Dear Friends,
This month's Hard Taco song, "Wilt Chamberlain" is fire. It is a certified bop. Behold, this phat track is a crackdown thunderclap bootyknocker hot ass thumper beat-clapping neck-slapper jam.
The opening salvo of this song, in which we repeatedly sing the titular basketball player's name, has been stuck in my head for over 30 years. The line was originally written for (and performed by) a group of prepubescent boys when I worked as cabin counselor at Camp Interlaken JCC in the mid-90s.
Being staff at Interlaken was hands-down the best job I ever had. I spent four weeks with friends Adam Bilsky, David Butlein and a gaggle of insane sixth graders in Cabin Naphtali. (Interlaken has a delightfully mysterious tradition of naming cabins after ensemble characters in Andrew Lloyd Weber's "Joseph and Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat." Nobody remembers why, but I love it!)
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| Back row, from left to right: Adam, David, Zach, an insane sixth grader |
Every weekday before dinner, the whole camp assembled on a cement rectangle outside the dining hall for a ritual flag-lowering ceremony and the greatest of camp traditions, the evening shticks. One-by-one, each cabin group recited, in unison, an original joke, sketch, song, or poem. Most of these were cobbled together in the minutes preceding their performance, but we in Cabin Naphtali knew the importance of quality shticks. Adam and I dedicated what little downtime we had to crafting shticks that were both whimsical and satirical. Shticks that encouraged growth and self-reflection. As the session went on, we increasingly left our third co-counselor David to handle the less consequential responsibilities, such as supervising and entertaining the campers.
But it was David who inadvertently inspired the greatest shtick of the summer, when he mentioned that Wilt Chamberlain claimed to have had sex with over 20,000 women. I found this to be noteworthy and compelling. It centered around a topic that I thought about constantly when I was seventeen... math.
"That comes out to 2.3 each day for 24 years," I told Adam. We sat in silence for a few minutes, trying to wrap our minds around the logistics.
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| It must have something to do with that mustache. |
"That's really something," he eventually said, picking up a guitar, "So... should we make a shtick about it?" I nodded solemnly. Kids love sports, so a crisp anecdote about a distinguished athlete could prove unusually engaging. We would keep the content pithy and informational. We would deliver it with a sticky musical hook to promote knowledge retention. From an educational standpoint, it was the perfect shtick idea, really.
Except for the part about all the sex. A cluster of 12-year-old boys chanting about Chamberlain's unparalleled lechery to the whole camp would certainly be memorable, but was the camp director ready for that depth of journalistic integrity? Or would he impugn our lesson as mission creep?
So we decided, instead, to fabricate an alternative history for Wilt Chamberlain, in which his notable feat was slightly different. In our song, Chamberlain bragged about having consumed over 20,000 multivitamin tablets during his lifetime. I know what you're thinking... that would have been an equally impressive accomplishment. Furthermore, sharing this knowledge with math-enthusiasts would allow them to experience the same arithmetic that I had so enjoyed. Plus, it shone a spotlight on a topic that Jewish parents cared deeply about - the prevention of nutritional deficiencies.
The Wilt Chamberlain shtick was epic. Or at least I think it was. I don't remember the music or lyrics, just the feeling. The catchy refrain that I borrowed for this month's Hard Taco song ("Wilt Chamberlain" x 8) is the only sliver that has not been lost to time. And while this new recording has almost nothing to do with either promiscuity or nutrition, I take comfort in the knowledge that it is still a pelvis-shattering serotonin canon of a banger earworm.
With warmest regards,
Zach
