Here’s another example of the types of stories I like to write: There’s nothing particularly newsworthy about all this, but it’s a look into a vanishing way of life and the subjects are real charmers. I also have been criticized for loving quotes too much, but in a story like this, the quotes are the story: The love the Klines have for each other, their rural Virginia background, even their age can all be found in the way they speak. Originally published in the Potomac News in fall 1997.
Perched above Va. 28 in Manassas Park, Kline’s Freeze is surrounded by bright, newly built shopping centers and chain restaurants. But the modest restaurant looks much as it did 32 years ago, when the Kline family bought it.
The lines of customers who wait outside at all hours of the day prove that the Klines must be doing something right.
It doesn’t hurt that Paul and June Kline love what they do.
“He loves to eat ice cream!” June said, preparing lunch orders on a recent Friday. “He grew up on a dairy, eating ice cream every Sunday, cranking it up. He can eat it every day of the year, all year ’round and never get tired of it.”
When Paul, who delivered milk for a local dairy, came home and announced the owner of the Tastee Freeze was looking to sell, June was all for it.
“Oh, that was simple,” she said. “He’d been looking at dairy farms. And I said, ‘honey, this is something we can handle.'”
Like all small businesses, this one had a few growing pains.
“It wasn’t a profit to begin with,” Paul, 75, said. The previous owner “only had the two ice cream machines. But you’re not going to sell that much ice cream when there’s snow on the ground.”
So the Klines added food griddles to the restaurant in January 1967.
“In the spring, when we had the food machines and the warmer weather. That’s when we started making a profit,” Paul said.
“Our foot-long hot dog has been our best food seller for years now,” June said, lifting the lid on the hot dog grill. “We make the homemade chili to put on it. We make everything to order. We don’t precook anything.”
There have been other changes, of course, in the years since the couple bought the restaurant. Cones that cost 10 cents, 20 cents and 30 cents when Kline’s opened now cost $1.10, $1.50 and $2.10.
“That just shows you how inflation is now,” Paul said, looking at a menu taped to the wall. “Now we can dip them in chocolate, you know? Man, we sell a mess of those. It’s just crazy.”
The Klines’ success, to hear them tell it, was almost guaranteed.
“This was the only thing between here and Centreville Road,” June, 68, said. “So the fire department would have turkey shoots and all right out back. They’d even have parades right down 28. You wouldn’t imagine that today.”
The fast-food chains that are now within walking distance haven’t hurt business one bit, Paul said.
“They’ll get their drinks somewhere else and come in here for their food and their ice cream. So in some ways, it’s helped,” he said.
Paul Kline walked into the kitchen area of the restaurant, with employees dodging him as they carried hot dogs, drinks and ice cream around him.
“I’d like to tell you exactly why. I’ve got the [soft] serve ice cream right here. We’ve got all the flavored toppings,” he gestured. “You just can’t get it anywhere else. There used to be Tastee Freezes and Dairy Queens everywhere. You’d think we’d have competition, but we don’t.”
The location has always been a good one.
“This has been a residential area for a long time now,” June said. “Now we get customers from Fairfax County.”
“We get customers from all over,” Paul said. “Woodbridge, Dumfries.”
“Right,” his wife continued. “Our problem is that we shut down at night while the customers are still coming.”
Kline’s Freeze is supposed to shut its doors at 8 p.m., but it rarely works that way on weekends.
“We’ll stay open later than that,” Paul said. “As long as they’ll keep coming in, we’ll stay open.”
He looked over his shoulder at the lunch crowd lining up at the windows.
“Yeah, they’re coming in nice.”
Kline’s Freeze was so successful, the Klines opened a second restaurant, a drive-in on Linton Hall Road, near the Manassas airport.
“We built in ’69,” Paul said.
“It was November,” his wife added.
He turned to her slightly.
“Do you know the exact date?”
“Of course. Veterans Day, November 11, 1969. Now, when we built it, we didn’t know that IBM was going to move in,” she said. “We moved in right at the same time, and so we made a profit right from day one.”
At the time, some people didn’t think it was such a wise decision.
“Oh, we lived just up the road. It was farmland there all around there,” Paul said. “And I’ll tell you something else. … Some businessmen in Manassas found out that I was going to build two-three miles out of Manassas, and they said ‘shucks, man, you’ll starve! No one will want to come out that far!’ And I said, ‘fine, we’ll starve.’
“But that took off like a rocket. We get a lot of traffic out there.”
Although the drive-in — now run by one of the couple’s sons — emphasizes hot food, both restaurants still are grounded in one thing: ice cream.
Paul walked over to the bank of ice cream machines.
“This here is strawberry. We’ve got strawberry, chocolate and vanilla.”
He rested his hands on the ice cream taps. “You pull here and you get chocolate, here you get vanilla and chocolate swirled together. And here you get strawberry and vanilla swirled together. People like that.”
They also like his milkshakes. They’re something of a novelty nowadays, as they’re made with real milk. And other real ingredients.
“You see that there?” He pointed, lifting up the lids on a series of tins. “That’s what makes this good. That’s frozen strawberries. And this here’s strawberry ice cream.” He handed over the milkshake, smiling like a proud father. “It’s got it, hasn’t it? Yes, sir. You add the strawberries to it, and that tells the story. … I got all these flavors here: strawberry, butterscotch, cherry, that’s pineapple, chocolate. And we can do malts.”
The Klines have been running their business since Lyndon Baines Johnson was president, and are working harder most days than many people 10 years younger do. But Paul is in no hurry to retire.
“I guess I will eventually,” he said. “I’m 75. But I won’t put no time on it. I don’t know when it’ll be.”
Neither Kline has any regrets about having spent more than 30 years selling ice cream to the public.
“Was I ever sorry?” June asked, slipping hot dogs into buns. “No, no!”
“Never for a minute have I been sorry,” Paul said.
“The business has been good to us,” June said, “All our kids have been able to work with us.”
The members of the expansive Kline family tree — including seven children and 18 grandchildren — aren’t the only employees of Kline’s Freeze, although it sometimes seems that way.
“They happen to all be my kin today,” Paul said. “That’s my daughter Lorraine in there. And this here’s her daughter, and she …”
“She’s a great niece,” June interjected.
“Is that how it works? Well, they’re all great,” Paul laughed. He glanced over at the lines forming across the counter. “Now, you can see out here the traffic we get. It’s only noon here.
“We get by,” he said, with quiet understatement. “Sometimes we have six people in here, with a person on the grill,” Paul said, watching his family bustling around the business that bears his name, serving the customers who line up, come rain, or come shine for his food. ‘And we put ’em out. We put ’em out.”
It began with a sense of vague unease.
It seems hard to believe I graduated high school 10 years ago. Although I no longer feel close to those days, emotionally or mentally, neither do I feel like someone old enough to be going to his 10th year reunion, as I did on August 16.
Driving to the country club it was to be held at a country club (pay attention to that, as it’s significant), I felt … not trepidation, but a certain low-level annoyance. I’d paid $45 for the privilege of seeing these people again, and I wasn’t sure why.
It wasn’t that my two years at South Lakes High School in Reston, Virginia were unpleasant — I only spent two years there because my family moved quite a bit while I was growing up — but they made little impression on me. I’m a great believer in the idea that there are certain key moments in a person’s life that transform it, and mold the person irrevocably. I can think of perhaps four such key events in my life off the top of my head — traveling, joining Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity, the time spent with my college-era girlfriend, working as a television reporter in college — but attending South Lakes is not one of them.
When I graduated back in 1987, Fairfax County, Va. was the second-richest public school district in America, and now that Orange County, Ca. has gone belly-up, it may be number one. Within the school district, South Lakes is probably the second wealthiest school, full of the children of lawyers, politicos, defense contractors and all the others that make the nation’s capital tick. There was a certain air of self-declared aristocracy amongst my classmates, a certain American classism existing independent of Ivy League schools or “old money.” Like other such groups, they felt a sense of entitlement as we graduated, as though the world was destined to give to us what we so clearly deserved.
Although I was friends with a number of such “A-list” people in high school, I was never really one of them. I had numerous friends — finding the popularity my senior year of high school that had previously escaped me — but they were scattered across grades and cliques, “cool” people, brains, artsy types and partiers.
As I pulled into the country club parking lot, Jimmy Buffett blasting from the stereo but unable to take the edge off my mood, I noticed with a sigh the convertible BMWs, Acuras and Volvos in the parking lot. My hard-working Hyundai was the only car of its brand in the lot.
The crowd was classically South Lakes, or at least the image the students had of themselves: Nearly all white, well-educated, and upper middle class sophisticated. It was essentially a really nice fraternity or sorority mixer, only without the music or the likelihood of anyone having sex with someone they didn’t come with.
I was there, hoping it’d be more fun than I feared, wanting to see about a half-dozen different people. I can only remember the names of three of my teachers. One I don’t wish to ever see again, or only to back over her with my car if I do, and the other two didn’t show. This was to set the tone for the evening.
About 568 people were in my graduating class (the figure has become hazy over the course of a decade) and 168 showed up. Alas, they were mostly the “A-List” people, and not my more interesting classmates. The classmates who showed, giving air kisses and squeezing biceps, actually kissing cheeks when they were really excited, were mostly pressed from a single mold, wearing the same few outfits — nearly all the women wore demure black cocktail dresses, except for one classmate seemingly showing off her boob job — with their hair neatly coifed the same way and telling the same stories over and over again.
Flipping through a list of classmates, as I sipped my single complimentary soda (I was not going to spend $2.75 for another), I saw that my senior prom date now lived in Las Vegas, where she’s presumably pursuing her singing career. Another high school friend of mine had moved to Phoenix. Neither were in attendance that evening.
The person I would have loved to spent the evening catching up with, telling her about all I’d done since last we talked, was absolutely not coming, as Aislinn has been dead for six years, a loss that still stings.
So I mingled, nodding and saying “hey, how ya doin’ to a succession of classmates who were, in most respects, the same as they always were. True, the women were typically a little heavier, and for all the cracks my family makes about my hairline, most of the men had lost far more of their hair than I have mine.
I ate with a friend whom I see periodically around the DC area, and ran into a few other people I was glad to see. But one encounter in particular sums up the whole of the experience, and what South Lakes means to me today.
[Old junk snipped. It’s been 10 years since I wrote this and 20 years since high school. No point in leaving this out there where it’ll cause unintended and thoughtless pain.]
I left feeling calm, untouched by anything I had seen or done that evening.
I got a diploma from South Lakes High School 10 years ago, but when I walked out its doors into the hot Washington summer, I left it behind. It recedes more and more in my rear-view mirror with each passing day. It’s where I came from, but it bears no impact on where I’m going.
This is one of three Potomac News reviews that won me a first place Virginia Press Association award in the Critical Writing category for medium-size newspapers in January 1998.
In its day, “Hair” was the musical that caused trouble. It insulted hallowed institutions, celebrated rebellion, featured nude actors — briefly — and rocked and rolled on Broadway.
Twenty-nine years later, “Hair” has returned to Washington, D.C., in a new production at the Studio Theatre.
The production is full of energy, sex-appeal and passion. But times have passed it by, and the anti-Vietnam, pro-hippie musical feels a little hollow in the 1990s.
For those of us who missed it the first time around — or weren’t even born — the legendary musical is about a group of drop-outs and protesters living on the streets, or in communal “pads.” But the spectre of Vietnam hovers over them, with one character finally getting drafted for the war.
The Studio production certainly captures the spirit of the times. The first act, the “love” portion of this “tribal love musical,” is enough to steam up anyone’s glasses. The cast is sexy, to put it mildly, and their gyrations and flirtations crank the heat up in the Studio Theatre’s Secondstage.
The musical, unfortunately, is structured in such a way that the first act, while fun, doesn’t have much drama to it. That’s all saved for the second act, where Claude (the excellent Jason Gilbert) wrestles with what to do about being drafted. His friends urge him to burn his draft card, and while he’s scared of death — hauntingly portrayed in two battle scenes — he also feels an uncool pull of patriotism.
Being a hippie for Claude is a lifestyle choice, not a political one, and although he’s the not the only one of his “tribe” of hippie drop-outs and protesters who feels that way, he’s the only one willing to even come close to admitting it.
More than two decades after the fall of Saigon, Gilbert and the cast of “Hair” make the idea of death in Southeast Asia, for a cause that was murky at best, terrifying.
The cast is uniformly excellent, with standout acting performances by Gilbert as Claude, Nell Mooney as the pregnant Jeanie, Chris Noll who plays Woof as though the character were on loan from “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” and Larry Baldine as the self-centered Berger. The cast are no slouches in the musical department, either, with Rebecca Davis, Tracie Nicole Thoms and Kathleen Maguire blowing the roof off the theater with their vocal chops.
Not content with just the story, songs and costuming, even the Studio production’s staging harkens back to the 1960s. Audience members shift rooms with the players several times, and the cast is very “hands-on” with the audience. (In 19 months of reviewing plays for the Potomac News, “Hair” on Sunday was the first time an actress has kissed me during a performance.) The approach prompted a few nervous giggles from audience members at first, especially those sitting on the floor with cast members, but ultimately it works.
Seeing “Hair” may be a revelation for those too young to know it except from its soundtrack. Who knew that “Let The Sun Shine In” is actually a haunting, even eerie sorrowful song? (Well, my parents did, but who listens to their parents talk about the 1960s?)
This isn’t to say the Studio production is total flashback to the 1960s: Most of the men’s hair styles are hardly the flowing locks celebrated in the title song, and K’dara Korin (who plays Hud) sports a wildly anachronistic nipple ring. And there’s at least one bad, bad wig worn by an ensemble member.
And although the performance itself works as a whole, the production comes off as little more than a time capsule, with the same relevancy as the animatronic robots in the Hall of Presidents in Disney World. The sting of “Hair” is lessened, to put it mildly, when we have a president who has smoked marijuana and protested the Vietnam War.
The musical would been more of a rebellion during the Reagan-Bush years — when ’60s nostalgia was still hip, incidentally — or, if Studio had really wanted to ruffle some feathers, during the Persian Gulf War.
For all the love, lust, passion and pain in this production, its timing means it comes off feeling a little too … safe.
Which is a total bummer, man.
Few comic books deal with such heavy and complex issues as race relations. Even fewer try to tackle the issue in the pages of a superhero comic. But Christopher Priest has wrestled with the subject more than once and “Quantum and Woody,” from Acclaim Comics, is a critical hit, blending action and comedy in the “buddy movie” tradition. But the book’s fun has been moderated by a recurrent thread dealing with remembered racism.
One of only a handful of black comic book professionals working for mainstream companies, Priest, 36, saw his first comic book at age 7, an issue of “Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen,” featuring the red-headed cub reporter decked out in pirate garb. Although he now laughs at the goofy nature of the book, it was enough to get the Queens, New York, native hooked on comic books.
He got his start in comics as a student at the New York School of Media Arts vocational high school, when he landed an internship at Marvel Comics. He mostly spent his time making photocopies, but he was in the door, and that was all that mattered.
“I never stopped working there. After the internship I did freelance copyediting.” That lead to a job as an assistant editor at “Crazy,” Marvel’s “Mad” knock-off.
An idea he pitched to Marvel’s then-Editor-In-Chief Jim Shooter turned into the 1984 “Falcon” miniseries, his first break into the world of superheroes, five years after he graduated high school.
“After that I did a lot of nothin’, a lot of fill-in work,” he said, during a July visit to Comics and Cards in Woodbridge, Va. “And one day Shooter took me down the hall and forced Denny O’Niell to hire me to write ‘Power Man and Iron Fist.'”
The legendary comic book writer and editor – who helped mold the modern vision of Batman, and introduced R’as Al Ghul – was assigned to teach Priest the craft of comic book writing.
Although Priest now pooh-poohs the early issues of his run, which began with issue #111 and extended through the series’ conclusion at #125, they were a hit with the fans, and marked the first time he worked with “Quantum and Woody” penciller Mark “Doc” Bright. And it’s no coincidence that when Acclaim Editor-In-Chief Fabian Nicieza came to Priest, he wanted a series like “Power Man and Iron Fist,” with its love/hate racially mixed buddy movie feel.
“Power Man and Iron Fist” featured a black ex-con hero of the streets and a rich white hero raised by Himalayan monks, whose fractious friendship made the two “heroes for hire” a staple of Marvel’s comics in the 1970s and ’80s.
Alas, things didn’t work out for the Priest and Bright “Power Man and Iron Fist.”
“We were selling about 110,000 copies when they canceled it,” in favor of Marvel’s most notorious boo-boo, the “New Universe.”
From there, Priest went on to write “Conan the Barbarian” and “Conan the King.” Even in ancient Hyperboria, American race relations reared its head.
He was once asked to change the depiction of the Pygmies of Pictland, who were short, spear-carrying and had bones in their noses, much as Pygmies on Earth once did, “because we don’t want to offend black people, because you know how they are. And I just looked at the phone and said ‘uh, yeah, I think I do.'”
He delivered the revised script to Marvel Comics in person.
He continued to freelance for Marvel, writing both “Conan” books, as well as “Green Lantern,” “The Unknown Soldier” and some “Batman” issues for DC Comics. Then he took several years off from the industry, selling screenplays that were never produced and driving a commuter bus in New Jersey.
“As long as I’ve got that CDL [Commercial Driver’s License], I can pay the rent,” he grinned.
“I was driving the bus and I got offered this editorship at DC. And I couldn’t stop laughing, because at Marvel, DC was always this joke.”
But DC, fresh from the shakeup it’d given its line in the “Crisis on Infinite Earths” 12 issue limited series, had changed since Priest’s days at Marvel. Many of Priest’s old colleagues, including Mike Carlin and Denny O’Niell were there now, and he came aboard, working for DC’s development group. The group worked on expanding the company’s line to appeal to adults and younger children.
Soon after, Priest changed his name from Jim Owsley (for reasons he will not discuss), and “The Ray” miniseries lead to an ongoing one. He also wrote for “Justice League Task Force,” the “Total Justice” miniseries and the “JLX Unleashed” Amalgam special.
“At some point during all this I got a call from Fabian, because he wanted me to do a buddy book for Acclaim. He wanted it to be ethnically diverse, edgy.”
The series he got, of course, was “Quantum and Woody.”
A series that hearkened back to the “Power Man and Iron Fist” days meant an opportunity to work with Bright again.
“I was pretty adamant about working together with Bright,” Priest said. “We’re good friends. The dynamic of ‘Quantum and Woody’ is based on us.”
The series has been a critical hit, with everyone from Wizard magazine to fellow comic creators declaring it a top book.
“It’s tremendously gratifying, but it has not turned into sales yet,” he said. “But the book has a buzz to it, and that usually translates into sales.”
Although Priest has tweaked his editor in the pages of “Quantum and Woody” for Nicieza’s initial nervousness over the word “nigger” and a supporting character’s nickname being the same as DC Comic’s Dark Knight’s, “for the most part, they just got the hell out of my way. If anything, Fabian wants it more edgy.”
Race isn’t an issue normally discussed in comics, partly due to the almost uniformly white superheroes in the Marvel, DC and Image comics, but partly due to a nervousness about dealing with taboo concepts, like racist characters and the differences that remain between blacks and whites in America.
“The thing about it, it’s also a double-standard. As an African-American, I can talk about race all day. But as a white guy, you’d get hit over the head and called racist,” he said. That’s especially true for use of the word Priest has now replaced with “noogie.” “If it’s based on ‘White Men Can’t Jump,'” the Wesley Snipes/Woody Harrelson movie that featured two basketball hustlers taking advantage of stereotypes about racially based athletic ability, “It’s all about race.”
Although Priest jokes about racism, both in “Quantum and Woody” and in person, he goes after the subject quite strongly in the first issues of the series, with Quantum mis-remembering a childhood incident in an elementary school bathroom, after his best friend Woody has moved away without warning, without leaving word.
Quantum, then simply Eric, remembers a classmate telling him Woody moved away without saying goodbye “because you’re a nigger.”
The scene is based on an incident from the life of Priest, who has a picture of Quantum on his business card.
“The first time I heard the word ‘nigger,’ I paid a kid a quarter to tell me what it meant” in the bathroom of Priest’s mostly white elementary school for gifted students. “He said ‘it means you.'”
That scene, one of the most painful of a series of emotionally charged scenes in the first story arc of “Quantum and Woody” is the “foundation” of Quantum’s character, Priest said.
The foundation of Woody’s character will be revealed in issue nine, where the time between him leaving Eric’s school and meeting him again as an adult will be explored. Among the incidents in Woody’s past are his family’s careening into poverty, his mother becoming a drug dealer and a big surprise Priest isn’t ready to reveal.
“I think we all have at least one big defining moment in our lives” where everything changes.
The series was also notable in its first arc for its disjointed structure, with scenes told out of chronological order, similar to the film “Pulp Fiction.”
“I was on the road” and overworked, Priest said. “I would literally just sit down and write whatever came into my head.” At the time, an editor at DC was giving him trouble over sending them scripts with scenes out of order, so out of sheer orneriness, Priest submitted his “Quantum and Woody” scripts that way. To his surprise, fans liked it, and he’ll be experimenting with the style more in coming issues.
The book was also funny, certainly as compared to some of Acclaim’s darker books, like “Shadowman” and “Bloodshot.” That, too, wasn’t intentional.
“It didn’t start out as a comedic book, it started out as ‘Power Man and Iron Fist,’ but I was mad about having to do it at the last minute” due to all his other commitments, so Priest just threw in all the sarcasm and scorn he was feeling. “Now, if I’d have to position it, I’d say it’s like ‘M*A*S*H.’ It goes back and forth from comedy to tragedy seamlessly.”
The most notorious surprise the series has taken, though, at least from the standpoint of Priest and Bright, is the runaway appeal of a character meant to be a throwaway: a goat Woody threatens the life of to get the cooperation of a group of monks in issue three.
“And Fabian [Nicieza] just loved it,” commissioning a cover for the issue proclaiming “introducing the Goat!” “I’m writing three issues later, and Fabian calls me up ans said ‘you gotta put the goat it, they love him.’ And I said ‘what goat?'”
Thus the goat makes several walk-on appearances in the comic, where he has been drawn in as an afterthought by Bright, whose extreme distaste for the goat was explained on the letters page to issue six.
“Mark [Bright] hates the goat. I don’t hate the goat. I love whatever pays my rent. I am a goat whore. Fabian wants me to do a goat one-shot, but I only want to do it if it’s a drama,” Priest said, eyes twinkling. He’s making the best of it, though: The goat will be gaining teleportation powers around issue 12, after eating a “fold map” belonging to the immortal Eternal Warriors.
“The neat thing about making the goat a teleportation goat is the indignity it puts Eric through. He needs to get to Paris now and he has to go in the presence of a goat.”
The goat will also be the plot device behind the major story arc for the second year of “Quantum and Woody.” Due to problems piloting the goat – there’s a phrase rarely used – the heroes end up wandering throughout time and space in the Acclaim Comics universe, including a visit to “Turok”‘s Lost Land.
Priest is philosophical about the twists his series has seen its first six months of life.
“If you had to calculate it, you couldn’t predict the fans were going to love. The goat? There was no stupid goat in the proposal.”
The success “Quantum and Woody” has gained has been enough to spark discussions of a movie or television deal.
“Fabian’s actually negotiating movie rights now. Jim Henson Productions has approached Acclaim about a movie. I don’t know what’s going to happen,” he said. “I would hope they’d ask me to be a creative consultant, but there’s no guarantee.”
The “stupid goat” will appear on a “Quantum and Woody” T-shirt coming out in December, along with Eric and Woody.
There will also be a “Quantum and Woody” trade paperback coming out, costing between $6.95 and $8.95. It will collect the first four issues, and include “additional footage. We’re trying to do the ‘director’s cut,’ showing you the stuff from between the issues.”
Speaking of “zero,” in addition to the “Steel” movie (based on the DC Comic Priest writes, and starring Shaquille O’Niell) coming out this summer and the proposed “Quantum and Woody” movie – which Priest would love to see Harrelson and Snipes in – a third Priest-penned comic, “Xero,” may be made into a film as well.
Finally, be on the lookout for action figure versions of Quantum and Woody.
“We’re currently talking about it,” Priest said. If either potential movie or television deals get beyond the talking stage “you can expect to see toy stuff ad naseum, whether or not the deals go through.”
The goat “will probably be something you send four box tops in for, as it’s the one everyone will want.”
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