Did Ralphie Parker grow up to be Lester the Nightfly?
Yes. Sort of. We’ll explain.
Ralphie Parker is the 9-year-old protagonist of A Christmas Story, The Musical, coming to Morsani Hall Nov. 28-30.
The musical is based on the 1983 holiday movie perennial A Christmas Story, which is based on stories from Jean Shepherd’s In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash, published in 1966.
Shepherd calls the work fiction but there’s no shortage of references to his own childhood experiences growing up in Hammond, Ind. (Hohman in A Christmas Story). Also, Shepherd, in the off-screen role of grown-up Ralphie, narrates the movie. Plus, an actor portraying Shepherd narrates the musical.
Before Shepherd put pen to page, though, he was a radio disc jockey who kept his audience enthralled with his storytelling. He found a home, for 20 years, on New York City’s WOR, 710 AM. His overnight slot built an audience of hipsters, graveyard shifters and fascinated suburban kids, including a young Donald Fagen.
Fagen later teamed with Walter Becker to form Steely Dan and sell oodles of records throughout the 1970s.
Fagan’s first solo album, 1982’s The Nightfly, included the title track, sung in first person by an overnight DJ:
I’m Lester the Nightfly … Tonight the night is mine … until the sun comes through the skyline.
Fagen told New York magazine in 2006 that Lester was based on Shepherd.
“He was a monologuist who used to just talk and tell stories and say funny things,” Fagan said. “He was a social satirist.”
And sometimes a social provocateur. Shepherd, annoyed that best-seller lists were based on demand as well as sales, asked listeners to visit bookstores and request a non-existent novel, I, Libertine by Frederick R. Ewing. His listeners did so and then some. By the time the jig was up, I, Libertine was rumored to be on upcoming best-seller charts and to have been banned in Boston. Novelist Theodore Sturgeon made the hoax reality, writing I, Libertine from Shepherd’s outline.
Shepherd had to be convinced to put his stories in print. He wasn’t a writer, he insisted. His friend, Shel Silverstein, transcribed some of Shepherd’s stories and helped him edit them for print, which convinced Shepherd his stories could be told in print as well as over the air.
That turned out to be a wise, and profitable, move, as it saved Shepherd’s work for posterity and fortified his finances once A Christmas Story became a hit.
So, did Ralphie grow up to be an overnight DJ? Possibly. It’s a better outcome than Shepherd gave him. Ralphie narrates the stories of In God We Trust from a barstool he apparently spends a lot of time on, bending the ear of the bartender, his childhood friend Flick.
Let’s hope grown-up Ralphie left his Red Ryder Carbine Action 200-shot Range Model air rifle at home. After a few rounds he might really shoot his eye out.