Ye Olde Blog
Dear Gene,
I’m not sure if you remember me. It’s been a while since I last wrote to you. Thirty-six years, in fact. Here, let me refresh your memory:
I knew going into last Thursday night’s Van Halen concert that, based solely on the size of the venue, I’d be fairly close to the stage … but I didn’t know I’d be THIS close:
No, seriously:
There is a scene in the movie “Almost Famous” during which the protagonist — a young and budding music journalist — approaches the backstage door of a concert venue, rings the buzzer, gives the surly security guard his name and says that he’s there to interview the band.
The guard checks the guest list on his clipboard.
“You’re not on the list,” he says dismissively and slams the door shut.
On the first day of the first class of my freshman year in college, my College Writing 101 professor instructed us to go home that weekend and write a paper about the person whom we would most like to meet if given the chance.
And I could have bullshitted him. I could have written about wanting to meet JFK or Martin Luther King Jr. or some other revered sociopolitical icon … but I wasn’t an 18-year-old freshmen just out of high school; I was a 22-year-old freshman who had recently spent nearly four years in the army, and my inclination to sling bullshit in order to impress a college professor was, by that point, quite nonexistent. And as I looked at the blank notebook in front of me that weekend, I saw stretching out before me four long years of higher education … and I knew that the only way I was going to make it to the finish line was to figure out how to marry my own personal interests to my academic pursuits.
So I wrote the “I want to meet Eddie Van Halen” paper.
