Thing of Beauty by Stephen Fried Page A

you bring any money with you?”
    “Yeah, yeah, yeah, c’mon, how about twenty-five dollars? I gotta get stuff.”
    No matter how tough he got with her—it varied with how busy he was—the end of the time-honored family ritual was always the same. He always gave Gia money, just like he always put his hand up to check when Gia would joke,“Dad, the toupee’s crooked,” when he was on his way out the door for a date. But before they left, the girls had to eat. “Okay, let me make you a hoagie,” he would begin. And on the subject of feeding, he was always firm. If it was nice out, they went up to the apartment Gia’s father was redoing upstairs and ate at the open window, watching people go by and occasionally dropping a pickle round on a passerby’s head.
    With money in hand, the two girls would set out to do Center City. Downtown Philadelphia was not very large—only twenty blocks by twenty-five blocks. But the area was in the midst of a rebirth, and any one of the city’s better shopping streets could end up taking a whole afternoon.
    The city was blossoming, in spite of the neomilitary reign of police-chief-turned-mayor Frank Rizzo. Like the rest of the country, Philadelphia was feeling the economic impact of the baby boom. Woodstock graduates were reclaiming the urban areas their parents had fled for suburbia and starting businesses that provided the products and services
they
wanted. And a few purely local phenomena were helping transform the dowdy town with its legendary inferiority complex about nearby New York into a place that might actually attract its
own
tourists.
    Federal funds were pouring into the city: not just the dwindling urban renewal money sent to save all municipalities, but additional dollars earmarked to spruce up Philadelphia for the upcoming bicentennial celebration. Graduates of the pioneering Restaurant School were turning the previously tasteless town into a culinary capital. The local music scene, moribund since Dick Clark had moved
American Bandstand
west in the sixties after a payola scandal, was soaring again. Even the city’s newest sports franchise, the Philadelphia Flyers hockey team, was showing great promise. The city was beginning to look exciting, sound exciting, even taste exciting.
    Their platform shoes clomping on the historic red brick sidewalks and cobblestone streets, Gia and Karen would set off to shop. First they walked down Chestnut, in and out of the new boutiques like The Hen’s Den and The Horse You Rode In On, as well as Dan’s Shoes, which sold the most outrageous footwear in Philadelphia. After a while they gotto know some of the store owners—or at least be recognized by them—just as they did in the record and poster shops. Both the newer, independent record stores—which made as much money selling bongs and rolling papers as music—and the more established Sam Goodys had to be shopped. It was hours of letting your fingers do the walking through the bins of alphabetically sorted rock albums: searching for obscure import versions of Bowie’s earlier releases and for records by the other stars of what was now a genre known as glitter-rock.
    A well-informed Bowie kid needed a lot of information, and it wasn’t available in mainstream newspapers, magazines or TV news reports. To these media, rock music was still basically for children. So the musical minutiae had to be gleaned from the pages of “alternative” publications. There were rock tabloids like
Rolling Stone, Crawdaddy
and the local
Drummer
, and magazines like
Creem
and
Circus
, which at least
attempted
to employ standard journalistic techniques in covering pop culture. And there were glossy magazines like
Hit Parade
, which, like most fanzines, were mostly pictures to be cut out and affixed to bedroom walls and notebooks. While schoolbooks held little interest for her, Gia pored over these publications for details.
    Appreciating Bowie meant more than memorizing lyrics, liner notes and