By Bob Gaydos

A blast from the past.

I got a surprise birthday present  three weeks ago from my cousin, Tom Nalesnik. It was a surprise because a) It wasn’t my birthday b) I didn’t think Tom knew my birthday was coming up c) The gift itself was a memory of an ever-more distant past d) How he came by it was perhaps more surprising than the gift itself.

Yes, that’s me dancing in the Go Go cage with Crickett in the photo accompanying this column. The photo  is the gift. It’s a framed copy of a story I wrote about 60 years ago for The Sun-Bulletin in Binghamton, N.Y. There’s no date on the article, but I started working in Binghamton in 1965 and I clearly wasn’t covering the political beat yet when I wrote this. Disco was just coming to the Triple Cities area.

I also was quite svelte and better dressed than I am today.

Wow.

Tom said he got the article from my mom, who never said a word to me about my newspaper career. Never. Not even when I got fired. But that’s a story for another birthday.

This one is about time flying. Some call it progress. We’ve gone from Disco to TikTok in a virtual heartbeat. Typewriters, like the one I used to write about Crickett and her partner, Gena, are now museum exhibits. Soon, artificial intelligence will be plagiarizing this article to write a history of dancing to recorded music in bars and of pieces of folded paper called newspapers.

But not yet.

Crickett and me.

I don’t know if Crickett (Karen Levine) ever realized her dreams of publishing a big music hit or breeding racehorses. Or if her partner, Gena Maloney, ever did anything with her love of photography. (See, I did  interview the ladies.)

As far as I can remember, the bright idea to put the skinny reporter in the cage with the go-go dancers came from the photographer, Renee Myrae, an institution in New York newspaper photography. Make for a better photo, she said. That’s why there’s an annual award named after her for the best photography in the state. At least there used to be, when there were newspapers.

Anyway, I “danced” for about 10 minutes, there was applause and, as I noted, no one offered to buy me a drink.

The article wound up in The Sun-Bulletin, somehow made its way to my uncommunicative mom in Bayonne, N.J., who shared it with my cousin, Tom, in Linden, so he could tell me 60 years later that I inspired him to pursue a career in journalism and communication.

Some things are worth waiting for.

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(Tom Nalesnik’s video commentary, “Whims of Resistance,” can be seen on substack.com, Instagram and Facebook.)