HUMOR: Classy Cleon
What's in a name? Check the Epstein files
By Drew Gallagher
HUMORIST
Like many middle-aged white male humorists, I recently searched the Epstein files to see if my name appeared. Opening that search engine was almost as bad as opening Patient View to get the results of a prostate exam. But I know I have a prostate whereas I was pretty certain my name would not appear in the Epstein files because I’ve never flown on a private plane, and the only Caribbean island I’ve ever been to was with my wife and she did not think leaving the Sandals resort for a seedy casino within walking distance was a fun way to spend the last night of our honeymoon even if the table minimums were $5 on a Friday night.
So, I was quite surprised to find that my name appears 1,100 times in the files. Sure, “Drew Gallagher” appears exactly zero times, but I have plenty of friends who simply call me “Drew” so this was of great concern. I do have some friends who refer to me as Drew Gallagher because I have a friend named Drew Wine, and it’s simpler to use our full names in certain conversations. (Nota Bene: Drew Wine does not appear in the Epstein Files either, but “wine” does appear 2,678 times. I am confident that any reference to “wine” was not about my friend Drew because he drinks IPAs.)
The thought of searching the 1,100 references to my name was daunting, and for the first time in my life, I wished that my mother would have prevailed in naming me Cleon as she had intended in February of 1970.
My mother grew up in the small town of Hamburg, Pennsylvania. When her ancestors arrived in Pennsylvania, they were told to get off the train when they got to the town with the red roofs (the roofs were made of tin and painted red for durability—Work Cited: In Our Neck of the Woods by Janet Barr). Somehow, in an era without cell phones or Google maps, they made it to Hamburg. One of my mother’s favorite memories of growing up in Hamburg was listening to the Brooklyn Dodgers on the radio with her grandfather. She would sit on the stoop with him on summer weekends and listen to the exploits of Duke, Pee Wee, Campy, and Jackie.
My mother went off to college and moved away from Hamburg about the same time the Dodgers moved away from Brooklyn, and she found herself in search of a new baseball team. Enter the New York Mets—a team only a mother, specifically my mother, could love. The Mets were an expansion team in 1962 and managed by Hall of Famer Casey Stengel who once said: “The only thing worse than a Mets game is a Mets doubleheader.” The Mets went 40-120 in their inaugural season and set the modern baseball record for losses in a season. My mother was hooked by these lovable losers.
The Mets were not losers for long and became ‘The Miracle Mets’ in 1969 when they stunned the Baltimore Orioles in the World Series. On this team of improbable champions was a leftfielder named Cleon Jones who finished seventh in the league MVP voting that season but finished first in my mother’s heart. Four months later when she gave birth to her first son, she wanted to name him Cleon. That would have been me except my father, a Phillies’ fan, intervened and they compromised with Andrew.
I have long been grateful to my father for not making me go through middle-class white suburbia as “Cleon,” but that was only until the release of the Epstein files. I figured if I was named Cleon there was a pretty good chance I was not going to appear in the files and certainly not 1,100 times. I was kind of right.
“Cleon” does appear in the Epstein files but not 1,100 times. Searching for “Cleon,” however, led me down a rabbit hole that made me long for the YouTube advertisements where Sylvester Stallone checked in on me and my little buddy while I showered. Much like the 1969 World Series though, the name Cleon again emerges as a hero.
Apparently, in 2012, there was an Australian filmmaker who wanted to write a documentary about people losing their virginity. Not a retrospective on the hazards of consummating a relationship in a Subaru hatchback, but a documentary following two people—a man and a woman—willing to sell off their virginity. (Any readers who are shocked that this was in the Epstein files please see me after class.) Two candidates emerged for the documentarian, and their respective virginities were opened to auction. At one point, the early bidding for the woman’s virginity approached $200,000 while the man’s barely approached $2,000.
As the bids grew higher for the Brazilian woman’s virginity, she decided that she would be donating all of her money to charities to help with affordable housing in her home country. This was noble but also problematic as noted by former NHL goaltender Cleon Daskalakis who was born before the 1969 Mets and thus likely not named for the New York outfielder. Daskalakis ran NetRaffle in 2012 which was a company that helped raise money for businesses on the internet.
Daskalakis opined that no company would want to, or should, take charitable donations from what was essentially prostitution. (The filmmaker had found a way around any potential criminal charges relating to prostitution by stating that both the man and the woman would lose their virginities on air flights which did not have laws on prostitution.) Daskalakis was not alone in finding fault with the undertaking as the documentarian Justin Sisely bemoaned:
“Its’s been difficult finding girls,” Sisely said. “Because anytime we cast one, their friends and families would do these interventions, tease them, and get them to pull out.”
I do not know if the “virginity” documentary was ever made, but I am glad that Daskalakis proved to be a further credit to my almost name. Amazon should consider making a documentary about Cleon Daskalakis. They could probably do it for less than $75 million.
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