Pegasus Theatre

Way back before kids, we attended a lot of theatrical plays here in Dallas. Some were at the Dallas Theater Center, which is the major playhouse in town. Others were at the Pegasus Theatre, which was a much smaller theater in Deep Ellum that performed only comedies.

We got involved with Pegasus because of our friend Mark (different Mark than the person in my space stories). I’m not exactly sure how he got involved, but he ended up doing a lot of volunteer work there and we ended up with a few years of season tickets.

For us, the most notable of the Pegasus comedies was Kurt Kleinmann’s “black & white” series. Imagine this: you have a bumbling private detective and aspiring actor (an Inspector Clouseau kind of guy) that stumbles into various criminal situations and ends up solving them, mostly through dumb luck and a lot of help from his personal assistant. Nothing really new there. Here’s the twist. The stories take place back in the 1940′s and Kurt wanted the audience to think they were watching an old black & white movie. So, everything you see on the stage is black & white & shades of gray. Even the actors are made up with those colors. It all looks very strange.

There are a few things you notice right away. The inside of a person’s mouth and areas around their eyes are very red. Can’t put makeup on those. Also, “white” people aren’t white and “black” people aren’t black. Even a small area around a collar or sleeve where makeup was missed or has rubbed off shows a lot of color. After a while, though, you don’t really notice these things and you just start enjoying the top-notch comedy.

After a few years, Pegasus lost the lease on their building and closed. It was a very sad day. A couple of years ago, however, the black & white plays reappeared at the Eisenman Center. My kids were totally blown away by them. Yes, the black & whites are kid-friendly. Friendly, at least, to kids that are old enough to sit through a 2-3 hour play and behave themselves. I’ve heard that Pegasus is having problems again, but there’s a possibility of them taking one of the black & whites on the road. If you ever get a chance to see one, don’t pass it up!

Here’s one of the official promo pictures. By the way, the person in color in the photograph is there just for contrast; the people that look like black & white statues are the actors…

Bambi?

Andrea’s grandfather on her mother’s side, Jim, was one heck of a cook. He also liked to hunt and those two ended up being a pretty tasty combination. Every year he’d go deer hunting and usually bring back enough meat to last a while.

We were up at Jim’s place in Ocala one weekend when Andrea was about two years old. He was smoking a bunch of venison on his barbeque in the back yard. There was all sorts of family there and a good time was being had by all.

Come supper time, everyone was sitting around, eating and talking, when Andrea’s Aunt Lura said “my, this is delicious Bambi.”

Oh, no.

Andrea looked up from her plate, her eyes welling with tears and her bottom lip quivering, and said “Bambi?”

I guess we had all been talking about venison and she had no idea what it was. All she knew was I put some meat on her plate and she liked it.

I suspect she doesn’t even remember this today.

Mechanized death

I’ve owned motorcycles in the past and had a lot of fun riding them. I don’t own one now because I live in Dallas and the traffic is just too insane to consider riding one through it.

I always considered it prudent to wear the proper clothing while riding. Sturdy shoes (usually boots), jeans, jacket, gloves, and most importantly, a helmet. But, that’s just me. If you don’t want to wear a helmet, that’s your thing. There’s no law in Texas that says you have to wear one. I saw something a few months back, however, that just blew me away.

I was driving home from work during rush hour on a six-lane divided highway. Traffic, as usual, was really heavy. The left lane was particularly jammed up and I finally saw what was going on. It was a biker doing just about the speed limit. Now, whether you think you should keep to the speed limit or not, the truth around here is someone is going to run you off the road if you’re doing this sort of thing.

But, that’s not what really caught my eye. Let me explain what I saw.

The biker was a woman. That’s not really pertinent to the rest of the description, but it was unusual because you rarely see female bikers around here. She’s wearing a sleeveless shirt, shorts, and sandals. No helmet, no gloves. If she had to put that bike down, it would be very ugly. The thing that really topped this off was she was talking on a mobile phone. One of the first things I was taught about biking was to always keep both hands on the grips.

So, here she is, poorly dressed, talking on a cell phone in the left lane of a highway with a line of angry commuters right on her tail.

How crazy is that?

Good day, bad day, part 2

My second very bad day (with apologies to Alexander) was the first of February, 2003.

It was Friday, the end of the work week, and Harrison Schmitt (LM pilot, Apollo 17) was going to be speaking over in Fort Worth. TCU was dedicating a new meteorite museum and they had invited him to give the dedication speech. Just hearing him speak would be a lot of fun, so Jerry and I took off after work and headed over there. I didn’t have Jack in my “Home Planet”, so I took that along as well.

The talk was given in a lecture room. There may have been a hundred people there, tops. The talk was quite interesting, considering I know absolutely nothing about meteorites or even general geology. Afterwards, Jack stayed long enough to sign autographs and I get him in my book. One of the really interesting things was he requested that all children wanting autographs go first, which was a cool thing to do. He took time to talk to each and every one of the kids, too. I was flying pretty high after this.

On the way back to Dallas, Jerry and I discussed the fact that STS-107 will be flying over the Dallas area first thing in the morning (Saturday) on it’s way to a landing in Florida. It’s always a spectacular sight; the shuttle blazes a firey trail across the sky from west to east, taking maybe a minute or two to make the pass. It’s the biggest, fattest contrail you’ve ever seen, with a bright orange fireball at the head of it.

Unfortunately, I overslept a bit Saturday morning and wasn’t quite sure what time the shuttle would be flying over. So, I jumped on the computer and was searching for the answer when I heard a loud explosion overhead. I mean, it was loud enough to rattle the windows and make me wonder “what the hell?”. Grabbing the binoculars and running outside, I looked up and saw that marvelous smoke trail across about two-thirds of the sky. I couldn’t immediately see anything wrong, but the longer I looked, the stranger things seemed. I finally realized what was bothering me; I couldn’t see the fireball. Where the heck was the shuttle? Then, I noticed that the contrail looked wrong. It wasn’t the nice, long, smooth path that it usually is. At a point slightly southeast of me, the path changed abruptly and I could clearly see what looked like multiple contrails radiating from the change point. Oh, no…

There was nothing else to see here, so I went back inside to see what I could find on the television. Iris thought the boom she heard was the shuttle decelerating through the sound barrier, but that doesn’t happen until the shuttle is almost on final over Florida. No, I knew something was wrong. It took a while for the TV stations to figure it out and even longer before there was any sort of official confirmation, but I already knew Columbia was gone.

Now for the freaky part.

I had finally decided to get back to writing and requesting astronaut autographs just a couple of weeks before this happened. I wrote to everyone on this flight, congratulating them on a successful mission, figuring they would see the letters when they got back. Well, I checked the mail on Monday (February 3) and found a large envelope from NASA; it was an STS-107 crew picture with all of their autographs on it. It was postmarked February 1. Someone must have opened one of my letters, saw it was an autograph request, and thrown the picture in the NASA mail the week before. It’s clearly an autopen, but that’s okay. I saved both the picture and the front flap of the envelope with the cancellation on it.

Several weeks later, I saw the video from inside Mission Control during the last few minutes of Columbia’s flight. LeRoy Cain was the Flight Director, I think, and I clearly remember the look on his face when someone told him about first reports from the area. He looked like he had taken a solid punch to the gut when he turned around and said “Lock the doors.” I know exactly how he felt.

Speaking of flying to Dallas

That flight that I used to take out of Washington, the early morning flight I talked about in Good day, bad day, part 1, really had nothing for breakfast. Oh, it had breakfast all right, but it was yogurt or cold cereal or some such thing. Cold cereal does happen to be a favorite of mine, but this really wasn’t worth it. By the time they served it, I had been up for a couple of hours and was starving.

One morning, Iris suggested we stop by the bagel place and pick up some bagels for me to take on the flight. Great idea! So, I got a couple nice, hot, fresh garlic bagels (still my favorite) and they sealed them up in a plastic bag. Into my carry-on they went.

Not long after takeoff, the attendants came through the cabin with the breakfast service and I pulled out my bagels. Now, remember that they’ve been sealed up in a plastic bag all this time. I opened it and wow! All that hot, fresh bread mixed with garlic smell just exploded into the cabin. Needless to say, it got a lot of attention. One person even offered me $10 for one.

No way.

Cigarettes aren’t for everyone, but…

About the time my dad turned 65, he was diagnosed with an abdominal aortic aneurysm. His doctor found it during his yearly physical exam. From what the doctor told us, they’re almost never found that way. So, this was a very fortunate thing. They literally checked into the hospital the next day and performed surgery to correct it.

Why the hurry? Well, the aorta is THE major artery in your body. An aneurysm is a weakness in the wall of the aorta. In this case, that weakness started to balloon out and would have eventually popped. Since it’s the aorta, you’d have just about enough time to say “what the hell?” and then fall over dead. That’s why.

The surgery went well and we got to see him in recovery. Over the next several days, however, things took a turn for the worse. Within a week, he was back in intensive care on a ventilator. Systems all over his body were shutting down. The doctors had no idea what was going on. When I say doctors, I mean doctors. He must have been seen by every specialist in the world.

I happened to be there when they brought in a pulmonologist to see him. He did a bunch of tests. As he’s sitting there, examining the chest x-rays, I asked him how bad the damage was from his smoking cigarettes. The pulmonologist looked a bit surprised and said “this man isn’t a smoker.”

Wait, what?

There was no obvious smoking damage in the x-rays. This was inconceivable to me. You see, Dad had smoked for the better part of fifty years. Two to three packs a day. There had to be some signs of that, but there wasn’t. There was some old scarring from an illness he had when he was little. It might have been rheumatic fever, but I’m not sure. But, it was almost like he never smoked a single cigarette. Too weird.

Anyway, it took a while, but Dad started getting better. We have no idea why. It wasn’t anything the doctors did. He just started recovering. A month after the operation, he was well enough to leave intensive care. A short while after that he came home. He was on dialysis for a couple of months after that, but eventually even that wasn’t needed anymore. He lived a pretty normal life for several years after that and never smoked another cigarette. The month in intensive care broke him of the habit. In fact, he couldn’t stand the smell. He wondered how anyone else could stand the smell in the house. They had to steam-clean the walls, shampoo the carpet several times, get new drapes,  and sand-blast the furniture just to begin to get rid of it. I thought it was pretty funny, but I don’t think he ever saw it that way.

Much later, when I had time to think about it, I figured out a couple of things. The first is all of my dad’s problems during this time, which the doctors were never able to figure out, were caused by cigarettes. Or more accurately, from cold turkey nicotine withdrawal. The second is somewhat bizarre: smoking won’t necessarily kill you. It’s not good for you, but not everyone who smokes will contract some ugly smoking-related disease. Why? I think that if you have absolutely no problems with your lungs, you’re okay. Maybe. But, if you have the slightest little imperfection or defect, smoking will get in there and exploit it, and that’s when the problems begin. How do you know if you have perfect lungs? You don’t and it’s almost impossible to tell. It’s easier just not to smoke. Cheaper, too.

Ouch

I occasionally have migraines. I have one this morning. It’s not too bad, but it slows me down a lot. I don’t get those “bang your head on the floor” migraines, but they can be pretty bad sometimes.

I must have been about thirteen when I first started getting them. Nobody knew what a migraine was, so we just thought it was a sinus headache. Thirty years later, I saw an advertisement in a magazine for a migraine medication. It was one of those “do you have any of the following symptoms” sorts of things. I glanced down the list and realized that just about every one of them applied to me. Shortly after that, my doctor confirmed it.

One of the best resources I’ve found is Ronda’s Migraine Page. Like everything else you find on the web, you need to take anything you read there with a grain of salt. But, there’s some great information for migraine sufferers.

Waffle House

I just got back from having breakfast at the Waffle House. There’s one about a quarter-mile from the office that’s really nice. It’s clean, the food is good, and the people there are great. I’ve been going to this particular one off and on for maybe five years now.

There’s just something I like about a diner. It must be because of my dad. He really loved to eat and breakfast was his favorite meal of the day. I remember going to places like this with him when I was little, sitting at the counter, and watching the cooks work that grill. It’s still fascinating to me.

Of course, things have changed over the years. Dad’s gone and I’m considerably older. But, you step inside that door and it’s like it was years ago; the building is the same, the food is the same, and one of the waitstaff will always have a smile and a “Good Morning!” for you. It always puts a smile on my face.

It’s all relative

Some years back, as a lot of these stories tend to be, a friend and I had started our own company. It was doing pretty well. We had around thirty people and were doing something like three million a year in total revenues. I was working on a contract out at a customer site when I got a phone call from our office manager. She told me something terrible had happened and that I needed to get to the office right away.

When I got to the office, I found most people sitting around in a state of shock. It seems that a couple of police detectives had shown up and arrested one of our people and took him away in handcuffs. It was for something pretty awful, which really doesn’t need to be mentioned here. Suffice it to say, people were upset.

Anyway, I’m talking with people, doing damage control and trying to get things straightened out when my pager goes off. It’s Iris, but I’m really involved with this issue, so I ignore it. It goes off again a few minutes later. And again. Hmmmmm…

Now, Iris wouldn’t do this unless it was really important, so I call home and the first words out of her mouth are “I finally got the bleeding stopped and we’re on the way to the emergency room.”

“Sorry, guys, I’ve got an emergency. See ya.”

Benjamin had fallen in the shower and cracked his head open. Nothing disastrous, but it bled a lot and required a few staples to close. I got to the emergency room about the time they were finishing up.

Good thing he has a hard head.