I grew up in the nineteen-seventies and eighties in a small town in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where the disco confection “Celebration” as performed by Kool and the Gang was a radio and roller-rink favorite. It was insanely cheerful, relentlessly upbeat and weirdly funky. And it had enough of a beat that you could slam-dance to it at Homecoming, if you fancied yourself a member of the stillborn local punk movement.

As teenagers in the early eighties, my brother and I both worked paper routes for the town newspaper. One Saturday morning the paper scheduled a big promotional meeting to kick off a major subscription sales drive. They held the conference at a duoplex movie house across the river, luring the carriers in with promises of a movie and entertainment along with the rah-rah here’s-how-to-pressure-the-marks-and-win-lame-prizes pep talk. This was before the VCR came into widespread use, the dying days of an era when “adult” movies would still occasionally turn up on film at a mainstream cinema. And so it was that all the kids arriving on bicycles and in friends’ beat-up cars were directed into a theatre advertising Debbie Does Dallas II.

While we sat in the dimly-lit cinema waiting for the “conference” to get underway, we heard Kool and the Gang singing “Celebration” over the theatre’s P.A. system. Then we heard it again. And again. It was apparently the only recording available for the occasion, and after fifteen minutes of this, my brother and I began singing along, employing what we believed to be clever lyrical improvisations, along the lines of “Play a different song, COME ON!”

Then the lights dimmed and the track was mercifully cut off. No, we didn’t get to see an accidental reel of porn. What we were actually shown was a dubbed, edited-for-content German ripoff of Disney’s Herbie the Love Bug movies called Super Bug. It contained more bad language and near-nudity than its inspiration, but was otherwise unmitigated crap. At last the movie was over. Kool and his musical collective began once again to celebrate nothing in particular, this time at an increased decibel level which encouraged us to include profanity in our singalongs.

The pain was not assuaged when the music faded out again, silently heralding the appearance of the “entertainment” — a clown who invested no discernible effort in clowning. He just walked out onto the stage in a full clown suit and makeup and participated in a half-baked “skit” with the newspaper sales staff. The bit cast him as a stubborn prospect who insisted he could not afford to subscribe to the newspaper because he could not afford to buy food. The recommended approach, wildly successful in this bizarre Potemkin universe, was to convince him to subscribe anyway, because he would ultimately save money using food coupons printed in the paper. This clown (and I use the term in its pejorative sense) did not have a funny voice. He delivered no japes, performed no antics. He certainly did not encourage anyone in the audience to push sales. It seemed to have escaped the staff’s notice completely that this hypothetical loser, by all indications a drug addict in a clown suit, would be likely to stiff the carriers for his subscription, hiding out in the bowels of his crumbling, smelly apartment until we got tired of knocking and began begging the back office bureaucracy to cancel him.

After this embarrassing peek at the world of grownup group-think was over, we were dismissed. The clown lit up a cigarette and stepped through the exit doors, and as we gathered up our pointlessly colorful sales flyers and prepared at last to escape, Kool and his furshlugginer Gang began their mindless caterwauling anew. Today, I cannot hear “Celebration” without flashing back to this most sordid scene of my sheltered youth: a lazy, nicotine-puffing clown ushering dozens of adolescent kids out of a porno house and into the mid-afternoon sun, hundreds of childhood hours forever wasted.