOUT SHELTER sign, with the fine print at the bottom warning that this CANNOT BE DISPLAYED OR USED WITHOUT PERMIS- SION OF THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE. According toa tag, it comes from a building in St. Louis. I marvel at this find. I mean, this is the equivalent of a brick from the Berlin Wall. There aren't any nuclear missiles aimed at American or Canadian cities any longer, al- though one cannot help wonder where they ARE pointed. Another issue, another time... We pounce on the FALLOUT SHELTER sign. All the way home I babble on about how wonderful it is that we survived the Cold War. Think about it! Here we are, in the Post-Armageddon Era, set- ding down to live happily ever after. You don’t have to go back in time very far before having a FALLOUT SHELTER sign in your basement would have been bleak humor, indeed. You could get away with it, but not without the risk of being viewed as a little on the sick side. Today? Hey, we made it! That’s about as much as I think anybody can say at this stage. We find ourselves living in such a rad- ically-altered geopolitical world that no one quite knows what to make of it, let alone precisely what to do. The FALLOUT SHELTER is quickly nailed up on the wall overlooking the pool table in the basement. My wife and I find ourselves staring at it, slightly mesmerized. “i'm not sure if this is funny,’’ she remarks, after a while. I'm not sure either. We seem to have set up a comfortable bunker down here in the basement. Nothing extravagant. Besides the table, there’s the television, the VCR, the Nintendo equipment, the shelves filled with tapes. Oh, and the bar. It’s com- fortable. It is also underground. We set things up thinking about using the downstairs in winter and spending the summers out in the backyard. Now it looks like we just might be spending more time down here than we thought, what with having to avoid the midday summer sun. I'd bought the damn sign as a way of celebrating the end of life under the constant threat of being nuked. But once it was up on the wall in the basement, it quickly took on an entirely new meaning. If — and, alas, it is no longer a matter of if but when -- the amount of UV radiation sweeping down through the damaged ozone A new sign of the times Jayer begins to force us to cover up or take shelter, to literally save our skins, and we’re all downstairs at noon on a Sunday, playing pool instead of playing in the yard, that sign is not going to seem very funny at all. Into the fallout shelter, kids. Hurry. Save BIG On... 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