The Aerie
Sherman, prepare the Wayback machine! We're taking a trip back into
the ancient past! Back! Back to the year... Nineteen Seventy Seven!
Yes, that's right, my friend Tim and I returned to where it all began
-- the theater at St. Francis High School. Our first performance
together was 'The Sound of Music' in 1977, when he was a senior and I
was a freshman. As you can see from the photos, that was back before
the invention of color. (Actually, the very pretty girl on the far
left in that photo, Marie, was my date to junior prom two years later.
I seem to recall she was in color by then.)
[som1977-1.jpg] So when Tim learned that the local theater group up
there was putting 'The Sound of Music' on again, we had to go visit.
Way back then, our theater director was [1]Wayne Torke, a senior
student, and under his, um, guidance (I wasn't going to type
'dictatorship', really!) we put on not one, not two, but three
theatrical performances in one year: The Sound of Muisc, Pygmalion,
and Treasure Island. The sets were elaborate beyond description -- the
ship for Treasure Island was a full-fledged ship fergoodness sakes. He
could have gotten away with a railing, a pole, and a ship's wheel, but
no, this behemoth had a hull and rigging weighed a ton if it weighed
an ounce.
[som1977-2.jpg] The set for 'The Sound of Music' was equally
impressive -- a circular structure on tiny casters, partitioned into
three sections, and intended to be rotated into position for each
scene. Of course what ended up happening was that the casters couldn't
take the strain, stopped rotating, and became high-traction rubber
feet, and those of us on Stage Crew had the pleasure of simply shoving
the beast into position.
Altogether, the 1977 theater season in St. Francis was an amazing
accomplishment, a testament not only to Torke's drive and abilities,
but also to the fact that the educational system was so screwed up at
that school that by the time you were a senior you pretty much could
do whatever you pleased. Wayne ran a theater company, I spent my days
writing computer programs. Classes? Oh, those.
[2][oldaud1.jpg] But that was then. Now the St. Francis High School
has a whole new theater building -- the "Carlson-Foley" Fine Arts
auditorium. Having had a chance to visit it once already, I prepared
Tim for the experience by first bringing him to the old theater.
The room has shrunk, and half of the back of the auditorium has been
raised and levelled, with the old lunchroom tables and chairs
distributed on the new floor. A few rows of seats remain, apparently
for those occasions when the old stage is used for choir practice.
[3][oldaud3.jpg] The stage floor itself is a shambles, warped and
cracked, and hardly good for walking across much less actual
performances. I can easily imagine a day when the interior of the
auditorium is excavated and turned into more classroom or office
space, because nobody seems to be interested in maintaining it as a
theater space.
[4][newaud1.jpg] After visiting the old theater, I led the way to the
new auditorium. It was... impressive. Very impressive. Tim stared,
utterly dumbfounded. Then again, that's not an unusual look for Tim.
It's a gigantic space, the size of a moderately large cineplex
theater. The ceiling is high overhead, and the stage is fronted by an
orchestra pit. An orchestra pit for Chrissakes!
[5][newaud2.jpg] D'you know what we would have given for an orchestra
pit? Oy!
Of course, this wasn't the after-school drama club putting on this
performance, this was Playhouse 15, a local amateur theatrical group
that began shortly after I graduated. Actually my mother was in a
couple of their performances, and I even did a minor bit of stage
crewing for them at once point when I was living at home after my
abortive first attempt to move out. [6][newaud3.jpg] So these guys had
a few more resources then we'd had. And their production was rather
better, I think, particularly in terms of the singing and the acting.
And the set. And the orchestral music.
Still, I think we did a creditable job for a high school drama club in
1977, back before the invention of color.
[7][carrie2.jpg] 'The Sound of Music' is a very long play, and due to
our prior involvement Tim and I already knew how it ended, so we left
at intermission to make the long drive back to the Twin Cities. Before
we did, however, we snooped around the school some. The walls of the
school, just inside the entrance, contain large signs bearing the
names and accomplishments of award winners going back to when the
school was opened in about 1974 or 1975. The earliest signs bore names
[debate.jpg] that Tim and I recognized, and they even listed
accomplishments in such esoteric pursuits as "Debate" (my friends
Steve and Andy were the national champions in 1983, under the coaching
of Randy Keillor, Garrison's cousin). It would have been nice if
they'd spelled Andy's last name correctly though.
[8][carrie3.jpg] While peeking at the sports trophy case -- neither of
us were expecting to find our own names in there, mind you -- I
spotted a very interesting plaque, one of the oldest trophies in the
case. It was a picture of the Girls' Tennis Team from 1978, and there
among all the white-clad gals was my old friend Carrie, now going by
the more sophistimicated grown-up name, Carolyn. I hadn't heard from
Carolyn for over twenty years until we reconnected at Steve's funeral.
[9][carolyn-smallie17.5-big.jpg] She was still as pretty as she had
been in high school, and it was great seeing her again, despite the
circumstances. She had always been funny and creative, and that had
continued... although I'd never have guessed that she would be
expressing her creativity by [10]tying fishing lures!
They are magnificent lures, however: attractive and colorful. After
[11][carrie4.jpg] Steve died Carolyn was inspired to create a set in
his honor, "Moldy Monster Bait," and she sent a set to me and to
Steve's widow. They're magnificent, but, I'm afraid to fish with them.
Not only would I be dunking a beautiful work of art into a river (and
heaven knows I've gotten into enough trouble doing that already), but
they're bloody HUGE! (That's a regular 8 1/2 by 11 sheet of paper I've
got them on.) I'm terrified at the idea of a fish big enough to
swallow one!
Hopefully we'll be able to visit Carolyn sometime and she can take us
fishing so we can try out the lures. I'll let the kids fish, anchored
to a nearby tree with steel cable. I'll stand ready with a shotgun,
and we'll see what kind of beasts these babies catch.
[12]Last
So here I am, sitting in my fave café, the Blue Moon, connected to my
webserver over an SSH session, updating (finally) my web journal. No
big deal, right? I'm on a wireless laptop, or a cybercafe connection.
Nope.
I'm on my Palm Tungsten W.
Now, for the non-nerd set, this may be as meaningless as an argument
over which is dumber, Ferengi misogyny or Betazed marriage ceremonies.
And the nerd crowd is saying 'Oh, I am SO impressed, be still my
beating heart.' in the Comic-Book Guy's voice. And the engineers are
saying 'Why don't you just write up your journal in Notepad and upload
it later?'
To all of these I say 'Feh!' And again, 'Feh!'
Because I just think this is cool. So there!
Maybe I'm just an old fogey, doomed to be awed by the everyday
miracles Those Darned Kids take for granted.
I was in the U of MN bookstore once twenty years ago, standing in the
checkout line. Beside me was an impulse-buy bin full of cheap $5
calculators.
This old codger was staring into the bin with misty eyes.
"These used to cost thousands of dollars," he said in a daze, "Now...
they give them away in cereal boxes."
And I could tell that he had worked on them back then, when a pocket
calculator filled a hot room with the smell of dust baking on hundreds
of vacuum tubes.
He had not only labored to pose the question 'What is 2 + 2?', he had
written the program to generate the answer and punched it laboriously
into a stack of paper cards, which he submitted for batch execution
sometime late in the evening.
And now, here it was, all that effort and innovation, encapsulated in
a piece of colored plastic temporarily fished out of the waste stream.
And here I am, staggered to be using a wireless terminal the size of a
Pop-Tart, remembering boot toggle switches, 110-baud papertape
teletypes, and keybounce algorithms for a breadboard calculator.
So pardon me if I show my age.
I just think this is cool.
Now if I can just figure out how to send a Control-D...
[1]Last
Well, the phone is finally back.
[T-3.gif] This stupid situation started when I bought this nifty new
phone, the Palm Tungsten W. It does everything: PDA, cell phone, web
browser, text messaging. The only thing it doesn't do is take photos,
which is just fine with me, thanks.
Sprint is advertising its phones with that horrid ad in which a lovely
blonde lass mocks a homely jerk by surreptitiously snapping his
photograph and sending it to her friend. This is a feature? Likewise
the "Dip says 'Hi'." commercial: a man positions his son in front of a
sign that says "Dip". His wife thinks its funny. Their son is doomed
to spend the next twenty years in therapy. Ha ha.
So anyway the Tungsten doesn't take pictures, which is good. But it
does everything else, which is also good. It has just one little major
flaw: You can only use the phone if you have an earbud.
This was very bad. I needed a clumsy, graceless $30 cable in order to
make or receive phone calls. In order to catch an incoming call I
either had to leave the cable connected all the time, or try to
untangle and connect the cable while the phone rang. VERY fugly.
I tried leaving the phone on my hip and the cable clipped under my
shirt, and that worked to an extent -- I only looked a LITTLE geeky.
Unfortunately the cable between my beltline and the PDA would catch on
things, and very soon the plug tip broke and I was out another $30 for
a new cable.
[T-4.jpg] Then I stumbled across an engineer on the Internet who was
advertising his service: to install ear- and mouthpieces into the back
of the Tungsten. Wonderful! I looked his website over for a while,
this was just one service of many that he offered. He seemed legit.
I packed up my phone and sent it off.
Then the fun began!
On September 9th he sent me an e-mail, "We completed work on your T/W
today, and will be shipping it tomorrow."
On the 16th he sent, "it was mistakenly placed back on the incoming
instead of outgoing... I will make sure it goes out on the next
shipment."
Two days later his assistant sent me a note saying "Your item has been
shipped."
On the 24th of September he sent me a note, "we got hit with a virus
which has made a mess of things here."
On the 25th, "We have finally found your Tungsten... I will personally
ship it."
26th, "Your Tungsten will go out tomorrow and I will personally send
you a tracking number."
He called me, voice, on the 27th and we talked about the situation. He
outlined a very elaborate set of circumstances. According to him, his
database had been hacked and the return address on a bunch of phones
set to a vacant house in New Jersey. Twelve phones had been delivered
and were considered lost, but the rest of the phones had been stopped
by the FBI and the USPS, and were being shipped back to him. Meanwhile
the FBI was "staking out" the house to capture the thieves.
This was such an extraordinary tale that it was hard to disbelieve. It
was also hard to believe. How could his shipping department --
presumably one fellow -- not have noticed that all the outbound labels
were for the same address in New Jersey? His story might have been
more believable if accompanied by a USPS shipping number that would
have at least demonstrated the delivery gone awry. But no matter, I
just wanted my phone back, I really didn't care about his troubles.
October 1, "I have your Tungsten!!!!! I will be shipping it
tomorrow!!!!!"
Nothing more for a long, agonizing week. I sent several increasingly
angry notes.
October 7, "I will have all shipping info by 5:00 p.m. PST."
On October 11th I had had enough. I resigned myself to the fact that I
might never get this phone back again. I had no idea what this fellow
might be doing with my phone -- he couldn't be placing calls as me,
because I had my phone's ID chip -- but it seemed clear I might never
see it again.
So I called the phone company, and they agreed to pare my phone
service back to the bare minimum necessary to keep the account open. I
even considered chucking the whole thing and having them switch
service back to one of my older phones.
Of course, in taking this step I invoked Murphy's Law. Now that I'd
screwed up my phone service, Murphy's Law took effect and immediately
began drawing my phone back to me.
Only hours after trimming my phone service, I got a note from the
guy's assistant. His boss, he claimed, was in the hospital, the
assistant would ship the Tungsten.
Imagine my astonishment when I saw that this note was accompanied
by... a shipping tracking number?
For two days I followed the number as the package made its way across
the country. What would be in it? Would it be my phone? Would it be
empty, and I'd get some message saying "Oh, we found your PDA, we
forgot to put it in the box, we'll be shipping it tomorrow, promise!"
Would it be someone else's PDA? Would it have the modifications? The
suspense was killing me.
And then yesterday, it arrived! Having missed the shipment, I went to
the Post Office to pick it up. When I arrived I realized that I'd left
my wallet in my computer bag at home.
No problem! The Post Office never asked for ID, just took my delivery
slip and handed me the phone. Keep that in mind if you're ever looking
to commit a federal crime: you can probably get some nice stuff by
heading down to the post office with a few delivery slips and no ID.
With shaking hands I opened the box and... there was a Tungsten W in
it! It looked a little worse for the wear, but certain scuffs and
scratches seemed to confirm that it was my original. I inserted the
identifier chip and turned it on... It worked! I placed a call... the
earpiece worked! I could use my phone without the cable!
But further delights awaited me when I returned home, for during its
absence AT&T apparently erected a cell phone tower somewhere in the
vicinity of my home. Instead of getting 12% signal in my office (which
was just enough to tell me my phone was ringing, but not enough to let
me answer and take the call), I am now getting about 50% signal, or
"plenty" for taking and placing calls.
So the phone is back. It works. It works better than it did before. I
even got AT&T to straighten out my online access (a whole different
problem) so I can manage the account on the web.
Hooray! The phone is back! And I can call without the cable!
But... I only have 27 minutes of time left on my plan for the next two
weeks.
Oh what the hell. If it takes Murphy's Law to bring the phone back, so
be it. Things could be worse.
[1]Last
What a weekend it was. It was such a weekend that I'm only now
recovering from it.
My son had two overnights in a row. The first was on Friday, and it
was his birthday overnight party. True, his birthday was six weeks
ago, but we stopped having the overnights in the summer because so
many of his friends failed to attend, being out of town on vacation.
The boys played video games and watched movies and had a bonfire and
all that stuff. At twelve, the boys are starting to get a bit stinky,
too. Went down to the basement game room and it smelled like a locker
room.
They were up past 2:00 in the morning but got a little sleep before
waking up for Saturday morning cartoons. Then one of his friends at
the party clued my son in to there being a MechWarrior gaming
tournament at a local game store at noon. So, minutes after the last
friend left the party, I drove my son to the tournament. He still
smelled like armpits, but he was hanging out with adult gamers, so I
figured he'd fit right in.
His friend's dad gave my son a ride home from the tournament at 4:00,
and my spouse immediately whisked him off to the church lock in. I
tried to get him to take a shower first, but my wife was in her
panicked "New experience, must arrive early!" mode and could not be
disuaded. Still wearing the grass-stained sweats he'd donned for
school Friday morning, a smelly, hollow-eyed twelve-year-old
accompanied his sister to the lock- in.
One of the deals to get the kids to attend the lock-in was that I had
to volunteer to take the graveyard shift. I'm sympathetic: you'd've
never gotten ME to go to a church lock in, especially when I was in
seventh grade and the biggest kids were seniors. Very intimidating. So
I had to be there as "security blanket" overnight. Happy to help.
So at midnight I drove over to the church and prepared to pull my
second all-nighter in as many weeks.
My son was glad to see me and we hung out for most of the evening,
watching "The Nightmare Before Christmas" and most of "Spirited Away"
together in the Social Hall before he finally nodded off.
It was interesting to observe the teenagers since, at 41, I am solidly
and completely invisible to them. I could burst into flame or sprout
horns and they wouldn't give me a second glance. In less than a year
I'll have two teenagers of my own... hopefully I won't turn invisible
to them. But if I do there'll be little I can do about it but wait for
them to get old, too.
By the end of the evening the teenagers were asleep in front of the
big- screen TV in the social hall, an unruly pile of limbs and
sleeping bags. My son was asleep by himself to one side. It was nice
sitting there, reading a book while "Tommy Boy" played out on the big
screen, thinking about how lucky my son is that he'll soon become
visible, very visible, to all those teenaged girls...
But I'm gonna have to get that boy to shower!
[1]Last