The Aerie
Sometimes people ask me where I got my nickname from...
And sometimes they know.
I didn't have any friends. This wasn't because I was a hopeless case, a dorky teenager who had not yet wandered down and discovered a computer in the physics classrom.
While this was true, the reason I didn't have any friends was because we had just moved to Minnesota from New Jersey, and I didn't know anybody. Well, that wasn't true - in Eighth Grade I had met Joe and over the summer I had met Steve through my friend Randy, who unbeknowst to all of us was about nine months away from going insane and being locked up. So of my first three friends in Minnesota one went nuts, and two are now dead. If I were my friend Tim, I'd be more than a little nervous.
Anyway Steve had given me a piece of advice over the summer: join the high school theater group. I had performed in a play in seventh grade in New Jersey, when my Social Studies teacher had been a theater major just happy to have a job. He had decided that our Social Studies course for the entire year would be a production of Arthur Miller's 'The Crucible.' I was Ezekiel Cheever.
So the first meeting of theater group I made a point of showing up. A lonely freshman, I felt intimidated by all the Big Scary Seniors (including, *snort*, Tim). The meeting was held in the theater, which did not have the newfangled modern flip-up desks that most school theaters now sport. I was wearing an onion on my belt, that being the fashion at the time.
Since there was paperwork to accomplish and no surfaces upon which to write, I was asked to hand out clipboards. As I did so I heard The Seniors discussing Monty Python jokes from the television. My position in a theater handing stuff out reminded me of the YouTube scene above, and I began calling out "Albatross! Albatross!"
And the Seniors found me FUNNY. I was in. I had friends for the first time, well, almost ever.
A nickname was born. And soon after I stumbled across that computer in the Physics room, and when a login was needed one came quickly to mind.
Thirty years later you're visiting albatross.org.
Makes me grateful that John Cleese wasn't selling Poop-shaped novelty hats...
Posted by Albatross at April 16, 2007 7:48 PM | TrackBack