Host Gil Roth talks about Bach, Piers Anthony and the escapism of being a geek.
The Virtual Memories Show
Season 2, Episode 1 - Pale horses at the burger joint.mp3
[music] Welcome to Season 2 of Virtual Memories Radio. I kind of spaced out last year after I promised to get a new batch of episodes going. I really did mean to make this podcast a regular event last year, but life got in the way. For one thing, I spent so much time ruminating about the significance of turning 40 that I managed to fritter away most of the year and make it all the way to 41. You can go ahead and wish me a happy birthday now. I realized a couple of days into the year that I hadn't made any new year's resolutions. So it occurred to me that I really ought to get back to this podcast. I've put together a list of people I'd like to interview and now I just need to get over my crippling anxiety, get out there and record some interviews. But this time around, you get story time and some music. This episode's music is the first part of cello suite number one by Bach, played by Pierre Fornier. I don't edit or write well when I'm listening to music with vocals, so I like to shuffle through my classical library sometimes at the office. I stumbled across this some time last year and found myself just transfixed by the suite. Gosh knows how it ended up in my iTunes, but a few months later it turned up in a movie that I really enjoyed, Beginners by Mike Mills. Ewan McGregor plays the lead, a guy who's trying to deal with the recent death of his father, a relationship that was complicated by his father coming out of the closet a few years earlier around the age of 70. Oh, and he's also trying to manage an affair with Melanie Laurent, the girl who played Shoshana and Glorious Bastards. And there's a dog who might be telepathic. Anyway, the dad is played by Christopher Plummer, who's on this insanely good late career run these last few years. I loved Plummer and Beginners, as well as the last station and the imaginary of Dr. Parnassus. Okay, sue me, I like that last one. I mean, I don't think Parnassus worked exactly, and I doubt it would have worked even if Heath Ledger hadn't died part way through, but it's still a movie with ambition, and you know, you really don't get a lot of those. So yeah, I'll take a Dr. Parnassus every so often, even if it is a big failure. Oh, and Plummer also did some voice work and cartoons lately, like nine, that post-apocalyptic adventure featuring burlap sacks, my dog Tulip, and up, I didn't like up too much. I felt like it degenerated into a silly acid venture movie, but everyone else seems to like it. So hey, I'm probably just being a dick, it's not new. Anyway, Beginners is a lovely little movie, and one of my faves from last year, we should give it a viewing, and listen to this cello suite by Bach sometime. So in that vein, welcome to the Maker's Mark story hour. Well, in a story five minutes, it's Maker's Mark because I'm trying to transition away from gin during the winter months, and my wife has convinced me that bourbon's the best choice. It's not like they're sponsoring anything, although if they want to, I'd be perfectly amenable. Anyway, a couple of years ago, my wife and I were visiting my family in St. Louis for Passover. Our hotel was next door to a five-guys burger joint. Now, if you've never been to one, and you're not a vegetarian, you should give it a shot. The burgers are awfully good, I mean, they're not in and out good, but they're much better than you get from the usual suspects. My only piece of advice, and I can't stress this enough, do not order the large fries. Trust me, go with a small. I don't care how many people you're there with. In all likelihood, five or six people can get by on a single order or small fries. It's that huge. Anyway, there's a Walgreens, a few hundred feet past the five guys, and I walked there to pick something up for Amy. On the way back, I saw something funny in the restaurant. I don't like perpetuating the whole Americans or fat consumer machines. Just eat till they explode, cliche, but let me tell you, this joint was filled with lard asses. I mean, every table had these obese, garishly dressed monsters, just gnawing away on burgers and fries. But there was this one family that caught my attention, and they were sitting at a table right next to the window, and the mom and dad were both pretty hefty and chomping away on burgers and slugging down their large sodas. But their son was with him, and he was maybe like 12 or 13 and kind of scrawny, and his burger was sitting there untouched because he had his nose buried in a paperback book, and that's when my instinctive ability to judge a book by its cover kicked into action. This is a skill I picked up from countless hours of staring at bookstore shelves. Since I was a little kid, I could just lose myself looking at all those books and trying to decide on just that one that I needed to have, the one that was going to push me along to the next step in this reader and evolution I was undergoing. I'm still pretty bad when I'm trying to figure out what book I should start next. I can just walk around in my library downstairs and hem and haw forever. So what was a kid reading? One glance at the yellow cover identified it on a pale horse by Piers Anthony. And I never read that one or his Xanth books. I was a science fiction geek, so his bio of a space tyrant was more my thing. But I saw it on a pale horse a million times in the fantasy sci-fi ghetto with my local Walden books. I was just fascinated by that kid. I mean, to me, he looked for all the world like he just wanted to escape. Like escape his family and burger joints and Missouri suburbs and bullies at school. I just wanted to go in there and hug him and say, "Kid, let your geek flag fly, man." And I figured I'd get arrested if I did something like that. I mean, shit, I was probably just projecting. After all, I was the kid who was bringing comic books to school when I was his age because I found them more interesting than the classwork. I even carried them on one of my dad's old briefcases like I was James Bond of the Nerds or something. I was smart enough to ace most of my classes so my teachers didn't really complain about this. I just was a character to them. I sat around reading comic books and sci-fi and writing these ridiculous, derivative stories and novels hoping to get cooler kids to like me. It wasn't exactly a happy time, but I think I understood early on that I wasn't going to fit in all that well, you know? I mean, sure. I lusted after all the pretty girls and I embarrassed myself in all sorts of ways, but we're talking like 13 years old when that shit's supposed to happen. Like I said, I carried comic books to school in a briefcase. I was not going to impress the ladies. The later that evening, we had our seder at my brother's house and there was a little chaos going down and some flaring at tempers, I think. I noticed my older niece was sitting in a corner with her nose in a book. I looked at the cover, but I had no idea what it was, which is a sure sign that came out sometime in the last 10 years, I guess. I had some kid chucking a lightning bolt, which seemed pretty awesome and I told her that. I asked her what she was reading and she said it was Percy Jackson, and then she went back to ignoring the world around her. And after I got over the surprise of discovering someone named Percy Jackson as white, I was awfully pleased just to see that my niece was following in her uncle's bookwormy footsteps. You know, if worms had feet. And that's the end of our first podcast of 2012. Thanks for sticking around. I hope you enjoyed it. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. the end.