Occaisionally, if our regular Saturday afternoon matinee movie looked like a stinker, we'd head on over to the John Innis Community Centre's kiddies dance. This was the late 50's when Elvis and everything else about rock and roll was hot.

Even back then at the tender age of 8 or 9, we all knew that we had to look as cool as possible, and the coolest looking guy back then was Elvis. Although none of us had clothes like The King, we did have hair that we could try to mould in his likeness.

On the way over to the dance, we got the bright idea to slip into the A&P store on Parliament Street and grease up on Brylcreem. We grabbed a super-duper extra-large tube of the greasy kid's stuff and squeezed out a handful each. Then we slapped it on our heads and rubbed it in as much as possible, wiping the what remained on our hands onto our jeans. We hid the empty tube behind some pork n' bean cans and left the store.

We decided to grab a Coke at our favorite variety store across the street. As we went in the shopkeeper laughed and yelled out at us.

"Hey, what you guys got on your heads, cowshit?"

We ignored him and payed for our purchases, after all what the hell did he know, we knew we looked very cool. As everybody knows, you can't explain to a kid how ridiculous they look because they always know different.

It was a red hot summer day and we now had a ten minute walk to get to our destination. About five minutes into our walk our pompadours began to melt in the blazing sun. The wonderful works of art that we had sculpted with our unbreakable nylon combs now sat flatly on our heads like soggy laundry.

By now, the Brylcreem was running down the back of our necks and into our eyes and ears, and believe me, this stuff wasn't too much fun when it got into the eyeballs. We took our t-shirts off and tried to rub the this slimey mess off our heads, we rubbed and rubbed, but all we accomplished was to saturate the shirts to the point that they resembled greasy service station rags. The slimy mess just kept right on flowing and flowing.

By the time we reached the dance we looked like drowned sewer rats. We immediately headed into the washroom where we soaped up our heads and rinsed. Finally, after using up stacks of paper towels, our hair was free of the slimy mess. Our shirts still looked as though they hadn't been washed for a month, but nobody seemed to notice.

All was not a total loss though, Kenny won a 45 RPM record for the best Elvis impersonation, and I won a hot dog and a Coke in a spot dance.