Saturday, June 4, 2011

Trotsky Came to Town

Once again, I think the statute of limitations will allow me to tell the truth about an event long past, but just in case, remember—this is just a blog and none of this really happened.

More than twenty years ago, I was in the computer retail business and one of my better customers was Enema U.  Naturally, the university bought a wide of variety of technical gear and through this business I met a wide variety of interesting people, but none was more interesting than Fred.  Fred worked for the university’s public radio station where he was the nighttime disk jockey.   A lifetime of reading through the night had made Fred an expert on everything.  I have never met a man with a more eclectic education.  Fred was unique in a number of ways, and this included his appearance.

Since he worked alone at night, over time his general appearance became strange.  By the time I met Fred, he had a long shaggy beard and hair that looked as if it had been combed with a lawnmower.  You can get a close approximation of his appearance if you imagine Santa Claus as a meth addict.  

Late one night several computer nerds were gathered at the business playing with our newest toy, a digital camera.  The camera was huge, the pictures were very low resolution, and the camera could only record images in black and white.  I think the resolution was about a tenth of a megapixel.  It was the first commercially available digital camera, and we loved it.
After a couple of hours playing with this camera, eventually we had to confess to ourselves that the photos were horrible.  No matter what the subject and regardless of the lighting, by the time you saw the image on the screen, it looked like a bad mug shot; if you printed it, the image was much worse.  If you had started by taking a photo of a beautiful dancing ballerina, the printed picture looked like a coffin photo of a dead nun.

Since the camera was, evidently, designed for taking the kind of photos found on wanted posters, we made a few.  You know what I mean: “Wanted: Dead or Alive.  Guilty of Highway Mopery and Dragging a Rope.”  We kept changing the wording and the photo until we ended up with a poster showing a close-up of Fred staring wide-eyed directly into the camera, hair and beard flying in every direction.
I’m not sure how it happened, as some single malt scotch was involved, but the final version of the poster read:

For One Night Only!
Leon Trotsky
Speaking on the Fallacy of a Contented Working Class
In a Post-Industrial America!

And in the middle of this poster was that crazy photo of Fred.  It was a stupid poster--partly because Fred looked a lot more like Engels than Trotsky, partly because Trotsky had been dead for over 40 years by the time we printed the poster, but mostly because of the bottom two lines of print:
Student Center Ballroom
Tuesday, October 3, 7:30 PM

A couple of dozen posters were printed and hung around the university on a lark.  Then, we forgot all about it.  It was a joke, and no one in their right mind would believe it.  Right???
Evidently wrong: the ballroom was filled to capacity, and the crowd waited for almost half an hour before they left, sad to have missed the great man.  At least, that is what I heard; I didn’t attend.

Several people said the entire Sociology Department was there.

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