BeowulfGirl

2011-09-10T17:37:00.000-07:00

And The Walls Came Down

"It is impossible to fully comprehend the evil that would have conjured up such a cowardly and depraved assault upon thousands of innocent people."

-- Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien

Everyone over the age of 15 most likely remembers where they were on this day ten years ago. Many of them were frightened, many confused, and many horrified. But I’m willing to speculate that no matter where you were, what you were doing, or how you ultimately reacted, your very first, knee-jerk reaction was one of absolutely stunned incredulity.

In 1983, I was a sophomore in high school and heavily involved in my school’s competitive forensics team. One of the speeches I used in competition that year dealt with nuclear disarmament (I was in favor of it). The speech was very melodramatic, filled with sobering statistics and horrifying descriptions of radiation sickness and eventual total global death. I’m not entirely sure what made me choose to write about such a cheery topic; perhaps I had seen WarGames too many times.

But despite the speech’s statewide appeal (I won more awards for that one speech than for any other piece I ever competed with), deep-down, I really, really didn’t think that any country (or any planet, really) would ever actually attack the United States. I knew about Pearl Harbor, of course, but after all, that had been in 1941, which to my 15 year-old reasoning was only slightly after the First Crusade.

In 2001, I was working at a computer engineering firm that was subcontracted by the FAA (probably the weirdest government agency to work for on 9/11). That Tuesday had started out oddly for me even before the first plane hit. The previous night, my mother had been admitted to the hospital for an upper respiratory infection, and I was coming down with something nasty and bronchial as well. Still, I deluded myself into thinking I was indispensible and hobbled my way in.

By 9:30, I knew I wasn’t going to make it. I dragged myself up the stairs with the intention of going to my boss’s office and telling him I was calling it a morning. As I passed the receptionist’s desk, she looked at me, blinking in confusion, and said, “A plane just hit the World Trade Center!”

When you work for the FAA and you hear that, the thought of terrorism doesn’t enter your mind right away, which is why I naturally thought it was some bizarre aviation accident and asked; “Was it one of ours?”

No one on my floor seemed as much worried as they were confused as to how such horribly inaccurate reporting could possibly have been allowed to air. We figured that something had happened at the Twin Towers, but it couldn’t possibly have been two jets purposely flying into them with the intention to level the buildings and kill thousands of people.

We then remembered that my boss had a TV in his office, so we joined the dozen or so other stunned engineers watching the news from there. As more information came in, we still didn’t really grasp that we had been attacked. It was just so unthinkable that it never entered our minds. Phones rang, unanswered, then almost simultaneously, everyone’s pager went off. An announcement came over the PA that we were shutting the site down. This all seemed to happen at once.

I spun the radio dial on the way home trying to piece together as much information as I could, without much success. I was now running a very high fever, and coupled with the weirdness of the day I felt fairly sure I couldn’t trust my own mental faculties. When I got home, I turned on the TV and fell into bed.

You remember the news footage. It was surreal. For the next week through my antibiotic haze, I watched those towers fall over and over again and it never got any more real. I felt like I was watching an apocalyptic science-fiction movie with really awesome special effects.

And in the weeks that followed, when we all tried to make sense of the whole thing by flying the flag, playing Kate Smith records, and asking “where were you?” I began to think of some very strange and picayune things, such as that every single photograph, picture, and film of the New York skyline was now incorrect, and that it would be very awkward for a radio station to ever play Bruce Springsteen’s “Darlington County” from now on.

And I found myself thinking about a very peculiar group of people. Yes, of course I think of all of the fallen, and they and their loved ones are always in my thoughts and prayers, but I think about certain people a little more frequently.

I think about the receptionist at a marketing agency who was on vacation that week.

I think about the temp that was supposed to cover for that receptionist but whose agency gave him the wrong start-time.

I think about the civil engineer who wasn’t able to get a cab in his usual spot and whose having to walk five extra blocks put him half an hour behind schedule.

I think about the investment broker who, at the eleventh hour, admitted to herself that she was just legitimately sick enough to call out.

I think about the cafeteria worker who had retired the Friday before and was now playing Dominos with his granddaughter.

I think about the maintenance man who fell asleep on the subway and didn’t wake up until the end of the line because his neighbors had kept him up all night screaming at each other.

But this is who I think about the most:

She is 22 or 23 years old, and her name is something like Sarah, or Emily, or Marian. This is her first “real” job since graduating college with a marketing degree, and this is only her third week. She still gets up an hour earlier than she has to in order to try on and reject different outfits, chose understated jewelry, and have something resembling an adult breakfast. Her dark hair smells of lavender and she has a French manicure. She arrives at her train stop in plenty of time.

She’s standing next to her new boss’s desk (one of those shiny chrome tables with a heavy glass top) in a tailored navy blue dress and shoes that are just a little uncomfortable, but she’s trying to “dress for the job she wants, not the job she has.” She’s trying to pay attention to everything the boss is saying, but she’s had a bit too much coffee and is twitchy. In fact, her coffee mug—which might have Dilbert, or Ziggy, or Snoopy on it—is still in her hand, complete with a coral-colored lipstick stain.

And the boss is explaining something she needs to do in Excel, or Adobe, or PowerPoint or something, and her mind is jumping around from her work to what color accent pillows to buy for her new living room set to wondering if the vending machine has a Zagnut bar, to how much she really wishes she had worn different shoes. And then she hears the noise, which is now drowning out the boss.

And she looks out the window, bewildered, and lowers her coffee mug. “Hey, Russell,” she interrupts, curiously, “isn’t that plane getting awfully clo—

2011-07-12T16:18:00.000-07:00

Cootchie-Cootchie-Coo!

“Don’t you want me baby?”

--Human League

I met someone today. I’m sure I broke Olympic records getting home to blog about it.

My father discovered he needed a refill on his cholesterol medication, so he dispatched me to the Walmart with instructions to pick up a few other sundries like vitamin-D and some corn plasters. While I was waiting for his prescription to be filled, I sat next to a heavy, slightly sweaty, balding man with glasses of about 35. He was reading a pamphlet about psoriasis (which he didn’t appear to have, at least not on the parts of him that were visable). He turned to me, flashed a smile and said, “Hello!”

“Hi,” I said. After all, I’m a friendly, agreeable person.

“Do you have psoriasis?”

I thought this was an odd thing to lead off with, but said, “No.”

"Neither do I,” he declared, tossing the pamphlet aside (leaving me to wonder what kind of opening that was). “How long have you lived here?”

I assumed he didn’t mean in the Walmart. “About ten years.”

He smiled. “I’m new.”

I knew that he was about to ask me the traditional “new-guy-on-the-block” questions such as where the best Chinese food was, which dry-cleaner wouldn’t shred his pants and what bars to avoid, so I tried to summon up some enthusiasm for my town. However, in another four seconds, all of my travelogue information was driven from my mind. “It’s so hard to meet people,” he said, slightly sadly. “And I have an especially hard time. Because of…well, because of the lifestyle.”

I wish I could say that there was a swelling of dramatic danger music, but there wasn’t. He very obviously wanted to ask me about his “lifestyle,” and when I didn’t right away he added, quickly, “Oh, no, it’s nothing too weird or perverted or anything. Let me give you our website address. He proceeded to dig in his wallet and handed me a card, which simply listed this website. (But don’t click on it yet. Wait for it. It’s worth it).

“What is this?” I asked curiously, examining the card.

“I’m an AB,” he said, in an explanatory tone.

“I’m sorry, I don’t know what that is,” I admitted, wondering if I really wanted to get into it.

He cleared it all up for me. “I’m an Adult Baby.”

There was a moment of silence.

“It’s not as uncommon as you’d think,” he went on, hastily. I was about to tell him I didn’t think anything about Adult babies, but apparently having gathered courage from my not screaming and running away yet, he continued. “We’re really misunderstood. A lot of people think we’re pedophiles or like to have sex with children, and we don’t do or want anything like that.”

I began to wonder what was taking so long with my dad’s medication. He kept explaining: “See, we like to be treated as babies. We sleep in cribs, drink from bottles, and wear diapers.”

I started looking around for Rod Serling. “Okay,” I said, fascinated.

Obviously feeling he had found a sympathetic ear, he continued. “The diapers are really expensive, actually. Personally, I like the Wellness Briefs Adult Baby Plastic Pants. I get them from eBay because they’re really discreet.”

“Well, they’d have to be,” I said, nodding sympathetically.

He was obviously frustrated. “If only people would try it before they judged it!” He said. “It’s such a comforting, reassuring lifestyle. We’re gentle, passive people. We’re not hurting anyone.”

“Of course not,” I said, trying to be soothing. And with that, I realized I had gone too far in my empathy.

He paused, then began, hopefully, “I don’t suppose you’d—“

“No.”

“No, really, if you’d just—“

“No.”

“Well, do you know anyone who’d like to—“

“No.”

“Will you please at least go to the website?” He seemed so desperate.

And then, like a blessed deus ex machina, the pharmacist yelled my dad’s name.

(You can go to the website now. You're welcome).

2011-04-07T09:35:00.000-07:00

Honorary Griswold

“Everything is contingent…and then there is chaos.”

--Spalding Gray, Impossible Vacation

_______________________________________________________

CAPTAIN PICARD: I hate being on vacation.

DR. CRUSHER: No, you hate going on vacation. Once you’re there, you have a good time.

“This is the worst trip I’ve ever been on.”

--The Beach Boys

I just came back from a vacation in Austin, Texas, where I visited my wonderful friend Deb. Because she lives 1,700 miles away, Deb and I only get to see each other once a year. Last year, we met in Atlanta…this year, we agreed I would go to her house and meet her family for the first time. I was psyched.

I was scheduled to fly out of Philadelphia at 9:55am. I would land in Tampa Bay at 1:30pm, then at 2:50 I’d get on the connecting flight to Austin, where Deb planned to pick me up at 5:50. I checked my luggage and got my boarding pass—it looked like it would be an easy flight.

I arrived at the airport early enough to get a very dry, dusty, and tasteless cinnamon-raisin scone and some tea at Starbucks. As I was choking it down, my father called me and told me that Southwest Airlines had just called him, looking for me. I then remembered that I had given the airlines my home number as a contact number, since I don’t always have my cell phone turned on. Apparently, they told Dad that my flight had been delayed until 11:00. I didn’t understand why, as it was only drizzling, but okay…I still had time to make the connection. I finished the awful scone and pressed on to the departure gate.

After being fondled at the TSA checkpoint, I got to the gate and found many, many angry people. I looked at the flight board—my plane was now delayed until 12:35, and there was no way I would land in Tampa soon enough to make my connection.

One of my fellow angry passengers told me that apparently there was a tornado in Tampa, causing them to shut down the airport. I was also told this is the first time this has happened in 11 years. I went to the ticket counter, telling them I had to be in Austin that night. I was told that the only way that would happen is if they sent me to Chicago first—7 hours later. Not only would I have to stay in the beautiful Philadelphia airport that entire time, but by the time I actually got to Austin it would be 10:40pm. I would be exhausted and cranky, and Deb would have to be out until all hours schlepping me around, but that was the only option so they ticketed me for that flight.

Disgusted, I plopped back down and angrily listened to Sixpence None the Richer for a while.

At about 11:30, though, there was good news—the Tampa Bay airport had re-opened, and there would still be time to make my connection. The angry passengers were appeased, however, I was still ticketed for the Chicago flight. I managed to have the tickets changed again, and happily boarded the plane.

Once we were all onboard, we were told that the Tampa airport had closed. Again. We sat on the tarmac for an hour and ten minutes. The man sitting next to me, who was also connecting in Tampa, pointed out that if no planes could land in Tampa, none could fly out, either, so we’d both probably still make our connections. I agreed with this reasoning, and once we finally took off, I promptly fell asleep.

Three hours later, I woke up to discover that we had been circling the Tampa airport for over forty-five minutes. Not only were we not cleared to land, we had also run out of fuel. We had to divert to Panama City (which I’d never even heard of) in order to refuel and wait out the tornado. We weren’t going to be allowed off the plane, so there was no way I could go to a ticket agent and try to make other arrangements. I was able to use my cell phone, however, so I called Deb and Dad and told them what was going on. After an hour of sitting on that tarmac (they gave us “complimentary water”—seriously), we finally took off. I have never in my life been afraid while airborne, but I found out that I would be just fine without ever getting to see jagged bolts of lightning zapping menacingly out the window of my plane again.

I eventually arrived in Tampa Bay at 6:40—more than 5 hours after I was originally supposed to. I never thought I would ever be on a plane in which the passengers applauded when it landed, because, really, you know that isn’t going anywhere good. I ran to the ticket agent. My connecting flight to Austin had left 20 minutes prior. There were no other flights to Austin that night. I would have to stay there for the night. However, even though I had missed my flight, my luggage hadn’t, so it was winging its way to Austin without me, taking things like a clean change of clothes, my toothbrush, makeup, and various medications with it. I asked when the first flight to Austin the following day was, and of course there wasn’t one. But, apparently, I could get a 6:55am flight to Houston, then board a flight to Austin (it’s all of 70 miles away) which would get me in at about 10:00am…well, okay. At least if I missed that connection it was close enough for Deb to drive out and get me. They ticketed me for that flight.

I decided to try to find out where my luggage might be. I took my claim ticket to the baggage claim office and they told me that it was, indeed, on its way to Austin, and that I could pick it up at the Southwest Airlines baggage claim office. I wasn’t optimistic.

The ticket agent said that there was a Marriott right there at the airport. Fine. I then realized that I hadn’t eaten in about 12 hours (the crummy scone had been the last, and it had long since worn off), and as I certainly wasn’t going anywhere, I treated myself to a long expensive dinner in one of the airport restaurants (and a drink or five), while listening to the mildest and calming thing on my iPod, which turned out to be Steve Lawrence. By this time, all the adrenaline had crashed (probably helped by the drinks and Steve), and I was exhausted. I headed off for the airport Marriott.

When I got there, I had this conversation with the guy at the front desk:

ME: Hi! I’d like a room for the night.

GUY: I’m sorry, we’re all booked for tonight.

ME: …

GUY: It’s Spring Break—every college student on the east coast is in Florida this week.

ME: …

GUY: If you want to take the bus, there’s another Marriott a few blocks from here.

ME: (sobs)

Well, it wasn’t as if I had much of a choice—it was either that or sleep in the terminal, so I headed for the bus. Of course, since the tornado was still somewhat going on, there was torrential rain and wind, which I’m sure made me look even more like the undead than I already did. There were two men also waiting for the bus, and one of them was ridiculously cheerful. I really wasn’t in the mood for it.

The bus came. We got on. The other two men (who I don’t think were together, but who had apparently bonded in the wake of the airline stupidity) started talking about the weather, and asked me what my deal was. I explained everything, and that’s when I found out that the cheerful fellow was one of those “It-could-be-worse!” guys. Unfortunately, he was one of those obnoxious “It-could-be-worse!” guys, in that we had this exchange:

HIM: It could be worse!

ME: Well, this was definitely one of the worst travel experiences I’ve ever had.

HIM: My daughter had a 26 year-old friend who was killed in a snowboarding accident last week. I’m sure he would love to trade places with you.

ME: Okay, you know what? That really isn’t helpful. I’m sorry your daughter lost her friend, but you know nothing about my situation, and nothing about the circumstances under which I’m traveling. Perhaps I had a funeral to go to tomorrow that I’m now going to miss, or a job interview, or a wedding. Please don’t try to throw perspective on something you know nothing about.

He shut up. We rode in stony silence to the hotel.

At the front desk, I told my tale of woe and the woman there told me that I definitely qualified for their special “Distressed Traveler” rate (which I found hysterical, but I might just have been punch drunk), and she even gave me a toothbrush and toothpaste (I almost kissed her). All I wanted was a shower and a bed, and, mercifully, I got both.

The next morning (well, only technically, as it was still pitch dark), I put my disgusting clothes back on, finger-combed my hair, and got on the bus again. When I got to the airport, I found out that my flight was actually leaving a half an hour early. Fortunately, I was in time, so I got on the plane and passed out. I also managed to get on my connecting flight to Austin without any problems and landed on time.

Deb, who wasn’t allowed past the TSA checkpoint, was going to meet me at the baggage claim. I spotted her, waiting with all the other chauffeurs who were of course holding signs such as “BILLY-BOB BOJO,” ‘SADIE-LOU SALLY-JO,” and “RICKY-WAYNE JIMBOB”—she was holding a sign that said, simply, “YANK.” It was the first thing to make me laugh on the whole trip so far. Much hugging, hand-flailing, and babbling ensued.

Of course, my luggage wasn’t there, but when I brought my ticket to the baggage claim office, they brought it out. It looked only a little mangled, so we schlepped out to her car and on the way to the hotel I bitched about the airline, finally happy to get it out of my system. We wanted to go to lunch (I hadn’t had breakfast), but I said that I absolutely had to go to the hotel first because the clothes I was wearing were now so disgusting that they were actually trying to bolt off of my body on their own in search of a Laundromat. Also, I had no makeup on and looked like I’d been in my own mausoleum for two weeks. We got to the hotel, and that’s when I made yet another interesting discovery.

The luggage, which had looked relatively unscathed on the outside, was a complete wreck on the inside. I had one suitcase which held nothing but clothes and a second that contained all my other “stuff.” The clothes were wet. I don’t mean that “cold and damp from being in the unpressurized hold of a plane for 8 hours” wet, I mean actually waterlogged. They also smelled of mildew. I looked in the other suitcase, and everything in there was equally wet, but because I had packed everything (makeup, toiletries, electrical stuff, etc.) in various cosmetic bags, they were more or less okay. Unfortunately, all the gifts I had brought for Deb and her family were completely trashed—the wrapping paper had actually somehow fused itself to the boxes. Fortunately, the gifts themselves (plaques and mugs) were ceramic and thus okay, but I certainly couldn’t give them to anyone in that condition. The packages were so unbelievably awful that I actually took a picture of them. I figured out what must have happened. Because I wasn’t there to claim the luggage the previous night, they had sat, outside, all night. In the tornado. Lovely.

Deb called her parents to tell them what had happened, and her mother got on the phone and absolutely insisted that I bring the soggy laundry to their house so she could wash it. I was horrified and said that I simply couldn’t allow this woman, whom I had never actually met in person, to wash my underwear. No, she insisted, she didn’t want to wait one more minute to meet me, whereupon I told her that I simply would not let her see me in my current condition. She blackmailed me by saying that if I would allow Deb to bring her my clothes, she would loan me a shirt and shorts. Well, it was either that or go to lunch in my bra and panties, and I wouldn’t subject anybody to that, so I reluctantly agreed.

Deb took my squelchy duffel bag to her house while I showered, then brought me back a t-shirt and shorts. We went to lunch at a BBQ place, and then I finally got to meet Deb’s family. They were absolutely wonderful, and sort of made the whole experience worth it, and, hey…at least I got some good material.

2010-10-19T20:51:00.000-07:00

Not A Holiday Inn

“Son, you’re gonna drive me to drinkin’

if you don’t quit drivin’ that Hot Rod Lincoln.”

-- Bill Kirchen

Here’s one I think you’ll like. It’s about this guy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAeEAdcQWiw

On any given day, anyone who wants to can go to Union Square and see Saravuth. You will probably be asked to play chess, but believe me, it’s worth it to hear the story. You can’t tell from the pictures, but Saravuth is quite diminutive.

There are six people in this story, and five of them aren’t me, so here’s a score card:

David: You’ve already met him in I Dream Of Men With Pink Hair:

http://beowulfgirl.blogspot.com/search?q=men+with+pink+hair

(Scroll down past the entry about Philip, though that one is a good read as well).

Lola: The best friend I mention in the entry about David. Has a good heart, but prone to histrionics. She went around the bend completely about a year after graduation when her mother died

Yarworth: An extremely rich guy who thinks that every problem can be solved by throwing money at it. He’s often right.

Sharon: The vice-president of the forensics team and more than a little stupid. She’s also hopelessly in crush with David, who may or may not know this depending on the combination of drugs he’s taken that day.

And, of course, the aforementioned Saravuth.

In October of 1986, the team was slated to compete in a tournament at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia at the first tournament of the 1986-87 season. Because we couldn’t afford six airline tickets, we decided to rent a car. The problem was, you needed to have a driver’s license (of course), a valid credit card, and be over 21.

David was 22, but had no driver’s license. I had a license, but was only 19. Sharon was 21, had a license, but no credit card. Yarworth had maxed out his credit cards earlier that year. The only member of the team who met all three of these criteria was Saravuth.

Saravuth proceeded to rent the absolutely ugliest car he could find—a 1980 wood-paneled station wagon, which we of course dubbed the Family Truckster. On the Friday before the tournament, we piled our luggage and ourselves into the car and took off for Virginia.

Saravuth, of course, drove, as he was the one who had rented the car.

And so it started.

We were only about half an hour out when it became obvious to all of us that Saravuth had no driving skills at all. He was all over the road, didn’t use his directionals when he turned or changed lanes, and was incapable of sticking to the speed limit.

Lola insisted we pull over at the next rest stop. We did.

Lola took off for the bathroom, and I followed. She then told me, tremulously, that a few months prior, she had been involved with a car accident and was now a bit skittish. I assured her that if Saravuth’s driving didn’t improve, I would take over the wheel.

About five hours later, we arrived in Fairfax, Virginia, mostly unscathed. Saravuth, Yarworth and Sharon stayed at the hotel, while David, Lola and I went in search of food. Lucky me got to drive the Family Truckster so I could get used to it.

The minute we got in the car, David said; “Now that we’re alone, can we talk about how awful Saravuth’s driving is?”

Both Lola and I fell over ourselves in agreement, and I at once volunteered to drive the Family Truckster home at the end of the tournament.

The tournament itself was uneventful, as only David won anything, and at 9:00 on Monday morning we prepared to head back. There was a grey, miserable looking sky. We all got back in the car to schlep home. Despite what David, Lola and I had decided, Saravuth once again captained the Family Truckster and we set off at a dangerous speed down the Interstate. David sat up front, Lola, Sharon and I shared the middle bench, and Yarworth was positioned in the back, writing his will on the back of his ballots.

Of course, it began to rain.

Of course, Saravuth’s driving was even worse in inclimate weather.

And it was only a matter of time before the inevitable happened.

As the rain got harder, Saravuth took more and more chances with the car (and, consequently, our lives) until he actually swerved over the yellow line and into oncoming traffic. An 18-wheeler beared down on us, sounding its air-horn at top volume. I screamed and threw my hands over my eyes. Yarworth, who couldn’t see anything due to where he was sitting, also let loose with a shriek. We ended up on the [wrong] side of the road, amazingly unhurt (physically…mentally was another story).

“Jesus Christ, Saravuth!” Lola screamed, as the Family Truckster came to a screeching halt on the gravel.

Saravuth said: “Don’t worry…I’m driving.

“That’s exactly what I’m worried about!” Lola shrieked.

Inexplicitly, Saravuth advised: “Go to sleep.”

Lola countered with: “Go to hell!”

We abandoned the car like it was on fire. The sky opened up full throttle. We almost had to shout to be heard over the torrential rain. David tried to make peace by asking Saravuth if I could drive the next 50 miles. Saravuth kept repeating; “No, no…she is not on my insurance.”

David sighed in slight annoyance and ran his hand through his pink hair. “Saravuth, you are being such a jerk.” This was the first time we had ever hear David say anything even remotely disparaging about anyone. Saravuth made a frustrated face and came out with;

“This is so inconvenient for me.”

This is where Lola loses it.

“Dammit, David!” she hollered, “I am not going to risk my life to spare someone’s short, little Cambodian feelings!”

“Wow!” I said, impressed.

Yarworth spoke up. “How far are we from Dulles Airport?”

We all looked at each other. “I’m not sure,” I said. “Why?”

“I have enough money to fly us all back to New Jersey,” Yarworth said, way too calmly.

“David,” I urged, “let’s do that.”

“We can’t,” he said, sadly. “We have no way of reimbursing Yarworth from the team’s budget—we’d bankrupt ourselves and not be able to compete anywhere for the rest of the year.”

“I don’t care!” Lola yelled.

“Wait,” Sharon piped up, “what about the train?”

The five of us looked at each other with why-didn’t-I-think-of-that looks.

“I could go for that,” said David.

Of course, this was long before cell phones, so the first order of business was to find a way to get us off the side of the road and to a pay phone so we could call a cab. Knowing that it was highly unlikely anyone would stop for us in the middle of the monsoon, David solved the problem by hurling himself into traffic. Sure enough, that did the trick.

The young man who had nearly mowed down David was named Kirby, and by a happy accident of fortune, he was also a college student. Naturally, he didn’t also have a Family Truckster, so he said that he could drive four of us back to his campus, where he would get his roommate to help with the driving.

Of course, that meant that one unlucky person would have to stay behind with Saravuth, who was now casually smoking by the car and looking irritated and, well, inconvenienced.

“Should we do rock, paper, scissors?” Sharon suggested.

“How about one-potato-two-potato?” Yarworth asked.

“No, let’s do odds-and-evens,” I said. Lola was too furious to give us any suggestions, but David solved the whole thing by volunteering to wait with the Family Truckster. The rest of us agreed that out of the five of us, David was the least likely to get violent, so we headed out with Kirby.

Kirby was a history major, and the rest of us shared our curricula with him as well. By the time we got to his dorm, the rain had subsided a bit. He went into the building to talk to his roommate, whose name was Neil. Neil was so intrigued by the story of Saravuth that he insisted on helping us. Sharon and Yarworth rode back with Neil, while Lola and I stayed in Kirby’s car.

When our posse got back to the site of the Family Truckster, we saw that David’s normally pink hair was now closer to burgundy due to the rain. Saravuth was still smoking.

Kirby and Neil didn’t know who was more interesting-looking, David or Saravuth. Lola refused to have anything to do with Saravuth and stayed in Kirby’s car, while Yarworth, Sharon and I went to collect the luggage.

We begged David to come with us, but he insisted on staying with the Family Truckster (since he was president and all), so we all hugged him good-bye, certain that we would never see him again. Kirby and Neil drove the rest of us to the train station, which was about an hour away, and Yarworth not only was able to purchase four tickets to New Jersey, he also handsomely compensated Kirby and Neil, who didn’t even want to take any money—they said the experience was worth it.

So, as I said, anyone who wants to can go to Union Square and play chess with Saravuth.

Be sure to tell him that Lola sends her love.

2010-09-22T17:59:00.000-07:00

The W Biz

“I promise
To love my Ws,
To honor them every day,
To never say ‘hate’ to a W,
And to never, ever write
‘I hate Ws.’’”

--The W Club pledge, c. 1973

I’m taking a big risk with this entry. It’s liable to stir up a lot of old ghosts which should have remained in their crypts. I can hear them rattling their chains already.

I decided to write this entry because of a conversation I’ve been having on Facebook with someone who attended the same elementary school as I did. This person began asking me questions about events that took place almost 35 years ago, and I suddenly realized that even I wasn’t sure what had exactly went down. I contacted (via Facebook) three people who had been there for the long haul and asked them what they remembered and what the hell happened. With a few (sometimes painful) reminders, I managed to cobble this together.

The whole thing started in 1972, and it started in my living room.

I was five, and, like most children at that age, I watched Sesame Street forty times a day. My mother used to get me up a full hour before I had to go to school just so I could get my daily fix of Oscar, Big Bird, the Count, and Gordon and Susan (haven’t you always wondered what really went on there?). As you know, each episode was “brought to you” by a certain number and letter.

It was an ordinary day (in winter, I believe), and I was up early watching muppets caper about, when suddenly a sketch began that took place in a dark alley with a full moon, illuminated only by a streetlight. Out of the darkness came a giant green W, a muppet policeman hot in pursuit—apparently the W had broken a very important law. The W, which was a lot smarter than the cop, disguised itself by turning upside down to make an M, and then tilting on its side to make an E. The sketch ended with the felt-covered police officer blowing his whistle and yelling, “Hey! Somebody stop that letter!”

In case you don't believe me, you can see it for yourself here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0iLTufp_bk&feature=related. My totally awesome friend Jason actually did the legwork and found it! Rock on, Jason. (Come on, isn't the W kind of cute?).

I didn’t know then, and I certainly don’t know now, why that particular sketch impacted me so powerfully. I had seen hundreds of Sesame Street sketches that were funnier and more clever, but for reasons beyond every inch of sanity, I became obsessed with the letter W.

And so, I was off to the races.

If you went to elementary school and junior high with me, you will no doubt remember the W Biz (as I called it), and also remember how I was treated. I have often wondered if I would have still been the school pariah if I had not shoved W down everyone’s throat, and I’m forced to admit that yes, I would have been—there was just too much else “wrong” with me to overshadow the whole W Biz.

So much has been written on the subject of bullying that I didn’t intend on mentioning it here, but as I thought about it I realized that, at age 43, I’m still very damaged from the constant teasing, ridicule, “jokes,” jeering and mockery. It is very much a part of my adult makeup. I can’t pass two people laughing at a private joke without the knee-jerk reaction of they’re laughing at me. Absolutely everything I said or did was looked upon with shame, derision, and scorn. I didn’t like the “right” music. I didn’t wear the “right” clothes. I didn’t watch the “right” television show. I was clumsy, awkward, and very bad at sports.

It did, however, prepare me for a life alone.

But my biggest crime, I think, was simply this: I didn’t give in. Not once. I’m weirdly proud of that now.

I realized very early that I was the school chump, so I figured as long as every person I came into contact with thought I was “corroded” (remember that? And the “anti-corrosion spray?” Don’t worry…I do. That was really mature, wasn’t it? Did it make you feel important to single out the weak and destroy any chance they have at any kind of self-esteem? You should be proud of yourself, and at least I know now where to send the hospital bills), I would at least give everyone a good reason to treat me like a leper.

So I formed the W Club.

It was, apparently, very easy to get a membership to the W Club—all you had to do was recite the insipid pledge at the top of the page, and learn the “secret signal.” To make the secret symbol, simply make the Peace sign with both hands. Now bring the hands together so that your fingers are making a W. Yeah, I know. Rocket science.

Of course, the W Club had its own language, which consisted of simply putting a W in front of every word. Wit was wuley wembarrassing, and not likely to give Pig Latin a run for its money.

Contingent on membership, everyone had to write “The W Book.” It wasn’t hard—just take a piece of manila paper, fold it in half, and fill it with bright colored Ws. Keep adding pages until you get caught wasting art supplies.

While all this was going on, my parents were really, really worried about me. They tried to humor me, thinking that I was going through a “phase” and would grow out of it. I didn’t. In fact I got even more manic and made up “burying dead Ws.”

This had to be seen to be believed. I would find four sticks of approximately the same size and dig a (shamefully shallow) “grave” (in the shape of a W, of course), bury the sticks, and then pray over it. In Latin.

(Did I mention the Ws had names? Oh sure they did. Sitting here, I can recall only a few of them; Wubbit, Dubbit, Wuberina, Wubberiska, Wub-Dub, and…uh…a bunch of other names that are bastardizations of W).

My teachers (with the exception of my third grade teacher, who was peri-menopausal and a huge bitch that got off on teasing me along with everyone else) tried very hard to get me to “pack away W” (poor Mrs. G.). The more I was harassed, the more gung-ho I got. There was no end in sight.

The end did finally come, and it ended as abruptly as it began. I literally woke up one morning and had no more interest in Ws. I did, however, have a great deal of interest in other things, not the least of which was regaining my self-respect.

Yeah, I know. *sigh*

I’m still working on it.

2010-04-18T01:40:00.000-07:00

Oh, Madonna SO Owes Me For This One!

“Every few years I try to re-invent myself. You know, change
my hair (laughs) I’m surprised it hasn’t fallen out by now!
I love experimenting with new music, working with really great musicians,
and learning from them. I loved doing the ‘Material Girl’ video
because I got to pay homage to Marilyn Monroe, one of my idols.
That was probably the video I had most fun doing.”

--Madonna

I advise all of you with whom I went to high school who are drinking any beverage—especially a carbonated one, to set it down, because if you laugh with beer in your mouth, it will come out your nose.

For my high school Facebook friends, I need not explain the absurdity of what is about to follow. If you didn’t attend my high school, let me try to explain what I was like. I think a bullet list will sum it up:

Glasses wearer
President of French Club (yay, Mrs. Young!), Editor-in-Chief of both the school newspaper (yay, Mr. Kruzel!) and the literary magazine (yay, Mr. Donahue!) A member of Latin Club (yay, Miss Emhoff!) typing editor of the yearbook (another kudo to Mr. Kruzel!) High honor society, President of the Thespian Society (yay, Mr. Saginario!) and God knows what else.
Wore hand-me-down clothes from my older cousins. Not cool.
Absolutely no athletic ability whatsoever (Mrs. Yuzuik was the only one to understand this)
Never saw the inside of Mr. Bates’ office.
Had 20 million words in my vocabulary and had to use them all before I could start all over again.

Yeah. That was me. A nerd, a geek, a dweeb, you name it.

Okay, now that that’s set up, we move on to the hideous embarrassment.

My high school was kind if structured pretty weird—instead of grades 9-12, it housed grades 7-12. Whoever came up with this plan deserves to be hanged from the highest yardarm. 7th &; 8th gradewas “junior high,” and 9-12 was legitimate high school.

The principal of the junior high was a nice man named Mr. Spain. Because he was in charge of discipline and I had never broken any rules, I had very little to do with him aside from passing him in the hall and saying, “hi, Mr. Spain, how’s it going?” and he’d say fine and then ask me where I was supposed to be and why wasn’t I there yet.

Mr. Spain was in charge of the junior high school graduation dinner, held at the new defunct Roosevelt café. I have to admit, he went all out; the restaurant (which sort of resembled a VFW hall) was covered in streamers and silver glitter, and I always had to suppress a laugh because it reminded me of the prom scene in Carrie.

It had long been a tradition at this banquet to have music entertainment, although absolutely no one danced. Mr. Spain, apparently not connected to any DJ’s, always asked good old Victor if his seniors who had starred in the musical that year to perform a song from the play. This worked out fine; in my junior year, I watched Joe and his cronies happily singing “Luck Be A Lady Tonight” from Guys and Dolls. Then, Joe and I did a duet of “I’ll Know When My Love Comes Along.” Neither Joe nor I had a problem with this since everyone in the audience knew these songs.

And then Victor lost his mind entirely, and for my senior year he put on The Unsinkable Molly Brown. Don’t even bother looking it up; there are no songs you will know in there. Having had the lead, I couldn’t imagine how Mr. Spain was going to get out of this one. I was soon to find out.

In spring of my senior year, Mr. Spain called me into his office. I was stunned that Mr. Cameron, my art teacher, was also there. Mr. Spain then explained to me in graphic detail what he wanted me to do. He wanted me to wear an exquisite red silk dress (from wardrobe) and sing Madonna’s “Material Girl,” while Mr. Cameron (who was also musical, it seemed), played his Casio keyboard.

I nearly hacked out a lung, then stared at Mr. Spain as if someone has spiked his coffee with LSD. Mr. Cameron was new to my high school, so he didn’t know my reputation of being the one everyone bullied and made fun of and teased. I tried to reason with Mr. Spain, reminding him of who I was (after all, he’d known me six years), and that there was no way in hell anyone would buy someone with my face and my body doing a Madonna cover. I was the one everyone in school reviled. I explained that his fancy banquet would be ruined by catcalls, laughter, and possibly thrown baked potatoes.

Mr. Spain, who saw he was being cornered by logic, reluctantly agreed, and asked if would consider it if I had two boys dressed in tuxedos flanking me, just like Madonna did in the video. He was so desperate that I finally relented (I figured they could block the potatoes). Mr. Cameron and I began practicing after art class (I had study hall the next period, and was excused), and eventually the tuxedo guys (underclassmen) showed up. As they both had the same first name, I’ll call them Thing One and Thing Two.

The red silk dress had been custom-made for me in New York, and, dripping with diamonds, everyone said I looked great. It also cost Victor a small mint. Thing One and Thing Two were so excited that they, as a sophomore and freshman respectively, got a chance to strut their stuff they paid no attention to the amount of Valium I was taking.

Now, I had two things working in my favor:

1) I had a superbly trained voice from all those years in theatre, and could reach from first soprano to low alto. Madonna sings a combination of mezzo-soprano and first alto, so I had no trouble with her notes.

2) By the time I, Thing One and Thing Two, got around to performing (during dessert) all the parents of the graduating 8th graders were so sloshed that I could have performed Camper van Beethoven’s “Take The Skinheads Bowling” and they wouldn’t have known the difference.

Thing One and Thing Two stood peering out of the curtain (rookie mistake—didn’t it dawn on them that if they could see the audience they could see them? And finally, my moment of truth came—Mr. Spain went up to the microphone and deftly said that instead of a ballad from the music, BeowulfGirl would be performing a hit rock and roll song. I prayed desperately for a meteor strike.

I honestly don’t know how I did it. Yes, there were catcalls and smart-ass remarks. My parents were there, sitting at the same table as Thing One and Thing Two’s families. Mr. Cameron grooved on his Casio. There was nothing to do but to try to become Madonna.

Thank God for Thing One and Thing Two—they mugged so dramatically that I happily let them take over. It seemed to last for days. Finally, it was time to promenade back stage.

While explaining my woes to my friend Sue the next day, she gave me a clap on the back and said, “well, it could be worse. Mr. Spain might have asked you to do a Joan Jett song!”

Oh, the horror…

2010-03-28T03:47:00.000-07:00

Holiday Road

CASINO PIT BOSS: Sir, we have reason to believe you’re cheating.

PATRICK JANE: I’m not cheating, I’m just memorizing the cards.

FRUSTRATED CASINO PIT BOSS: Well…well…well, we don’t like people to do that!

--"The Mentalist"

There is a wonderful writer named Mark Clayton who wrote a wonderful essay entitled “A Whole Lot Of Cheatin’ Going On.” This essay exists in a textbook titled The Presence of Others, and since I’m in bed on my laptop and it’s 5:30am, I’m not going to haul myself up and do the citation in correct MLA format.

In this essay, Mr. Clayton discovered that over 80% of college students have admitted to cheating (or plagiarizing) in one form or another in high school and college. And now your mind is going to have to corner like a Lamborghini because I’m going to talk about religion.

For my Facebook Friends, you will see on my profile that under “Religion” I have written “Zero Sum Theologist,” which is a term my most erudite, eloquent and elocutionary British friend Mark suggested. Zero Sum Theology is ridiculously simple. It’s basically the theory that the universe has to maintain balance at all times or it will cease to exist. (Mark didn’t come up with that part—he isn’t quite as insane as I am). Some people call this “karma,” or, as we say in New Jersey, “payback’s a bitch.” Now get ready to corner again because now I’m switching to expensive, high-end electronics.

Machines, in all their forms, see me coming a mile away. Because they cannot move, they can’t make a run for it, which they should if they see me there. The things I most often destroy are copy machines and printers. Usually, the way to get them to work again is “smacking and pounding.” If this doesn’t work, “taking off the back” is a close second.

The more expensive and complicated an electronic device is, the more likely I am to futz it up. In the 1980’s I went through three Walkmans. Computers laugh as they give me the blue screen of death. My iPod has a mind of it’s own. VCRs and DVD players just keep spitting out what I try to put in there. My cousin Annemarie is trying to get me set up with a digital camera, but I know that somehow I’ll burn the lens (and my retinas) out.

My father is a retired engineer, and cannot comprehend why I have this affliction. All he knows is when I go to purchase something very fancy and costly, I get the highest maintenance agreement possible because I know that in a week I’ll be dragging the confounded thing back to the store.

And earlier this week it hit me. All the planets aligned in perfect symmetry. Cheating. Zero Sum Theology. Electronic kryptonite.

Ready to take a journey back in time? Those of you with whom I went to high school with laugh so hard you’ll cough up your own skull.

When I was in the seventh and eighth grade, everybody was required to take shop. I didn’t want to take shop. I knew, even then, that I wanted to be an English teacher of some sort and that knowing how to use a precision grinder, spot welder, coping saw, or a drill press wouldn’t be necessary skills. But I did know that I had to get good grades in shop, otherwise my GPA would tank, I wouldn’t get to be valedictorian six years later, never get into college, be unable to get a job, be disowned by my parents, and die. Alone. On the sidewalk. In a box.

My shop teachers were kind to me, grade-wise. I started electricity shop with good intentions. The teacher was a middle-aged, soft-spoken African American man named Mr. George Holiday, who, thank God, gave out books. Books I could do. I learned all about amps, volts, watts, and joules. There was practical work, too (I was especially fond of soldering). And then he announced that we would all make…a motor.

A motor? Like in a car? Was he insane?

He gave us all the parts, which I vaguely recall being a D-cell battery, some copper wiring to wind around the armature, a bolt or two, and what looked like scrap iron. Passing the class was contingent upon the motor working.

Six weeks into it, I knew I couldn’t do it. I followed Mr. Holiday’s instructions. I looked at the pictures in the book. I asked the guy next to me for help. I couldn’t get that motor stared for a billion dollars. So I decided to do the only thing that would prevent me from dying alone in a box.

I decided to cheat.

One afternoon after electricity shop was over, I pretended to put my little motor back into my locker, but sneaked it into my purse instead. And I took it home, in tears, and gave it to my father. The engineer.

He took one look at it, tried not to laugh, touched two wires together, did something with a soldering iron and maybe a glue gun and within five minutes, the motor was whirring along prettily.

I stuck it back in my purse. The following day, I showed up for school a half hour early, and luck was with me! The electricity shop room was open and unmanned by Mr. Holiday!

I shoved “my” motor in my locker, and proceeded along to Social Studies with Mr. Toci.

When it was time for shop, I sauntered—well, okay, swaggered—into the room with the rest of the class, headed for my locker, and got out the motor for inspection. This was it! If it worked today, I would pass the class!

Mr. Holiday walked up and down the aisles, appraising each aspiring Thomas Alva Edison’s motor. He got to me and he already had a hangdog look. He knew he was going to have to fail me, and it was killing him.

When I touched those two wires and the motor turned on, I honestly thought Mr. Holiday (who I prayed didn’t have a pacemaker) was going to have an apoplectic attack. His eyes got as wide as ping-pong balls. His jaw dropped and his upper dentures clicked. The expression on his face was of one who was actually seeing Jesus.

And he said to me, “Oh, dear Lord. I can’t believe this. This motor is going in the Project Hall Of Fame!” He was so proud of me. I passed with a very respectable 3.3, and (seriously) never, ever cheated again. If you went to high school with me, you probably suspect that I didn’t have to.

Years went by. (This is the part where the screen gets all wavy).

Going back to earlier in the week, I suddenly had the revelation. The reason I have had nothing but bad luck with electrical appliances for my entire life is because I cheated in electricity shop! Zero Sum Theology! All I had to do (according to the voices in my head) was find Mr. Holiday, wherever he was, and tell him what I had done and apologize for it. If he gave me absolution, maybe I would be able to get the remote for my plasma TV to work!

I immediately jumped on Facebook and shot a message to Mrs. Yuzuik, the most awesome Physical Education teacher I have ever had (and she remembered me!). I asked her if she knew the whereabouts of Mr. Holiday.

Well, you can see what’s coming.

Yes. Sadly, Mr. Holiday died recently, so therefore I couldn’t apologize to him. But I vowed to do the next best thing. Write out my confession, blog it, and post the link on Facebook so everyone in the world will know.

And maybe now I can get. . . a cell phone!

N.B. The font is all funky and weird here on my Dashboard--I apologize if it looks weird in the blog.

2009-12-21T22:03:00.000-08:00

CUL8RQT!

CBS REPORTER: Mr. President, what is your plan to stop the war?

FORMER PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: Strategery.

This is an essay about how text-messaging is turning us into a nation of illiterates. And one of the illiterates is, in about thirty years, going to become President of the United States.

I voted for Barack Obama for two main reasons:

1. I was terrified that one night John McCain’s mind would snap and we’d be suddenly in a nuclear war. Do I respect him? Absolutely. Do I think he’s a brave, courageous man who went through hell and came out alive? Without a doubt. Am I proud of what he did for our country? No question about it. Do I trust him as Commander In Chief of our Armed Forces? Not as far as I could sling a piano.

2. Obama is the best public speaker I’ve seen since Clinton. Actually, he’s better than Clinton. He’s smooth, articulate, makes excellent eye contact, appears authoritative without being overbearing, is both calm and passionate at the same time, and believable. Yes, of course I know he doesn’t write his own material, but you can tell he has a lot of hands-on experience with his speechwriting team.

What does all of this have to do with text-messaging? Well, take a moment. I want all of you right now to try to think of five people you know who do not own a cell phone. You can’t do it, can you? (No, your Mad Uncle Renwick who lives on the Arctic Circle doesn’t count). Heck, I’ll even give you a freebie—me. I don’t even have Caller ID. I do get free unlimited long distance, though.

Now, before you think I’m some kind of neo-Luddite, I will disclose my drug of choice—the internet. God, do I love the internet. If I had more than three friends, I’d e-mail all day long. I can’t go for 4 hours without looking up something on Google or Mapquest or Wikipedia, and when I was dragged kicking and screaming onto Facebook I would stay there for days if my dad didn’t need me to go food shopping.

I absolutely love Dictionary.com because, even though I own over a dozen dictionaries in print, Dictionary.com is updated daily; for example, my most recently printed dictionary doesn’t have the words “internet” or “website” and the definition for “browsing” merely delineates wandering aimlessly through a store.

But then came text-messaging. And the bastard children of text-messaging, “leetspeak,” “netspeak” and “chatspeak.” Now, I understand that texting costs money per character typed, but here’s the logic I could never wrap my mind around.

1. Let’s pretend I have a cell phone. I am supposed to meet my cousin Annemarie for lunch.

2. Annemarie is running late. She has a cell phone.

If I have a phone, and Annemarie has a phone, why can’t she just call me (which is actually cheaper than texting)? We could quickly make alternate plans, hang up, and be done with it.

But the worst thing that text-messaging has done is its effects on my college students. I have been an English professor for over a dozen years, and every year as texting becomes more and more “indispensible” to the 18-22 year-old sect, their actual vocabularies in the English language decrease.

I am literally stunned, each term, when I receive formal academic essays, the rules and etiquette I have gone over for copiously (complete with handouts) with the numerals “4” instead of “for” or “u” instead of “you” and “r” instead of “are” and “8” instead of “ate.” Folks, here is the golden rule:

Unless you are Prince, you cannot use numbers for words.

(I am deliberately omitting Van Halen’s OU812 and INXS’s whole name because those are just clever. The e-mails—real, actually, completely un-futzed with e-mails, came from sophomore college students to me. Their professor. Their English professor.

Whenever I write a short (two or three sentences) e-mail to my department Chair, it takes me half an hour. Do I have everything punctuated correctly? Did I run it through Spell Check nine times? Am I sure that word means what I think it means? I sweat, chatter my teeth, and almost chew my acrylics off.

But go ahead—see for yourself:

Example One:

hey professor how are you doing I been fighting a crappy cold that
has been draining me I couldnt get out of bed today Im very sorry for
being absent I go to doctor tomorrow here is my paper you have a
good one Peace

(Schmo’s name)

Wow. Barely any punctuation and no capitalization at the beginning. Great.

Example Two:

sorry that i didnt make it to class earlier today, i was on my way
here and there was a 3 car accident right in front of me and i was
stuck in the middle of the road for like 45 minutes. by the time i got
to the college it was 9am already and it was pointless to come to
class. once again im sorry for this but i wil be attending on thursday.

This one was unsigned, so I have no idea whose it is. I guess he thinks I'm like Patrick Jane on "The Mentalist." No capitalization or punctuation at all.

Example Three:

Hello Ms. BeowulfGirl

Hi Mr. Nigroc

I'm just letting you know that I won't be able to make it to class tomorrow ( 9:30 am /tue). My son and I were in a car accident today and my car was towed and is un drivable. I will bring u a copy of the accident report when it's ready. Hopefully by tomorrow. Please let me know if there is anything you would like done for Thursday's class.

Thank you,

(Whole name)

(“Street” name)

Ooooookay. First of all—Ms. BeowulfGirl? Sweetie, I spent seven years and tens of thousands of dollars to earn the title of “Professor,” you are going to damn well going to use it. Also, this person apparently also thinks I’m “Mr. Nigroc,” whoever he is. Did you catch the “u” for “you?” And the signing with the street moniker was actually kind of considerate, really.

Example Four:

Here is that paper that you started grading today in class, my cell
phone number is ###-#### give me a call, if i dont pick up its
either because im in class or im driving, leave a message and as soon
as i get the chance i will call back..

(Guy’s name)

He never did call back, and since he submitted the paper in a program I can’t open, he ended up with a zero. Again, no punctuation—even on “I” for God’s sake. Are we really that lazy? That we can’t hit the Shift key along with the letter?

Example Five:

Hey beowulfgirl I came to class late Tuesday I was sick and I missed my 8am class but I dragged myself there by 945 to walk into ur class 15 mins late to find no one there lol I walked around aimlessly for like 10 mins till I saw Julie and she told me that almost no one showed up I wanted you to kno I had my rough draft for you cuz I couldn’t find a 07 issued of word sorry, also I will also have to try email u my “lie” paper cause I need to get printer ink tomorrow so you will have it asap tomorrow after class again very sorry for just missin you Tuesday.

Wow. Again…”Hey beowulfgirl?” See previous paragraph on correct use of my title—this clown is not my best friend. I challenged this guy to actually read aloud this missive exactly as he wrote it—with absolutely no pauses or punctuation—without running out of breath. He couldn’t do it. Neither could the other five brave souls that tried. I also find the juxtaposition of “cuz” and “cause” rather quaint, along with the omnipresent “u.”

This one, though, is my absolute favorite:

Example Six:

Hi proffessr Bayowolfgurl,, IWill not be in class today becase I have to go to Wal-Mart to buy a strapless braw for my bridesmaids gown1

Wow, there’s so much wrong here I don’t even know where to start. Aside from the mangling of the word “Professor,” this chick doesn’t even know how to spell my name (which is very, very common and easy) after fourteen weeks. But what horrifies me the most is that a 21 year old woman doesn’t know how to spell “bra.”

And to think that when some child-burdened person has the nerve to badger me for remaining blissfully childfree for life, their first whine is always “but chyyyyyldrennnn are our fyooooture.”

Not my future. Not these children, you dumb bint. Better check Harvard or Yale or Oxford.

And take away their damn cell phones.

Next Time: My Past Career As A Fag Hag

2009-09-26T10:37:00.000-07:00

Where Does The Aspirator Go Again?

"There's nothing more dangerous than a resourceful idiot." -- Dilbert

Yes, I did e-mail this telephone exchange to several people because it was just too good to keep to myself. Finally, it was my eloquent and dangerously persuasive friend Sebastian who convinced me to blog it because he felt it was unjust to deprive the world of this individual's raging idiocy.

Because of the nature of my profession, I am (thank God) largely surrounded by insanely smart and can discuss any number of subjects with grace and aplomb. Sometimes there is a "coming down period" in which I slowly crank up my brain to "Mensa might not actually laugh, but..."

And now, let us begin our story.

As you have no doubt gathered, I have this. . . well…extremely stupid friend. This friend has somehow managed to get through about 40 years of life relatively unscathed, aside from some rather common personal drama, such as marital troubles and job difficulties (the most common of which is that he can't maintain one). This friend somehow found me on Facebook, and because this person is more or less illiterate, they asked me to phone them instead of writing.

While I babbled on about my life and this insipid individual grunted about theirs, we got into a discussion about the recent passing of Michael Jackson and how we had first heard the sad news. The following, thanks to my phonographic memory, is a more or less verbatim transcript of that conversation:

ME: Isn’t it sad about Michael Jackson?

STUPID FRIEND: (tries to remember who Michael Jackson is) Uh—yeah.

ME: Man, remember him in the mid-80’s, before he got all weird on us? We thought he could walk on water. Hey—how did you find out that he had died?

SF: I think my dad told me.

ME: Your dad lives in [another state].

SF: Oh, wait…it was [guy who used to hang around with us who is now serving a life sentence for capital murder; no, I am not kidding]. Why…how did you find out?

ME: I was on the phone with my friend Mark, actually. The news was on TV but muted, and the caption said something about Michael Jackson being dead and I was so stunned I said it out loud, and Mark confirmed it.

SF: (long pause to process complex sentence) Who’s Mark?

ME: You don’t know him. He lives in England.

SF: Oh, well, that explains it, then.

ME: Explains what?

SF: Well, if your friend lives in England, of course he’d know about Michael Jackson being dead before you because he’d have been dead longer for him than for you.

ME: Um…what?

SF: (sighs in frustration) England is what…nine, ten hours behind us?

ME: No, five hours ahead.

SF: Okay, so then, Michael Jackson would have been dead five hours earlier for your friend, therefore giving him five more hours to find out about it than you.

ME: But…no…listen, [Stupid Friend], where you live in the world doesn’t affect when Michael Jackson actually died. Mark just happened to hear about it before I did because he actually listens to the news and I don’t.

SF: No, no…if Mark lives five hours away, Michael Jackson was dead five hours for him before he died for you.

ME: (weirdly understanding the twisted logic, but unable to mount a defense against it because my mind doesn’t work like this) Okay…wait…first of all, Mark doesn’t live five hours away, he lives five time zones away. Second, using your logic, Michael Jackson died twice – once for Mark, and once for me.

SF: I didn’t say he died twice…I said he was dead longer for Mark than for you.

ME: Well, again, applying your twisted logic, Michael Jackson actually died twenty-four different times; one for each time zone.

SF: (pause) Is that possible?

ME: (slightly freaking out) [Stupid Friend], will you shut up and listen? The Earth rotates on its axis once every twenty-four hours. It is therefore impossible for it to be the same time everywhere in the world at the same time. It would be chaos.

SF: I think it would be easier, actually.

ME: For you, yes, no doubt. But for the rest of us, to avoid confusion, time zones were created. We begin with Greenwich Mean Time—which is where Mark is, coincidentally—and move across—

SF: But what about the Jews?

ME: (confused) Jews? What about them?

SF: How long has Michael Jackson been dead for the Jews?

ME: Well…I don’t get why you think he’d be dead for a different length of time for Jews, especially, but it’s the same thing—If these fictional Jews live in our time zone, Michael Jackson would have been declared dead at [I honestly don’t remember when it became “official” in my time zone, so I’m just going to pick an arbitrary time] 5:00pm.

SF: But isn’t it the year 5000 and something for them?

ME: (screams) What in the name of God does that have to with when Michael Jackson died?

SF: Well, wouldn’t that be the date and time for them, in their newspapers and stuff?

ME: (hardly able to follow at this point) What…what…look, for American Jews, or really any Jews other than maybe Hassidic Jews, I—why are we talking about the Jews? We’re talking about Michael Jackson!!!

SF: (reverently) Yeah, he was pretty awesome, wasn’t he?

ME: AAARRGGGHH!

I either completely blacked out at this point or am suffering anterior grade amnesia because the next thing I knew I was writing this.

So the next time you fly through multiple time zones, just think for a moment how many times Michael Jackson had to die for YOU! Get off the cross, Michael--We need the wood.

2009-08-27T16:37:00.000-07:00

What Must That Feel Like?

“Time slips away, mister,
And leaves you with nothing but
Boring stories of glory days.”

--Bruce Springsteen

Yes, I know. This was supposed to be about the three people who helped me through my mother’s slow, horrible, 114-day deathwatch, but every time I tried to start it it either ended up eleven pages long or went so hopelessly off topic that I finally took the hint my psyche was trying to tell me and decided to put it off. However, I did want to write my blog, so I’ve decided to babble about a certain humbling feeling I get when I see certain people doing certain things. Allow me to be more clear.

Regular readers of my blog probably can agree that I’ve seen and experienced some pretty extraordinary and downright weird things. However, there is nothing (and I must stress this) there is really nothing outstanding about myself. Yes, I’m smarter than the average bear and I sometimes have an uncanny ability to sense when something is horribly wrong with people between the ages of 18 and 22, but other than that, God didn’t deal me many aces.

It is because of this that I so often see a truly extraordinarily person do something amazing, and I sit in my den, stare at the TV, and say in complete wonder; “Oh my God…what must that feel like?” I shall now give examples—maybe you have thought about them, too.

President of the United States Example

The first president I remember is Richard M. Nixon, and the first thing I remember him doing was resigning on television. My mom and I were cuddling in her bed (God, I miss that) and although I understood only about a third of what President Nixon was saying, I could sense something bad was happening. I asked my mom what was going on.

I was a bright kid, but not bright enough to grasp the concept of Watergate at age five, so my mother just explained that the president had lied. Well, that I understood—I knew lying was a very, very bad thing, and the fact that the president had done it to the whole country—well, that was unconscionable.

Later that night, I went up to my mother and asked, “Mommy, was President Nixon making that up as he went along?” (This seemed perfectly reasonable to me; after all, I told myself elaborate stories every day). My mom said no, and explained that he had a team of people to write his speeches for him. (I think a five-year old’s equivalent of “what an illiterate clod” went through my mind at this point).

It didn’t hit me until President Clinton’s first inaugural address. I was watching it with my friends and suddenly my mind drifted from what Clinton was actually saying to this:

“This is the most powerful man in the world. And someone—unseen and uncredited—wrote his words. What is it like to hear your words come out of the mouth of the person who could change the world? What must that feel like?”

I was fascinated by this. And then, of course, we had Bush, whose speechwriters must have gone through about eleven thousand bottles of Excedrin.

Billy Joel Example

My cousin Annemarie just went to a Billy Joel concert, and I’m extremely jealous. I’ve been a huge Billy fan since junior high, yet have never seen him live. In 1990, he was performing at Yankee Stadium. I was all set—I rounded up a group of fellow Billy fans, saved my money, and…and…my best friend chose that day to get married.

I was disappointed, but happily, MTV aired the concert several months later so I was at least able to watch it on television. The whole show was awesome, and of course one of his encore songs was “Piano Man.”

Billy took his harmonica and played the opening notes. The crowd went wild. He began singing the first verse, but soon realized something; he was being drown out by the crowd. By the time he got to the first chorus, no one could hear Billy at all, even with his microphone. He got a very amused look on his face, shrugged his shoulders in a sort of “okay, whatever” way, and held out the microphone toward the audience, which was entirely on its feet, swaying and singing.

Yankee Stadium holds over 52,000 people. I cannot even conceive of that many people packed into one venue. And all of them—every single one of them—was singing the song he wrote to him. I sat on the sofa, gaping. And again, all I could think of was: “Oh my God…what must that feel like?”

Billy got a big kick out of it. I’d have fainted.

Michael Phelps Example

I enjoy the Olympics even though I have absolutely no sporting ability whatsoever. I admire athletes because they possess the discipline to make their bodies do whatever they want. I just eat a lot of potato chips.

As you all know, this year, the untouchable star was Michael Phelps. As he is very young, I’m not sure if he grasps the enormity of what he did. But I do, and I’m not talking about the fact he won eight freakin’ gold medals—I just want to talk about one; for any sport, for any Olympic athlete.

Whenever an American athlete wins an Olympic gold medal, I am incapable of sitting through the medal ceremony without bursting into tears at the playing of our national anthem, especially if the athlete her/himself begins crying (which they usually do).

I sit there, staring, astounded first at the words. “In the gold medal position, representing the United States of America…” and begin to shiver. I can’t even imagine what it must feel like to hear your name after those words. Then, of course, they clanked another gold medal around Michael Phelps’ neck, and began playing our national anthem and raising our flag.

And I felt so…insignificant. And again, in my imagination: “I’m representing my entire country. Billions of people are watching this. That flag is being raised for me. Our anthem is being played for me. My God, what must that feel like?”

Queen of England Example

Being only 42, Queen Elizabeth II is the only reigning monarch of the United Kingdom I have ever known, and I suspect I will feel quite weird when I have to start saying “King Charles.” However, what fascinated me most about Queen Elizabeth is the fact that whenever she attends a public event, everyone stands and sings “God Save The Queen.” I can’t even imagine what it must feel like to have that happen every time I went somewhere.

I have a very loving and devoted British friend to whom I once posed the question, “how do you think the queen feels hearing ‘God Save The Queen’ every time she goes to an official event?” My friend, whose sense of humor is only slightly more skewed than mine, quirked: “I imagine she’s pretty sick of it by now.”

Michael Jackson Example:

The last time I had my nails done by the angry Vietnamese woman, Michael Jackson had just tragically passed. They have a large plasma TV in the salon, which was showing a Michael Jackson concert (It was the Dangerous tour). However, the cameras didn’t seem too interested in Michael himself—what they kept showing was the crowd, which of course was made overwhelmingly of young people.

I don’t know what the venue was, but Michael was fantastic and the special effects were overwhelming. But I kept staring at the crowd. People (mostly girls) were screaming his name, sobbing hysterically, flailing, and at least four girls passed out and had to be dragged out by security. I have always found the concept of crowd hysteria to be fascinating (I wish Paul McCartney would return my call and explain it), but all I could think of was, “one man is causing absolute hysteria in tens of thousands of people. What must that feel like?”

BeowulfGirl Example:

Two terms ago, I had a shy, brilliant student I’ll call Ellen. On the first day of class, I asked (as always) what my students’ career goals were. Ellen said she would like to become a lawyer. I told her that was a fine choice and wished her luck.

Fifteen weeks later, after the last day of class, Ellen lingered. I asked if she was all right and she told me, with an odd tone that she no longer had any intention of becoming a lawyer, but a college English professor. Horrified, I told her she’d make ten times less than if she became an attorney. Here is here response:

“But I chose it because of you, Professor BeowulfGirl. You changed my life. You change everyone’s life. Can I ask you something?”

Somewhat shaken I said, “sure.”

With a profound, idolatrous look, and asked: “What does it feel like?”

And my world. . . shifted.

2009-07-13T04:29:00.000-07:00

The Mother And Child Reunion Is Only a Motion Away

“Salve Regina, mater misericordiae. Vita dulcedo es pes nostra, salve, salve regina. Ad te teclamamus, exules fillir heavae, ad te sepstumatis gementes, et flentis, o clemens o pia.”
--Traditional Catholic prayer

“Doctor, doctor, will I die?
Yes, my child, and so will I.”
--Anonymous

My mother died two months ago.

For my entire life, I’ve looked with a sort of wonderment at people whose parents are deceased because all I could think was: “They’ve been through it. They’ve been through the worst thing that I can imagine and they’re still functioning. How do you do that? It would kill me if one of my parents died.”

She was in the hospice for 114 days, admitted with serious pneumonia. But she was terrified that if she went to the hospital, she would get wore pneumonia and die.

She did not leave her bed to do anything except use the bathroom and get the occasional snack. She was 20 pounds underweight—101 pounds at 5’%”. She was so weak she couldn’t feed herself.

Finally, I snapped. “Mom, you are a 76 woman with a 60 year smoking habit that has ravished your lungs. You are technically anorexic. You cannot ride out bronchial pneumonia with Tylenol and Mucinex! You need a doctor! You need antibiotics!”

Long story short, she ended up going to the hospital. And she did die there.

Once they confirmed the pneumonia, they discovered a whole hoard of other life threatening diseases such as:

--pleural effusions
--cancer (we already knew that one)
--congestive heart failure
--sepsis
--severe kidney failure
--ischemic strokes
--severe edema
--unexplained rectal bleeding

I knew, on day four, she was never walking out of that place. No amount of prayers, no amount of rosaries, no amount of get well cards was going to do it. And all I could do was look at her, swollen with edema, her eyes sometimes recognizing me and say, “why did you do this, God? She had mental problems but was far from evil. I’m the bad one in the family. It should have been me. It should have been me!

Imagine having to watch your own mother on her deathbed for five horrible terrifying months, most of which she didn’t know me Pretty awful right? Now imagine that when you have Borderline Personality Disorder (very first diagnostic criteria: “Irrational fear of imagined or realistic abandonment.” That’s probably worse, right?

Now imagine how it felt go to through that completely alone.

My father is emotionally neutral. Mom died on April 24th and he is absolutely astonished that I’m not “over it” yet. Well, I’m sorry, I’m not. I haven’t found my emotion switch, Dad. I kept reminding him that when his mom passed (he was 28), he had an older brother, a father, two sisters, all their husbands and wives, his Navy buddie, and, oh yeah, a frigging spouse! I HAD NO ONE!

My mother was not always loving, She found my weak spots early on and she played into those fear. (What’s that line from The Wall? “Mother’s gonna make all your nightmares come true / Mother’s gonna put all of her fears into you.” And she did. She made me paranoid. She had a one-way intercom installed in my bedroom just so could hear what was “going on up there.” (With a female friend?) .She blatantly admitted to reading my journals, which is how she a She is largely responsible for my own mental illness.
Oh, yes, the psychiatrist gave me a little extra chemical help, but

But there were so wonderful things about her. I can hear her voice so clearly it’s scary. I break down when I smell her perfume. We would watch movies from the 1940’s and it was she who made me fall in love with Cary Grant and Gary Cooper and Gregory Peck. We traded books we knew the other would like—and we always did.

She taught me how to knit, just for fun. Even though she hated sewing machines, it just look so neat that she taught me, too. We played games, horsing around on the floor, then my dad would come in and then all three of us would start roughhousing and it would be…love.

She taught me how to wear makeup. She taught me how to pluck my eyebrows, shave my legs, and of course when it came time for the sex talk, she was stellar. She had charts. And audio-visual aids. And she loved to play dress up, and bride and groom, and game show.

My absolute favorite thing she used to do, though, was whenever I was upset, she would make me lie my head down on her lap and stroke my hair with such love and she smelled so good, but weirdly rarely wore perfume. And it was so comforting and so loving and tender that it almost was like being part of her body again or something and now..

and now…

and now…

I’ll never feel that again! Her gentle, warm fingers with those long nails will never make me feel better again. The very last words she spoke to me were, "it'll be okay," and then she started yanking on my long hair. I was confused, but then I realized what she wanted and I laid my head on her hospital bed in her lap and she gingerly started stroking my hair. I sobbed and sobbed. Even on her deathbed her FINAL THOUGHT was to COMFORT ME.

Get over it in three months? If something funny or weird happens in class my very first thought is, “Oh, I have to tell this to Mom right now!” If my department Chair gives me a merit raise or a commendation, my knee-jerk reaction is “I can’t wait to tell Mom!” I once so far as to borrow a cell-phone from a student and start to dial.

If something bad happens I have no one in whose arms to cry. My father tries hard, God love him, but he so obviously hates physical contact that our “hug” is about two feet apart.

Did I mention he’s got lung cancer?

Next time: The Powers That Be send three people into my life to help me.

2009-02-02T20:44:00.000-08:00

And So It Goes, And So It Goes, And So Will You, Soon, I Suppose

“I only wanted to talk to you one last time
not to change your mind,
but just to say I’ll miss you, baby,
good luck, good-bye, Bobby-Jean.”
--Bruce Springsteen

Friendship is important to me.

The reason friendship is so important to me is that when I was younger (up until about my mid-twenties), I really didn’t have any friends. I had buddies, pals, work and school colleagues, but no real friends, no one I could share secrets with, or go places with, or just hang out with when I had no money (which was often the case.)

Regular readers of the BeowulfBlog (all four of you) may have noticed that the vast majority of my entries begin with phrases like; “I once had a friend who…” or “I used to know this guy who…” or “Years ago, my friends and I…” The reason for this is simple—I am once again pretty much alone.

Don’t get me wrong…I know people. I talk to people. I have people in my department with whom I do social things, but there’s nobody I can really talk to except for good old Andrew in California, and my favorite cousin, with whom I am getting very close. As a result of this, I spend a lot of time online, and therefore, the vast majority of my “friends” are found there.

The problem is, though, whenever someone does make a friendly overture toward me, I get so excited at the prospect of having an actual live, in-person friend that I get all obsessed about the friendship and tend to analyze every aspect of it. Now, this is not to say that I play and replay their voice-mail messages like the Zapruder film, but I am somewhat “clingy.” If I haven’t heard from, say, Sue in a few days, instead of asking myself, “I wonder what Sue’s up to?” I am more likely to think, “what did I do that Sue is avoiding me?”

Also, for some reason yet to be explained, people keep…well, they keep leaving me. It began about ten years ago when three of my best friends (who were in my wedding) simply told me, point blank, that they didn’t have room in their lives for me anymore; that I was too “intense” and too “high maintenance” a friend. I understood. I was heartbroken, and I miss them every day, but I understood. It had been that way all my life--I was "the weird kid," so I was ostracized. Then of course my husband left me and that pretty much sealed the deal on my end—something was obviously wrong with me.

I decided it would be emotionally safer to make friends online, and for a while it seemed to work. I made two very close friends in other states (Alan and Jessica, respectively), but those friendships just sort of petered out naturally, and I wasn’t really hurt by them.

Which brings us to Meg.

Meg is not her real name, but I like the name Meg, and I’ve decided to call her that. Meg and I “met” on a message board for a TV show that we both liked about four years ago. We instantly hit it off in the forums, and before we knew it, we had taken it to e-mail, and we e-mailed like crazy for the next three years. I’m talking long, involved, profound e-mails, in which we divulged secrets, hopes and dreams, and most of all…most important of all…she made me laugh. It may surprise some of my readers to learn that, despite the humorous tone of my blog, I really don’t have very much joy in my life. In fact, most of the time I feel very empty and alone. When I would open my in-box and see a message from Meg, it absolutely delighted me. It made my whole freakin’ day.

Although we never talked on the phone, we exchanged lots of pictures and I felt—strongly—that our relationship was growing into a real “friendship” rather than “e-mail buddies.” I knew, of course, that she had other things going on in her life—other friends, her job, her family, her hobbies and interests. But I didn’t have any of that. Aside from Andrew and the aforementioned cousin, Meg was the only one I could really open up to over e-mail. Although there was a significant gap in our ages (she was about 12 years younger), I never once felt ware of that--and she was so amazingly articulate and eloquent that she made the perfect correspondent for an English professor. She was bright, witty, funny, loyal, (and extremely beautiful).

And then it started to happen. Like it always does.

Her life somehow got “busier,” and she wrote to me asking if we could write shorter e-mails from now on. I was totally on board with that—I would much rather have shorter, more frequent messages from her than to have to wait days and days for her to construct one of our usual missives. Besides, with the easy schedule of a college professor, I could roll with it. So I said of course, let’s go for it.

That lasted for about two months. Her e-mails began to come so infrequently that I actually had to save up all the things that had been happening to me in the meantime, then felt guilty because I had to send her a “long” e-mail, which she clearly didn’t want.

Now in the past when this happened (when one of us didn’t get back to the other right away) we would send each other a quick friendly message—simply with the subject line of *waves* and the message reading, “pop in when you have a chance, will you?” And that would be all. This method worked fine for years. However, about a year ago when I sent her one of these friendly shout-outs, I got a very snappish response saying, “I am perfectly aware of when I owe you an e-mail. I don’t need your little reminders.”

Um…okay. That shut me up for about two weeks. But did I take the hint? No, of course not. After all, we were friends, right? Right?

It started to go downhill from there.

Halloween came, her favorite holiday. I wrote to her asking her what she dressed as. No answer.

Two weeks later was her birthday. I sent her an e-card and a note asking how she had celebrated. No answer.

Thanksgiving came. I wrote asking her how her dinner had been with her family. No answer.

Christmas came. I wrote to wish her a Merry Christmas. No answer.

And still…still I refused to admit what was right in front of me. She wanted out. She was trying, gracefully and delicately and with extreme diplomacy to solve “the BeowulfGirl problem,” and I wasn’t letting her because I was so selfish that I wanted her friendship—contact with her, any way I could get it. So I kept torturing myself by e-mailing her, then for the following three days running to my computer every hour to see if she’d written back.

About three months before all the unanswered holiday-related e-mails, I got what I refer to as “the penultimate e-mail,” meaning that I knew—somehow I knew that this would be the second to last time I would ever hear from her. She wrote a beautiful letter about how she needed to concentrate on her “real life friends,” and that stopped me cold.

“Real life friends?” After four years of writing extremely intimate things about our lives, did I still not count as a real-life friend? She and I told each other things we had never told our “real life” best friends, our parents, our psychiatrists…nobody. We spent literally hours every week writing to each other—yet I still wasn’t close enough to count as a “real life friend.” Was there some sort of trial period I wasn’t aware of?

Still shaking and confused, I continued to read the e-mail (which I really must emphasize was so elegantly written) until I got to this sentence: “The nature of our relationship (pen-pals, basically) dictates that…”

That’s as far as I got. My eyes wouldn’t move beyond those three words. “Pen pals, basically.”
I couldn’t wrap my mind around the concept that that was all she considered us to be. With those three words, she managed to devalue our entire friendship (excuse me, “relationship”) to the level of an assignment for a high school French class.

I was reading this e-mail in my office at Very Serious University when a colleague (I’m frankly too terrified to call anyone a “friend” at this point since people seem to bolt whenever I use the word) passed my door, noticed the look of horror on my face and asked what my problem was.

“I think…I think my best e-mail friend is breaking up with me,” I said, kind of bewildered.

Somehow (I don’t remember how) I crafted a response which wasn’t nearly as expressive as hers and waited. I didn’t have to wait long.

What arrived a few days later was, without a doubt, the most beautifully written ending-a-friendship letter I’ve ever received (and I’ve received several). I won’t quote it here out of respect for her privacy, but it was so overwhelmingly eloquent that I immediately wrote back requesting a few days grace because she deserved an answer as carefully written as her letter had been.

Oddly, the same colleague who had read "the penultimate e-mail" was chatting outside my office with a professor from another department and I waved him in. At this point, I was literally in tears. I just got up and he sat down at the computer and read what Meg had written. Because he knows me so well, he was able to point out the exact phrases that were like daggers and said, softly, "she's extraordinarily well-spoken. I can see why you loved writing to her." Then he handed me tissues and closed my door and let me grieve in peace.

I can’t express how I felt (and still feel). I was angry, deeply confused, hurt, heartbroken, crushed, dejected, disconsolate…all with the overwhelming feeling that once again I had done something to drive yet another close friend away. Her e-mail, beautiful as it was, was actually unclear as to why she was ending our friendship, though she did say she was “pulling away from her e-mail acquaintances.” (I have to admit that I wondered, briefly, if she meant all her internet acquaintances, or just the ones who were “high maintenance.”) She also gently assured me that this was something she was “not going to change her mind about.”

My ultimate reply to her was emotional and visceral, and I’m ashamed of most of it now.

I keep thinking about the things I’ll never know about her future. I’ll never see a picture of her in her wedding gown. I’ll never see pictures of her children. I’ll never meet her in person (which I was planning on). She has invited me to continue to read her blog, but it’s much too painful right now—it would be too much like she was writing to me again.

The thing is, though, I know she reads my blog. And I hope if she reads this entry, she’ll know exactly how much she hurt me, and how utterly destroyed part of me is now, how I feel part of my soul is gone, I and how I’m going to think about her and miss her for a very, very long time…possibly years. And I will absolutely never really get over it.

I know a lot of my readers have many online correspondents whom they do not consider to be “real” friends, either, and I only ask one thing of them. Please, please remember that there is a human being at the other end of that keyboard, who feels the pain of rejection just as much as you do. If you are blessed enough to have friends—in person or online—please be gentle with their hearts. You may never know how much you helped save someone.

2009-01-12T20:16:00.000-08:00

Wait A Minute, Mr. Postman

"Deliver the letter, the sooner the better..."
--The Marvelettes

I have never, ever trusted my mailman.

I’m not sure what it is. As a 40 year old adult, I have no problems with mail carriers, or anyone who works for the U.S. Postal Service. But when I was a teenager, our family’s mailman gave me the serious creeps. He was about 50, fat, and had a puffy red face. It got to the point where, when we left our front door open in the summer, I would run screaming for my dad whenever I saw him coming down the street.

In 1983, however, I wasn’t too concerned about the mailman—yet. The biggest drama in my life at that time involved the repertory. I was in my second year, and it happened to be the year that Scott had his Big Gay Crisis and left us. This left Victor (who had been planning on directing a show in which Scott would star) kind of in a quandary. With Scott gone, the only other actor who even approached “good” was Joe.

Now, I liked Joe a lot (see previous entries), but even I, at age 15, didn’t think he could handle a serious leading role. Joe’s main attributes at the tender age of 16 were (1) if given enough time and a hacksaw, he probably could act his way out of a paper bag eventually, and (2) he was really good-looking.

Victor (wise man that he was), however, saw yet a third aspect of Joe—he was so popular, if all his friends came to see the play, we would make a killing. Victor went off in search of a play which could feature Joe without making Joe work too hard at it.

He came up with L’il Abner.

It’s a dreadful play, really. For those of you fortunate enough to have not experienced it, here’s the “plot”: The United States government wants to test a new, powerful superbomb (think the Manhattan Project with one-tenth the I.Q. points), and they search for “the most unnecessary town in America.” They end up picking Dogpatch, which is, of course, where L’il Abner and his worthless, stupid, soulless friends reside.

The characters spend most of their time trying to convince the government that Dogpatch actually is necessary, and they search like hell to find something useful in their town to keep from getting bombed. By the end of the play, most of the audience feels like going out and getting bombed, too.

Hating every minute of it, I went through auditions. I had no idea what part Victor was going to stick me with. It sure wasn’t gong to be Daisy May—we had a very slutty, blonde, talentless twit who was currently sleeping her way through the company that had that part pretty much sewn up. There were no other large female parts at all.

And, finally, the call sheet went up. I was going to play a secretary, in Washington. I had fourteen lines.

This bruised my ego tremendously. The year prior, I had had a second lead, and no one could understand why I had been “demoted” like that. When the night of the first read-through came, I was so disgusted by the inanity of my part that I told Victor I didn’t even want to be recognized and asked if I could wear a disguise.

Weirdly, he called my bluff, and I ended up wearing a blonde Marilyn-Monroe type wig. Because my natural hair is straight, honey-colored, and to my waist, I hoped no one would recognize me. Despite repeated attempts at bribery, I could not get the crafts people doing the program to leave my name out. Even worse, during tech week, the press showed up, and for some unfathomable reason, instead of taking a picture of the leads for the newspaper, they took one of me and the guy playing my boss and ran it.

Opening night came. I tromped onstage. I said my fourteen lines. I tromped off. This went on night after night, until, thank God, the run ended.

Two weeks later, I was sitting in my living room when I heard the familiar, horrifying sound of the mailman coming up the sidewalk. I bolted off the sofa and yelled for my dad, who didn’t really understand why I was so freaked-out by this man. However, he came to the door anyway to deal with him. I cowered behind the door, out of sight.

Dad tried to take the mail, but the mailman just stood there, huffing, and said; “I saw your daughter’s picture in the paper.” (Ewwww!)

“Well, she’s in there a lot,” said Dad, again trying to yank the mail.

“She looked really hot in that blonde wig,” said David Berkowitz. (And in my head I was screaming, “dude, I’m 15!”)

“Um…okay,” said my father, clearly getting uncomfortable.

“I went and saw every performance, too,” hissed the mailman from hell. “And every time she came out in that wig and that slinky dress—I almost lost it.”

Mentally, I sent to my father: “Why the hell aren’t you decking him?”

“Can I just have my mail?” asked my dad, who really isn’t good in a crisis.

“I don’t suppose,” the mailman began, in a lecherous tone, “that you have any color photographs of her dressed like that, do you?” (Ewwww!)

“Nope,” said my father, and shut the door.

“You see?” I said, leaping out at him. “I told you there was something wrong with him! Why didn’t you believe me? Why does no one ever believe me?” And I walked out in a huff.

Two weeks later, my family and I were eating dinner in front of the 6:00 local news. I wasn’t really paying attention (the news depresses me), but suddenly, my mom dropped her fork and said; “Oh, my God!”

I looked up. There, on my television, was our mailman. He was being dragged away—in handcuffs-- from a very seedy apartment building in our town, in which he apparently lived. The reporter was talking, but we were so busy staring that we missed what he said. In the following day’s paper, it all came out.

Due to an anonymous tip by a mother who had become concerned that the mailman had been getting “too friendly” with her son, the police searched his apartment (I have no idea if this is a Fourth Amendment violation or not, but when you get to the end, you won’t care, either). Upon entering, they found the walls of the apartment covered from floor to ceiling with photographs of naked pre-pubescent children (boys and girls) and pictures of teenagers which were either blatantly sexual or very revealing.

And on the rear wall, near a closet, were five color Polaroid pictures of me in the Marilyn Monroe get-up. Apparently, the mailman had showed up during tech week pretending to be a member of the press, and was therefore able to shoot as many pictures of me as he wanted. Also on the wall was the legitimate picture of me which had been in the newspaper.

It took me two weeks to stop shaking.

I am currently very close friends with a very powerful, very brilliant, and very talented criminal lawyer. When I told him this story, he blinked twice and said, “if your dad had shot him, I’d have argued justifiable homicide.”

Stay safe out there, my friends.

Next time: Perhaps something about someone I once knew who was profoundly stupid.

2008-12-22T15:14:00.000-08:00

My Vietnam War Story

In 1985, I starred in The Unsinkable Molly Brown. It’s a dreadful show, really, but when you think about it, there are only a handful of musicals that have a strong female lead only (with the exception of Funny Girl or Evita). Despite the show’s awfulness, I vowed to give it my all. Fortunately, I had a very strong supporting cast.

The worst week of any theatrical run is Dress and Tech Week, because that’s when you find out everything that goes wrong. Costumes don’t fit (I’ll bet you didn’t know that professional theatre costumes—especially elaborate period pieces—are only held together with Velcro. All those buttons are purely for show, and if the actress turns wrong, she ends up naked on the stage), lighting cues are missed, props disappear, scenery falls down around your ears, you deal with the orchestra for the first time—everything.

We generally opened on a Friday night. However, the Thursday night before, we always had a special free preview for senior citizens and the residents of our local Veterans Hospital. I’m not sure why veterans were so interested in musical theatre, but they showed up faithfully every time anyway.

Here’s where my ego goes off the charts.

My absolute favorite part of any live performance is when, after the curtain calls (which are pretty damn awesome too, let me tell you), the cast stands in the hall in the back of the stage and the audience files past us telling us how good we were. Keep in mind that I was hearing all these compliments while I was still flying on adrenaline and endorphins, clutching a ton of flowers and kind of shaking. To this day, I tell my students that that particular rush is better than any drug—legal or illegal—I have ever taken.

Finally it seemed to be over, so I went into my dressing room to change into my street clothes and meet up with my friends at the diner. While I was doing this, my friend Sue knocked on the door and told me that “a guy wanted to see me in the hall.”

“What guy?”

“I don’t know, he’s just a guy.”

“Does he have a name? What does he want?”

“How the hell would I know,” she asked, getting irritated. “Just come out.”

I put everything down and went out into the hall. Waiting for me was a bearded man with longish hair in a flannel shirt and jeans. He was in a wheelchair. He looked to be about 50 years old.

He had no legs from the knees down.

I wasn’t sure what to do, but when he saw me, his eyes brightened. He wheeled himself over. “Hello,” he said, in a nice voice. “My name is Gary.”

I shook his hand. “Hi, Gary,” I said. “I hear you wanted to see me?”

“Yes,” he said, still not letting go of my hand. “I’ve been coming to these plays since I’ve been in the V.A. hospital. And I have never seen a performance like yours. Ever.”

“Thank you,” I said, not knowing what else to say.

“I just have to ask,” he said, seriously. “How do you get the courage to do that?”

I blinked. “Do what?”

“Get up there in front of six hundred people and sing, dance, and act. I don’t get it. You’re the bravest person I’ve ever seen.”

I looked in his eyes, which were soft and grey. Very quietly I said; “You were in Vietnam, weren’t you?”

He nodded. “Yes, ma'am. Two tours,” he said. “Marines.”

I was trying very hard not to cry, and was failing at it. “Sir,” I said, “if you don’t mind me saying, I think what you did was a hell of a lot braver than what I just did. And if my acting gave you any kind of distraction from the memories you must have of that—well, I’ve more than done my job.”

I might have gone on babbling forever, but he took my hand. “Honey,” he said, “all that stuff I did over there—I’m proud to have done it, but there was never any beauty in it. The show I just saw you do…that has beauty in it.”

That’s when I lost it. Through tears, I asked Gary if I could take a picture of us. He said of course. I rounded up Victor (who always had a camera at the ready) and we took some shots.

The bus back to the V.A. Hospital was leaving, so he had to go. I pushed him down the hall, kissed his cheek, and we hugged. We both said “Semper Fi”, and I never saw him again.

I have that picture framed and on my office wall.

I never knew his last name.

Next time: How I helped convict my mailman of a felony!

2008-10-02T15:44:00.000-07:00

Hitting The Nail On The Head

Throughout my life, there has only been one thing that I actually like about my physical appearance—my hands. They’re delicate and slender and have long, tapered fingers. I get a lot of compliments on them, and have been asked several times if I’d ever modeled them (I haven’t).

When I was in high school, I decided to try to grow my nails out. It was more of an experiment than anything else—I wanted to see how long I could grow them before they broke. It worked out surprisingly well and they grew to a nice length and everybody noticed them and liked them.

I began to pay attention to them and paint them and buff them and pamper them. I only had one problem; they were very, very thin, and when they got wet, they were as fragile as paper. As a result they literally tore off whenever I took a shower. I even attempted showering with latex gloves, but to no avail.

I struggled with artificial tips for years. I hated them—they looked phony, the glue was messy and they felt weird. Also, they were much too big for me—my ring size is only 3 ½..

And then I heard about acrylics.

I was fascinated by this concept. You can actually sculpt artificial nails? Without huge tips? And they lasted for months? I absolutely had to look into this.

I began talking to other women who had acrylics and asked them how they liked their acrylic nails. That’s when I started to hear the horror stories.

Horror Story #1: Once you start, you can’t stop. (Kind of like meth). You are doomed to having acrylics forever and ever.

Horror Story #2: Acrylics ruin your real nails and they’ll never be the same.

Horror Story #3: Actually getting the acrylics hurts.

Horror Story #4: Acrylics can lead to nail fungus, which causes your real nails to fall off entirely.

This petrified me, and put the idea out of my head at once.

But I kept coming back to it. I kept admiring the acrylics of all my co-workers and I began to wonder if it was worth the risk.

I gathered my courage and called a local nail salon. I asked if they took walk-ins. They said yes.

“Okay,” I said with determination, “I’m walking in!”

I walked in. The nail salon appeared to be run by several middle-aged Vietnamese women who may or may not be related to each other. When they saw me mosey in, one of them came scooting over to me and asked: “Can I help you?” She looked outrageously happy for some reason.

“How much for a full set of acrylics with nail art?” I asked (I love nail art--decals, stripes, foil, you name it).

“Twenty-five dollars.”

Well, you can’t beat that. Hell, two months ago I spent one hundred and seventy-five dollars having my hair highlighted. “Let’s do it,” I said.

“Sit down at my station,” said the Vietnamese woman.

I’m gregarious by nature, and as she drilled and filled and brushed and dipped I asked her her name (Tina), where in Vietnam was she from (Nha Trang), how old was she when she came to America (21), and how long she’d been a manicurist (ever since she got here). What was the hardest part about adjusting to America? (learning English).

I then told her that I was actually an English professor, and she got all excited and asked if I ever taught any Vietnamese students. I told her yes—I’ve taught students from many Asian countries. She asked me if I knew any Vietnamese, and I had to admit I did not. She said, “it’s okay, I’ll teach you!” By the time I left the salon, I had learned how to say “Hello, how are you?” “Thank you,” and “Please take me to the American Embassy” in Vietnamese.

The funny part is this; although she speaks excellent English, she only speaks angry English, as if the person who taught her English was perpetually pissed off. Even when she compliments me she yells. “You have beautiful eyes!” she screamed. “You’re so funny!” she yelled. Whenever I go in for a fill and she sees me she hollers: “You! English teacher! Go sit at my station!” It’s quite intimidating, really.

Three weeks ago after getting a fill, she took me by the arm and whispered to me: “I’m going on vacation for a month. Don’t you go to any of the other girls. You wait for me to get back.” She then told me she wouldn’t be back until October 15th, which was five weeks away. I knew I couldn’t go that long without getting a fill…it would look awful. So, sadly, last week I cheated on her. “Please don’t tell Tina I was here,” I said, nervously. The manicurist just giggled.

As far as the acrylics go…I love them, I have no problem with them, and I’m sorry I didn’t do this ten years ago. They’re gorgeous, and best of all, they’re durable. I can do anything with them.

Sometimes you just have to take a risk.

2008-09-20T11:42:00.000-07:00

The James Woods Story

“Someone to care for,
To be there for,
I’ve got…James Woods.”
--Peter Griffin

I have always really liked James Woods.

I know, I know. I can’t figure it out either. It’s not like he’s a Shakespearian trained actor, or is especially outstandingly handsome. I just like him. I enjoy every movie he’s in. (My favorite is The Hard Way, which also stars Michael J Fox.) I also like him because he's just so intelligent--he's in Mensa and went to M.I.T.

Anyway, a few years ago, the BeowulfParents decided they apparently had too much money in the bank, so we went to our favorite casino to squander it.

When we got to the casino, there was a lot of noise and confusion surrounding the poker room. There were almost a hundred people standing outside of it looking in with great interest. I asked a passing cocktail waitress what the fuss was all about, and she explained that the casino was hosting a celebrity poker tournament for charity.

We thought that was pretty cool, but since none of us play poker, it didn’t affect us in the slightest way. We headed down to the casino floor and hit the slot machines.

I ran out of money embarrassingly fast and with my last few dollars I went to the central bar and ordered a Fuzzy Navel. As I sat there sipping it, I looked around the floor to see if I could see my parents.

Suddenly, a strange middle-aged man began thundering towards the bar with a determined look on his face. It was a face I recognized and was absolutely stunned to see—it was James Woods. What the hell is he doing here? I wondered.

For reasons I will never understand, as soon as James got to the bar, he pounded me on the upper arm like an old Army buddy and said, “hi!”

“Hi,” I said, just kind of staring at him.

“Having any luck tonight?” he asked, after ordering his drink.

“Not really,” I said. “How about you?” Then it dawned on me. “Oh, wait! You’re probably here for the celebrity poker tournament.” He confirmed that he was. I asked him how he was doing and he told me he was down almost sixty thousand dollars. For some unbelievable reason, he didn’t seem phased by this at all.

“So, what do you do when you’re not gambling?” he asked. I was happy that he was trying so hard to be friendly, but the whole thing was still kind of weirding me out.

“I’m an English professor,” I explained.

That did it. James proceeded to launch into a long speech about the problems in our educational system which allow functional illiterates to go to college (which they almost immediately flunk out of) and how college tuition is going to bankrupt everyone. He was very dramatic about it—he waved his hands around and talked at lightning speed.

There aren’t a lot of subjects that I can talk about with aplomb, but education is one of them. James and I started talking over one another as we each agreed with the other one. The conversation went something like this:

“And you know what else?...”

“Oh, I totally agree. And another thing…”

“Right! I can’t see how…”

“Yes! No one seems to know…”

“Exactly! And then when you…”

“Oh, absolutely. And then you…”

"I know! And also..."

"I totally understand where you're coming from! And..."

It went on and on for easily 15 minutes. He forgot entirely that he was in a poker tournament, and I forgot entirely that I was having a conversation about education reform with a major motion picture star. When he finally snapped back to reality, he wished me a good night, I wished him good luck, and he went back to the poker room to win his sixty grand back.

I left the bar to find the BeowulfParents. When I did, I said; “I just had a fifteen minute conversation with James Woods about the state of education in America.”

“That’s nice, dear,” said my mom. Absolutely nothing phases her.

Later, I felt badly that I had missed my chance to tell him how much I enjoyed his movies, and ever since then, I kind of giggle when I see James Woods in a movie or on TV. And don’t even get me started on that episode of Family Guy when Peter becomes best friends with him.

2008-08-20T19:20:00.000-07:00

The Timothy Hutton Story

In order for this story to make any sense, you need to know two pieces of exposition.

Expository Bit #1: In 1981, nineteen year-old Timothy Hutton won the Best Supporting Actor Academy Award for his performance in Ordinary People. Anyone who has seen the film can clearly understand why. It was a phenomenal performance, however nothing could possibly match Timothy’s acceptance speech. Sadly, a few scant months before the awards, Timothy’s father, actor Jim Hutton, died of liver cancer. Timothy dedicated his award to his father, amidst floods of tears. By the time he was finished, everyone in the audience was sobbing, too.

Expository Bit #2: In 1973, Jim Hutton made a low-budget horror flick called Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark. It was a wonderful bit of Americana-gone-wrong. In the film, a young couple moves to an abandoned farmhouse which, for some reason, has a bricked-up fireplace in the living room. The scary old caretaker (why is there always a scary old caretaker?) warns the couple not to unbrick the fireplace.

Which the wife (Kim Darby) immediately does. What she doesn’t know is that living in the fireplace, beneath the bowels of the house, are terrifying little creatures that like to reach up through the fireplace, grab people, and drag them down to their lair. The only thing the creatures are afraid of is light, and of course once the wife smashes through the bricks, the power goes out and, well, you can imagine what happens.

The point is, I loved this movie as a child (of course, I also loved The Exorcist) and was very sad when Jim Hutton died because I’d never get a chance to tell him how much I enjoyed this schlocky horror film.

In my third year of repertory, I somehow got shanghaied into entering a competition in which veteran, professional actors would be paired with schmos like me to perform various scenes. It was kind of like the Pro-Am Golf Tournament, only without Bob Barker. By sheer luck of the draw, I was paired with Timothy Hutton, whom I had never met but always thought was a marvelous actor. The whole competition was called An Evening With Noel Coward.

Timothy and I talked at great lengths about what we’d like to perform. We finally decided on Blithe Spirit, with me as Ruth and Timothy as Charles. Surprisingly, we both got very into it and we were determined to win. (I especially had a gripe with a very serious rival actress who was doing Private Lives, and I was determined to beat her).

In the weeks of rehearsal that followed, I kept trying to tell Timothy that I had been a fan of his father’s, but it just didn’t seem to work itself into conversation. Finally, with only a few days to go, I decided to just come out with it.

“You know, Tim,” I said, casually one day as we were being pinned for costumes, “I’ve always wanted to tell you…I really was a big fan of your father’s.”

He seemed delighted to hear that. “Really? That’s great! Did you watch him in Ellery Queen?”

“Well, yes, but my favorite…” (and here I stumbled—was I actually going to admit this?) “Well, my favorite movie of his was Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark.”

Timothy laughed and laughed. “Oh my God,” he said, “I wasn’t even allowed to watch that until I was fifteen!”

We both giggled and then I said, “man, I haven’t seen that movie in years.”

There was a thoughtful silence. “You know,” Timothy said, “I’ve got that movie on videotape.”

I blinked. “There’s a VCR in the green room,” I said.

“What are you doing tomorrow night?” he asked, grinning enthusiastically.

“Bringing popcorn. You bring the tape.”

And that’s how it happened. Twenty-four hours later, Timothy Hutton and I were sitting in the green room, eating very bad store-bought popcorn and watching Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark.

We both jumped nervously a number of times, and for the rest of the rehearsal period we kept sneaking up behind each other and doing the scary voices that the creatures did in the film. Then we’d collapse in laughter and no one knew what the hell was wrong with us.

As it turned out, Blithe Spirit wound up taking second place, but I was consoled by the fact that I did end up beating the girl I hated.

Timothy, of course, went on to a stellar career and I still get a friendly feeling every time I watch him. Occasionally I get the urge to contact him and see if he remembers me and our terrifying night in the green room.

Only, you know, he might think I was weird.

Next time: The legendary Larry.

2008-08-09T11:01:00.000-07:00

In Security

All summer, I have been trying (unsuccessfully) to obtain a temp job in some office somewhere since I won't get paid by Very Serious University again until the end of September, and I want to avoid debtor’s prison. On Wednesday, they finally called.

It was a two-day job. It was at the local field office of a Very Important Federal Government Agency which I can’t be specific about or I’ll go to Levonworth. The job payed a ridiculous amount of money--way more than the agency usually pays. Immediately suspicious, I asked what exactly I was supposed to do over there.

It seemed that some brainiac in Homeland Security has invented a new kind of metal detector. The Unnamed Agency is considering buying them. Before they shell our tens of millions of our tax dollars, they naturally want to conduct expensive tests.

My job would consist of walking through the metal detectors. All day. Apparently several hundred times. I had no idea why they just don't use government employees for this.

I was then told that after I finished testing them "unarmed," they were going to tape a knife to my thigh and see if I could get through with it. Well, I thought, I sort of need to shave my legs anyway. No biggie.

But wait, it gets even weirder! After the whole knife experiment, they would then give me a gun. An actual gun. I was supposed to conceal the gun somewhere on my person and try to get it through. I sincerely hoped they wouldn’t strip search me.

And here's the big one! Once I was finished with the gun, they were actually going to strap a bomb on my chest. With actual explosives. However, I was told I don't have to worry because "government explosives and demolition experts will be standing by." Yeah, that makes me feel a lot better. Thanks, guys.

(You would not believe the number of government forms I had to sign for this. I'm assuming that they're waivers so my family can't sue the federal government if I get blown up.) I also didn’t know how they would be able to drag this out for 16 hours, although I was told that there's actually a four hour orientation on the first day. Four hours. To explain about walking through metal detectors.

And so, the adventure began.

The following morning, I showed up at the government offices at 8:00. I went into the Visitor's Center and told the woman behind the desk that I was here for the "metal detector experiment."

"Are you with [temp agency]?”

"Yep."

"Fill this out." She passed me a form. "You're not allowed to go any further until you fill it out."

For some reason, the form seemed to deal with information about my car. She then gave me a visitor's pass and sent me over to a group of strangers who were also clutching forms and looking very confused.

Eventually, a very nice woman named Heather came in and told us to "get on the van,” which would then drive all of us to “an undisclosed location.” All of us got on the van. The van took us to a very scary-looking domed building which was surrounded by a 25 foot chain-link fence with barbed wire at the top. The driver of the van opened his window and punched some numbers into a keypad. The doors opened ominously.

"Wow!" said the guy in back of me. "It's just like when I was in prison!"

There was a woman named Lucille waiting for us outside the building. She ushered us inside and took us into a conference room where, she said, we needed to see a brief safety film.
I assumed that the film was pretty basic…telling us where the exits were and how to use the fire extinguishers. That sort of thing.

But no. The film dealt almost exclusively with "what to do in the event of a nuclear emergency." Really. There was a brief moment about fire extinguishers at the end, but mostly it was about where the bunkers are. Yes--bunkers.

We filled out another form, which was a non-disclosure agreement. Basically, we swore that we would never tell anyone what the results of the experiment were. Apparently, it's okay to talk about the experiment itself, though. (And, in case you’re wondering if it’s legal to blog about this, I showed the agreement to a lawyer friend and he said it was no problem.) Lucille collected the forms and shepherded us down the hall, then outside into a parking lot--apparently we were now going to "the lab."

For some reason, the entire paved lot was cluttered with lots and lots of suitcases, some of which were open and had clothes inside. There were literally hundreds of them. I asked, "what's all the luggage for?"

"It's not real luggage," said Lucille, in a low whisper.

"Huh?"

"It's test luggage."

"What?"

Apparently, the engineers who work at that specific site are contracted to do extensive tests on luggage. I have no idea what the tests are or where the test luggage originally came from. It was bizarre.

We went into another building into yet another conference room, this time with donuts and coffee. There were two men from Homeland Security named Ted and Bob. Ted is an engineer, and he told us all about the scientific side of the new metal detectors, which are actually scanners, much like MRIs. Apparently, the new technology is to zap the person passing through with tons of microwaves and X-rays. Some people started to look alarmed, but then Ted reassured us with this:

"Don't worry. This isn't harmful. I've been scanned hundreds of times, and so far there's no brain damage." Thank you, Ted.

Bob got up. Bob talked exclusively about how proud we should be, and telling us that we're serving our country, and that we're fighting terrorism together. It was very inspiring. Lucille came back and told us that the next day the women are supposed to wear a one-piece bathing suit, a t-shirt, a button-down shirt over that, and sweat pants and bedroom slippers. The bathing suit is (and this is verbatim) "in order to protect us from the duct tape."

She then asked, enthusiastically, "do you want to see the machine?"

Of course we did. We all trooped out behind her down the hall to the lab. It doesn't look that scary, actually. It looks like a tollboth. Ted demonstrated it for us. He walked into it, planted his feet on a strip of tape, and held up his hands in the air like he was being held hostage. He stayed that way for 6 seconds, then told us we had to practice it.

One by one, we went into the machine, planted our feet and held up our hands for 6 seconds. We all got it right on the first try. Back into the conference room to wait for the van again. Bob had a parting word of wisdom for us:

"Bring a book."

Day Two started out exactly like Day One: Go to the Visitor's Center, fill out (more) forms, wait with my group, get on the van and drive to the "undisclosed location." We signed in (again) and got badges and waited in the hall. Finally, Heather lead us across the parking lot. We made our way through all the mysterious luggage again and ended up being herded into (yet another) conference room where we were briefed and introduced to the representatives from the electronics company that had actually built the scanners. We then had another pep talk by Bob and Ted about how important we were to their research.

We were all given lists of what weapons we would be given for each scan (each of us had about fifteen scans scheduled) and where on the body they needed to be placed. Reading it, I was extremely glad I had (1) shaved my legs, and (2) worn nice underwear. We were all given numbers, since they didn't appear to be interested in our names.

Here is just a partial list of lethal objects that were taped on, strapped on, shoved in my underwear, and stuck in my bra:

--Four guns, including a .287 Magnum and a hunting rifle
--Knives. Lots of knives. Steak knives, switchblades, folding knives, assassins blades, scaling knives, cleavers, choppers, dicers, and an axe.
--Wooden numchucks
--Chinese throwing stars
--Plasticene explosives
--Gel slurry explosives
--Corkscrews
--Sticks of dynamite
--A time bomb
--Several random detonators
--Syringes
--Slingshots
--Razon blades
--A blow gun (with darts)
--Blasting caps

We were also given a lot of inert objects like Chap stick, a pack of gum, mouthwash, and Tic-Tacs. We were told it was so they could test to see if the scanner was able to distinguish non-lethal items from weapons of approximately the same dimensions.

It was an impressive setup. We had to walk along a designated path to various stations. First we had to go to a table to get our weapons and to have our paper checked by the woman there. We then went into the dressing room with someone who helped us rig the weapons up to our bodies. Then we progressed into the actual scanner, which was being operated by a nice guy named Dan. Dan would yell out our number A guy who was hidden behind a wall would then yell; "Good scan!" and we'd go back to the dressing room, divest ourselves of the weapons, return them to the table where they were checked back in, and go back to the end of the line to do it all over again.

You'd think that with such precise planning everything would run smoothly. But no...after five minutes, things degenerated into what always arises when engineers attempt to interact with non-engineers; total chaos. People were wandering around the lab, deadly objects hanging off their bodies. The scanner kept malfunctioning. Dan kept pressing the button, frantically.

I was having problems of my own. My very long hair kept getting caught in the duct tape and I kept saying "Ow! Hair!" as the woman dressing me fretted. Also, I learned that removing duct tape from bare skin really, really hurts.

Then came an awful moment when one member of my group, who was obese, literally couldn't fit inside the scanner. We had to wait until the engineers dismantled it and re-configured it to accomodate him. Thoroughly freaked out by this point, Bob and Ted sent us all to lunch.

Because we were in a top-secret undisclosed location, we couldn't go to the cafeteria like normal people. We had been told to bring our lunch, so we chowed down in the conference room. Conversation was stilted since (1) we weren't allowed to talk about what we were doing, much like a sequestered jury, and (2) we already knew what we all did for a living--we were all temps. We gave up and read our books (good suggestion, Bob!) until one guy remembered he had a deck of cards.

We decided to play some poker, but of course we had all left our wallets at home (we were told not to bring them) and naturally no one had poker chips. Our problems were solved when one of the more personable engineers went to the warehouse and brought us back a box of five hundred rivets. We happily used them in lieu of chips and proceeded to play no limit hold 'em until Bob and Ted told us we were ready to go again.

The afternoon session went more smoothly than the morning, and by 4:30, we were done. We were once again shoved into the conference room where Ted gave us a triumphant victory speech. "They said we couldn't possibly do 200 scans in an 8-hour day!" he shouted, "but we pulled it off in less than six! You guys rock!" (And how funny it was to hear an engineer say "you guys rock!")

Bob went on and on about how we made air travel safer for everyone and how much he appreciated us donating our time to the experiment. We didn't tell him that we were actually not really "donating" our time--that we were, in fact, being paid an obscene amount of money. In my case, I made more in two days than I do in a week as a professor.

Back in the van. Back to the Visitor's Center where they took my badges and where my car was.

I've thought a lot about it, and, weirdly, I really do feel like I helped make flying less dangerous. I was also sad, though, that we live in a world where an experiment like this is even necessary.

Next Time: The Timothy Hutton Story

2008-07-17T11:56:00.000-07:00

Searching For My Grandfather

“He’s dead. My master is dead.”
“A man died. He seemed to be a good man, but I did not know him.”
--Don Quixote

In October of 1981, an 83 year old man stood in the kitchen of his mobile home in rural Pennsylvania. He was holding a box of cornflakes, trying to decide if he wanted it for breakfast. Four seconds later, both the old man and the cornflakes were on the floor. The cornflakes were spilled, and the old man was dead. The autopsy proved that he had had an aneurism in his brain, and that he was literally dead before he hit the floor.

That man was my mother’s father, my Grandpa Roy. I had only met him four times in my entire life because my mother’s parents were divorced and Grandpa Roy moved far away.

Whenever I’m talking to someone about our families and the subject of grandfathers comes up, I vaguely remember that at one point I had a couple of these, but that I don’t anymore. And it bothers me. I feel cheated.

Let me tell you what I know.

My father’s father, my Grandpa Charlie, is shrouded in mystery. He died of a heart attack in 1958, years before I was born. I have only seen two pictures of him in my entire life (clearly, BeowulfDad isn’t very sentimental). He was a very good looking man and very natty.

Allegedly, Grandpa Charlie fought in World War One (France) and came back home a little, well, strange. He began drinking and joined the Moose lodge, to which my father would have to drive him every night (at least Grandpa Charlie was smart enough not to drive drunk). BeowulfDad didn’t mind this, since it allowed him to have the car for the evening and he could go around doing whatever the hell he did when he was young.

Grandpa Charlie then took a job as a machinist in a factory. I have no idea what the factory manufactured, or precisely what kind of “machine” Grandpa Charlie operated. Eventually, he was promoted to foreman.

Sadly, nothing else is known about Grandpa Charlie except for the quirky fact that he would do his gardening in a dress shirt and a tie.

Moving to the matrilineal line, I know a great deal about Grandpa Roy. He also fought in World War One (Germany), and there’s an impressive picture of him in his Army uniform in our living room. After returning from the war, he and a friend opened a dry-cleaning shop.

Unfortunately, the “friend” absconded with all the money one night, completely cleaning the place out, and leaving Grandpa Roy destitute. He told my grandmother that he was leaving for “the city” to look for work. Because the Depression was going on, he expected to be away for quite a while.

While Grandpa Roy was wandering around Pennsylvania, my grandmother met and fell in love with another man. When Grandpa Roy came home (he still hadn’t found work), he discovered that he was not only unemployed, he was now also homeless. My grandmother divorced him and married her boyfriend.

Not to be daunted, Grandpa Roy built and opened a hardware store, where he worked until his dying day.

I was first introduced to Grandpa Roy when I was 13. To this day I’m not sure why my family went to visit him—it was a nine hour drive. I was a little nervous about meeting him. Was he nice? Would he like me? Would I like him?

When we arrived at his house (the mobile home), I saw nothing but an elderly man sitting on his picnic bench. After greeting my parents, he looked at me and smiled. “Are you BeowulfGirl?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. He had a nice smile.

“Well,” he said happily, “I’m your grandpa!”

I was so confused. Why didn’t I feel anything for this man? Wasn’t I automatically supposed to love him? He was my grandfather. Everyone I knew loved their grandfather. What the hell was wrong with me?

The next time I saw Grandpa Roy was a few years later at my cousin’s wedding. I danced with him, and with his hunched-over shoulders, I was actually taller than he was.

And then, sadly, the cornflakes incident happened, and he was gone.

On the way up to the funeral, my mother was very concerned about the fact that this would be my first funeral, and my first time seeing a dead body. I sat in the back wondering why I wasn’t freaking out. My grandfather had died—shouldn’t I be crying or something?

We arrived at the funeral home, marched in, and went up to the casket. There was Grandpa Roy, in his suit, lying peacefully, flag draped over the coffin. My parents watched me carefully, apparently afraid I was going to snap and drag the body out of the casket.

I thought: This man is my grandfather. He’s my mom’s father. I was just getting to know him, and now he’s gone forever. But why can’t I feel anything?

In the back of the funeral parlor was a small group of very old men. They turned out to be World War One veterans who had served with Grandpa Roy. I approached them, told them who I was, and asked them if they could please tell me a little bit about my grandfather.

The veterans and I talked for well over an hour. They told me stories of funny pranks he had played on the other men in his outfit. They told me he was a brave soldier and a good man. They all agreed on that. My grandfather was a good man.

I approached the casket again and looked at my grandfather. He looked peaceful and at rest.

“Miss you, Grandpa,” I said, and touched his hand.

He was a good man.

2008-06-24T17:37:00.000-07:00

“And The Children Were Singing, You’ll Be Back At Christmastime”

“It was long ago, and it was far away
And it was so much better than it is today.”
--Meat Loaf

Yes, I know, I promised to talk about my grandfathers this time, but I’d much rather tell you about Ken, with whom I had an incredible strange friendship for more than a decade.

First let me tell you that out of all my friends, Ken was the most stable, reasonable, logical, and down-to-earth one I had. Ken was sort of like St. Jude; if one of my other, high-maintenance friends was acting up and nothing I did to help was working, I would inevitably call up Ken and tell him the problem. He’d have it solved in minutes.

Ken was a year older in repertory, but because we competed in a lot of the same events, we found ourselves being thrown together a lot. He was extremely intelligent (he could write speeches worthy of presidential candidates) and had an incredibly dry sense of humor that almost nobody picked up except for me. he was kind of like Ben Stein. I laughed hilariously at everything he said, causing people to stare at me.

We became friends in repertory, but never really hung out together; he was a year older, had a different set of friends, and the only time we ever really saw each other was at rehearsal. He wasn’t the best actor in the troupe—sometimes his line delivery was a little flat, but at least he was consistent. He always knew his mark and his lines and didn’t have the usual actor’s attitude problem. If he was playing the lead, fine. If he was just in the crowd scenes, that was also fine.

One day near the end of the school year, Ken called me at my house. This surprised me because I never expected him to have something to tell me that was so important it couldn’t wait until rehearsal that night. After determining nothing was wrong, Ken finally got around to asking what he wanted:

“Would you like to get together and discuss Science Fiction?”

This was extremely odd. First of all, I had no recollection of ever telling Ken that I was a big Science Fiction fan (which I was), and second, why did he want to “discuss it” with me? I was more than a little curious, so I said, “sure…come on over.”

Ken lived exactly five minutes away from my house and when he climbed up the front steps he was carrying two large shopping bags from Macy’s. “What’s all that about?” I asked.

“I thought you might like to read some of my books,” he said, “so we can discuss them.”

The Macy’s bags contained everything from Frank Herbert’s entire Dune series to Harlan Ellison’s Edgeworks to Bradbury, Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, Vonnegut…all the really heavy hitters. I couldn’t think of a way to explain to Ken that it would take me months to get through them before we could “discuss them.” For the remainder of his visit, we talked about Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica.

The very next afternoon, Ken called wanting to discuss Science Fiction…again. I told him that, not having speed-reading abilities, I had not been able to really delve into his collection yet, but that didn’t seem to bother him. I shrugged and said, “come on over.”

He did and we spent the afternoon playing Scrabble. I’m still not sure how that happened.

Now, while all of this was going on, the repertory was preparing to go to a tournament in Pennsylvania. One of the events they were hosting was called “Dramatic Pairs.” It was pretty much self-explanatory. Two people acted a scene together (props and costumes encouraged).

After a week of not discussing Science Fiction, Ken finally caved and asked me, “would you like to be my partner in Dramatic Pairs at the Mansfield tournament?”

I was so stunned that Ken thought so highly of my acting abilities that he wanted to be my partner that I completely missed that the whole “discussing Science Fiction” thing was a ruse to get to know me better and to make sure I wouldn’t go bonkers during the tournament. Flattered, I said I’d be happy to partner Ken. “Good!” Ken said, all excited. “I’ve already got a scene picked out!”

We ended up doing a scene from Same Time, Next Year. In particular, it was the scene in which Alan Alda’s character breaks down while telling Ellen Burstyn that his son was killed in Vietnam. It was an incredibly powerful scene. Remember that Ken, up until this point, had little actual acting experience—he was mostly an orator. But something happened when we took the stage; we played off each other beautifully. We wound up winning a very respectable third place.

Since rehearsals for Same Time, Next Year had been so frequent, Ken and I got used to hanging around together. After the season was over, he would continue to come over to my house every Friday night, eat pizza, play Scrabble, and make fun of MTV. This went on for three more years until Ken left for college.

I couldn’t figure out why he didn’t have a girlfriend. Like I said, he was intelligent, funny, witty, and quite handsome. (Of course, I couldn’t figure out why I didn’t have a boyfriend, either). But every Friday, there we were.

It started to get weirder. When Ken would come home from college for winter break, I would be the first person he’d call. Often he’d call before he had even unpacked. And, because he was a terrible correspondent, I didn’t hear from him much during the academic year.

“Hi!” he’d say, enthusiastically. “I’m home! Let’s do something!”

Let me explain something here. Due to a combination of jobs and grants, I had a ridiculous amount of money. Yet, Ken refused to ever let me pick up a tab. We’d go out to diner; he’d pay. We went to the movies; he’d pay. We got popcorn at the movies; he’d pay.

I was confused. Were these “dates?” We certainly acted like we were on a date—I would do full makeup and hair and he’d put on a very nice sweater and cologne. We never argued, we liked the same things and had friends in common. The one thing missing, of course, was that nothing physical ever happened. We would hug hello as soon as he got back from college, but aside from that, I can think of only two other instances when Ken touched me: When he told me Victor had died he held me, trying not to freak out. The second time was when I danced with him at his wedding.

We went on these weird “pseudo-dates” for seven years. I loved it. I missed him so much that I would break my leg answering the phone when I knew he was coming home. He was my best guy friend, that’s all there was.

And then he met Lucy. And it was all downhill from there.

Now, I’m not the brightest bead on the rosary and sometimes I can be as dumb as a box of hair, but I still can’t figure out why a guy can’t have a girlfriend and a “girl friend” at the same time. It’s happened with all of my male friendships. Hell, it’s happened with most of my female ones, too. I seem to be the only one capable of having a romantic relationship (with my ex) and maintain my platonic friendships with both sexes. Why was I the one to discover the magic button? Didn't anyone else know where it was?

My ex was never threatened by my relationship with Ken. If Ken and I wanted to go bowling, we went bowling. It seemed simple.

Lucy, however, was very threatened by me. I couldn’t understand why—not only wasn’t I dating Ken, I had never dated Ken, nor did I want to.

It is perhaps best summed up by Ken’s friend Frank, who said: “Lucy has taken Ken’s penis and put it in her purse. And she says, ‘you can have this back when I’ve decided you can handle it.’”

Ken’s wedding was awful. I felt like I was burying a friend. I knew I’d never see him alone again. No more Friday night Scrabble marathons, no more MTV, no more spending hours on the phone solving each other’s problems. He was gone.

My ex and I tried to do things with them as a couple, but it wasn’t the same. It would never be the same. I guess part of me always figured that I would somehow wind up with him since we were so good together. But then he began being a “family man,” and with the news of Lucy’s first pregnancy, I wrote him off for good. We even stopped sending Christmas cards. I don’t know where he is, what he’s doing, or who he’s with.

All I know is that I lost something special when that woman walked down the aisle.

And I haven’t forgiven her for it.

Next time: My grandfathers. I promise.

2008-06-15T18:43:00.000-07:00

The Great Michael Jackson Incident Of 1983

My high school is in “Trivial Pursuit.”

No, it really is. And it’s all Michael Jackson’s fault.

The vast majority of my blog readers are significantly younger than me (about 15-20 years younger) and therefore they don’t remember the Great Michael Jackson Incident of 1983; hell, half of them weren’t born yet. So get comfy, settle in. I’m going to tell you the story of how a single white glove divided teachers, students, parents, and administration in a very small town in New Jersey, all those years ago.

In 1983, I was a junior in high school and worried about what all juniors worried about: Would I pass my driver’s test? Would I get my license? How was I going to do on the S.A.T.’s? Would I get into a good Ivy League school? Oh, and yeah…was I ever going to get a date? With an actual boy?

It was also my third year of repertory, and I was pretty much calling the shots. Although Joe was nominally in charge, he didn’t actually do anything and left most of the fundraising and publicity and news articles to me. This annoyed me, but since I was so in crush with Joe, I forgave him.

Two important things happened in 1983. The first was that our repertory was finally asked to attend a very prestigious competition held at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. It was by invitation only, and for years Victor had been trying to sneak our way in by blatantly lying to the board of directors and telling them we were a “prestigious private school located by a serene babbling brook.” I don’t know if the board just got so sick of Victor’s whining or if they just finally gave up, because they finally caved and we got our invitation. There was much rejoicing.

It was a very long competition—four days. We would be leaving Thursday evening, competing over the long weekend, and the awards ceremony was scheduled for Monday morning. We’d all be back in school by Tuesday morning, each of us only missing two days of school. Because we were all exemplary students, none of our teachers had a problem with this and said we could make up the work any time.

Now, while all this was going on, something else was brewing in 1983. And, if you’re anywhere near the age of 40, you will remember it as: “The year Thriller came out.”

Even if you weren’t even cognizant of music in 1983, I’m sure you all know all about Thriller. Along with the title track, there was, of course, “Beat It,” “Billie Jean,” “The Girl Is Mine,” “Want to Be Starting Somethin’,” “Pretty Young Thing,” and the list goes on and on.

I should say at this point that I never actively disliked Michael Jackson, I was just more of a Bruce Springsteen girl (hey—I’m a Jersey girl!). In fact, graduation from my high school was contingent on how loudly you could scream “BRUUUUUUUUUCE!” at top volume.

Now, apparently, here’s what happened. During the long weekend the repertory had been away competing, the Grammy awards had happened and Michael Jackson won every single award that he could possibly win. At that time, he was starting to dress a little oddly—remember those weird military-type ensembles with the red sequins and the gold fringe? Yeah, that. And there was something else, too.

He wore one white glove on one hand. That was all. It wasn’t flashy, and I was never clear as to what it stood for. But apparently, over the weekend, the entire high school went insane and decided to start showing “support” for Michael Jackson by wearing one white glove to school.

And then the madness started.

Tuesday morning came and I strolled into French class for first period. My French teacher asked me (in French) how I had done in the competition and I replied I had done tres bien, mais je suis tres fatigue. There were only six students in French IV, and by the time we were all there, chaos had erupted out in the hall.

There was a thunderous sound of students running. Bright lights flashed in the halls. There was yelling. My French teacher, terrified there was a fire or something even worse, fought her way out of the classroom.

Way down at the end of the hall, we saw huge, glittering klieg lamps, television cameras, microphones, headsets and Extremely Famous Newscasters. Keep in mind—I had been away and had no idea what was going on. I shanghaied my friend Cheryl who was coming out of the biology lab and asked what it was all about.

Before she could answer, the fire alarm went off. All the teachers emerged from their classrooms and shooed us out onto the front lawn where I was finally able to get the truth from several trustworthy teachers.

It seemed that the previous Monday, an enormously large group of students wanted to pay “homage” to Michael Jackson’s Grammy upset by wearing his trademark one white glove to school. The principal, a senile, alcoholic (but previously fair) man had decided that “such attire was inappropriate for school and that all students sporting one glove in honor of Mr. Jackson would be sent home immediately to change.”

You think I’m kidding. But I‘m not.

Well, you can imagine what happened. The pro-Jackson camp had called up the local town rag and insisted the principal’s edict had violated something in the Bill Of Rights, and because Michael Jackson was very big news at the time, the story immediately went out over the wire to the national news. I’m talking ABC, CBS, and NBC here—the real heavy hitters.

The godawful part, though, was when the reporters interviewed the students, who fell apart at the sight of a TV camera in their face. Ironically, a lot of the girls being interviewed were simultaneously trying to dress like Madonna.

I sat in front of my TV that night, watching in horror as Honor Roll students—Ivy League tract students—tried desperately to explain that wearing a glove wasn’t going to cause gang violence, or a turf war, or make people bang heroin into their arm. And it wasn’t just the news—this crap was in the paper for weeks.

I got my say in, though. When a well-known female anchor asked me, “do you, BeowulfGirl, as a high achieving student, think that a point was being made here?”

To which I replied: “I’m not sure. I was out of state, winning actual awards for the glory of my school.”

So…yeah. We’re in “Trivial Pursuit.” When you pick the “Entertainment” Category and you get the question, “What high school went under intense scrutiny in 1983 when its students attempted to emulate Michael Jackson?” The answer is, “BeowulfGirl’s.”

If they don’t accept that as an answer, screw ‘em.

Next week: Searching for my grandfathers.

2008-04-01T10:31:00.000-07:00

Dies Irae

I know, I know. You’ve been waiting for almost two damn months for an update, and I’ve probably lost three quarters of my readers by now. But on the chance there’s still someone out there that has this bookmarked, here’s a little something for you.

It’s not a feel-good entry. Not by a long shot.

Right before Easter, my aunt died, thanks to a fifty year smoking habit which culminated in COPD and emphysema. It was a painful, horrible end and she spent her last two weeks on a ventilator, coughing up bloody bits of her lungs before finally literally drowning in her own mucous. So by all means, guys, keep on smoking. Her very last communication was a handwritten note which read: “I’d like to go now, please.” Her doctors brought in her children, and she passed away.

But it’s another death I want to tell you about today, on the happened when I was 23 years old during my first position as a professor. It was Spring semester and the weather was just starting to turn, and one night I was curled up in my favorite wicker chair grading essays when the phone rang. It was Helena, one of my favorite students. (Yes, I know teachers aren’t supposed to have “favorites.” We do. Get over it.)

Helena sounded shaken. “Professor BeowulfGirl,” she said, nervously. “I have some bad news. Wes Hockin is dead.”

Wes Hockin was a quiet, red-haired boy who sat near the back of the room. He was a gifted writer, though he never said much. Stunned, I just said, “what?”

Helena told me the story. It seemed that Wes had gone rock-climbing. In the middle of the night. Stoned out of his mind on pot. Alone. He had neared the top of the rock, then missed. That was all. He had simply fallen off the rock and broken his neck.

(It is important to note here that when one attends a Teaching University to learn how to be a professor, they almost never teach you how to handle a classroom when a student dies in medias res.) Helena wanted to know what she should do. I told her to tell no one and that I would make an announcement in tomorrow’s class.

The next day, I strolled somberly in and asked Paul, a boy who sat near the door, to close it. I cleared the gravel from my throat and said something along the lines that there had been a death in the class. I pretty much repeated verbatim what Helena had told me. My voice was shaking, and I felt very, very young.

The students sat there, staring at me like frozen food. Wes’s chair was conspicuously empty. I announced there would be no lecture that day, but they were free to freewrite about it if they wanted to.

Surprisingly, they all wanted to. The overwhelming emotion was anger and rage, followed closely by confusion and sorrow. I felt so damn useless—in three years of Doctoral Candidacy School, they had never prepared me for this.

The entire class wanted to go to the wake, which was held two days later. Since only Helena knew how to get to the funeral home, we all piled in our cars and followed her. On the way there, I kept rehearsing what I would say to Wes’s parents.

The funeral home was Standing Room Only. There were dozens and dozens of college-age kids there, all looking as freaked out as we were. I had my little moment up at the casket, and it dawned on me that I had never seen anything so utterly devoid of life as Wes's body was right then.

I managed my way through the “receiving line” and shook all the hands that were proffered. I wedged myself into an armchair and began saying the rosary.

I was so proud of my students—they were well behaved, appropriately mournful, and while I was looking at them, I heard a strange sound coming from the parking lot.

I stepped out of the funeral home and took a look around. A group of about eight of my students was huddled together on the porch singing “Amazing Grace” in a beautiful tenor voice. No one had asked them, no one had prompted them. And then finally, a tear rolled down my face. I was so glad to at last be feeling something—anything—that I just grabbed the nearest student to me and hugged her.

Several weeks later, I wrote a long letter to Wes’s parents, re-introducing myself and saying what a pleasure he was to have in class. It dawned on me that Billy Joel was probably right after all.

Only the good die young.

Next time: Hopefully something more cheerful.

2008-02-14T12:48:00.000-08:00

The Harlan Ellison Story

“For a brief time,
I was here,
And for a brief time,
I mattered.”
--Harlan Ellison, 1989

Harlan Ellison is, far and away, my favorite living American writer. I first became a fan when I was about fifteen and I read Strange Wine, an anthology of wonderful science fiction stories. I was hooked immediately and proceeded to procure and read everything the man had written. I even own a huge tome called The Essential Ellison, in which appears stories, essays, and a screenplay.

Why, then, have I never blogged about him before?

There are two answers to this, actually.

First, the majority of readers of my blog all hang out on a certain message board that I absolutely love, and I consider them to be extremely intelligent and enlightened people. I’ve mentioned Ellison a few times in my posts, and it seems that the overwhelming majority of my friends there have had unpleasant, frightening, and disturbing experiences with him, which makes me very sad. I can’t really defend him, though, because it’s true that while he’s a brilliant writer, he’s kind of an asshat.

The second reason I haven’t told The Harlan Ellison Story before is that my ex-husband has a prominent role in it, and frankly, writing about him upsets me. It upsets me so much that I’m going to call him Floyd in this entry because he doesn’t deserve to have his real name blogged.

In 1998, Floyd and I were living in a suite of rooms at the New Jersey shore. One day, Floyd came home with the local newspaper which was sporting a picture of Harlan Ellison (he was actually smiling!) in a huge ad which advertised “An Evening With Harlan Ellison.” Apparently, Ellison was going to give a talk at a local (and crappy) college.

I was extremely excited, and more than a little nervous. Unlike most of my encounters with celebrities where I just suddenly ran into them, I had time to think about it before meeting Ellison. I decided to open the conversation by telling him that, as a professor, I often taught his work. Then I’d flatter him shamelessly and get him to sign my copy of Slippage.

So, off we went to see Harlan Ellison in all his brilliant asshattery.

It’s important to know that during this time, Floyd was working as an Assistant Prosecutor in the county in which we lived. In this capacity, he knew a lot of people in law enforcement, mostly cops.

The auditorium was pretty packed when we got there. There were a great deal of college students, and as we settled into our seats, the Dean of Students introduced Ellison. I still couldn’t believe I was actually seeing him, and that I would for once have the opportunity to tell a writer I admired how much his work meant to me. (Being that I specialize in Early British Literature, the vast majority of my favorite writers are long dead).

Ellison got going. He opened with an extremely funny story about the cab ride he had taken from the airport to his hotel—apparently there had been some confusion as to how much the trip would cost and Ellison didn’t have enough cash on hand. The cab driver, who didn't speak much English, completely freaked out and called the police. Ellison mentioned the name of the police officer who showed up and Floyd kind of snapped awake and whispered to me; “Oh my God, I actually know that cop.”

Ellison told a few jokes and said; “If, by the end of tonight’s talk I still have managed to somehow not offend you, your religion, your intelligence, or your nationality, please come up and tell me and I’ll do it personally.” There was giggling. He took some questions from the audience, talked about his latest book, discussed the sorry state of television programming, and made some general statements about politics. The whole thing lasted a whopping three hours. (The person I felt the most sorry for was the Sign Language interpreter standing next to him. Ellison talked so fast that I thought the poor girl was going to start a fire from waving her hands around).

“I’ll be happy to sign anything you’d like,” he said, wrapping it up. “Thanks for having me, I’ve had a good time!”

Having seen Ellison in action made me a little less nervous about meeting him. He didn’t actually breathe fire or spew bile. I got in line, clutching my copy of Slippage, praying I wouldn’t screw it up. I could hear him conversing at the front of the line with other fans and he didn't seem to be cannibalizing them or anything. Floyd had a condescending “she’s so cute when she’s nervous” look on his face.

It was finally my turn! Ellison smiled at me and offered his hand. When I shook it I said, “I’m so happy to meet you, Mr. Ellison. I’ve been teaching your work for some time now.”

He smiled. “Oh, please,” he said, “Mr. Ellison is my father’s name.”

And this is where it got weird. As soon as he said it, my mouth opened in confusion and I said, automatically, “No it’s not. Your father’s name is Louis Laverne.”

Ellison’s blue eyes opened so wide I could actually see his brain. He looked completely thunderstruck. He took a few steps back. “Louis Laverne! How do you know that?”

Because I’m an obsessed fan who knows everything about you, including the fast that your mother’s name is Serita Rosenthal, I thought, but managed to save myself by telling him I had remembered it from an essay he had written after his father’s death. Ellison still looked kind of freaked.

In an effort to regain equal ground, I introduced Floyd. “This is my husband, Floyd,” I said. “Interestingly, he actually knows the police officer you were talking about earlier.”

Ellison said, politely, “Oh? Are you also a policeman?”

“No,” said Floyd, shaking Ellison’s hand, “I’m a pros…a pros…a pros…” Floyd couldn’t remember the word “prosecutor.” His brain kept trying, though, as he held Ellison’s hand in a deathgrip. “I’m a pros…a pros…” He had gone completely white and he looked absolutely terrified.

“He’s a lawyer,” I interjected, wishing I hadn’t brought Floyd with me.

Floyd managed to get out: “I’m sorry, usually I can speak the English language.” He looked mortified.

Ellison grinned and said, “Well, you seem to be having no trouble with it now.”

Floyd finally detangled himself from Ellison and, in abject horror and humiliation, walked away and started looking at the pile of books for sale.

Ellison, apparently deciding that talking to someone who knew his father’s name was better than talking to an obviously mentally impaired attorney, asked me what, exactly, I taught. He seemed genuinely interested and when I asked about his heart condition (he had had a heart attack the year before, requiring a quadruple bypass) he said, “How nice of you to ask! I’m doing very well, thanks. I need to drop a little weight, though.”

I handed him my copy of Slippage and he happily signed it. We shook hands again, I wished him a good evening, and walked off the stage to collect Floyd, who was beating his head against a wall. “I can’t believe I did that,” he moaned.

“I am never taking you out in public again,” I said, irritated. He didn’t say a word on the trip home.

I was proud of myself. I had survived meeting my favorite author, and my autographed copy of Slippage sits on my shelf with Ellison’s other works. Occasionally I take it down just to look at it.

So, I hope my friends on the message board I mentioned at the beginning will forgive me when I say that my encounter with Harlan Ellison was pleasant and memorable. Unless I just managed to catch him on a good day.

2008-01-29T11:17:00.000-08:00

Embarrassing Crush Story #215: The Alec Years

If Jude Law and Josh Holloway managed somehow to have a baby, that baby would grow up to look just like Alec. My crush on Alec, therefore, was not embarrassing because it happened; it was embarrassing because it lasted for three years.

It began in my sophomore year of college. As I’ve mentioned here before, I was the president of the Forensic Society (I’m talking about speech and debate, here—not what Grissom does). Every year we had a table at the Activities Fair and passed out flyers to unsuspecting freshmen. One of the freshmen that we snagged that year was Alec.

I noticed him right from the very first meeting. He was easily one of the best looking people I had ever seen outside a movie theatre. He didn’t say much, but he did laugh at all my jokes, which was, of course, of vital importance.

To my delight, Alec decided to join the team and stick around. He continued to charm and beguile me and by the time our first tournament rolled around, I was deeply in crush with him.

The main reason I fell for Alec wasn’t his looks (though they certainly helped), but the fact that he was also a writer. Like me, he had started when he was a young child. He was so serious about writing that he had been allowed to live in the Creative Writing section of the Special Interest dorm. This was impressive because you actually had to submit written work to get in there. He was also incredibly intelligent--I don't think there was any subject he couldn't take about with some degree of aplomb.

Conveniently, my friend Lola also lived there, in the Performing Arts section, so I had a legitimate excuse to be in that dorm at any time. Lola was the first person I told about my crush and she was thrilled. She thought he was adorable, too. Her only criticism of him was that his clothes were always wrinkled. “He always looks like someone tried to stuff him in a mail slot,” she observed.

We set off for our first competition in November. It was then that, to my dismay, I discovered a horrible truth; Alec was a terrible public speaker. This stunned me because he was so articulate. He did so poorly, in fact, that his scores brought the team down as a whole and we had no shot at winning sweepstakes.

A clearer-minded thinker would have, at this point, suggested to Alec that he either (A) practice, or (B) consider leaving the team. But I was not, at the time, such a thinker. I absolutely refused to let Alec quit because if he stopped coming to meetings, I wouldn’t have the excuse to see him once a week.

I proceeded to get very, very weird. I began dressing up for meetings. I began trying new hairstyles. I even selected a specific perfume—it was called “Pearls & Lace”—to wear whenever I knew I’d be around Alec. I wanted him to associate it with me, so that if he was ever strolling through Macy’s and smelled it, he’d be awestruck and think of me.

I wrote pages and pages of “He doesn’t know I’m alive” poetry. I mooned around the campus. I called my friends and forced them to analyze everything he ever said or did. ("Lola said she saw him in the laundry room and he was washing Hanes 32's. What do you think it means?") When he left a message on my answering machine, I would play it over and over again like the Zapruder film. To put it mildly, I was not a well woman.

Alec had a lot of weirdness going on himself. First of all, he was very moody. Of course, I chalked this up to being a “tortured artist,” and insisted that, out of all of the people he knew, I was the only one to truly “understand” him. He was often very quiet and shy—I interpreted this as being “introspective and brooding,” something true intellectuals did. He also wasn’t the most reliable person in the world—often he’d stroll into Forensics meetings an hour late or wouldn’t show up at all. My reaction? “He was too busy writing.” Yeah, I know.

During the entire first year I was in love with Alec (because that’s what my 18 year old mind insisted it was), he didn’t have a girlfriend, which I found absolutely astounding. I was thrilled, of course, but was constantly wary—someone that good couldn’t go walking around free forever. But as our friendship grew, there was no sign of a girlfriend.

And we did become good friends. We talked about writing, we talked about our friends (most of whom were dysfunctional), we talked about our goals. While part of me was so thrilled that he was finally opening up to me, another part of me was worrying that he would pigeonhole me firmly in the “just friends” category of his brain and he’d be unable to see me as possible girlfriend material.

This went on, as I said, for three years.

By the time I was a senior, my crush on Alec had become an obsession. He was all I thought about. It got to the point where it was no longer fun and exciting; it was painful. My schoolwork suffered, my friendships suffered, and my performance at the pharmaceutical company suffered. I lost thirty pounds. One good friend asked me if I was on drugs. Another friend saw me in my underwear and burst into tears at my skeletal appearance. My mother asked me if I needed a psychiatrist.

No. What I needed was Alec, and with graduation looming up ahead I now had very limited time in which to get him.

And here is where your humble author completely lost it. Instead of doing the normal thing and actually telling Alec about my feelings, or even trusting his best friend and roommate Chris to tell him (I was also close friends with Chris—it was good to have an ally right in his room) I actually placed an anonymous personal ad in one of the university’s newspapers that I knew he read copiously. This easily ranks as one of the stupidest things I've ever done.

The ad read thusly: “Attention, Alec X. I have been interested in you for three years now. You can’t possibly be this clueless. Just come up to me and say ‘yes,’ ‘no,’ or ‘maybe,’ and let me get on with my life.”

All of my friends were horrified. All of his friends immediately launched a full scale investigation to find out who had written it. No one suspected me because it was so completely out of character. I went around with a boulder in my stomach, terrified every time the phone rang.

In the following week’s paper, Alec had written this response: “Yes, I CAN be this clueless. Who are you?”

Pressure was building all around me. Finals were coming up. I had grad school applications pending. I was cramming for the GREs. I finally couldn’t take it anymore, went to Alec’s room, and found Chris. I threw myself into his arms and began to sob.

Chris, being a smart man, immediately understood. He said that he had suspected it had been me since the beginning, and that Alec knew that, too. We had a very nice long talk until Alec came back from class. He saw me crying with Chris and a look passed over his face that told me he knew everything. And that I wasn’t going to like his answer.

Chris made a dramatic exit and Alec started up his computer. He began to write something. Without looking at me, he said, very softly: “No.”

A very polite, forced conversation followed in which I apologized nine or ten times, he told me it was okay nine or ten times, and we promised we would always be friends. Feeling like I had been through a war, I finally left his room, went home, and called Lola. I told her everything.

I was strange for a long time after that. I had lived for so long with the hope that I would be with Alec that I honestly didn't know how to feel any other way. I wasn't used to noticing men anymore. Every morning when I woke up, the very first thing I would think was, "he said no." I withdrew from just about everything and everyone.

Alec finally began dating over that summer, and I found out an amazing thing. He was an even worse boyfriend than he was a public speaker. In fact, in the course of four months, Alec went through seven girlfriends, all of whom were quirky and, to be truthful, not very attractive. Without exception, they all broke up with him because he “couldn’t communicate.”

And I was the one he called when this happened to ease his pain. And it turned out I did “understand” him more than just about anyone else, and we built a wonderful, long friendship. More than once he told me, “BeowulfGirl, you’re the one who knows me best.”

Sadly, for reasons that are too long (and painful) to explain here, Alec ended our friendship in 2000. And even though I don’t know exactly where he is now, I do know what he’s thinking because (embarrassed sigh) I read his blog.

Yeah. I know.

2007-12-11T15:09:00.000-08:00

The Christopher Plummer Story

In my senior year of college, I had a class called Theatre Management with a professor named Eric Krebs. Krebs was a really fun guy who looked a lot like Gabe Kaplan. At the time of the class, Krebs was partial owner and Artistic Director of the Harold Clurman Theatre in New York.

Because there were only six students in the class, in a fit of generosity one day Krebs decided to take all of us to the city to see his wonderful theatre and to see up close how a professional theatre was run. On a rainy Saturday morning, we all piled into the Krebs Family Truckster and headed off to the bright lights.

On the way there, Krebs told us all about how excited he was about his current production of Macbeth, which was to star Christopher Plummer. The play was still in early rehearsal stage, but Krebs seemed sure that we could talk to some stagehands and sound engineers or something.

To my utter shock and horror, it turned out that I was the only one in the Krebs Family Truckster that had even heard of Christopher Plummer. Krebs and I tried valiantly to name other things he had been in, but the other students just sat there like frozen food. Finally, I told Krebs (merely making conversation) that I was looking forward to Plummer’s Macbeth because I had so enjoyed him in Othello five years earlier.

The Harold Clurman Theatre was on West 42nd Street, and of course there was no parking, so Krebs ended up parking in a lot several blocks away. Miserably, we trouped down the busy sidewalk in the pouring rain, hoping that Krebs would at least feed us eventually.

We finally arrived at Krebs’ theatre and shook ourselves dry in the lobby. Krebs disappeared into the theatre proper and started yelling for “Mark.”

Mark, apparently, wasn’t there. Then Krebs sounded very surprised and I heard him say to someone in the darkness: “Oh, hello! I didn’t think you would be here today! Listen, come on out here, there are some people I’d like you to meet.”

And, who should emerge from the darkness but Christopher Plummer himself.

I was immediately star-struck. I honestly don’t know what the hell was the matter with me. I had met famous (and infamous) actors before during my tenure in theatre, but I was somehow overcome by Plummer’s elegance.

Surprisingly, he was a bit shorter than me (I’m 5’7”). He was wearing a light blue turtleneck sweater and grey flannel trousers. In one hand he held a cup of coffee. All I could do was stare.

Since none of the other idiots knew who the man was, they all turned to me. Krebs, not yet noticing my catatonia, made a polite introduction. “Chris, this is BeowulfGirl. BeowulfGirl, this is Christopher Plummer.”

“Hello,” said Plummer politely, extending his hand. I just stared at it for a moment not knowing what to do with it. Finally, I raised my own hand and we shook. Unfortunately, I was still not able to form words. My friends in the class were starting to grin.

Krebs tried to help. “BeowulfGirl was just saying in the car that she really enjoyed your Iago a few years back,” he said.

Plummer looked at me, probably surprised that someone so young could possibly want to sit through three and a half hours of Shakespeare, and asked in his lovely voice, “Oh? Did you really like it?”

Oh, God, it was my turn to talk again. At this point, Lola, another friend in the class, punched me in the shoulder blade to try to jump-start me. After working my mouth a bit, I finally came up with: “I thought it was…breathtaking, actually.”

Plummer looked pleased. “That’s very kind of you to say,” he said, smoothly.

Krebs gave another gallant effort. “BeowulfGirl has spent eight years in professional theatre,” he said. “She knows her way around Shakespeare.”

Plummer looked intrigued. “Really? Have you done anything I would know?”

Oh dear God, I thought. Was I actually going to stand here and compare resumes with Christopher Plummer? And, of course, I couldn’t remember a damn thing I was in. Plummer was waiting patiently with kind blue eyes. “I—well, I did a lot of workshops,” I babbled. “And I was in Twelfth Night. And, um, Much Ado About Nothing.”

“Oh, that’s a charming one,” Plummer said, nodding encouragingly.

Krebs, seeing that he wasn’t going to get much further, said something terrifying: “Chris, I was about to take the class here to Sa Crepe for some lunch. Do you want to join us?”

The thought that I would have to sit through an entire lunch with Plummer was just terrifying, but at least he wasn’t laughing at me or anything. Plummer smiled at Krebs and said, “oh, that sounds nice. I just need to make a phone call first.” He dug in his pocket for change and headed for the pay phone on the other side of the lobby.

Once he was out of earshot, Lola said to me: “You are such a dork.”

Krebs started talking about production costs while Plummer made his phone call. Suddenly, Krebs looked over at him and called: “Chris? What’s wrong?”

“I think it’s broken,” said Plummer, banging the receiver on the phone.

“BeowulfGirl,” said Krebs, “go over there and help him.”

Horrified, I walked over to where Plummer was and asked what his problem was. It didn’t take long to decipher. He was trying to make a phone call using only a dime, and at that time pay phones required a twenty cent deposit. For some reason, he had a hard time understanding this, but eventually we dug up another dime and he was able to reach his party.

It was time for lunch.

Because Sa Crepe was all the way in the East 50’s, we had to all troop back to the Krebs Family Truckster in order to get there. Plummer crammed in the front seat with Krebs, and the rest of us got stuffed in the back, wet and rumpled. I was still kind of shaken up.

Eventually, we got to the restaurant and filed in. It was very busy, but because we had Plummer with us we got a table right away. I was seated directly across from Krebs, and Plummer was on his right. We perused the menus and decided on what we wanted.

When the waitress approached, Plummer decided to get fancy and order his meal in French. At this point, Lola, who is always making trouble, said: “BeowulfGirl speaks fluent French. Don’t you?”

And I, who have spoken French since I was fourteen, proceeded to forget every noun, verb conjugation, and cognate in the entire language. I was just unable to function with Plummer looking at me like that with those diamond-cutter eyes of his. He looked very amused.

The rest of the lunch passed with me feeling like I was functioning underwater. We piled back into the Krebs Family Truckster, deposited Plummer back at the Harold Clurman, and headed home.

Two weeks later in Theatre Management class, Krebs handed me a manila envelope. “This came for you, in care of me,” he said, grinning. “I think you’ll be very pleased.”

Puzzled, I tore open the envelope and was stunned to find four tickets to Macbeth, for a performance about two weeks away. It was accompanied by a lovely note, written in elegant script on very impressive stationery. “To one thespian from another—perhaps this time it won’t rain. Chris Plummer.”

I actually still have that note in a little plastic sleeve with all my theatre memorabilia. To this day, I get a happy feeling whenever I see The Sound Of Music.

2007-11-20T14:13:00.000-08:00

Early Literary Disasters

I decided I wanted to become a writer when I saw Richard Nixon resign the presidency on television. I was five. I was absolutely stunned when the BeowulfParents explained to me that someone else had written the words the president was saying and that they got paid for it. I thought it was the coolest job I could ever have, so I decided to start early.

I was convinced that I would be a bestselling author by the time I was 15. Clearly, I had to start working right away. Here, in roughly chronological order, are the unholy messes that I managed to churn out in the many years that followed before I was actually published.

The Ida Scripts:

The Ida Scripts were a series of vignettes about an eight year old girl (since I was also eight and I had no concept of writing characters that weren’t me) named Ida, and her two best friends, Iris and Ivy (do you notice a trend?) The scenes were only one or two pages long and consisted of adventures such as “Ida Goes To The Store,” “Ida Does Her Homework,” and “Ida Watches TV.”

For some demented reason, I asked my third grade teacher (who hated—absolutely hated—me) if I could perform The Ida Scripts in class. She said no, which made BeowulfMom pay a visit to the school to chew out the teacher for “curtailing my creative outlet.” The teacher finally gave in.

BeowulfMom’s big mistake was that she didn’t ever actually read The Ida Scripts, and had no idea that the scene I decided to perform for the class was a morbid little number called “Ida Goes To The Morgue.”

I recruited six of my classmates to play dead bodies and two other brave souls to play Iris and Ivy. I, of course, played Ida (no fool, I). Halfway through the production of “Ida Goes To The Morgue,” two little girls began screaming in terror and the performance was cut short. After that, I wisely shelved The Ida Scripts and decided to write my first novel.

My Father, The Ghostbreaker:

I want to make it clear that I had this idea years before Dan Ackroyd and Harold Ramis did. My Father The Ghostbreaker revolved around the life of 12 year-old Marcia Cameron, whose father, an unassuming lawyer, takes up the hobby of ghostbreaking. Ghostbreaking, for the uninitiated, is the “science” of getting rid of ghosts using machinery.

The machinery in question was called, respectively, “the graph” (I still don’t know what it actually did), “the Vistaroid” (it gave out some kind of “spectral reading”) and a lot of other old-time computer-like things with switches and dials.

The Camerons lived in Los Angeles, and you’d be surprised how many ghosts there were there. I like to think that if it weren’t for Marcia’s crusading, vigilant dad, the entire town might have become a Hellmouth. Kind of like Chicago would be if it weren’t for Karl Kolchak.

I spent so much time writing and re-writing My Father The Ghostbreaker that eventually the movie Ghostbusters came out, and I spent a lot of time being furious. To this day I think they owe me.

Meredith Blackwell, Child Spy:

I was fascinated with spy movies as a child, largely because of my unrequited crush on Roger Moore (I was 12, he was 56—it wouldn’t have worked out). The plot of this novel concerned a high school freshman named Meredith Blackwell, whose world is turned upside down when the F.B.I. discovers drugs (gasp!) planted in her locker.

Somehow (and this was never made clear), Meredith ended up working for the F.B.I. to help them catch a kidnapper. Meredith masquerades as an “international ballet star” named Charlotte LaTruse (yuccchhhh) and the F.B.I. trains her as a “junior agent.”

The problem was, despite many hours of television, I had no idea how the F.B.I. actually worked. I therefore saw no problem with the ending, when Meredith actually gets kidnapped and manages to overpower the kidnapper with a bottle of Percodan. (You think I’m kidding, but I’m not.)

Years later, I had an actual F.B.I. agent read the draft and he laughed so hard I think he got a hernia.

Once A Spy:

Clearly not having learned anything from my Meredith Blackwell debacle, I launched a second spy novel featuring an agent named Travis Macy. Who Travis actually worked for remained vague, but it was some part of “the government.” Travis, who was really only a watered-down Sam Spade, was teamed with a female agent from a different agency who has the distinction of having by far the weirdest name I’ve ever come up with: Magnolia Symmetry.

Travis and Magnolia’s “mission” was to find out which country was stealing America’s nuclear warheads. Because I was (and still am) incredibly lazy about research, I conveniently glossed over all the technical parts (like the actual mission) and instead wrote scene after scene of Travis and Magnolia getting trapped in strange places in foreign countries. When last seen, they were in Nassau, in the middle of a monsoon.

Stacks Of Stock:

This one is so stupid it barely deserves an entry. It was about a young girl (again) becoming fascinated with the stock market and investing her life savings (seventy-two dollars!!) in the market. Not surprisingly, she got incredibly rich and it spawned a hideous sequel called The Millionaire Of Wall Street.

Once again, I realized about halfway in that I really had no concept of the real stock market and I ended up actually showing the manuscript to a real stockbroker. He was kind enough not to laugh at a 13 year-old girl, but he did advise me to “save my money” in case I was thinking of investing in real life.

The Last Robert:

The Last Robert was my one and only venture into surrealism, and wow, was it awful. It concerns twelve men, all named Robert, who get invited to a birthday party at “The Robert Building.” I guess the entire high-rise was populated with men named Robert.

In any case, once all the Roberts show up, poison gas is leaked through the vents and they all fall unconscious. One by one, they disappear. Chaos ensues as the remaining Roberts try desperately to figure out who is taking them.

The whole thing culminates with a bizarre trial scene (in the Robert Building) in which one of the Roberts is implicated and is then bizarrely shot through the window (presumably by a rogue Robert) and dies. The other Roberts then proceed to have a sort of hoe-down, and the novel mercifully ends.

(I actually gave this mess to my 10th grade English teacher to read. Not being the type to mince words, he told me it was terrible and wanted to know how I managed to win the Creative Writing award every damn year.)

Gone With The Wind And Back:

My sequel to Gone With The Wind, which conveniently leaves out Scarlett’s children, the Civil War, and the entire character of Rhett Butler. The only redeeming quality about it is that I learned how to write in a dialect.

Dickensian Nights:

This was actully an assignment given to me by my 12th grade English teacher, in which I had to re-write the ending of A Tale Of Two Cities. It actually turned out to be an easy assignment. There was a lot of blood, death, and decapitation, Lucie Manette runs off with Sydney Carton (hey, at least he has a job) and boring Charles Darnay is executed. My teacher thought this was so delightful that he made copies for the entire department.

Now, knowing all this…don’t you all wonder how I eventually managed to sell something? And continue to work in this field?

Even scarier…I’m about 160 pages into another novel. But that’s another story.

2007-11-11T17:04:00.000-08:00

On Acting

I wish I could tell you what it’s like.

If you’ve never acted live onstage—if you’ve never felt that particular kind of adrenaline rush—it’s very, very hard to put it into words. I spent eight years of my life doing it, and I still can say with all honesty that the feeling I got when I was up there in front of a large, live audience was better than anything I’ve ever experienced. No drug, no food, no relationship could come close to it. This probably explains why I haven't had a date in seven years.

I started dabbling as young as six. Throughout elementary school, I would always find myself playing the lead role in school pageants, plays, and productions. The reasons for this were partly because I never shut up and absolutely loved being the center of attention, and also because I seemed to have no understanding of stage fright. I would do absolutely anything—sing, dance, fall down, whatever—as long as I had an audience.

I got serious when I was about fourteen and got accepted into an elite repertory group. The other actors in the group were really the first friends I ever had. I finally had met people who didn’t treat me as an outcast because of my intelligence and eccentricity, but instead embraced it and me. The experience I gained doing repertory shows in my early teens pretty much made the transition into the professional world a lot easier.

But it’s the repertory I really want to talk about, since they’re really responsible for my ensuing career, and I loved them so very much. I spent four years with them, and in that time I learned a lot about theatre and its bizarre customs.

Come, take my hand. Let me show you a little of that world.

Bathrobes:

The bathrobe tradition, I am told, was started by Rex Harrison in 1956 with My Fair Lady. Apparently, Rex, who was feuding with his wife at the time, would come to the theatre hours early in order to get away from her. He would then change into his bathrobe and wander around the theatre, bothering the technical people and the musicians.

In any case, my group embraced the bathrobe tradition wholeheartedly. The leads would arrive several hours before opening, put on our bathrobes, and generally make nuisances of ourselves until it was time to change into costume and go into makeup. The key thing was to always appear cool and unflappable, as if you did this sort of thing every day.

Sex:

I can honestly say that in the four years I worked in repertory, I never had sex with anyone I was in a show with. Not that I wasn’t tempted, mind you—some of my leading men were almost unbelievably handsome and charming. I think what stopped me was—well, to be honest, what stopped me was that they didn’t seem to want to have sex with me, either.

I did, however, often come across other people having sex. The most common places for theatrical trysts were up in the flyspace (and God alone knows how they got up there with no ladders), the wardrobe room (usually using a pile of costumes for cushioning) and, weirdly, the hall. Eventually I got used to it. I would just storm right past the couple, eyes shielded, saying, “coming through, coming through…sorry, pardon me, sorry…” and let them go on with their snogging.

Purple Towels:

Michael Crawford is to blame for this one. In 1988, Michael gave an interview to New York Magazine in which he admitted that, in between acts of Phantom Of The Opera, he would actually take a nap with a purple towel. (“Ralph Lauren makes a lovely shade,” said Michael, “not too grape, not too mauve.”) There has been much discussion as to how Michael managed to actually fall asleep during the intermission (I, personally, always used the time to do vocal exercises), but the man did win a Tony Award, so I trust him. In any event, we often carted purple towels around with us backstage, in the hopes that we would also win a Tony.

Fruit:

While you’re walking around in your bathrobe with your towel, it’s a general practice to eat fruit. I always ate a nectarine. The logic here was that the acid in the fruit would break up any phlegm or mucus you might have in your throat that would impede your singing. If you didn’t like fruit, carrying around a mug of tea was equally acceptable.

Monotony:

The most common question I am asked about my theatre days is, “how on earth can you stand doing the exact same show every single night for months at a time?” I can completely understand this question. For most people who have normal jobs, the thought of having the exact same day over and over again—with identical dialogue and clothing—would make them take a header off the Chrysler Building.

But the thing with live theatre is, it’s actually different every night because the audience is different. It’s a completely different energy. After a while, you learn to “read” an audience and know what to expect. A Saturday night crowd, for example, is a lot different than a Friday night one (Friday night audiences have less energy). Matinee audiences sometimes drag. Around the holidays you get a lot of out-of-towners who are generally really enthusiastic.

The thing you have to watch out for, though, is to never lose your concentration. If your mind starts to wander, you face the very real danger of suddenly “waking up” in the middle of the show and having no idea where you are or which scene you’re in. This is especially terrifying if it’s in the middle of your big soliloquy.

Lead Disease:

Lead Disease is the term used when a lesser cast member, usually an extra or chorus person, develops powerful romantic feelings for the play’s leading lady and/or man, depending on their gender or sexual preference. It is a very private hell, and can lead to behavior such as gazing, twitching, vomiting, and staring at maps of their home towns until you get dizzy and pass out. Fortunately, Lead Disease usually goes away once you become a lead yourself and the position no longer awes you.

The polar opposite of Lead Disease is…

Intense Personal Hatred:

Like every other job in the world, theatre has its share of assholes. Chances are good you’ll be forced to act across from one. The best advice I can give here is to try like hell not to sock them in the jaw, and to invest in a dart-board on which you can put their head shot.

Opening Night Speeches:

This is when the leads, who have spent the last twelve weeks of rehearsal driving everyone crazy, give an enthusiastic pep-talk to the rest of the cast. Usually the director goes first (in which he thanks everyone), followed by the leading man (who makes a special point of thanking the director), then the leading lady. I was never able to make it through a single one without crying, which lead to the makeup people chasing me with eye-liner.

The First Nighter:

The opening night cast party, or “First Nighter,” is always held at a nearby hotel where there is plenty of dancing and drinking. If you’re a lead, you can show up either in street clothes or your bathrobe. Usually the director makes a toast, then gets completely bombed with the producer and choreographer. Cast members who have wanted to have sex since the first read-through go get rooms. At least one person ends up unconscious in the bathroom. Eventually, if you’re doing it right, someone will call the riot squad.

Do I miss it? Every day. I miss all my directors and my co-workers. I get excited when I see or hear that one of them has “made it.” And I wish like hell it had been me.

So, like I said…I wish I could tell you what it’s like.

2007-10-18T09:36:00.000-07:00

Crazy Nina

(For those of you following the saga, my home computer is still not functioning. Still, I felt that I owed you all a new blog entry.)

I should have known that I was going to have a problem with Crazy Nina when she showed up on the first day of class in a tube top, stiletto heels, and clutching a six-pack of Red Bull. Since it was an 8:00am class, I kind of understood the Red Bull, but she looked horribly uncomfortable in her clothes. She was wearing makeup that looked like it had been applied the night before and slept in—the eyeliner half-moons under her eyes made her look like a morphine addict.

Crazy Nina’s past academic history is kind of sketchy. She purports to have only gone to high school “for two months,” after which she (apparently) dropped out until she decided she wanted to attend college. Somehow she got a GED and got accepted here at Very Serious University (who will accept anyone whose knuckles don’t drag on the ground when they walk).

At the beginning of every class, we have freewriting. Freewriting is pretty much what it sounds like—you write for ten minutes about anything you want to. Afterwards, if you want to, you can read your freewriting aloud and the class discusses it.

Crazy Nina writes every freewriting about George W. Bush and the things she’d like to do to him. These involve torture, execution, and public humiliation (always with lots of obscenities). I am astounded that Homeland Security or the Secret Service haven’t yet swarmed into the classroom to take Crazy Nina to a maximum security prison.

Crazy Nina also manages to work Bush into every essay she writes for class, no matter how far the stretch. In her essay on King Lear, Crazy Nina insisted that King Lear was really supposed to be Bush. I couldn’t seem to explain to her that Shakespeare, not being Doctor Who, couldn’t have any knowledge of Bush and his actions. Her paper on Bleak House was equally bizarre, in which she argued that the character of Mr. Krook (a lawyer) was really a simulacrum of Bush. She was especially fond of the scene in which Krook/Bush spontaneously combusts.

Three weeks ago, Crazy Nina approached me and told me that she was going to Georgia for a few days and would have to miss class. I made the mistake of asking her what she was planning to do in Georgia, and she explained to me that she was going to meet an “online friend” in person for the first time. This “friend” was allegedly named Dee Dee and was 39 years old. Crazy Nina is 17 and refers to Dee Dee as her “best friend.” They’ve known each other in cyberspace for only two months.

That should have set off a warning signal, but no.

A week passed and I got an e-mail from Crazy Nina, telling me that she was having such a good time in Georgia with Dee Dee that she decided to stay an extra few days. She then asked me if I could e-mail her the lecture that she had missed. Kind of miffed, I wrote back and said that if I were able to do that, nobody would have to come to class and I could just stay home in my bathrobe e-mailing the lecture to everyone.

Another week passed and there was no sign of Crazy Nina. Everyone began to become concerned.

The following evening, I got a phone call from Crazy Nina. I could hear the sound of traffic in the background.

“Where are you?” I asked.

“I’m not sure,” she said. “I think I’m somewhere in Virginia.”

“What happened?”

She then told me a long confusing story about how she and Dee Dee had gotten into a terrible fight, causing Dee Dee to rip Crazy Nina’s windshield wipers off her car. She also threw her out of the house. The problem with all of this was that Dee Dee was supposed to give her money for gas for the way home and now that they’d had a fight, she wouldn’t.

“How much money do you have?” I asked, concerned.

“Five dollars,” said Crazy Nina.

“You’re never going to make it to New Jersey on five dollars,” I said.

“Oh, my car is very good on gas,” she said.

Of course, I knew that wouldn’t happen and she’d be stranded. She then told me that she was stopping at every truck stop on the highway in order to beg people for money for food and gas. I told her that this was highly dangerous, and she didn’t care.

“Can’t you call your parents?” I asked.

“That’s not really an option,” she said.

She explained that she lived with her father, but because she knew he would never allow her to drive all the way to Georgia to visit a complete stranger, she had lied to him and told him that she was visiting her aunt—his own sister. When Crazy Nina didn’t come home on the day she had told her father she was coming home, he got concerned and called his sister. The sister, of course, had no idea where Crazy Nina was and then they both got really scared.

Her father then began calling Crazy Nina’s cell phone. Crazy Nina saw that it was her father calling, didn’t want to deal with the inevitable questions, and let all the calls go to voice mail. Now horribly worried, her father called both the police and the F.B.I.

This really alarmed Crazy Nina, not because she was now a fugitive (more or less) but because she doesn’t have a driver’s license. I tried to convince her to call her father anyway, to at least ease the man’s mind, but she wouldn’t hear of it. At this point, a truck cut her off, she cursed loudly, and we got disconnected.

All I could think of was the F.B.I. finding Crazy Nina’s body on the side of the interstate, hacked into pieces. They would examine her cell phone and see that the last call she had made had been to me, and I would suddenly become deeply involved in federal crime.

Several more days went by with no sign of Crazy Nina. By this time she had missed four classes.

Three nights ago at around 12:30am, I was sound asleep and was vaguely aware of the telephone ringing. A few moments later, BeowulfDad staggered into my room, angrily telling me that a student was on the phone for me.

“Hello?” I asked, bleerily.

“Hi! It’s Nina!” I could hear wind blowing and cars in the distance.

“Um…it’s 12:30,” I babbled.

“Yeah, well, I need a favor.”

I couldn’t believe this. “What?”

“I’m in Maryland and I’m completely out of money. I can’t get the truckers to give me any. Can you send me some?”

I blinked in confusion. “What?”

“Can you send me some money?”

“Absolutely not,” I said. “Why don’t you just call your father?”

“He’d be mad,” she said.

“I’m mad!” I said, and hung up.

Two days later, I had an important visitor to class. I was due to be evaluated (it happens every two years) and I had to be in top form. Things were going fine until about fifteen minutes into class when the door literally banged open and Crazy Nina came striding in, wielding her essay, which had been due the previous week when she was doing her Jack Kerouac impersonation.

She marched right up to me, oblivious, and said: “Here’s my f*****g essay.”

The class gasped. The observer began writing furiously.

“Nina, sit down,” I said, through clenched teeth.

We then started the exercise, which was something I like to call “Fantasy Mail.” Basically, you write a letter to someone or some thing that you really wish you could send, but can’t. People usually get very creative. Most guys write to their cars or their favorite athletes. Most girls write to their hair, clothes, or boyfriends.

Crazy Nina wrote to her mother, from whom she is estranged. It started off mildly, but as she read aloud it became more and more bizarre and filled with expletives. It got to the point where, literally, every other word was some cognate of the f-word. Along with other things that I didn’t need to know, I found out that Crazy Nina’s mother had put Crazy Nina into rehab when she was just fourteen. I have no idea why.

I wrapped up the class, pretty certain I was going to be fired.

Last night, the observer called me at home for my conference. I was stunned to find out that she had actually loved the class and felt I related well to my students. I apologized profusely for Crazy Nina, and she said not to worry about it and that she had had her share of insane students as well.

I have nine more weeks to deal with Crazy Nina. I have the feeling I’m going to wind up in rehab as well.

2007-10-09T10:20:00.000-07:00

Talk Tech To Me

At Christmas of 2003, the BeowulfParents attempted to get me out of my severe depression by bribing me with high end electronics. They bought me a state-of-the-art computer system, which I loved and adored. At the time, I also switched my Internet Provider, and because I live out in the sticks, I was unable to get DSL.

This changed a few weeks ago when Verizon sent me a mailing saying they now had DSL available in my area. Thoroughly pumped, I called them up and ordered it.

And the nightmare began.

On Friday, as appointed, a tech from Verizon named Frank showed up at my house to install my DSL. Frank was a young, happy-go-lucky fat guy with a small moustache and a crew cut. He brought an impressive array of tools in with him and headed for my basement.

Once there, Frank messed with the phone jack, ran some wires and lines, did something with the phone box, went outside and crawled under the house, and generally wired the hell out of the basement. Because BeowulfMom doesn’t trust anyone, she made BeowulfDad follow him around, thinking that he would try to steal something.

Finally, it was time for Frank to install the Verizon software. I was mere seconds away from having the DSL of my dreams. I went down to my office with Frank to watch (and to make sure he didn’t stuff any of my things into his pants).

Frank installed the software, and the computer cheerfully told him it was time to reboot. So, we waited.

And waited.

And waited.

The problem seemed to be that the computer was permanantly stuck on the opening screen for Windows ME. I didn’t even get to the icon screen. It just froze there, drives whirring and gears grinding. Frank began to look nervous.

We turned everything off and turned it back on again. Nothing.

We unplugged everything and tried that. Nothing.

Nervously, Frank got out his cell phone and called Verizon. He got on with someone named Gary and described what was happening. Gary didn’t seem to know anything, but he told Frank that it sounded like a “computer problem” and not a “Verizon problem.”

Relieved that he seemed to be off the hook, Frank hung up and told me to call the manufacturer, which was Compaq. I had no idea what Compaq's number was—up until six months ago, the computer had been on warranty, and whenever I needed repairs I just took it back to Radio Shack where I had bought it.

I got out the phone book and looked up Radio Shack’s number. When I got them, I asked for the tech support number for Compaq. They told me it was 1-800-GO-COMPAQ.

I dialed as Frank watched. There were several clicks and tones. Finally, a sultry pre-recorded female voice said: “Do you want to talk to me? If so, please enter your credit card number.”

Horrified, I slammed the phone down. I called Radio Shack back.

“Um, hello? That number you just gave me for Compaq tech support? Yeah, that. It’s phone sex.”

“What?” they asked, horrified.

“It’s phone sex,” I said again.

There were several moments of laughing (though not by me) and they finally dug around in their paperwork and told me that the correct number was 1-800-OK-COMPAQ. Fine.

I called the number and got an electronic menu (what a shock). It asked me to state the name of my product. “Compaq Presario 5000,” I said, confidently.

I was then cheerfully informed by the robot voice: “We’re sorry, but Compaq no longer offers technical support for that product.” CLICK.

I just stared at the phone. Frank backed wisely away.

I called Radio Shack for a third time and told them what had happened. The girl I spoke to, named Brenda, said that she had no idea how to help me, but there was, apparently, a guy who worked there named Matt who “fixed computers on the side.” Great. Matt was due to be in at 1:30. It was 1:15 at the time.

I hung up kind of helplessly. Frank said, “I know…why don’t you call Geek Squad?”

Well, why not? I got their number from Information and called them. After navigating their electronic menu (which was horrifying) I finally got hooked up with a nice British lady who asked me a ton of questions and typed furiously. I kept asking repeatedly, “how much is this going to cost me?” and she kept finding ways to avoid the question.

Finally she said, a little hesitantly, that to have a Geek Squad tech come to the house and diagnose the problem, it would cost me two hundred and fifty dollars. And that’s just to diagnose the problem. If I needed any actual work done (which I clearly would), it would be even more.

“I don’t have that kind of money,” I said, and hung up.

By this time it was 1:30, when the mysterious Matt was due to show up at Radio Shack. I called back and asked to speak with him. He was a very soft-spoken man with an accent I couldn’t quite place. I told him who I was and what had happened to my computer. He didn’t seem to understand why I was calling him. When I told him that Brenda had told me that he “fixes computers on the side,” he got very upset and told me that she had no right to give out that information.

Once I had calmed him down, I explained what had happened and that Geek Squad wanted two hundred and fifty dollars. Matt got uppity and said that he charges even more. Thoroughly disgusted, I hung up.

Frank, who had been watching all this, decided to call a friend of his named Tony who “knew all about these things.” I was patient while he dialed. He explained my problem to Tony and said: “Really? That’s all?” He then looked at me. “I don’t suppose you have the Recovery disk that came with this computer?”

Of course I did. I save everything. I dug it out of my desk and handed it to him. He loaded it and we looked at the screen. Tony (who was still on the phone) tried to talk us through it, but we couldn’t see a single option that wouldn’t erase everything on my hard drive and restore it to the factory presets.

“Look, Frank,” I said, nervously. “I’m an English professor and a writer. I have about fifty short stories and three novels on that thing. I can’t lose them. I have no hard copies.” Frank relayed all this to Tony, who then had a brainstorm.

According to Tony, since the problem had occurred directly after the installation of the Verizon software, it was entirely possible that the software had maxed out my memory and thus wouldn’t load Windows properly. I agreed that this was possible, since I have five years worth of crap on there, including several enormous programs. Frank asked Tony what I should do, and Tony recommended going to Best Buy and purchasing more memory.

I called Best Buy and spoke to a guy named Brian in the computers department. I told him my problem and what Tony had said. Brian agreed with Tony and said to bring my computer in and he’d hook me up.

Frank left. He was now two hours late for his second customer. I felt bad.

The following day, BeowulfDad and I unhooked the computer tower and loaded it into the car and headed off to Best Buy. I was very optimistic—soon I’d have my memory upgrade (which was only supposed to cost forty bucks) and my beloved DSL. I schlepped the computer to the computers department and asked for Brian. He wasn’t working, but another sales associate said he could help me.

He couldn’t find the model number on my computer. “Do me a favor,” he said. “Go over to the Geek Squad window and ask them for the model number.” (I was still kind of annoyed at Geek Squad, but since they seemed to have the answers, I thought I’d have to deal with them.)

I dumped the computer on the Geek Squad counter and asked the designated geek what the model number was. He just blinked at me. “Why do you want to know?” he asked.

I told him that I was in for a memory upgrade. The geek looked dubious and plugged the computer into a monitor. The hated Windows ME screen glowed ominously. The geek shook his head and said, “this isn’t a memory problem, it’s a mechanical problem. Who told you it was a memory problem?”

“Brian,” I said.

“Well, he’s an idiot. You need to reinstall Windows ME, which they don’t even make anymore, and erase your hard drive.”

I just blinked at him. “Um…that can’t happen,” I said. I was very close to freaking out.

“We can try to recover your data,” he said, not sounding as if he believed it.

“And how much is all this going to cost me?” I asked, gritting my teeth.

“About four hundred dollars. Provided you don’t need any parts.”

That was it. I freaked out. “I don’t have four hundred dollars,” I said, “can’t you just uninstall the Verizon software? Everything was fine before he installed it. I know that’s what the problem is!”

“It’ll be about four hundred dollars,” said the geek.

“Well,” I said, drolly, “isn’t that just fucking fantastic?” And I grabbed the computer and hauled ass out of there.

Back in the car, BeowulfDad kept muttering about how he always thought the whole DSL thing was a bad idea and how he just knew I was going to mess it up. We argued and bickered our way down the highway. I decided, just for kicks, to go to Radio Shack. Even if I was no longer under warranty, they might still agree to fix it, hopefully for less than four hundred dollars.

When I got there, a strange, ancient foreign man took all of my information and the rest of the sales associates had a good laugh at how old my computer was. The ancient salesman told me (in an almost indecipherable accent) that it would be fixed in “four to six weeks.”

I almost had a heart attack. “No,” I said, “absolutely not. I need it this week. I’m a professor and a writer. I have to have access to a computer.”

“Sorry, four to six weeks,” he muttered.

“And do you have any idea how much it would cost?” I asked, through clenched teeth.
“No,” he said. “They’ll call you with an estimate.”

“Oh, Jesus Christ,” I muttered.

“Oh, and you’ll have to go to the UPS store, buy a box and some Styrofoam, pack up the computer and pay for shipping,” said the man. “Both ways.”

This was too much for BeowulfDad. “Forget it,” he said, disgusted, and picked up the computer and marched out.

We went home. I was almost in tears. (In the meantime, I’m being billed by Verizon for the DSL service I’m not using yet.) I looked in the yellow pages for computer repair people, but as it was now the weekend, no one was open.

It wasn't until today, in the middle of lecture, that I realized that I know a few people in the Computer Science department. Hopefully, one of them will be able to diagnose and fix the problem--I'd much rather pay them than some guy I don't even know.

The upshot of all this is...God only knows when I'll be able to make another blog entry. I'll try to get them in during the times I'm here at Very Serious University, but I can't promise anything fantastic.

Pray for me.

2007-09-12T14:28:00.000-07:00

The Robert Palmer Story

In early 2001, the BeowulfParents and I visited Harrah’s Hotel & Casino for the weekend. I really didn’t have a lot of cash to blow, but I liked the restaurants there so I figured I would go along and at least get something good to eat.

On our first day there, miraculously (in a never-to-be-repeated feat), I won $800 on a one-dollar Wheel Of Fortune slot machine. It was my first big win at a casino, and I was thrilled.

BeowulfDad, ever vigilant, told me that I shouldn’t walk around the casino with that much cash and that it might be a good idea to put it in the safe up in our room. I agreed with him and headed off for the elevators.

Our room was on the 45th floor, and I was the only one on the elevator. I rode for some time in silence until the elevator stopped somewhere around the 20th floor and an attractive man of about fifty wearing a light grey suit stepped in. He gave me a big smile, and, since I was feeling giddy about my win (and he was very cute) I smiled back.

The thing that was really gnawing at me, though, was that he looked strangely familiar. I wasn’t sure where I could know him from; I was new to the area, my friends were considerably younger, and the BeowulfParents have, sadly, no friends at all.

“Which floor?” I asked, since I was the one standing by the buttons.

“Fifty-two, please,” he said.

As soon as he spoke, I knew exactly who he was. He was Robert Palmer.

I started to giggle. I couldn’t help it, and I didn’t know what the hell was wrong with me. From my career in theatre, I had met many celebrities and (usually) held up pretty well, but for some reason the concept of sharing an elevator with Robert Palmer at Harrah’s just made me laugh.

I felt I needed to apologize because he was looking at me like I was insane. “I’m sorry,” I said, between giggles, “I haven’t had much sleep, and I just won $800…Anyway, I just realized who you are. I’m a really big fan.” (I was).

Palmer’s smile widened. “Thank you!” he said, enthusiastically. “That’s always nice to hear!”

I managed to collect myself. “Are you performing here?” I asked. “I didn’t see any signs or advance publicity.”

“No,” he said, “I’m here promoting an album with some people from Island Records.”

“Oh,” I said, happily, “that’s great! What’s the title? I’ll have to pick it up when it comes out.” At this point I was just babbling, wondering why the hell the elevator was taking so long.

“Oh, you don’t have to wait!” said Palmer. “I have some demos in my suite! Come on down, I’ll give you one.”

I thought briefly of the BeowulfParents and wondered what they would say if they knew I was chatting up a famous musician in the elevator. But then I realized that if I did go with him, I’d be able to tell a story to my friends that included the line: “So then, Robert Palmer and I went back to his hotel room…”

We rode to his floor and I followed him doggedly down the hall. He asked me my name and how long I was in town. We eventually arrived at a room and he swiped his card and held the door open for me.

There were two other men (also in suits) in the room, and they were staring at some large photographs collected on a table in front of them. They seemed to be arguing. Also on the table was a large cardboard box. Palmer began rummaging through the box and pulled out a CD case. “Here you go! Wait, I’ll sign it for you.”

I looked at the CD and was confused to see that there was no cover or liner notes or anything. “Where’s the cover?” I asked, confused.

One of the Island Record guys looked up from the table and said; “that’s what we’re trying to decide.”

Palmer came back wielding a pen. “We’re just finalizing the cover art,” he said. He opened up the CD case, took out the CD, and wrote something on it. He indicated the photographs on the table. “Which one do you like?” he asked.

I was stunned. “I…um…I’m an English Literature professor, I really don’t know much about music marketing…”

Palmer looked interested. “What’s your favorite?” he asked.

“My favorite what?”

“Bit of English Literature.”

I blinked. Could I actually be having this conversation? “Well…I did my dissertation on Beowulf,” I said. “I also like Chaucer.”

Palmer asked, “Do you know Peter Gabriel?”

The record executives looked annoyed. “Well, not personally,” I said.

“He studied English Literature, too,” he said.

Well, I thought, if I ever meet Peter Gabriel and we run out of things to say about “Shock The Monkey,” I’m all set.

Palmer left the room and one of the Island Records guys, who was bald and apparently getting impatient, asked me: “Which picture do you like?”

Apparently, I wasn’t going to get out of it. Evidently, they were trying to decide among three different pictures. I could tell by the pictures that the album was going to be called Best Of Both Worlds and was a compilation album. I was pretty psyched to own it, actually. “I kind of like the blue one, with the luggage,” I said.

“That’s the one I like, too,” said the bald man.

“I still like the one with the coconuts,” said the first man.

Suddenly, Palmer came back in holding an Entenman’s box. “Crumb cake?” he asked, politely.

“I—er—no, thank you, I’m—“

“Why do you like the blue one?” asked the man who liked the coconuts.

I waved my hands in a disconnected way. “It stands out, that’s all,” I said.

“It’s very good crumb cake,” said Palmer, pushing it.

“No, really, I’m fine.”

“Tea?” asked Palmer.

“I don’t like the coconuts at all,” said Baldy.

“No thank you, it’s okay,” I said, nervously looking at my watch. “I really need to go because I’m having dinner with my family, but it was really great to meet you.”

Seeing that he wasn’t going to get me to eat crumb cake with him, Palmer showed me to the door. And suddenly, gathering courage, I said: “Can I ask you something about Heavy Nova?”

He looked surprised, but said, “sure!”

“What in the world was up with all that yodeling on ‘Change His Ways’?” I asked. I had wondered about that for years.

Palmer sighed and looked very weary. “The yodeling was a very bad idea,” he admitted.

The man who was still championing the coconuts looked over and said; “don’t blame us for that one…he did that album for EMI.”

After a round of handshaking, I was free to leave. When Best of Both Worlds finally came out (with the cover I liked!) I bought it anyway just so I could have the cover. I still have my autographed demo, though, and when Palmer passed away in 2003, I played it for days.

Had I been a clearer-minded thinker, I would have asked about the “Addicted To Love” video.

Next time: Perhaps something about the extended BeowulfFamily, which is insane.

2007-08-29T14:43:00.000-07:00

How I Got Here

A lot of people ask me, “how did you get this way?”

“What way?” I ask.

“You know…the way you are. Loud. Overbearing. Dramatic.” They always seem annoyed at this point.

“I’m not sure,” I say, honestly. “I think I was born that way.”

“Well, how did you become interested in all this crap? This Old English crap? The whole professor gig? Why aren’t you a secretary or an accountant or a window-washer or something?”

The answer to that question is complicated. The truth is, I wound up doing what I do because of the intervention of several fine, dedicated people with whom I was lucky enough to come into contact. I shall now tell you about some of them. If you are ever fortunate enough to encounter these people, don’t let them leave without imparting some of their wisdom on you.

Mr. Dennis Donahue, 12th Grade Honors English: The man who introduced me to Anglo-Saxon and Beowulf for the first time! I can still remember seeing the Anglo-Saxon language filmstrip (“beep”) and being fascinated with all those strange letters and symbols. When I heard it read aloud for the first time, I clearly recall thinking: “I want to know everything about this. Everything.” And a career (fixation?) was born.

Mr. Donahue was the only inspirational figure in high school, so we move on now to college, where I really came unglued.

Dr. Ann Baines Coiro, Shakespeare Seminar: Oh, how I wanted to be Dr. Coiro when I grew up! She was tall, thin, elegant, sophisticated, and soft-spoken. She wore long flowing dresses. She was charming and eloquent. She had a beautiful lecture voice which kind of lulled me into a trance. Once, in a fit of bravery, I went to her office hours and told her; “I want to be just like you!” She turned scarlet and looked flustered and couldn’t understand why. I’m sad to report that the only part of Dr. Coiro I was able to transfer to my own professorhood is the being tall part.

Dr. John “Mickey” McClure, Bible As Literature: Mickey was an extremely popular professor who was kind enough to bend the rules for me in order to get me in to his Bible As Literature class. The class was a fascinating mix of fundamentalist Christians, Jews, atheists, agnostics, Muslims, and one lapsed Catholic (me) who just needed credits in the Religious Studies department. Mickey managed to keep everyone in line without a holy war breaking out, even if he did wear strange things like a plaid flannel shirt with a paisley tie. When I found out that Mickey actually lived near my house, I drove there to see what kind of digs he had. Sadly, it turned out that he lived in a real rat-hole of an apartment in urban New Jersey. I sincerely hope he’s moved.

Dr. Whitney Bolton, Linguistics: Dr. Bolton is actually the Bolton of the famous Wrenn-Bolton edition of Beowulf, so he was like a minor celebrity to me when I took his class. He was tall, lanky, eccentric, and slightly obsessed with his cat, Bugsy. The textbook for the class (A Living Language – I recommend it to language geeks) was actually one that Bolton himself wrote, and I usually abhor this practice. However, it was really convenient to have him right there to explain things that confused you. He further solidified my love of linguistics and all things Anglo-Saxon, and was the only person who could ever properly explain The Great Vowel Shift to me. He was kind enough to write me a recommendation to grad school.

Dr. Terry Holt, Science Fiction: Dr. Holt was enormously popular because he was young, brilliant, and handsome. He was able to handle a class of 400 insane Sci-Fi fans with aplomb and grace. He also taught Creative Writing, and I jumped through hoops to get into one of his classes, but sadly, even my methods were ineffective. The one clear thing I remember from Science Fiction class was Dr. Holt saying: “Star Trek is Mister Rogers’ Universe.” I wasn’t entirely sure what he meant by that, but it sure sounds cool. A while back, I tried to find out whatever happened to Dr. Holt, and discovered that apparently he had freaked out, quit teaching, and joined the Navy. I can only assume he was having a mid-life crisis.

Dr. Rick Barr, Dramatic Literature: So thrilled with Dr. Barr was I that I took both halves of his two-term course, thus having him as a professor for a whole academic year. I admired him because he didn’t care what he looked like and often showed up for our (morning) class looking like he had slept in his clothes. He also threw chalk at inattentive students. I can clearly remember him saying on the first day of class: “August Strindberg is everybody’s nightmare blind date.” He never explained it further, but I still have that written in my notebook.

Dr. Julian Monihan, Modern Novel: Oh, there are just no words to say how much I adored this man. He was about sixty, and very “old school” – he called his female students “Miss So-and-so”, and was so damn charming about it that nobody minded. I had his class during my very last semester in college, and applying to grad schools was making me even more insane than usual. One day after class, I collapsed in tears at my desk, and Dr. Monihan patted me on the shoulder reassuringly. “Miss BeowulfGirl,” he said, gently, “just ask yourself…will it matter a thousand years from now?” I said that it probably wouldn’t. He smiled and gave me a Junior Mint and sent me on my way.

Dr. Barry Qualls, Victorian Novel: Dr. Qualls was a southern gentleman who was also the Chair of the English department, which meant I absolutely had to have him on my side. He is the only professor, to date, to ever make me actually finish Bleak House and write a paper on it. I owe Dr. Qualls a lot because he worked tirelessly with me on my Statement of Purpose for my grad school applications, and when I was accepted, he was the first one I called.

Dr. Susan Cachel, Athropology: Yes! A science professor sneaks in! I was hesitant to take Anthropology, but Dr. Cachel made it so interesting and accessible that I fell in love with it. If I hadn’t discovered it so late in my academic career, I might have minored in it. I often watch the National Geographic Channel and think of her.

Dr. Allen Josephson, Abnormal Psychology: I took his class, naturally, so that I might diagnose myself and my friends. He looked a lot like Freddy Mercury, and on the very first day of class after handing out the syllabus he announced loudly: “According to my permanent record at this university, I have an addiction problem because I smoke. And I’m pissed off about it!” A few years ago, I actually saw Dr. Josephson on television, being interviewed about Multiple Personality Disorder. I hope he has given up smoking.

Dr. Eric Krebs, Theatre Appreciation: Dr. Krebs was a jolly fat man who, at the time, co-managed the Harold Clurman Theatre in New York. We had a field trip there, where I actually met Christopher Plummer in the lobby. While shaking Plummer’s hand, I completely forgot every single thing I ever knew about the man, even though he’s one of my favorite actors. Dr. Krebs tried to help by saying; “BeowulfGirl was just telling me how much she liked your Iago.” Plummer, charmingly, said something like; “Really?” And all I could do was stare. It was a week before I could face Krebs again.

Dr. Mary Schmidt, Intermediate Algebra: The whole reason I had to take Intermediate Algebra was because I didn’t take enough math in high school. Because of this, the entire class was filled with people just like me—basically smart people who had a lot of higher math anxiety and got the hell out as soon as they could in high school. Knowing this, Dr. Schmidt was extremely kind and explained everything as if she were talking to a room of five year olds. Since the first half of the class was basic algebra review, I managed an “A” on the mid-term. Unfortunately, after that we got into (shudder) polynomials and I failed the final. Fortunately, this averaged out to a “C+” for the course, and I was able to leave math behind forever. I still think of Dr. Schmidt fondly when balancing my checkbook.

I’m sure there are some that I’m forgetting, but these are just a few of the people who helped shape my life and career. I keep track of them, and one day hope to be able to pay back what they’ve done for me.

I think I turned out pretty well after all!

Next time: Oh, who the hell knows. Suggestions welcome.

2007-07-31T09:46:00.000-07:00

Some Midol For Philip, Please

In college, I was the president of the university’s speech and debate team (I know—big surprise). On the team was a guy named Philip.

Philip was a year younger than I was, very slightly built, with natural auburn hair that a girl would kill for. For some reason, Philip bleached the tips of it and told everyone he was trying to look like Billy Idol. It wasn’t working. He wore small, square-framed glasses and didn’t walk down the street as much as glide down it.

For all his physical strangeness, Philip was actually a good speaker and often placed in the finals at the various forensics tournaments we went to during the year. In my senior year, he approached me and asked me if I would like to do a scene with him and enter the Dramatic Pairs competition at an upcoming tournament in Ithaca, New York.

I weighed the pros and cons. On the plus side, we were almost sure to win—Philip and I were both very good, and our combined talent would probably be exceptional. On the other hand, it would mean hours and hours of “quality alone time” with Philip while we practiced. I finally decided to bite the bullet and say yes.

Philip chose Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf as our play, which was strange because when you looked at Philip, Richard Burton was not the first person to enter your mind. But I agreed and we set up our first rehearsal, which would take place in Philip’s dorm room.

It occurred to me as I schlepped over there that I had never seen Philip’s room, and I was curious as to what it looked like. When I got there, all I could do was stare.

He had carpeted the room (which wasn’t allowed) in pink shag. He had a scarlet bed-ruffle on his bed, and throughout the room there were small end-tables with pink skirts on them. On all of the tables and shelves, there were pictures (in gorgeous antique silver frames) of a beautiful young woman with long blonde hair.

I just blinked and said, “Wow.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t have time to clean,” said Philip, worridly.

I indicated one of the pictures of the attractive woman. “Is this your girlfriend?” (I highly doubted it—women who looked like that just didn’t go for Philip).

He goggled. “No,” he said, “that’s my mother.”

“Er…okay.”

I decided not to say anything else, and rehearsal got underway. I had to admit that Philip had chosen a good scene for us, and he actually didn’t give me a hard time when I gave him suggestions. By the end of the night I was feeling pretty good about it.

This went on for several weeks.

When the weekend of the tournament dawned, we were faced with a problem. It was February, and we were expecting a lot of snow, a problem which would be even worse in the frozen tundra of Ithaca. I had a small and lightweight car and didn’t feel comfortable driving the five long hours to Ithaca College, so my friend Ann Marie, who drove a 1978 Thunderbird, volunteered to drive. Another team member, Maryanne, said she would drive her car as well. With all of that figured out, we piled into the cars and headed off.

Philip and I were in Ann Marie’s car. For the entire five-hour ride, he did “mouth exercises,” which consisted of making faces and strange noises. I watched him in the rear-view mirror, and prayed a police officer wouldn’t stop us and haul him in for being drunk and disorderly.

We finally arrived in Ithaca, found the hotel, and crashed for the night.

The tournament itself was boring, and you will be mercifully be spared hearing about it. Suffice it to say that at the end of the first day, only Philip and I had made it to the finals and would have to stay the following day. Maryanne agreed to chauffer the rest of the team home so they wouldn’t have to waste an entire day just watching me and Philip.

At the awards ceremony the following night, things started to get weird.

Ann Marie, Philip and I sat in the front row of the auditorium while the president of the Ithaca speech team handed out the awards. Philip suddenly began clutching his abdomen.

“Dude, are you all right?” I asked.

He made a whining noise. “I have cramps,” he said.

“What did you eat?” I asked, concerned.

“Oh, it’s not that,” he said, waving his hand. “I’m just getting my period.”

Naturally, I thought it was a joke (albeit a very strange one), so I ignored it. The ceremony droned on, and Philip and I managed to take second place in Dramatic Pairs. I was very excited.

We all filed out into the parking lot, where it was now quite dark and extremely cold. It was also beginning to snow. The three of us made our way toward Ann Marie’s car. Philip continued to make little painful sounds as he clutched his stomach.

“I’m sorry,” he kept saying. “This is an extremely painful period.”

I finally said, “Philip, what the hell are you talking about?”

“You don’t know about my periods? Everybody in the dorm knows about my periods.”

“I don’t live in your dorm,” I reminded him.

“Oh. Well, every twenty-eight days, I get terrible cramps, I get bloated, my nipples get tender, and I have diarrhea for four or five days. It’s like clockwork.” He then doubled over. “Oh! Cramps!”

We got to the car and Philip dove into the back seat, holding his stomach and moaning. Ann Marie tried to start the car.

Dead silence.

“Oh, crap.” She turned the key in the ignition again. We then heard the most frightening sound of all: Click.

“Oh, crap.”

She popped the hood and the two of us stood outside, in the snow, peering under it. Neither one of us knew what the hell we were looking for. From inside the car, we could still hear Philip’s moaning about how much his nipples hurt. He seemed to alternate grabbing his chest and his stomach.

“Do you know what’s wrong?” I asked Ann Marie.

“No. Do you? Your father’s an engineer.”

“Yeah, but he’s not here,” I said. We both stared at the car’s innards again, trying to figure out where the engine was.

This went on for some time. Finally, a van with the words U.S. Coast Guard Academy printed on the side pulled up to us. Two very nice-looking cadets in dress uniforms came out and approached us.

“Hi there,” one of them said in a friendly voice. “Having some car trouble?”

Ann Marie and I wisely stepped away from the car while the cadet and several more of his compatriots fussed around under the hood. The entire Coast Guard speech team insisted that if we couldn’t get the car started, we could go home with them—they weren’t about to let “two ladies” get stranded in the snow five hours from home.

“Do you have anyone here with you?” asked one of the cadets.

“Well,” I said, dryly, “we have him.” I pointed into the back seat.

The cadet looked into the car, and I distinctly heard Philip say: “Excuse me, I’m having my period and I have cramps. Do you have any Midol, or Pamprin, or anything like that?”

The cadet looked at him in disbelief and looked back at me. “Do you have anyone else?”

“No,” I said, sadly.

The cadet who seemed to be in charge of the whole thing finally diagnosed the problem, had Ann Marie try the engine again, and it turned over. We were overjoyed, not only because we were able to go home, but because we could finally rid ourselves of the cowering, crying Philip, who was now curled up in a ball in the back seat, begging for a toilet.

I took down the names of all the cadets who had helped us, and promised I would write a very nice letter about them to the Coast Guard Academy. They were very humble about the whole thing. “Are you sure,” asked the cadet in charge, looking suspiciously at Philip, “that you don’t want one of us men to go with you?”

“No, that won’t be necessary,” I said, sighing. “Thank you, though.”

The Coast Guard cadets drove off into the night, and Ann Marie and I took Philip home. We played the radio at top volume to drown out his wailing.

An interesting afternote to this is that two weeks later, Philip’s roommate asked for a transfer to another room. Apparently, Philip’s cramps didn’t bother him nearly as much as the boxes of tampons Philip kept in the room.

2007-07-16T19:32:00.000-07:00

The One About Hamlet

I teach Hamlet pretty much every semester in my Early British Literature class, and eventually, a student will ask me who was my favorite Hamlet. There is, of course, an impressive pantheon to choose from, including Laurence Olivier, Nicol Williamson, Kenneth Branagh, Kevin Kline, and Mel Gibson (before he got all weird on us).

But whenever they ask me, “who is your favorite Hamlet?” my reply usually makes them blink and say; “Who?” And then I just smile and say it again.

“Steve Dennis.”

(Long pause). “I don’t know who that is,” they usually say.

Well, I’m not surprised. There are probably only about a thousand people roaming around on the earth who got to see Steve Dennis’ Hamlet, and I’m one of them. And unfortunately, there is no video evidence of his performance (and believe me, I’ve checked). But wait, I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me take you back.

Picture it. New Jersey, 1987.

I was taking a dramatics class, which I had somehow not managed to place out of, and one of the requirements was to watch and review a play. Fortunately, the city where I went to college was a big theatre town, so I had plenty to choose from. At the same time, one of my closest friends, Lola, was working crew for the university production of Hamlet. As soon as she found out about my assignment, she fell over herself trying to get me to choose Hamlet as my subject.

“I don’t know, Lo,” I said, kind of unimpressed. “I’m looking to do a real in-depth review, and there’s not many ways you can really do Hamlet that haven’t been done to death already.”

“No, you don’t understand,” she said. She took a reverent pause. “It stars…Steve Dennis.”

“Who’s Steve Dennis?”

I still remember that conversation. It was in a Burger King. Lola couldn’t believe I didn’t know who Steve was. She told me a long complicated story about how he was the absolute best actor in the university’s M.F.A. program (which is, truth be told, extremely exclusive) and how everything he did was simply magical. She wouldn’t shut up about him. I finally caved and said that I would go and see Hamlet if she would only let me eat my chicken tenders in peace.

A week later, I found myself in the theatre waiting to see the Great and Powerful Steve Dennis do Hamlet. The theatre sat about two hundred people, and I was surprised to see that it was filled. At this point, Hamlet had been running for about a week and I didn’t think that it would really appeal to so many people (and many were obviously not students).

Lola sat next to me. The lights dimmed.

As you know if you remember your Hamlet, Hamlet isn’t even onstage when the play begins. He comes in a few pages in and his first line is: “A little more than kin and less than kind.” It isn’t really a killer line, but it gets things going. Anyway, the actor playing Claudius babbled his lines, and then this guy in a black doublet walked on and delivered the line.

Lola clutched my hand and gasped. I just stared at her. Then I looked at Steve.

There was absolutely nothing remarkable about him. He looked to be about 25, had longish blonde hair, and seemed a bit on the short side. He was very thin and had bright blue eyes. If you passed him on the street, you’d never notice him. But man, his voice was incredible. As an actress myself, I was especially “tuned in” to voices, and this guy had, hands down, the most beautiful line delivery I had ever heard.

I really wish that I had the ability to transport you all there. I wish so much that you could have seen it. Because if I say something vague like: “Steve was incredible,” you’re just going to ask: “Oh yeah? How?” And I don’t know if I can answer it. But here are a few facts:

1. For days after the play, I realized that I literally could not remember what the other actors looked like if they were in a scene with Steve. Your eyes just went to him every time he was onstage, even if he wasn’t talking.

2. Lola took my pulse at intermission. It was 120. She had to hold my hand during the fifth act.

3. At the end of the play, even knowing that Hamlet dies, I still bawled like a five year old. Steve’s death scene was so convincing that I wanted to clamor onto the stage and save him. And I wasn’t the only one. The entire theatre was sobbing.

4. Remember how I said he wasn’t particularly good-looking? I apparently lied. By the end of the play, he was gorgeous.

5. When it was time for curtain-calls and I attempted to give Steve a standing ovation, my knees collapsed from under me and all I could do was sit there.

6. I kept muttering: “Why the hell isn’t he on Broadway yet?” throughout the scene changes.

7. For the entire three-and-a-half hours of running time, the whole theatre was silent. I don’t think anybody even went to the bathroom.

8. During Steve’s soliloquies, I wanted to answer him.

9. I think I actually said: “Laurence Olivier is such a hack,” at one point.

10. I vowed, at one point during the gravedigger scene, that I would meet him and tell him I loved him.

When the whole thing was over, Lola and I staggered out of the theatre in a sense of bizarre euphoria. We would have been concerned about our behavior (giggling, gasping, and beginning sentences with “Ohmigod…”), but the whole freakin’ audience was doing the same thing.

I then went home and tried to write my review. I sat there for an hour, trying to put what I had felt and experienced into words. It was next to impossible. I finally finished by saying something like: “This performance was not only the best version of Hamlet I have ever seen, but possibly the best performance of any play, ever.”

When my professor (who was male, keep in mind) handed me back the essay, he had written: “I know exactly what you mean. I’ve seen it.”

Hamlet ran about three weeks (I went to see it two more times!), and after it closed, Lola and I mourned that we would probably never see Steve again. But fortunately, someone important had spotted him, and after his graduation he appeared in a few Off-Broadway shows. I went to see as many as I could, and one night, finally, I got up the courage to hang around outside the theatre and wait for him (Da Dum!).

When I was actually talking to him, it seemed otherworldly. I introduced myself, told him I had once been in the business, and told him I had enjoyed his play. And then, God help me, I started babbling about Hamlet, and he smiled at me beatifically, somehow keeping himself from slowly backing away. I sincerely hope that he didn’t think I was dangerously insane. He seemed genuinely surprised that someone actually remembered his Hamlet.

And then, my real life kicked in. College, grad school, getting married, getting a job—all that nonsense. I never forgot about Steve, though, and often wondered what had happened to him and why he had never become a legendary actor.

One night about four years ago, I was watching Star Trek: Enterprise (shut up), and an episode about the Andorians came on. Andorians are small, blue creatures with antennae. I sat through the opening credits and to my astonishment saw: “Steven Dennis”.

I blinked. Was that possible?

Of course I didn’t recognize Steve when he finally came on…he was blue. But there was no disguising that voice. “Holy crap!” I yelled, and went frantically looking for Lola’s number at the first commercial. “Turn on UPN!” I yelled at her, “right now!”

Pause, then: “Holy crap!” Followed by, of course, giggling.

I really hope he got more than Union scale for that appearance.

So that's my favorite Hamlet. I just hope that Steve doesn't have to be blue in his next role.

2007-06-30T13:12:00.000-07:00

Sexual Harassment

This is yet another story about the pharmaceutical company (see previous entry about Mike). It's also kind of a serious entry, so don't expect to writhe on the ground in laughter. I promise we'll get back to the funny stuff next time.

As I mentioned, the department had two graphics designers—myself and this other guy named Matt, who was a complete idiot and mainly dealt with video. He spent the majority of the time complaining that his job grade-level was technically “secretary” (as was mine) because he was a man, and of course, men couldn’t be secretaries.

There was also another guy in the department. His name was Ron and his title was something like “Audio/Visual Manager.” Ron was 56 and was short and homunculous, and had white hair and a white beard. He looked exactly like a very unfriendly garden gnome.

To this day, I’m not sure how it started. Ron and I worked together happily—almost friends—for several years. Then I started getting more and more important assignments and Ron became very worried about his job security, even though no one cared enough about what he did to want to steal his job.

One day, at the copy machine, Ron came up to me and said; “You know, your breasts are lopsided.”

Now you have to remember, I was only 24. I was very unskilled socially and no man had ever made a sexual comment to me before, let alone a man old enough to be my father. He just cackled and walked away.

Two days later, I arrived at work, opened my desk, and found an adult toy and video catalogue in the middle drawer. A post-it note (in Ron’s handwriting) read: “Go ahead and order something…you could use the experience.”

(Yeah, I know. By now you’re saying; “Why the hell didn’t you go to your boss?” Simple answer: I was embarrassed. My boss was a man and I didn’t think I could bring myself to show him the catalogue. Which is exactly what pretty much all sexual harassers are banking on.)

I finally snapped that Friday when I opened an e-mail from Ron and found very explicit, step-by-step instructions on how to administer oral sex. I freaked out. I printed it out, stuffed it along with the adult catalogue in a confidential envelope along with a brief explanatory letter and walked into my boss’s office.

“I’m not going to be here when you look at all of this,” I said to him. “I’ll be at my desk.”

Ten minutes later, the boss buzzed me and asked me to come in. “Close the door,” he said, quietly.

I did. The boss then proceeded to explain to me that he was overjoyed by my harassment because it turns out that the company had been trying to find an excuse to get rid of Ron for years. Ron, it seems, was drawing an enormous salary for doing absolutely nothing, and now that I was doing basically all the designing and Matt was running around with his camcorder, Ron’s job wasn’t even necessary anymore.

However, the boss explained, we needed more evidence. Apparently, what Ron had already done to me wasn’t enough. I couldn’t believe it. The boss was very apologetic and said that he was “building a file” against Ron, and if I would just be brave and tough it out a little longer we could possibly get rid of him for good.

At this point, it’s necessary to point out that Ron did have one friend in the department…a frightening, horrible, ghastly German woman of about 50 named Ulla. She hated me from the moment she shook my hand (I have that effect on people) and I hated her right back. Apparently, she and Ron were friends from way back when.

Anyway, one day, Ulla went to Princeton to some workshop or something and she called the office from the road and asked me to go into her office and find some document that she needed mailed ASAP. I went into her office, opened the drawer she had specified, and found the document.

I also found a file folder with my name on it.

Well…come on. Wouldn’t you? Of course you would. And I did.

The folder consisted of a series of e-mails between Ron and Ulla, about me. It seems that Ron had shared his paranoid fantasy of me taking over his job with Ulla, and she agreed with him that I was "a dangerous upstart who needs to have her hands slapped." Through these e-mails, I also found out that Ron had been searching my computer’s hard-drive every morning before I came into the office in an attempt to find anything of a personal nature. Apparently, his goal was to have me fired before I could usurp his position.

(During this time I was only working on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays because I was going to graduate school on Tuesdays and Thursdays. This will be important later.)

I copied everything in the folder and gave it to the boss. The boss and I cooked up a plan to catch Ron at his snooping: I would create a document entitled “RON HISLASTNAME HARASSMENT CASE” and save it on my hard drive. Because our word processing program time-and-date-stamped a document every time it was opened, if Ron opened that document on a day that I wasn’t in the office, we had him nailed.

(The document, by the way, was cheerful. It said, simply: “Hi, Ron! Going through my computer again to see if I have anything personal on it? God, that’s sad. That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard. Love and kisses, BeowulfGirl.”)

A few days later, I found a dildo in my drawer, with another cheerful post-it note from Ron saying, “This is the only boyfriend you’ll ever have.” I gave it to the boss saying that my patience was running out. The boss set up a meeting for myself, him, and his boss (who was, logically, my grandboss) during which I would present my case.

Do you have any idea how hard it is to say “dildo” to a vice president? It’s awful.

The grandboss assured me that action would be taken. “Yeah, right,” I said. Frankly, I was starting to think I was on my own.

And then, that Friday, it happened.

I came into the office at 7:30 as usual, Coke in hand, and scanned my hard-drive. And there it was—the document I had created with Ron’s name had been opened last at 6:22am on the day before—a Thursday, when I was not in the office.

I printed out the screen, highlighted the date and time, and marched into Ron’s office. He looked up, surprised, as I slammed the paper on his desk. “I’ve got you, you son of a bitch,” I said, viciously, and stalked out.

Ron was fired that afternoon, and I sat down at my desk and quietly began to cry. I hadn’t realized how much stress the whole thing had caused me. He was escorted off my premises by an armed security guard.

And what really kicked me in the teeth was that Ron’s firing was not for all the sexual harassment, but for invasion of privacy and misappropriation of company property.

Be careful what battles you choose, troops.

2007-05-12T14:19:00.000-07:00

Drunk, Disorderly, and the Devil

And now, a first for the BeowulfBlog! Instead of telling you something that happened in my distant past (on which the statute of limitations has probably run out), I'm going to relate something that actually happened this week!

We're coming down the home stretch here at Very Serious University. Monday afternoon at 2:45 was my first final exam of the term. The class wanted to go out to dinner after the exam, at Applebee’s. I said that would be lovely.

There’s this kid in the class named Dave. He’s freaky looking. He’s very short and has an enormous head. He’s kind of proportioned like Timmy on South Park. In the last 15 weeks, I have never heard him speak. All he did was sit there in the back of the room and stare at me with these creepy, creepy, crazy eyes. Nobody talked to him because he was just so damn scary.

About one-half of the class was left when Creepy Dave finished his exam. He came up to my desk and wordlessly handed it in.

“Are you coming to the dinner?” I asked, hoping he wasn’t.

“No,” he said, dully.

“Oh, that’s a shame,” I lied. “Why not?”

And Dave looked at me with his crazy eyes and suddenly yelled: “I don’t want to go to dinner with YOU! You’re a terrible teacher and I hate this class!”

I was too stunned to say anything. The rest of the class looked up in horror. Dave stalked out of the class in a huff.

There was silence until Chris, one of the brighter beads on the rosary, asked; “Um…you don’t think he’s coming back with a gun, do you?”

“Jesus Christ!” I said.

Jason, who sat next to Dave for the whole term, suddenly said: “Professor BeowulfGirl, I think you should know something. This whole semester he hasn’t been taking notes. All he’s been doing is drawing pictures of the Devil in his notebook!”

By now I was really freaked out. Everyone hurried up with their exams and we bolted out of there. It was time to go to Applebee’s.

There were nine of us altogether. I had to give Aliya, far and away the best student in class, a ride because she didn’t have a car. We got to the Applebee’s without incident and secured two large tables in the corner.

I was sitting between Jason and Marissa, talking about engineering. Time was flying by until suddenly Chris, who was sitting at the neighboring table, approached me and said in a whisper; “Professor, I think we have a problem.”

“What’s up?” I asked.

“I think Aliya’s drunk.”

I looked over at the other table. Aliya was babbling at the top of her lungs, apparently to no one. In front of her were several empty beer-bottles. From what I could hear, she was talking about bacon.

“What do we do?” asked Jason.

“Well, don’t give her anything more to drink, that’s for sure,” I said.

“Should we get her coffee?”

“No, that doesn’t work,” I said, “she’ll be just as drunk, only wired.” I got up and went to Aliya’s table. “Does anyone know where she lives?”

“I really like bacon,” Aliya said, wobbily.

“Aliya,” I asked her, “where do you live?”

“Bacon…bacon…bacon…”

“I’m going to look in her purse,” I said.

“Can we do that?” asked Chris.

“Well, we have to find out where she lives,” I said. Loudly; “Aliya, honey, I’m going to look in your purse, okay?”

“Whatever, dawg,” said Aliya, and slumped backward.

I found her I.D. (no driver’s license) and found out that she lived only a few miles from my house. “I can take her home,” I said.

Chris said; “No, you can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Think about it,” he said. “You’re her professor. She’s drunk and underage. If you bring her home in this condition and her parents freak and call the school, you could lose your job.”

I blinked. I hadn’t even thought of that. “Well, Jesus, what are we going to do?” I asked.

“Let’s walk her around outside a while,” Chris suggested.

Chris, Jason and I hauled Aliya up and dragged her out the door. She kept insisting she wasn’t drunk. Chris finally said he would take her home and deal with her parents. We all agreed this was very brave. They took off.

Two days later I received an e-mail from Aliya, who was happy Chris had taken her home. She didn’t say if she got in trouble with her parents, but to cheer her up, I told her that she had earned an “A.”

Sometimes, that’s all you need.

2007-05-03T11:50:00.001-07:00

Engineers In The Mist

Several years ago, to supplement my income as a professor, I took a secretarial job at the F.A.A. My job interview went something like this:

"Look," the man who was interviewing me said, "the truth is, we need someone to look after these engineers. They're just not good on their own."

The engineers in question were a large group of insane men (nope, no women) whose job it was to design airplanes to be "more efficient." They had a large banner hanging over their work area which said: "Our Mission: Fewer Crashes." I would have felt better if they had been aiming toward no crashes, but I took what I could get.

The man interviewing me was named Ed, and he was also an aerospace engineer. He was the only one there with a sense of humor. On his office door he had a bumper sticker that said: "Actually, it IS rocket science!"

I was asked if I had ever worked with engineers before. I told him I hadn't, but that BeowulfDad had spent forty-five years as a service technician. Ed seemed to think that was close enough, and hired me on the spot.

Then it was time to meet the engineers.

I first met the head of Engineering, who was an Annapolis man named Rich. He was very, very, Alpha Male. I found out that he didn't so much do engineering as he did bully the other engineers, who, after a lifetime of schoolyard bullying, were used to it. Rich and I never really had much to do with each other; he stayed in his office and flexed his muscles.

A short, portly man came up to me and stuck out his hand. "Hello," he said, "I'm Joe. But you can call me by my Star Trek name!"

"Er...and what is that?" I asked, nervously.

"T'Katch," he said, and walked away before I could say anything.

"You have to be careful with him," warned Ed. "He actually signs documents that way."

We were then passed by a tall balding man who was shaking all over and muttering: "My forms...my forms...my forms..." He took no notice of me or Ed. I asked Ed who he was.

"That's Jim," Ed said. "Don't worry about him, he's insane."

"Er...okay," I said, wondering what I had gotten into.

On my first day of work, I noticed something odd. Fastened to all of the walls of the building, every twelve feet or so, were whiteboards with markers. Occasionally, a bizarre ritual would take place. An engineer would wander up to one of the whiteboards, take a marker, and write some kind of equation or diagram. He would then stand there and stare at it for twenty minutes, until another engineer also sidled up, took a different marker, and added something to the diagram. The first engineer would nod, slowly. They would both point at the board. Sometimes they would be joined by a third engineer who would do the same thing. It was not uncommon for me to come upon whole groups of engineers standing by whiteboards in complete silence, staring.

Another thing they would do (Ed told me) was forget that they were walking. It was not uncommon to find an engineer completely motionless in the hall, eyes to the heavens, apparently thinking great thoughts. Ed told me that all I had to do in this case was give the engineer a slight push on the shoulder in order to get him going again, and they would then wander back to their office. I had to do this a lot.

The other thing I had to do was make sure all the engineers showed up at the Monday 9:00 project meeting. This was difficult--I would have had an easier time corralling cattle than the engineers. None of them wanted to go to the meeting because it involved talking in public, which they were all terrified to do.

They loved caffeine. God bless them, they never asked me to make coffee...most of them had their own coffee makers in their office, and every morning it smelled like a Folgers factory.

After a few weeks of this, it was clear that the engineers still didn't really know me. Don't get me wrong, they were polite and all, but they just wouldn't engage me in conversation. I finally found an answer.

I put up a large poster of the instrument panel of a Cessna aircraft in my cubicle. I knew nothing about aviation, but I figured it might get the engineers to talk to me. And it worked!

They would wander up with their coffee: "I see you have a Cessna," they would say.

"Well, not personally," I would reply. "I just like flying."

What inevitably followed was a long diatribe about altimeters, the "T-Zone," the horizon, and a thousand other things that I didn't understand but what really seemed to thrill the engineers. They began saying hello to me in the halls and using my first name.

When Christmas came around, the engineers had a contest to see who could decorate their cubicle most creatively. It was a hideous sight--thirty cubicles with twinkling lights, luminescent Santa Clauses, Frostys, and those weird, abstract Christmas trees that look like spirals. No one got any work done, and the engineers had a gay old time trying to outdo each other.

One day when I came back from lunch, I smelled something burning. Horrified, I called out: "Guys? What's on fire?"

It turned out to be a guy named Simon, our lone Jewish engineer, who had a real menorah in his cubicle, with real flames. Apparently, no one had told him that open flames weren't allowed in the cubicles, and he set one of his binders on fire. Ed, fortunately, was on hand with the fire extinguisher, and Simon had to use another cubicle for a couple of days until his old one could be cleaned up.

After all this time, I still think about the engineers when I see a plane pass overhead and I think about "fewer crashes." I hope they're happy, wherever they are, and that they're not just standing still in the hallway!

2007-05-03T11:50:00.000-07:00

2007-03-06T14:30:00.000-08:00

I Dream Of Men With Pink Hair

I know I promised to write about engineers this time, but I simply have to tell you about a friend of mine in college named David. He’s much more interesting than the engineers.

When I was a freshman in college, I joined the speech and debate team (because I’m good at things like that). I left a message in their mailbox at the Student Center introducing myself and asking that someone please call me. That night, someone did.

He introduced himself as David, and told me that he was the president of the club and that he was very much looking forward to having me on the team. He told me when the club had its weekly meetings and said he would see me there.

When I showed up at the meeting, David wasn’t there yet so I mingled with some of the other team members. They were all very nice and I felt comfortable and accepted.

“Sorry I’m late!” came a voice from the door. I glanced over and beheld David for the first time.

He was tall and exceptionally skinny. He was wearing, for reasons I never would know, black tights and a green leotard-type outfit. He kind of looked like Peter Pan. The most striking thing about him was that his hair was magenta, had five earrings in one ear, and carried a day-glo green purse. He kind of looked like a combination of Eddie Izzard and Boy George.

“I was going to be on time, I swear,” he said, perching himself on top of the front desk and crossing his legs in what looked like a very uncomfortable position, “but my roommate Clive thinks he’s slipping into another dimension and I had to talk him down.”

“Doesn’t this concern you?” asked one of the girls.

David just kind of blinked. “No. More room in the apartment.”

I was formally introduced and spent the next half an hour just staring at him. The rest of the team was apparently used to him. On the way out of the meeting, I couldn’t help asking one of the guys: “Is he always like that?”

“Who, David? Yeah. He’s really talented, though.”

I spent the next few weeks being kind of intimidated by David, which was stupid because he turned out to be the most gentle, non-threatening person on the team. Eventually, he came to me and asked me if I would like to be his partner at a speech competition in Shippensburg, PA, and wanted to know if I would do a scene with him. I was very surprised by this (after all, he was a senior and I was a mere freshman) but I was still kind of fascinated by him so I said yes.

We rehearsed in his apartment. I met Clive, who most assuredly was not slipping into another dimension, and I also found David’s cache of drugs.

He had every kind of drug imaginable, along with a huge selection of drug paraphernalia, including an enormous hookah pipe and several exotic-looking bongs. His room was filled with various bottles, bags, and packages. I was stunned…he was certainly “out there,” but I didn’t know he was into the drug scene.

“Please excuse all the drugs,” he said, kicking them aside so I could sit down. “Did you know that the right combination of drugs will send you shooting into outer space?” (I still don’t know if he meant that literally). He rummaged around in one of the bags and pulled out some pills. “Would you like one?” he asked. “It makes your spinal fluid shoot up into your brain and gives you wicked hallucinations.”

“Er…no, thanks, my spinal fluid is fine where it is,” I said.

“By the way,” he said, examining some old cocaine he had stuffed in a sock, “in order to save the university money, would you mind sharing a room with me in Shippensburg?”

I don’t know what I was thinking, but, trying to appear sophisticated, I said that I would. Later, when I recounted this conversation to my best friend, she gave me a good “what the hell were you thinking?” smackdown, and I meekly called David and asked if I could have my own room. As usual, he was fine with it.

On the day of the competition, David and I showed up at the train station at a ridiculous hour of the morning before an eight-hour train ride into Shippensburg. He had two suitcases; one for clothes, and the other for his various pharmacology.

We got to Shippensburg, found the hotel, found the college and performed our scene. Sadly, we lost. That night back at the hotel, David tried to cheer me up by telling me he would teach me astral projection. I looked at him skeptically. “No, seriously,” he said, “I can leave my body.”

I suspected he had been dipping into his stash, so I just said good night to him and went back to my own room. Since I was exhausted, I fell asleep instantly…

…and had the most erotic, sexually-charged dream about David. It was bizarre. I knew I didn’t think about him in “that way,” yet here I was, ferociously making out with him. The only other weird thing about the dream was that standing in room, looking over us, was President Bush (the first one, not the one who’s currently wrecking our country).

The following morning, I banged on David’s door because we were in danger of missing the train home. Bleary-eyed, we walked down the hall with our luggage toward the elevator.

“How did you sleep?” he asked me.

Still remembering my make-out dream, I just said, nervously. “Good, good. You?”

“Good.”

He pressed the button for the hotel lobby. He then said, casually; “I’m sorry about President Bush. I just couldn’t get him to go away.”

And the elevator doors closed.

2007-01-10T11:04:00.000-08:00

My Most Frightening Student Ever

When I got out of graduate school, I took a job at a local, low-key community college where I was assigned to teach English 101, which was a composition course. I was deleriously happy to finally be doing what I had spent seven years in college training to do, and I attacked my job like a Pit Bull.

One of my students was named Jason, and I'm not entirely convinced that his last name wasn't Voorhees.

Jason was older than anyone else in the class--about 25. He wore black jeans, black t-shirts, and a black leather jacket. The jacket had bits of metal attached to it, and upon closer examination they proved to be razor blades. He also wore a lot of eyeliner--not cute, fun eyeliner like Michael Stipe, but weird, scary eyeliner like Alice Cooper circa 1975.

Jason sat in the back of the room and never talked. His eyes fixed on me with a thousand-yard stare that kind of reminded me of Charles Manson.

For their first essay, the students were required to write about something that they enjoyed watching, like sports, or the ocean, or people passing by. Everyone enjoyed the assignment, except for Jason; he wrote about blood.

The entire essay (three pages) was about how much he liked seeing blood, playing with blood, tasting blood, and making other people bleed (presumably with the razor blades he always had on him). I was pretty shocked by this, but since he wasn't out-and-out threatening anyone, there was nothing I could do with him. I gave him a "C" and pressed on.

Around the middle of the semester, the school nurse came to my class to do a presentation about A.I.D.S. She had to do this to every English class to make sure that all the students at the college heard it. After sitting through this presentation seven times, I now know more about A.I.D.S. than the Surgeon General of the United States.

To make sure my students paid attention to the nurse, I told them there would be an assignment afterwards--to write a reaction paper to the presentation. They grumbled, but they sat there like good Do-Bees and took notes. Except, of course, for Jason.

When the essays rolled in, they were pretty predictable; the students wrote about what they had learned, promised to have safe sex, that sort of thing. Then I got to Jason's paper.

First of all, he had titled it: "A.I.D.S. -- Anally Injected Death Serum." I knew right away we were going to have a problem.

The essay wasn't about the presentation at all. Instead, for three pages, Jason described in mind-numbing detail the things he would do to a woman if she infected him with A.I.D.S. One of the more minor punishments included encasing the woman in cement, knocking out all of her teeth with a hammer, and orally raping her.

Yeah. That kind of thing. For three pages. It was more creative than anything Dr. Mengele could have thought up.

Not knowing what to do, I showed the paper to my Department Chair, who went completely white and immediately summoned the school counselor. The counselor advised me to go back to my class and pretend nothing had happened.

In the middle of the lecture (Jason was gazing at me vacantly again), the door opened and the counselor (a very dapper man in a tweed sportscoat) came in and asked to see Jason. Confused, Jason went out into the hall with him. About ten minutes later, he came back in. He walked right up to my desk, looked me in the eye, and muttered: "I'm going to get you."

Fortunately, there was a kid in the front row who was a football player who had overheard this remark, and he walked me to my car after class.

The following morning, at 6:00 when it was still dark outside, the phone rang. It was Jason. I have no idea how he got my home number. I also had terrifying visions of cops telling me; "the call is coming from inside the house."

Jason wanted to tell me, apparently, that he had been up all night thinking about what I had done to him. He couldn't understand why I was so concerned about his paper and his attitude toward A.I.D.S. Then he got really weird and started describing Middle Eastern torture methods to me with glee. Completely freaked, I hung up and hid under the covers.

The following day in class, Jason didn't show up. The rest of the students were as relieved as I was. He never showed up again. He disappeared.

Even though that was over ten years ago, I know he's still out there somewhere, terrorizing people and watching blood. So if you see a scary guy with razor blades on his jacket, run. Run like hell.

Next time: My prom date!

2006-11-30T12:28:00.000-08:00

In Memory of Victor

Regular readers of my blog (both of you) know that most of the time, I attempt to be funny and lighthearted. Today we're going to take a slight detour and aim toward "heartwarming and touching."

Today, November 30, is the 20th anniversary of the death of someone who was very special to me. His name was Victor Saginario, and he was the director of the first repertory I worked in. I worked with Victor for four years and loved him dearly, and every year on this day, I take a little time to remember him and drink a toast to him.

Victor was an unusual looking man. He was short and squat and quite bald, with tremendously thick glasses that made his brown eyes look enormous. He sort of resembled a bulldog in a velour shirt. He had a loud expressive voice and had absolutely no problem with embarrassing his actors at top volume.

I first met Victor in 1981, when I was very young and very inexperienced. I was looking into joining his repertory because I was sick and tired of not having any friends and not having a creative outlet. After my first meeting (during which Victor intimidated me greatly), Victor invited me to an acting tournament at the University of Delaware the following month. I honestly didn't think I'd do very well, but Victor seemed insistent, and I figured that if he had been doing this as long as he had, he must know what he was talking about.

I ended up winning first place.

After that, I was the Golden Girl. Victor installed me as his lead actress, and before I knew it, I was getting cast in everything. I was playing across actors much more experienced than I was, in roles that were difficult, challenging, and very intense. I loved every minute of it.

There's no way I can really describe Victor's kindness. He looked out for me with the sharp eye of a second father. He bought me gifts. He took me into New York several times to see Broadway plays so that I could study professionals. He also became great friends of my parents, and the four of us often did social things together. My parents came to love him as much as I did.

Then, on November 30, 1986, everything came crashing down.

One of my best friends from repertory, Ken, was at my house tutoring me in advanced algebra. As we sat at my desk struggling through problems, his mother called and asked to speak to him. I handed him the phone, and in a few seconds, his face went white. He hung up, turned around, and told me that Victor had been killed on the way back from his family's home in Elmira, New York. He had been there visiting for Thanksgiving.

Chaos ensued. As the word spread throughout the repertory, various actors started wandering into my house, crying, hysterical, and confused. Everyone who showed up had new information, or conflicting stories, and I moved through the house like a zombie.

We finally found out what had happened. On a remote highway in New York, Victor's car had been struck head-on by a drunk driver--a nineteen year old girl named Tammy Brewster. Victor had been killed on impact; Tammy suffered...a broken arm.

A broken arm.

We tried to hold it together. For the entire week, the actors never left each other. Finally, five days later, Victor's funeral was held.

The priest, who knew me, asked if I would be willing to do a reading of John Donne's "Death Be Not Proud" at the funeral mass. Of course I said yes...I hadn't really accepted Victor's death yet, and doing this last "performance" for him may help me move on and get past it. So, on the appointed day, with literally hundreds of mourners at the church, I marched up to the altar and read the poem. It wasn't highly dramatic or anything, but it was clear and heartfelt, and I felt a great deal of peace.

Snow fell as Victor was buried. All around me I could hear the soft crying of his friends, students, and family. I still felt unreal. I couldn't cry.

Several days later, we found out the fate of Tammy Brewster, the intoxicated teenager that had killed our friend. It turned out that Tammy's father was a Sheriff in the neighboring town, and, even though Tammy was a known alcoholic, she would be charged only with...failure to keep right. No vehicular manslaughter. Not even a DUI. Just "failure to keep right." She was given a $100 fine and let go, without so much as a point on her license.

And, sitting here writing this, I'm wondering if she knows what today is, and how her incredible stupidity changed the lives of hundreds of people.

God bless you, Victor, wherever you are. I love you and I miss you. This one's for you.

Next time: Back to our usual fun. Promise!

2006-11-20T07:19:00.000-08:00

[2x (4xy - 2x) + (6n + 7xy)]

I'm fascinated with a guy at work.

He's in the Math department, which is weird right there...usually I stay away from the math professors like the plague because they always smell of chalk and get all excited about things like quadratic equations and trapezoids. But this guy...he just transcends all that and ends up being ultimately cool.

His name isn't Kyle, but I'm going to call him that anyway, in case he ever reads this (because believe me, he's smart enough to hack in).

As a college professor, I work with many, many smart people. However, in my career I have only worked with a handful of authentic geniuses. Kyle is one of them.

Kyle is 24, graduated from high school when he was 14, and has two Ph.D.s (math and physics). He also has all of his course work completed for a third doctorate in Comparative Religion. This means he managed to cram nine years worth of graduate school into three, which would have made me start screaming and never stop. He has photographic memory, can speed read, and (and to me, this is his most useful skill) can balance his checkbook (and mine) in his head.

The most fascinating thing about him, though, is the way he dresses. He has no problems wearing a pinstriped suit with a paisley dress shirt and bolo tie. He also owns white disco pants, several pairs of bell-bottoms, and a full-fledged zoot suit that makes him look like Johnny Dangerously.

I first Kyle at the Faculty Mixer in the beginning of the year, where we all meet the new faculty and try to make them feel welcome. I felt a weird attraction to Kyle from the start (he's terribly good-looking, but he'd never admit that) and when he started doing differential equations on the cocktail napkins, I was hooked.

I knew I was going to like him tremendously the first time he showed up at my office and was able to read the sign that I have on my door, which is the words to the entrance of Dante's Inferno--in Latin. When I asked him why a math professor would study Latin, he just blinked at me as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

The first thing I did was invite him to our monthly karaoke night, which is really the brainchild of my friend Glenn, who's in the Business department. Kyle claimed to have never done karaoke before, but agreed to go. He wore tan slacks, tennis shoes, a blue sweater-vest and a white tie. Although he didn't sing, he seemed very amused by the rest of us.

He's very quiet (I assume he's always thinking), but after our karaoke night he started opening up a little more to me. I took him out for lunch one day, which caused no end of gossip and giggling in my department, but for some reason, Kyle seemed to find it completely normal.

Several weeks ago, I was sitting in my office when suddenly I heard "Catch!" from the doorway. I looked up just in time to see Kyle lobbing something at me from the door. It kind of looked like a volleyball.

Once I examined it, I saw that it actually looked like a gigantic twelve-sided die that you would use in Dungeons and Dragons. On each side was drawn a face with a different expression. I had no idea what it was.

"I'm not sure what this is," I confessed to Kyle.

"It's a mood dodecahedron," he said, happily.

"Sorry?" I said.

"A dodecahedron," he explained, "is a twelve-sided geometrical shape. I put a different face on each side, so whatever mood you're in, just point that side toward the door."

I thought this was delightful. Most of the time I keep it set to "happy," but I also often use "sleepy" and "hungry." Sometimes I set it to "confused," especially when grading my remedial students' papers.

To thank him for this interesting (albeit bizarre) gift, I made him a music mix, which excited him so much that he proceeded to send me an e-mail after listening to each track, telling me what he thought of it. Neither of us got any work done for about eighty minutes.

Last month, he bought me a hardcover copy of the latest biography of Jack Kerouac, my favorite American writer. He even inscribed it...in Latin.

We keep talking. I keep flirting. He keeps not running away.

We'll see what happens next karaoke night.

Next time: Something serious. Seriously.

2006-11-06T07:04:00.000-08:00

Checkmate In Three

I'll admit it...I like chess.

I learned to play chess when I was about ten. Unfortunately, the friend that taught me chess moved away, and for many years I had no one to play with. I had a couple of computer chess programs that I liked and fiddled around with, but as the years went on I was hungry for a real game with another person.

At the very first college at which I taught, I was meandering the halls one day and saw a flyer on the community bulletin board. Apparently, the college Chess Club was looking for a faculty advisor. I considered this for a few moments, wondering if I was the type of person who would enjoy advising, but I figured I might at least get a few games of chess out of it. I wrote a note to the president of Chess Club, a guy named Al, and put it in the Chess Club mailbox.

Two days later, I got a phone call from the mysterious Al, in which he told me that he was delighted that I wanted to work with the Chess Club, and we set up a time to meet in the Student Center when he would give me all the details. He also asked me if I had time for a game of chess, and of course I said yes.

"Wait a minute," I said. "I don't know what you look like. How will I know you?"

There was a brief pause. "I'll be the one with the chess set," he said.

Duh.

On Wednesday, I headed valiantly to the Student Center, anxious to meet Al in person and learn all about my duties as Chess Club advisor. When I got there, I immediately started to giggle. Even without the chess set, I would have known it was Al.

Seated at a table near the video games was a tall, gangly guy with short black hair and black horn-rimmed glasses. He was wearing a white button-down dress shirt and a black tie. He was drinking a Coke and looked anxiously around. In front of him was a regular, Staunton chess set.

I came in, approached him, and introduced myself. Nervously, he leaped up, shook my hand, and said, "I'm Al, and I'm really happy to meet you!" He sounded so enthusiastic.

We sat down and I asked Al to tell me exactly what the Chess Club needed me to do, as well as when I would get to meet the rest of the club. It was at this point that Al started looking even more nervous and said: "Um...yeah, about that..."

"Yes?" I asked.

"Actually...I'm the only one in Chess Club."

I blinked. "You're the president and the only member?"

"Yes," he said. He then broke down completely and admitted that the whole "looking for an advisor" thing had been a ruse, and that all he really wanted was someone to play chess with. He looked so pitiful that I was overcome with emotion and agreed to play chess with him twice a week. He was very happy about this.

He then proceeded to kick my ass at chess. He stormed across the board like General MacArthur, destroying everything in his path. Before I knew it, I was left with just my King, and I meekly admitted defeat.

That's how it went for several weeks. I would show up, and Al would decimate me in chess. I was so put out by this that I invested in several chess books and studied my endgame at home, furiously. It didn't matter...Al destroyed me every time.

As time went on, Al and I began to become friends. We found out that, curiously, we both liked the same obscure music--in particular, the music of a man named Anthony Newley, a now-deceased British lounge singer/songwriter. I'm sure that, whether you know it or not, you're already familliar with the works of Mr. Newley--he's the one who wrote all the songs in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, as well as the songs in Doctor Dolittle (the good one, with Rex Harrison, not the crappy remake).

Anyway, Al was just mad for Newley, and when he found out that I liked him, too, he proceeded to make me copies of every Anthony Newley album he had--and he had all of them. Al was in heaven--he had finally found someone who liked both chess and Newley.

The day came when Al transferred from my college to another one, and that's when we started playing chess online. He still completely trounced me, only now it wasn't as personal. Finally, one day, he asked me if I would go to Philadelphia with him to watch him compete in a national chess tournament.

Chess tournaments are usually sponsored by F.I.D.E.S., which stands for Federation Internationale Des Eschecs, which is French for the International Chess Federation. Since I wasn't a member, I couldn't compete, but Al was, and he was looking for a cheering section. Since Al had no other friends, I agreed to go.

Sadly, as good as Al was, he was wiped out in the first preliminary round, and ended up coming in 525th. Weirdly, he was pleased about this, because now his name would be published in Chess Life magazine.

However, I haven't yet told you the most bizarre thing about Al.

Al is now 30 years old, and he has never had a job. Ever. He still lives with his parents in an affluent neighborhood, and they continue to support him. They also give him money to go to Atlantic City and gamble with, to get tickets to concerts, and to buy CD's. Because they enable him so much, he has no desire to get a job or become a productive member of society. This was the subject of great debate one Thanksgiving, when Al's extended family suggested that he see a psychiatrist about his "anti-social personality." Al's parents ended up throwing them out of the house and sent the hysterical Al to his room to calm down.

Even stranger is Al's daily routine. He gets up early, puts on a dress shirt and tie, and proceeds to sit down at this computer and play internet chess for eight hours. Every day. Then he watches television for the rest of the day.

Al has never had a date. Not one. And this doesn't seem to bother him, either. He's happy in his own little world of chess, Anthony Newley, and analyzing political races. It's bizarre.

I have often told the BeowulfParents that I'm ditching them to go live with Al's family, so they would support me, too. Hey, at least Al would have a live person to play chess with. However, BeowulfDad has a pool table, and I'm not quite ready to give that luxury up.

An interesting end note is that Al is the one that took me to see Kevin Spacey sing Bobby Darin songs, and when I tried to pay him for pay ticket he just said, offhandedly: "No, no...it's on me."

"No it isn't," I said, "it's on your dad."

Next time: More classroom randomness

2006-10-23T06:56:00.000-07:00

The Kevin Spacey People

Part of me hopes that Kevin Spacey, wherever he is, will one day Google his own name and find this blog entry. As it is, I've made a promise to myself that, if I ever meet Kevin in person, I'll tell him the story I'm about to tell you.

Let me take you back in time to the summer of 2000. It was a very hard time for me; that was when my husband of six years decided to abandon me, leaving me alone and terrified. All I did that summer was sleep, take Xanax, and rent movies. Lots and lots of movies.

However, despite it being a crappy year for me, it was a very good year for Kevin Spacey; he was nominated for and won his second Academy Award for American Beauty. Prior to this, I had absolutely no opinion of the man. I thought he was an excellent actor, but that's about as far as it went. I certainly never meant to become involved in his personal life.

During that horrible summer, I also spent a lot of time on the internet, mostly in divorce support group forums. However one day I stumbled upon an American Beauty website, which linked directly to a Kevin Spacey tribute site. I was curious as to the content of this, so I went there.

The site was run (I later found out) by five middle-aged women that I eventually began to call, simply, The Kevin Spacey People. Two of them lived in Manhattan and were best friends and the "brains" of the operation. Their names were Alice and Susan. There was a third woman, Midge, who lived in Brooklyn and who practiced Wicca. A fourth woman, Charlotte, was from West Virginia, and the group was rounded out by Stella, who was from Chicago. These five women had a singular and very terrifying purpose--they were devoted to the cause of getting Kevin Spacey to have sex with them. All of them.

I was fascinated by this. For one thing, this was about the time that the rumors of Kevin's sexuality (or bisexuality, or homosexuality, or whatever) were flying about. Also, having just won the Oscar, Kevin was hot property (though his next movie was a complete piece of crap called Pay It Forward). This did not daunt the KS People. They were more determined than ever to get the poor man into bed.

Intrigued by this insanity, I infiltrated their group. I posted on their message board, pretending to also be a middle-aged woman in New York who was obsessed with Kevin. The fanatics welcomed me with open arms. Yes, I know this was deceitful and dishonest and manipulative, but I couldn't help myself. I was fascinated by the madness. And I was, you know, mentally unstable.

The first thing they did was send me (via regular mail) a copy of their collective erotic novel which featured Kevin and all five of them in...um...intimate circumstances. They alternated writing chapters. Not only was the novel bad as a piece of literature, it wasn't even good erotica--some of the bizarre sexual exploits seemed, to me, to be physically impossible. I began to think of all the famous people I had come in contact with during my years in theatre, and tried to think of someone who might actually know Kevin, so I could warn him about these people.

Midge the witch, in the meantime, spent several hours each day casting spells to try to get Kevin to fall in love with them. There was much candle-lighting and incense-burning. To my knowledge, none of this helped.

For Christmas that year, they sent me a mouse pad with Kevin's picture on it. A few weeks later, they sent me a tote bag with a collage of pictures of Kevin on it.

I was also invited to participate in a bizarre form of cyber-sex, in which one person would pretend to be Kevin while the rest of them did...things with him/her. I never actually did this, but one of them was kind enough to actually e-mail me the transcript. It was just...horrible. I sent it on to my best friend Andrew just so he could see what kind of lunacy I had fallen into, and he confirmed my belief that 85% of the actions performed by "Kevin" were not possible for a mortal man.

At around this time, there was a very famous website (now defunct) devoted entirely to celebrities and their private lives. Kevin had his own thread (as did just about every other actor you could possibly think of), but for some reason it seemed that the majority of the posters there hated Kevin for being "closeted" and for "not just coming out and admitting he was gay." Naturally, I told the KS People about this, and they went to the forum immediately and completely lost their minds.

Alice, who was pretty much of a bully, lied completely and said that she ("and several other women she knew") had actually had sex with Kevin, and therefore he couldn't be gay. This brought enormous repercussions on the part of the forum regulators, who out-and-out called Alice on her lie and managed to get her banned from the website altogether.

And then it was time for the Kev-In.

The Kev-In (yes, they really called it that) was the brainchild of the two Manhattanites, who arranged an elaborate weekend in the spring of 2001 during which all of us would get together in Central Park and, well, I'm not sure what we were meant to do. Talk about Kevin, apparently. After the "meeting", we would then progress to lunch at the Tribeca Grill, and following that, we would actually go to Kevin's apartment and try to see him. Yeah, that'll work.

Sadly, I could not attend the Kev-In, of course, because they would then find out I was only using their bizarre obsession for my own amusement. I came up with some excuse and demanded to see pictures, which Midge was only too happy to provide.

The two out-of-state women actually flew to New York in order to attend the Kev-In. Alice and Susan created an enormous banner proclaiming "Kev-In 2001". Everyone had picket-type signs with huge pictures of Kevin from various movies. And there they sat, in Central Park, for several hours.

Then there were dozens of pictures of Kevin's apartment building in Tribeca. I have no idea how they managed to find it, but they seemed to know exactly which one of the windows was his. They marched determinedly into the lobby, pretending to be tax accountants and insisted they must see Mr. Spacey immediately. Not being an idiot, the guard on duty sent them away. I assume that he figured out that tax accountants probably wouldn't be carrying around gigantic signs with Kevin's picture on them.

Not to be thwarted, the KS People resorted to throwing rocks at his window, trying to get his attention, until the guard came outside and threatened to have them arrested.

The final straw came on 9/11. I was frantically worried about the New York based KS People, so I sent them an e-mail asking if they were all right. Several hours later, I received a group e-mail from Alice to all of the KS People saying: "What we really need to be concentrating on, here, is this...how is all of this affecting Kevin?"

I gave up after that. But I know they're still out there, somewhere.

An interesting postscript to all of this is that in December of 2004, I actually saw Kevin Spacey, live, singing Bobby Darin songs in Atlantic City in order to promote Beyond The Sea. I had a front row seat, and at the end of his set, Kevin shook our hands. He seemed very nice.

I should have slipped him a note.

Next time: My friend Al!

2006-10-11T08:32:00.000-07:00

Classroom Randomness

At the beginning of this term, my Department Chair called me in a panic. It seemed that one of our English professors had some sort of mysterious "emergency" and was unable to teach. My boss asked me if I could please pick up two remedial classes in addition to my usual course load.

Despite the fact that I teach electives and haven't taught a remedial class since graduate school, all I could see were dollar signs, so I said yes.

Here are a few highlights from the remedial classes so far. Keep in mind, we're only a third of the way into the term:

(after explaining verb tense)

ME: Does anyone have any questions?

CHRIS: Is it true that dudes used to play the girls' roles in Shakespeare's plays?

(after explaining complete sentence form)

ME: Does anyone have any questions?

SHONTAY: I like the guy who works at my Blockbuster. Should I ask him out?

(after explaining the correct use of the semicolon)

ME: Does anyone have any questions?

SARAH: Do you know Johnny Depp?

(after explaining noun-verb agreement)

ME: Does anyone have any questions?

JOE: Is that your real hair?

(after explaining commas)

ME: Does anyone have any questions?

DOUG: Don't you think Drew Bledsoe sucks?

And then there were the following two incidents that happened just this week:

The class was reading aloud an essay in which Sigmund Freud was mentioned. The student who was reading mispronounced Freud's name as "Frood" (just like Bill and Ted!) I giggled and corrected him. Suddenly, another guy raised his hand and yelled out; "Who's Sigmund Freud?"

I opened my mouth to answer him, but before I could get anything out, another student (who is perpetually stoned) said; "I think he's that dude with the tigers."

At this point, the kid sitting next to him turned and said; "That's Sigfried and Roy, you dork!" And the class exploded in laughter.

In my second remedial class, we were reading an essay written by a man in the Ku Klux Klan. The essay was on "the problem of the black man." I explained to the class that when reading, you have to be very careful to know something about the author, as he/she might have a bias or prejudiced. "Can anyone think of another example?" I asked.

Jessica shot her hand in the air. "I'm afraid of midgets," she said.

I blinked. "Are you afraid they're going to get you somehow?" I asked.

"No, I just think they're freaky little half-people who don't deserve to live."

I asked; "Is this a debilitating fear?"

"Oh yeah," she said, nodding. "I've dropped classes and quit jobs because of midgets."

"Well," I said, amidst the weird looks the other students were giving her, "this doesn't sound like a prejudice as much as it does a phobia. I mean, you do think they should be given the same rights as average-sized people, don't you?"

"Oh, no," she said, "I don't think they have the right to be alive at all."

At this point, Steve, the guy who sits next to her, leaned in and said; "Dude...don't ever watch the Discovery Health Channel. It's like the all-midgets-all-the-time channel."

Jessica never came back to class again. I'm not sure what happened to her. Maybe the midgets got her.

And, to put icing on the cake, this morning one of my students burst into tears in the middle of class. When I asked her what was wrong, she sobbed that she had just broken up with her boyfriend and was now thinking of dropping out of college to join the Navy in order to "forget about him."

I am seriously considering applying for sabbatical.

2006-10-01T13:22:00.000-07:00

Watch Out, James Bond!

In the mid-1990s, anti-stalking laws went into effect in New Jersey, making the punishment for stalking anything from a fine to several years in jail. Fortunately, for my friend Kim, these laws were as of yet unwritten in our senior year of college, otherwise she might be behind bars today.

It was the second semester of senior year, and thoughts of graduation danced in our heads. Kim was taking her last Secondary Education class (her goal was to become a high-school English teacher), and in the class was a quiet, unassuming guy named Frank.

Kim latched on to Frank immediately. He was exactly her type: short, Italian, and a little stupid. She began to talk about him all the time, and finally dragged me to the class so I could meet him and give my approval. He seemed nice, but…nothing special.

Kim continued to blather about how attractive he was (he wasn’t), how smart he was (he wasn’t), and how he would make a wonderful teacher one day (he wouldn’t). I figured this was harmless, and to be honest, I had my own problems to worry about; I was trying to get into graduate school.

It started to get weird one night when Kim showed up at my house wielding binoculars. “We’re going to spy on Frank,” she announced.

Bewildered, I got in the car and we headed for campus, where Frank had a late night class. We parked outside the building, and when the class let out, Kim aimed the binoculars at the front door. She spotted Frank and began squealing. Her beady little eyes followed Frank to his car (a 1987 black Mustang), and then she turned to me with a manic look. “Let’s follow him!”

“What?” I asked, bewildered.

“Let’s follow him home!” she said. “I want to see where he lives!”

“Oh, Jesus.”

Poor, unsuspecting Frank rocketed down the Garden State Parkway, with Kim (and me) in close pursuit. After half an hour of this, he pulled off into a very affluent residential area and eventually pulled into a driveway. Kim idled down the street, and watched (with the binoculars) as Frank schlepped into his house.

"Well," I said, nonplussed, "at least he has money."

Kim stepped it up a notch after that. She found out that Frank worked as the night manager at a McDonald’s right off campus. Every night she would put me in the car and we would go to the McDonald’s, sit across the street in the parking lot of a bank, and stare at the drive-through window with the binoculars. (I could just imagine how this would look to the police). Kim kept up an endless narration of how cute he was, handing patrons their hamburgers and McNuggets, but never got up the gumption to actually go into the McDonald’s herself, even though she actually knew Frank legitimately.

And, of course, after he got off shift, we would follow him home again just to watch him walk into the house.

One day she came up to me wielding a camera, and asked me to take a picture of Frank, so she could frame it and keep it by her bed. I asked how the hell I was supposed to do that without him knowing it, and she said, “pretend you’re from the college newspaper.”

And so she tracked him to the Student Center where he was in line to buy some coffee, and I approached him, told him my lie, and asked if he would mind me taking his picture. He cooperated beautifully, and I got my shot. Kim was delirious, and said that she would name her first daughter after me. I felt slightly dirty.

One night, as we were sitting outside his house (I was doing homework, Kim was staring through the binoculars intently), we were terrified to see the front door open. “Duck!” Kim screamed, diving to the floor. I just held my book in front of my face.

It turned out to be only his father, putting out the garbage for the night. He dumped the garbage at the end of the driveway, not seeing us. He went back into the house.

Kim stared at the garbage with a strange, strange look in her eye.

“What are you thinking?” I asked, nervously.

“I’m going to go through his garbage,” she said, trance-like.

“Why?” I asked.

She looked at me as if I were stupid. “So I know what kind of food he likes, so I know what to cook him when we get married,” she said, soberly.

“You’re insane,” I said.

“I’m going to take the garbage home with me so I can examine it,” she said, and opened the door.

“Kim,” I said, “you are not bringing that garbage into this car. If you do, I’m getting out, knocking on the door, and telling him what’s been going on.” (This is one of the few times in my friendship with Kim that I was assertive).

I managed to talk her out of stealing the garbage, but I couldn’t persuade her to actually approach Frank and see if he might be interested in her.

During one class, Frank casually told Kim that he was going on vacation for a week at a seaside resort about an hour away from campus. On the day after Frank was scheduled to depart, Kim showed up at my house, insisting that we drive to the resort “to look for him.” I told her that we had no idea where Frank was staying, and there was no way we could ever locate him.

“It doesn’t matter,” she insisted. “We know what his car looks like. If we find his car and watch it long enough, he’ll eventually go to it. I am not missing my one chance to see Frank in a bathing suit.” And a long (and gross) monologue ensued about her speculation on Frank’s chest hair.

So off we went. We drove around the resort for hours…and hours…and hours. No sign of the Mustang, no sign of Frank. She finally admitted defeat, and to appease herself she drove to Frank’s house and we watched it for a while, hoping to at least see a member of his family.

Finally, she folded like a bad poker hand and asked me to tell Frank that she liked him Gently, of course. I was thrilled that the whole thing was almost over.

So, one night as Frank was leaving his late-night class, I accosted him in the parking lot (with Kim watching all this through the binoculars). I reintroduced myself and told him, calmly, that Kim was very interested in him. He seemed surprised, and told me that although he was very flattered, he already had a serious girlfriend. I wasn’t sure when he had the time to see this girlfriend, since Kim had accounted for all his nighttime hours. All he seemed to do was go to class, work at McDonald’s, and go home.

And so it finally ended. Frank went off to parts unknown after graduation. Frighteningly, Kim now has a position as a high-school teacher, and I sincerely hope that she has given away the binoculars.

Lock up your garbage, people.

2006-09-11T07:52:00.000-07:00

Off-Broadway Bound

During my second year of Repertory, when I was still very young and very afraid, I was friends with a guy named Scott. Scott was two years older than me and a lot more experienced in theatre and really knew where his head was at; until one summer he figured out he was gay and fell apart at the seams.

For some reason, discovering he was gay caused Scott to drop out of Repertory and join a horrible community theatre group that was run by an insane woman named Phyllis, who insisted on writing, producing, and directing all the plays herself. Fortunately, she had lots of money, so she was able to do this unquestioned. She took Scott under her wing and we all stopped worrying about him.

Several weeks later, Scott called me in a panic; the leading lady of Phyllis's latest dramatic effort had had a nervous breakdown and had to quit the play. Could I possibly take the part?

Terrified, I spoke to the head of the Repertory, who was still angry with Scott for quitting, gay or not. He said he didn't care what I did, as long as it didn't interfere with his rehearsals. I called Scott back and said I would look at the script.

The play was called The Brass Peddler Prince, and was really, really bad. Don't worry if you've never heard of it. It was the saga of a married man who stops in a local shop to buy his pregnant wife a present, and ends up in a torrid affair with the shop clerk. It was a musical, and all the songs were by...Neil Diamond.

I would be playing the role of the pregnant wife, Scott explained, as he drove me to the theatre to meet Phyllis. It was supposedly a "meaty" role.

When we got there, it didn't take me long to figure out that Phyllis was biopolar, as she alternatively cried hysterically and laughed like a maniac throughout the evening. I was also introduced to Keith, the leading man. Keith considered himself to be "a serious actor" and "a movie star." The reason he thought this was because he had somehow landed a bit part in a movie that, because of legal reasons, I can only refer to as The Donald Sutherland Movie, which was being filmed at the same time The Brass Peddler Prince was rehearsing. Keith said we were "lucky to get him."

Weeks of rehearsal went by, and it came down to the final week. I was nervous, not because of my role (I had long since memorized the part, including the dreadful Neil Diamond songs), but because of Keith. Keith was so caught up with The Donald Sutherland Movie that he gave no effort at all to the play, and as a result had no idea what his lines were. At all. He had a vague idea of what his character was supposed to do during the play, and figured that any lines he said to get him to this end were fine. This was very frustrating to the other actors, who had actually memorized their lines and as a result, most of Keith's scenes made no sense.

The tearful Phyllis made an announcement. Somehow, she had hobbled together enough money to take The Brass Peddler Prince to an Off-Broadway theatre on West 57th Street (it's still there). We were going big time.

Opening night came, and Scott and I took the train into New York. Keith was already there, babbling about The Donald Sutherland Movie and flitting around backstage. Phyllis had on her headset and was freaking out.

Curtain.

Keith stumbled and babbled throughout the first act. He managed to forget two Neil Diamond songs entirely, and in his scenes with me he kept skipping whole pages of dialogue. I tried to keep up, but the play simply made no sense. It was like watching Samuel Beckett on acid. Keith wound up the first act by grabbing me, kissing me passionately, and then turning to the audience and asking; "How's that for entertainment?"

In the front row, Frank Rich, theatre critic for The New York Times, was writing furiously.

During the second act, Keith's mind disappeared entirely. In the middle of one of the Neil Diamond songs, he got a look on his face that I immediately recognized. It said; when I get to the end of this lyric, I will have no idea what to say next.

And he didn't. He opened his mouth and nothing came out. I tried valiantly to sing his lyrics, but they made no sense coming from me. In the wings, I could see Phyllis crying and Scott slowly shaking his head. Keith proceeded to ad-lib the entire rest of the play. When the whole damn thing was finally over, at least the plot had been saved.

We were panned by Frank Rich. We were panned by The Village Voice. We were panned by Neil Diamond.

Eventually, the only audience we had as the run went on consisted of winos who were looking for a way out of the cold. Finally, four weeks later, The Brass Peddler Prince finished its run, and we were mercifully cancelled.

The Donald Sutherland Movie, it turned out, was also bad. To this day, I want to meet Mr. Sutherland so I can ask him about Keith.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the price of fame.

Next time: Oh, I don't know. I'll think of something.

2006-08-19T10:01:00.000-07:00

Stalking Your Best Friend

A few of you have requested another story about the Count, so here’s a real whopper. I hope you enjoy it!

For those of you who may be unfamiliar with the Count, click over on the May Archives section in the column to the right of my blog. Scroll down to the entry for May 2, 2006, and read. Go ahead, I’ll wait. Seriously.

**real time lag**

OK, all caught up? Let’s press on!

I thought the assignment was simple enough. Write an in-class essay entitled “My Best Friend,” in which the student describes the special, emotional, and deep feelings they have for their best friend. Then, we would go around the class and share them.

It yielded some interesting results. First of all, four people picked Jesus. Two girls picked their mothers. Two guys picked their brothers, and one guy picked his godfather.

The Count picked Robert Downey, Jr.

I knew we were in trouble when it became his turn to read aloud. After clearing his throat dramatically, he began with: “My best friend is a famous stage and screen actor…” (this caused several students to look up, alarmed) “…named Robert Downey, Jr.”

The other students, who hadn’t really been paying attention, suddenly look very confused and intrigued. The Count’s essay went on to describe how he and Mr. Downey had grown up together in California, and how they partied all the time. I just stood at the front of the classroom, tapping my foot.

“OK, Count?” I asked, once he paused to take a breath, “how old are you?”

“Twenty,” said the Count.

“Robert Downey, Jr. is forty-one years old,” I said. “There’s no possible way you could have grown up together. Technically, he’s old enough to be your father.”

The Count remained undaunted. “Well, we didn’t really grow up together,” he allowed. “But we were teenagers together.”

I loved this leap in logic, but not as much as a poor guy named Ryan, who sat directly behind the Count (the Count, of course, sat front row center). Ryan began pretending his finger was a gun and kept “shooting” the Count in the back of the head.

“No,” I argued, “that’s not possible. When Downey was a teenager, you weren’t born yet.”

Even this logic didn’t penetrate the Count’s skull. He continued to read his essay, talking about all the good times he and “Rob” had had as teenagers, mostly “cruising around in Rob’s car and picking up chicks.” This was too much for poor Ryan, who suddenly blurted out: “For the love of God, Professor BeowulfGirl, make him stop lying!)

Out of curiosity, I asked the Count; “What did you do when your so-called best friend went to jail for drugs?”

“He never went to jail for drugs,” said the Count, in a low, intimate whisper. “He was…set up.”

“By whom?” I demanded.

“I’m afraid I can’t tell you that,” said the Count, ominously. “It could lead to very bad things. But I can tell you this; he wasn't in prison. He was making a movie at an undisclosed location.”

"Oh, well, yes, that makes perfect sense," I said, rolling my eyes sarcastically like Hugh Laurie.

And that’s pretty much how the class went. The Count kept insisting he was best friends with Robert Downey, Jr. Ryan kept calling the Count delusional. I kept trying to corner him with logic. Nothing worked.

Several days later, I had a brainstorm. Since no one at Very Serious University had a clue as to how to deal with the Count, I decided to go right to the horse’s mouth; I would ask my psychiatrist.

My psychiatrist was utterly fascinated with the Count and we spent nearly the entire session talking about him; I want my money back. He explained to me that the Count actually had two problems. The first was pathological lying, the clinical name for which is pseudologica fantastica. With this condition, the patient honestly doesn’t know he’s lying, and lives in a constant state of surprise and confusion when people keep proving him wrong. Although annoying, these people are rarely dangerous.

The Count’s other problem, according to the good doctor, was something called parasocial relationships. This is a condition in which the patient believes that fictional characters on television and movies are not only real, but they are talking directly to him. (Apparently, this most often happens with soap operas). These are people who think they're dating, say, Dan Rather, because Dan shows up in their living room every night. In extreme cases (like the Count), the patient actually believes they are best friends, lovers, or confidents of very famous people. These are the sort of people who, when the object of their parasocial relationship gets married, are very upset that they were not invited to the wedding. (A good example of this is that woman who was stalking David Letterman some years ago).

There are many other great stories of delusional lies that the Count told me and the class as the semester unfolded, so I will do my best to report them here. Believe me, there is a plethora of them.

Next time: BeowulfGirl’s Excellent Off-Broadway Adventure!

2006-08-06T12:11:00.000-07:00

Bleeding Hearts and Other Body Parts

And now we conclude our trilogy of Unstable Men Who Asked Out BeowulfGirl with…

Dan:

I was a Creative Writing minor, which meant I had to take five classes in Creative Writing in order to complete my degree (in fact, it was in one of these classes that I met my aforementioned best friend, Andrew). Second semester senior year, I took my final class and met Dan.

Dan weighed about two hundred pounds, had a scraggly moustache, and always wore the same shirt—a football jersey sporting the logo of the New York Giants. He had interesting body odor, and was completely obnoxious in class. Even the professor hated him. And lucky me got to sit right next to him.

Dan was a Theatre Arts major, which meant that he had access to professional make-up kits. Dan’s favorite thing to do was to create fake and incredibly gory-looking wounds on himself using liquid latex and red paint. No one was sure why he did this, but I just assumed it was another way of getting attention.

One night, with a fake eyeball hanging out of its socket, Dan came looming up to me after class and asked; “Would you like to have dinner?”

“I’m having dinner with a friend,” I replied, and took off. This wasn’t a lie—I was having dinner with my friend Kim. We did it every week after I got out of class. She was waiting for me across the courtyard in the History building.

Two weeks later, Dan tried again (this time he had an axe blade through his head). After class he asked; “What are you doing Saturday night? Would you like to go out?”

“I have a family wedding in Philadelphia,” I said, and this was also the truth.

Another week went by, and at the end of class I collected my things and took off like a shot before Dan could confront me again (this week, he had a pencil driven through his hand). I stormed across the courtyard at top speed, all the while hearing Dan lurching behind me and breathing heavily. I spotted Kim, and she began to make her way towards me. Suddenly, I felt Dan’s big, meaty hand drop on my shoulder. Damn.

I turned around, and he stood there, panting. Then he wheezed: “Look, you’ve turned me down twice now, so I’ll just ask…would you like to go to a movie sometime?”

Jesus Christ, I thought, what the hell does it take to get this guy to take a hint? I opened my mouth to try to say something intelligent, when suddenly Kim, who had heard everything, came out with:

“She already has a boyfriend.”

I just stared at her. This was an idea that I simply had not thought of before.

“Oh,” said Dan, mournfully, “she does?”

“Yes. His name is Steve Duhamel. He goes to college in…um…Rhode Island. He’s majoring in…um…”

“Architecture,” I put in, trying to help.

“Yes,” Kim went on, “and he rows crew and is involved in student government. They’ve been going out for two years now, and are probably going to get married after graduation.”

“Yeah, it’s pretty serious,” I said, nodding enthusiastically.

“Oh,” said Dan. “Bummer.” He paused. "So a date is out of the question, then?"

"Yes!" I screamed. "For God's sake, I'm practically engaged!" I was taking this fantasy to a whole new level.

And he slowly walked away.

“That was awesome!” I said to Kim.

To this day, Kim and I resurrect “Steve Duhamel” whenever we get invited somewhere by a creepy guy. Steve has since graduated from college and now lives in Pennsylvania, where he’s a partner in a large architectural firm.

And, of course, he’s completely devoted to us.

Next time: Another story about the Count!

2006-07-31T13:11:00.000-07:00

Soup Is Good Food

Matt:

Two weeks after Derek the Bridge Dumper took a header off of the Route 18 overpass onto oncoming traffic, Greg began to get lonely and asked a fellow named Matt to move in with him until Derek got out of the hospital.

Matt was an interesting guy. First of all, he had Marftan’s Syndrome (which is what Abraham Lincoln had) and was six foot five inches tall. He loomed over everything and everyone, and Greg affectionately (or otherwise) called him “Lurch.” Matt’s other claim to fame was that he was, apparently, the soul heir to the Lipton’s Soup Company, and one day he would inherit millions of dollars.

Matt was a Chemistry major, and one of the few genuine geniuses I’ve ever met. We all liked him, but we couldn’t understand two-thirds of what he said. Still, he seemed to cheer up Greg, so we all accepted him.

My dealings with Matt were only Greg-related, much as they had been with Derek. I was very surprised when he called me at home one night, because I didn’t even know he had my number.

“Hello,” he said pleasantly. “Greg gave me your number, I hope you don’t mind.”

“Er…no,” I said, wondering if I did or not.

“I was just wondering…would you like to go to dinner on Friday, perhaps see a movie, and have some polite conversation?” (As opposed to rude conversation, I assumed).

“Has Greg done something?” I asked, nervously.

“Well, you could say that it’s Greg-related,” said Matt.

“Well, Friday is when I have forensics,” I said, “but I can meet you for pizza or something in the Student Center.”

He agreed that that would be fine, and that’s what we did. For the entire dinner, I kept asking, “so what has Greg done, exactly?” but Matt didn’t seem to want to tell me about that. Instead, he went on and on about how he was trying to isolate a protein that would somehow revolutionize the soup industry.

When the whole thing was mercifully over, Matt and I walked outside and he looked down at me and said, “to be perfectly honest with you, Greg suggested that I do this, which is why I said it concerned him. Would you…would you like to go out with me?”

Oh, balls. The trouble was, I didn’t. At all. I simply didn’t like him “that way.” I could barely follow his conversation, how would I have a relationship with him? And, I proceeded to look this nice guy right in the eyes and lie to him.

I told him I was interested in someone else, and that all of my energy was focused there, but I really thanked him for asking me, and wished him well. I made sure he was okay before he left me—I’d have opened a vein if he also jumped off a bridge.

A few weeks later, Matt suddenly started showing up with an incredibly unattractive, dumpy girl named Betsy, with whom he claimed he was madly in love. I didn’t understand it, but was happy for him. A week after that, he announced that he was bisexual. We then started seeing him strolling the campus with both the hideous Betsy and a strange, blonde, scruffy man, holding hands with both of them.

By the end of the term, Matt had moved out of the dorm and into an apartment with both of them, where they shared a king-sized bed and lived happily as a threesome. It was astounding.

Two months later, I was in my living room and the phone rang. It was Greg. “Turn on CBS!” He yelled. “Right now!”

I turned on the TV and was astonished to see Matt, Betsy, and the unnamed man on The Montel Williams Show. The theme of the show was “Threesomes That Work.” And all three of them chatted with Montel about how happy they were, and that they all adored each other.

“Wow,” said Greg, amazed. “Just think…that could have been you.”

Next time: We wrap up our series of interesting men by discussing Dan, a guy who had a really creative use for latex.

2006-07-26T11:30:00.000-07:00

Three Men and a Frightened Lady

This is going to be another three-parter, folks. I want to be able to get the ambiance of all the stories right.

But first, some exposition:

I didn’t date in college. At all. For four years, I managed to convince myself that this was all right; that I was “too wrapped up in my work” and “developing my writing” to bother with the frivolities of having a boyfriend. I fooled myself (and others) pretty well for four years.

There were, in fact, only three men in college that asked me out; and there was something hideously wrong with every one of them.

Keep in mind that this all happened second semester senior year—I was coming dangerously close to graduating without ever having had a date. But then fate (or something) stepped in and brought me three completely bizarre men whose clutches I barely escaped. Let's begin:

Derek:

First, there was Derek. Derek and I had a class together in Arthurian Romance. His roommate, Greg, was a good friend of mine. My dealings with Derek were always brief: “Hi, is Greg here?” and “Tell Greg to call me,” and “I’m borrowing Greg’s Anthropology book.”

Derek was heavily into Roll Playing Games and insisted that everyone call him “The Grand Vizier” (no, I don’t know what that means). He was kind of pale and sickly-looking, though he had always been polite to me. He was a tall, rambling guy whose clothes never seemed to fit him, and he wore thick glasses that he always polished on his shirt. He was a Criminology major, and I fight it frightening that he's somewhere out there fighting crime.

One day after Arthurian Romance, Derek approached me and nervously asked me to go to the Student Center for dinner. He said he wanted to “discuss the final.” Because I was completely academic-minded in college, it didn’t dawn on me that he was actually asking me for a date; I just wasn't "tuned in" to that vibe because I had stopped looking for it long ago. In any case, because I had a club meeting that night, I said no, and Derek walked away, dejected. I honestly thought that would be the end of it.

Later that night, Greg called me and in a disgusted tone blurted out; “Derek threw his synthesizer down the stairs.” He sounded more annoyed than anything else.

“Um…why?” I asked, confused as to why Greg was even telling me this.

“Oh, he was upset that his date didn’t go well,” said Greg. “He mentioned something about asking someone to dinner and being rejected. He went totally off the wall about it.”

I stared at the phone in horror. Could I have caused this? Or did Derek ask someone else out that day as well? I got very nervous. “Let me know what happens,” I said.

Two hours later, Greg called a second time. This time he said, matter-of-factly, “Derek jumped off a bridge.”

Mortified, I asked for details. Apparently, after a total meltdown in the dorm, he began running in the halls and screaming, “I’m never going to get a girlfriend! I can't take this anymore! I don't want to live!”. He then disappeared into the night and headed for the Route 18 overpass, which went over a major highway and a river. He chose to dive off the highway-end, and as a result landed on top of a car coming out from under the bridge. Derek’s legs were crushed, and both he and the driver of the car wound up in the hospital. Miraculously, no one was killed.

The scariest part about all of this was going to visit Derek in the hospital, with Greg and the rest of my friends from the dorm. I was convinced that he would take one look at me and start throwing cups at me, screaming for me to get out.

But miraculously, that didn’t happen. Weirdly, Derek never seemed to blame me for any part of it. He returned to school on crutches, claiming he had “found Jesus” in the hospital.

Coming soon (very soon, I promise): The story of me, the Lipton’s soup heir, and Montel Williams.

2006-06-23T10:44:00.000-07:00

And This Man Has Tenure, People...

There’s a Department Chair here at Very Serious University named Roger. Roger is an interesting guy.

Roger is approximately sixty years old, balding, short, scrawny, and has a pointy nose and vacant grey eyes. Heretofore, my dealings with him have always been formal, and I’ve just recently experienced the questionable joy of dealing with Roger up-close and in-person.

Roger’s sexual history is complicated. While he was married to his first wife, Phyllis, he had an affair with a woman named Linda. Eventually, Roger left Phyllis and married Linda, with whom he had three children. For the last six years, Roger has been carrying on an affair with a girl not much older than I am: his assistant, named Cathy. Cathy has stuck with Roger this long because she’s convinced that one day he is going to leave Linda for her…after all, he divorced his first wife in order to marry a mistress.

A few months ago, Roger got in trouble with the Dean of Faculty for having sex in his office with Cathy. He actually has a sofa-bed in there. The Dean told him that he had to get rid of the sofa-bed immediately, and that he had to be off-campus by a certain time. This caused much trauma, especially to Cathy, because they now had no place to have sex; she still lives with her parents.

A while ago, before I knew all of this, Roger “noticed” me. He asked me to go for Chinese food with him. Foolishly, I thought this was harmless.

At the restaurant, Roger suddenly leaned toward me, gave me a salacious grin, and said; “So…what kind of men do you like? Do you like older men?”

“Older than what?” I asked, stupidly. “Older than God? Older than dirt? Older than my father?”

Roger laughed and said to never mind, he had his answer. Whatever.

What followed was a series of increasingly more complicated and convoluted meetings, most of which involved Roger, Cathy, and me doing something social like going out for pizza or strolling through the park. It all seemed very innocuous, until one night when Roger approached me in my own office. I believe there was a thunderstorm in the background--it was sort of like in Frankenstein.

He made himself at home in my guest chair and leaned in, lecherously. “I have a proposition,” he said, with an evil smile.

“What’s that?” I asked, wondering if I would get some more Chinese food out of him.

“Cathy and I have been discussing the possibility of bringing in…another person,” he said.

I didn’t get it. “What are you talking about?” I asked.

“Do you write erotica?” Roger asked, as a complete non-sequitor.

“No,” I said, getting concerned.

“Do you think you could write a…scenario…about you, me, and Cathy?”

I told him that I absolutely would not. I had more important (and less gross) work to do. But he was not to be dissuaded:

“I want you to seduce my girlfriend,” he said. “I think we could do it as a drinking game.”

I was completely appalled. I tried to explain to Roger that not only was I not bisexual, I didn’t find him attractive at all (even if I did like “older men”) and refused to have anything to do with him or Cathy.

He meekly went away, and I was safe until the following morning, when I found an erotic paperback titled Caterina In Charge in my mailbox, with a post-it note saying: “Perhaps you’ll find this stimulating and it will inspire you.”

I tracked Roger down and told him in no uncertain terms that if he kept this up, I was going to report him to the Dean of Faculty, who already was out for his head for having sex in his office. Fortunately, this seemed to shut him up, at least for the time being.

The worst thing is that Roger and I share several students, who weirdly speak very highly of him as a professor. I keep wanting to tell them how creepy and scary he is, but that wouldn't get me anywhere.

At least he isn't allowed on campus until after dark.

2006-06-16T08:26:00.000-07:00

1,500 Insane People

The day finally dawned at the Furry convention, and it was time for me to “gather material,” as Andrew said. The particular convention I went to was called Anthrocon—you can find out more about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthrocon. Seriously, go look. I'll wait.

When we arrived in Philadelphia, I was immediately terrified because not only were there about 1,500 people there, but they were all dressed as animals (apparently, this is called “wearing a fursuit”). Frightened, I grabbed Tracey’s arm and refused to let her go.

I then noticed something strange…there was no talking. Apparently, since animals can’t speak, people dressed as animals can’t, either.

If you want to know how fursuiters do communicate, it’s by way of an activity called “skritching.” This involves going up to a compete stranger and scratching them on the back, with their paws or hooves or whatever the hell else they’re wearing. I wasn't there three minutes before a gorilla approached me and started "skritching" my back. Now, I’m a very friendly person, but that kind of freaked me out. "I'm sorry," I said, "but please stop doing that."

The gorilla turned sadly away, and made a big show out of his shoulders drooping a little.

The only Furry that spoke to me was a man dressed as an ostrich who asked me: “Do you want to yiff?”

Confused, I asked, “is that like dancing?”

I then discovered that “yiffing” is having sex while still wearing your costumes. While I’m not the most suave person when it comes to sex, I do prefer it with, you know, a human being and not an ostrich.

Tracey thought I’d be more comfortable in the Art Gallery, so we went there. Oh, dear God.

Easily 80% of the art (which, bizarrely, as all very well drawn) was X-rated, and included many drawings of foxes having sex with wolves, tigers having sex with horses, and dogs having sex with squirrels. Even weirder was that the non-explicit art all seemed to include lesbians. And people were actually buying it.

Thoroughly freaked, I went back upstairs to my hotel room and immediately called Andrew. He was just as weirded-out as I was. While I was talking to him, someone knocked on the door.

I opened the door and saw…Steve. He was dressed in full horse regalia, looming over me in a latex horse suit and a rubber head. He was at least seven feet tall and looked terrifying. My first thought was: “My God, he’s between me and the door.”

I babbled some excuse about using the pool, and took off. By the time I got back downstairs to the convention, something called “The Fursuit Dance” had begun. It truly has to be seen to be believed. Hundreds of people dressed up like cats, lions, birds and gorillas, were freaking out on the dance floor. The music seemed to be some sort of modern industrial music and they had a laser light show, followed by a talent show. When that was all over, they had a “Fursuit Parade”, which is pretty much self-explanatory.

The only workshop that I attended was for a Tarot card reading. It didn't go well. Being divorced, I wanted to ask if I had a shot in hell of every finding somebody else. Sadly, the reader shook her head and said; "I'm sorry, I don't see any relationship cards in your reading at all."

The convention wrapped up with a huge meeting trying to figure out how to improve the convention next year. I wanted to suggest “no yiffing”, but I think I would be overruled.

And there you have it…my dealings with the Furries. I promise my next entry will be even more bizarre.