Nada-Feengah! Jazz-speak for A Christmas Story

If you haven’t seen it, I’ll set the scene for you.

Inside the home, it is holiday time. Dad is downstairs, busily tinkering with a misbehaving furnace in the basement. Suddenly, there is the sound
of a loud crash coming from the main floor.
It brings the old man vaulting up the stairs where he finds that his prized possession — a lamp in the shape of a woman’s leg — has been shattered.

He removes his soot-battered gloves, takes a bended knee as if in mourning and cradles the wounded trophy as if it were a precious babe in swaddling clothes.
Then, in his grief, he unleashes one of the great curses heard in the
past quarter-century:

“Nada-Feengah!”

It should rank up there right alongside other classic lines from the yuletide
canon like “Mankind was my business!” and “Every time a bell rings, an angel gets its wings.”

Actor Darren McGavin plays “The Dad” in the 1983 movie “A Christmas Story,” where the funny line, the furiously, stammering “Not a Finger!” is spoken.

The words come from the pen of the late Jean Shepherd, an American renaissance man of the 20th century.
Shepherd wrote columns for periodicals like the Village Voice and
Playboy and performed hundreds of live shows at colleges across the
country. He wrote books, made appearances on television and recorded six
albums, including one with jazz legend Charles Mingus.

It was his work on radio for more than 20 years however, where he performed some of his greatest work.

A true “radio personality” of 1950s America, Shepherd was an on-air
philosopher and satirist.

He was the hip character in leather boots, crumpled chinos and a black turtleneck whose improvised monologues would be broadcast late into the night, live and in person from the jazz clubs of Greenwich Village.
Slang dictionaries credit him for coining the phrase “night people” for his fellow non-conformists, and beat historians insist he was the late-night radio host who Jack Kerouac used as the model in his book “On the Road.”

For more than 20 years, Shepherd entertained listeners with his first-person stories, poetry, and music. He wrote a novel, “In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash,” then turned it into a screenplay for the 1983 film “A Christmas Story.”

It is Shepherd’s wit that conjured Ralphie — a boy who dreams of owning
an official Red Ryder carbine-action 200-shot range model air rifle,
that is at the center of the movie.
And it is Shepherd’s care for his characters and his humor that delivers lines like: “Fra-gi-ley. That must be Italian,” and the congregation of dream-killing adults who nag at every turn: “You’ll shoot your eye out kid!”

Shepherd’s role in the film is also as narrator.
It is his voice you hear when a grown-up Ralphie looks back and wonders aloud exactly how his father would kill him:

“What would it be?
The guillotine? Hanging?
The chair? The rack? The Chinese water torture?” he ponders after unintentionally letting fly with The Word: "the big one, the queen-mother
of dirty words, the F-dash-dash-dash word.”

You can also hear snippets from Shepherd’s lifetime of skills as a prose
stylist when the film’s narrator leads in with jazz-speak rambles.
“We plunged into the cornucopia quivering with desire and the ecstasy of
unbridled avarice,” he announces at one point.

Kerouac would have been proud.

The most fun comes when Ralphie critiques the old man’s verse. It is a
colorful language delivered under extreme duress, the boy explains,speaking
in strange tongues with a steady torrent of obscenities pouring out of him.

“My father worked in profanity the way other artists might work in oils or clay,” Ralphie said. “Weaving a tapestry of obscenities that as far as we know is still hanging in space over Lake Michigan.”

This would be usually followed by the clanking sound of a soot-blasting
furnace and a fatherly skein of holiday epiphanies:
Der-bloot!
Dad-gummit!
Rattle-scropem-schnikelfotten…

Shepherd died in 1999 at the age of 78. For all his lifetime accomplishments, he will most likely be best remembered for “A Christmas Story.”
It is an enduring legacy of his, to which no other accomplishment comes close. For sheer fun, you can’t touch it. Nadafeengah.


by Thomas Dimopoulos
published in The Saratogian