Buddy
Buddy is a typical high school teen living in a typical small town in America in the 1970’s. He hangs out with friends, goes to the prom, casually references pop culture entities from the Brady Bunch to Joe Frazier and is thoroughly unexceptional. Which is exactly the point. The author has stated his dislike of the whitewashed portrait of his youth in the TV show The Wonder Years was the stimulus for this book but ironically Buddy really isn’t so different from Kevin Arnold.
Mike Amalfi
Mike Amalfi, now he’s a bit more exceptional. After all, how often do you come across the character who drives a vehicle shaped like a hot dog in a story, much less meet one in real life? Mike Amalfi is his name, but he is much better known—and more often referred to—as the Wiener Man. That this the name Mike has when Buddy first meets him. The Wiener Man only comes to be known as Mike by virtue of shockingly unexpected turn of events at the location where Buddy’s scout troop has arrived to meet him: he turns out to be a long-lost friend of Buddy’s mom.
Dave Horvath
Dave is Buddy’s friend, the kind of high school friend with whom you to go to the formal wear store together to pick out hideous 1970’s tuxedos to wear to the prom. He keeps a used pair of his girlfriend’s panties stashed away inside the glove compartment complete with her approval because “she’s got an open mind about stuff like that.”
Ted Wenkus
Buddy only knows Ted through Dave and even at that he mainly only knows him through reputation. Ted appears just on the prom section and he is one of those characters that you instantly wish the author had made more important. Ted gets the funniest line of dialogue in the book and is also the subject of an anecdote that reveals him to possess an unusually idiosyncratic personality. He’s certainly more interesting than any of Buddy’s actual friends with the notable exception of Ed Kelso.
Ed Kelso
Rhythm guitar player Ed Kelso is the only guy in town who can go mano-a-mano with Robert Plant when it comes to hitting the high notes in Zeppelin songs his band covers. Normally, of course, this would make Ed the center of attraction for local girls, but while he may sing like Robert Plant, he looks like a shrub. Heavy and shy, Kelso seems unlikely to live out his rock star dream, but while he may have trouble expressing himself in front girls, he proves unreasonably insightful for a kid his age when it comes to deconstruction the inherently fascist message spewed across the airwaves every December when time rolls around for the annual airing of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.
Laura Daly
What would a story about a high school kid growing up in the 1970’s be without the girl who becomes the First? Like so many initiations into sexuality by actual high school boys in that or any other decade, the much-anticipated encounter fails to meet expectations. Laura is hot enough and willing to lead Buddy by the nose of his temptation, but her heart—or other parts anyway—really belong to long-time boyfriend Keith. And when Buddy inevitably fails to exert mastery over his domain and brings things to a premature ending, it really does become an ending.
