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Show iftffik WDnsadldPysu ::x::: by IUck Brough Whoever takes my garbage, takes trash Here are some lessons I gained from participating in last weekend's Park City Clean-Up: Sure, it involves a lot of tedious bending over. But you can relieve your boredom by role-playing! Imagine you're Sally Fields in the cotton-picking scene from "Places in the Heart." If you pick up around a fast-food drive-in, you can expect to find a lot of straws. (The Record team was assigned to clean the Prospector Square area, near the Dairy Queen.) Trash is not lying around neatly on the ground, waiting for you to pick it up. It is beaten into the ground until it is slimy muck. It is clustered under thick bushes, down sewer holes or left in small, ungrippable piles of glass or plastic. If you are chasing a loose piece of trash blown by the wind, do not follow it into traffic. Do not buy a condo from the company with the most old real-estate signs lying on the ground. The city recommends you take rakes, shovels or gloves on your detail. The most practical device, however, would be a vacuum cleaner that could pick up anything from wet cigarette packs to 18-foot-square sections of chain link fence. On clean-ups, you are given an official Park City trash bag. The thin rating of these bags is somewhere between the Brand X towel in a Bounty commercial and a Richard Nixon explanation of Watergate. Once your bags starts ripping, you'll have to salvage all you can and get it to a dump site. The city's instructions say, "If it isn't growing, pick it up." First the word "growing" does not apply, in the est sense, to people, though you may be able to suggest some who should be in trash bags. Second, this rule does not justify the looting of 7-Elevens. A related note: The idea is to get rid of trash. But this does not mean you can take a sledgehammer to unsightly examples of Park City architecture. Don't try to pluck up one of those rusty metal bands on a construction site that runs deep into the earth. It's worse than trying to pull out the root of a sequoia. You can get lucky. Take the case of Record writer Nan Chalat. Practically the first thing she picked up was a cardboard box on our parking lot under which she found one of the city's tokens, good for big prizes. On the other hand, the most exciting thing found was a discarded Polaroid photo that looked as if the camera lens was smeared with Vaseline. The Fields Corporation is a fun bunch. When the cleaning volunteers gathered at City Park at 9 a.m., Debbi Fields was there in her spiffy pick-up outfit. And afterward, when the volunteers met back at the park for i- i . . - lunch, the Fields company supplied bags of cookies When clean-up time is over, at noon, don't be conscientious enough to linger five or 10 more minutes to 1 pick up trash. Otherwise, the hot dogs will be gone by the time you get to the park. (At the same time, there were plenty of buns left. It's an age-old paradox that hot dogs come in packs of 10, and buns in packs of eight. ) You will notice that huge concentrations of trash can be found in large blue metal containers, each one about the size of a truck. These are called "garbage bins" and you don't have to take garbage out of them. (I damn near broke my neck in those monsters.) So far, there's no major progress in Whaddyknow's campaign to elect Debby Symonds as the first female head of Rotary. However, I think she will be doing a Pepsi commercial. Our junk mail includes a lot of political pleas for money. One of the most unusual was from BLACK PAC, the only political action committee for black conservatives both of them. The letter asks us to join the Advisory Board of BLACK PAC, which includes such distinguished folk as Orrin Hatch and Jack Kemp. If you can join, check off one of the boxes, listing contributions from $25 to $5,000. If you don't join, you're supposed to check off this box: "I regret that I cannot join ... I understand that my failure to accept this challenge could cost Republicans control of the U.S. Senate in 1986." How's that for an ethnic combination? a conservative group for blacks that nags you like a Jewish mother! The late Margaret Hamilton, who was the Wicked Witch of "The Wizard of Oz," anticipated all the bad jokes that would be made about her demise. Before her death last week, she told a friend, "I hope somebody has enough presence of mind to say, 'Ding, dong, the witch it really dead." Hamilton, the best movie witch of them all, was 82. She did not fit her villainous image (she really liked children) and later became famous selling coffee. For those of you keeping tabs, the only person surviving from Oz's significant characters is Ray Bolger, the Scarecrow. , WHO CALLS IT YELLOW JOURNALISM? DEPT: According to a press story last week, a journalism prize in photography was given to the Bridgeport (Connecticut) Post and the Telegram for a "series of photos of man staggering after being shot in the neck." |