Live, from Maino Music on Hylan, Blvd 1964! Matty Sings for Extra Credit!
Don't Miss the Live Remastered Recording Below!
Vito and the Elegants move over; Matty is headed to Maino Music on Hylan Blvd!
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It didn’t take me long to realize, once the school year began at JHS 27 in West Brighton, Staten Island, that to get a passing grade from my Social Studies teacher, Mr. Marone, I would have to rely on my strengths, which weren’t always in sync with school assignments. Earlier in 1963, in my math/science class, we were asked to study parallelograms. I had difficulty with names like isosceles, trapezoid, and rhombus; I could not keep track of these things when I was tested. I’m not sure how it all came about, but I thought that if I took the extraordinary initiative to make a dodecahedron out of cardboard and Scotch tape, my teacher, Mr. McKinley, would have no choice but to give me “Extra Credit.” Enough Extra Credits would be the buffer I’d need to get a decent report card if my testing fell short. Sure enough, during Show & Tell that fall, I shuffled up to the front of the class and lifted my dodecahedron out of a shopping bag from Majors Department Store. When the class saw this bizarre thing, their jaws dropped. Even Mr. McKinley, a man of color with a reserved sensibility, didn’t quite know what to make of it - or me - as I went into my memorized talk:
“The Wonderful Dodecahedron! As many of us know, a dodecahedron is a polyhedron with 12 flat faces. Let’s count the sides together. 1-2-3-4, there are 3 of these 4-sided faces, which equals 12 altogether. Are there any questions…? ”
As Mr. McKinley raised his eyebrows at my display, one of the brighter stars in the class, Wayne Miller, shot his hand up and asked me a question to let everyone know that he was (which he was) smarter than me.”
“Matthew, can you tell us what a 24-sided polyhedron is called?”
I stood dumbfounded. How could he do that to me? Upstage my greatest moment with a stupid, dumb question? I stared at the Dodecahedron as if it was going to talk to me like the Jerry Mahoney dummy, and I was Paul Winchell. Finally, out of the pregnant silence, Mr. McKinley cleared his voice.
“Mr. Selman, do you know the answer to Wayne’s question?”
Knowing that I had no idea, Mr. McKinley shifted his focus to Wayne who was standing at his seat, smiling smugly like the cat who ate the canary.
“Do you know the answer, Wayne?”
Wayne nodded.
“Yes, Mr. McKinley. A 24-sided polyhedron is called a tetraicosagon.”
Before I could say “Jack Robinson Crusoe,” Wayne had stolen the spotlight from right under my nose. Suddenly, my Dodecahedron was nothing; it was a Chevy Corsair, a can of beans, a wrapper from a used Devil Dog compared to Wayne’s monstrous virtual 24-sided Tetraicosagon . While I knew I’d been given the Extra Credit, it was time to change my game plan completely. I needed to find a way to stand out - and never again be shaken from my throne of excess accreditation.
Right around the time the Beatles came to America, we were given an assignment by our Social Studies teacher, Mr. Marone, to do a paper on Greek Mythology. I had always been banging on either a piano or a baritone ukulele, making up little songs and melodies, when one day, after school, riding up Forest Avenue on the two-tone green 107 Bus, the big idea hit me. I would write a paper about the Greek God, Mercury (because I loved playing with mercury from cracking open thermometers, collecting the weird and later-to-be-learned toxic substance in a little jar, and rolling it around my desk), but that would merely be the jumping off point. For Extra Credit, I would write an original song about Mercury, record it at Maino Music on Hylan Boulevard, and then play it for the class! I didn’t tell anyone about my plan except my then-current heartthrob and confidant, Beth Bevridge, who was brilliantly musical, had a gorgeous singing voice, and would have told me to jump in a lake if she thought it was a bad idea.
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