Odd Celebrity Sightings

I went to a conference this weekend. It was the usual stuff: presenting some papers, gossiping about co-workers (we call them colleagues to sound smart), drink a few beers at the hotel bar (this time we got 2 free drink tickets per night), and networking.

So, I was standing with some of my colleagues at the entrace of the Pullman Hotel in Huntington, West Virginia, and we were trying to figure out where we were going to eat. We were also making some small talk with somebody who was walking by. There was a big group of us, and the doors to the hotel slide open and in walks Pauly Shore. I looked at the colleague next to me who also saw him. We had puzzled expressions on our face. Is Pauly Shore in Hungtington? Then somebody came in and said, "That guy sitting on the bench just got beat up and robbed! He's bleeding from the head!" I looked at Pauly, and he was checking into the hotel. He did have a bandana on his head.

It turned out that they were two separate things entirely, but for a moment I was confused. I was picturing Pauly passed out on a bench outside a hotel in Huntington and then getting beat up on top of that. I thought, boy, he's really having a rough go of it these days.

We later found out that Pauly was doing a comedy show in town that night, and I thought, well, it could be worse. He could be a drunk drifting from town to town and getting beat up outside hotels. Then we started to talk about odd celebrity sightings.

One of my colleagues told a story about being at a film festival (in some big city) with her husband. She said all weekend she kept seeing somebody watching her and then popping out of sight. Eventually, the mysterious man walked up to her, and it was Michael J. Pollard. If I recall the story correctly, he walked up and said something like, "I was in Bonnie and Clyde. Do you want to go back to my hotel room?" Or something really to the point like that.

Somebody else told me this weekend that Matthew McConaughey was in Huntington, crowds were following him around. I think it is so much better to see Pauly Shore or Michael J. Pollard than somebody like McConaughey.

Mamushka!

On a recent Galactica Watercooler podcast, one guy said he was walking through a bar/restaurant when he heard Raul Julia's voice shouting "Mamuska!" He wheeled around and found himself face to face with an old friend. The "Addams Family" pinball machine.

This brought back some very fond memories for me. Sometimes I wonder how I spent hours upon hours in bars. The answer is pinball. I can almost check off the pinball machines that they had at The Mounty back home in Hancock County, West Virginia, on Rt. 30. I gave the full location for posterity sake because I assume this blog will live on and future beings will want to mark the location on their holographic maps.

I believe (1) Tomcat was the machine in the bar when I first went in there as an underage lad around 1989. It was a lame F-16 themed game. The one that seduced me, however, was (2) Bad Cats about 1991. Occasionally a chorus of white people would sing "Seafoooooood!" I really enjoyed that one.

I think next might have been (3) Dr. Who, which was addictive but I remember very little about it. That might have been 1993 when I was finally twenty-one. Next up I would guess Addams Family. This was perhaps the king of the pinball games. Something infectious about Raul Julia as Gomez yelling crazy shit like "Mamushka!," which was followed up by Russian folk music. Incidentally, I never liked the movies.

I'm thinking mid-1990s would have been Indiana Jones (4), a mish-mash of scenes from all three movies. Some catch phrases featured in the game graphics : "You chose wisely"; "No time for love Dr. Jones"; and possibly "Junior!"

Now somewhere in there was another great, possibly the late 1990s: The Twilight Zone (5). I had little idea what most of it was about, but I loved that there was a crazy magnet thing that would happen where it might stop the ball on a dime or make the ball swerve around the board.

As I talk about the pinball, I can't help but picture myself with a mindless smile and wide eyes, jumping and clapping at the pretty lights and loud noises. The truth is not so far off. Except picture me, David, and Benji with beers in our hands--in fact, picture us on mug night with our own mugs from back home--and we are watching Greg play endlessly and clowning around. For future beings, just picture three guys watching one guy thrusting his pelvis into the pinball machine in an obscene fashion.

Incidentally, "mug night" lasted for about five weeks one summer until the bar owners wife put a stop to it for illogical reasons. But mug night lives forever in my mind.

Never Living It Down

I was making small talk with a student, a male student, the other evening as I flipped through an enormous stack of papers searching for his exam.

Me: "So, what's your major?"

Him: "Business. Eventually I'm going to study to be a mortician and take over the family business."

Me: "So, you want to go back and live in your hometown? How do you like it there?"

Him: "I like it a lot, but sometimes the politics of living in a small town can get old. And everybody knows all your business, you know?"

Me: "[Laugh] Oh yeah. There was a kid on my bus..."

Well, now I've started a story that I have to decide how I'm going to finish. The moral of the story was simply going to be about how some things haunt you when you grow up in a small town. Again, I flipped through the rolodex and came up with a story, but maybe not the right story. This one is about a kid named Jason who lived on Tope Hill.

Strangely, Tope Hill had a large concentration of pot heads. In a recent entry in Jane Espensen's blog about writing scripts (she writes for Battlestar Galactica), she said you should name your characters something that vaguely remind you what the character is like without being too obvious. Claire in the Breakfast Club would be a good example. Rich, snooty, smart. Whereas Bender sounds like he enjoys binge drinking and fucking things up. Wouldn't Tope Hill sound vaguely like a place where people like to smoke reefer? And it just happens to be a real place. I also remember hearing that when Scott, a Tope Hill denizen, didn't have pot, he enjoyed a huff or two of gasoline.

At any rate, I remember hearing on the bus that a kid named Jason was caught somehow, by somebody, in a comprimising position involving a drumstick. To be specific, a witness deduced that he had inserted it in his ass. Everybody on the bus had learned the news the next morning before our bus lurched down the back road, off of Tope Hill (picture a Guatemalan bus teetering down a mountain).

As I piece the story back together now, parts of it sound likely. But then drumsticks tend to have lots of splinters and rough patches. Maybe with a lot of sanding and several coats of polyurethane, it could provide a harmless thrill.

Nevertheless, it's been more than twenty years, and I remember the kid's name and that one story. I imagine that among his closest friends, he probably became known for other things: probably pot-related exploits. For a much larger percentage of the population, he was known for the drumstick thing. It's odd to think that a twelve year old indulged in a moment of sexual experimentation, probably in a darkened corner of his house more than twenty years ago, and that moment--if it ever actually happened--lives in infamy.

I saw a documentary on pbs about kids tormenting each other on the internet, and how once something goes up on the internet there's no taking it back. They made the point that this was a frightening new world of being exposed to the world, etc. Well back in my day, we didn't need the internet. We had what anthropoligists call a rich oral tradition...which reminds me of this girl who rode the bus. But that's a story for another time. Actually, that sort of thing didn't happen when I was a kid. That was an advance of subsequent generations.

So, how to finish the borderline inappropriate story I started telling my pupil. I said, "...well, a kid on my bus masturbated with a drumstick, and nobody ever forgot. Looks like I lost your test."