Brushes With Greatness

(Inspired by a post from a chat forum I regularly visit)

The poster wrote:

"I reckon it would be nice if there was a "Brushes With Greatness" archive that compiled all these bits together."

"Brushes With Greatness," hmmm.... Yes, this could be a fun and interesting topic.

My brushes with greatness include the time my 5th grade class went on a field trip to see Marcel Marceau perform his pretty amazing mime act in a dinner theater, and then had the honor of a private audience with him for quite awhile after the show, because he and my teacher had somehow struck up a friendship. Mrs. Stamberg was the kind of teacher who took art classes at night, then came back to the classroom the next day and taught us every thing she'd learned about drawing or painting. She was one of those teachers who literally changes the way you think, has a direct hand in shaping you and your interests.

And there was the time I met...ah, you've already heard enough about me meeting the four blokes in Led Zeppelin in a previous post. So I won't go into that one again now.

But my most intense, sustained brush with greatness was the time I sat opposite the white-haired man in the red-and-white checked shirt and the bright red socks as he let his tape recorder run. If you haven't figured out the answer to my "riddle" yet, I'm talkin' about Mr. Studs Terkel.

One day my phone rang, and there was the slightly nasal voice of an old man on the other end. Said he'd seen my op-ed piece in The Chicago Tribune, and had gotten my number from the editor. Said it was Studs Terkel. Me being pretty young and unexposed to Studs at the time, I'd never heard him speak before. So I didn't yet recognize that voice that's so highly recognizable once you've heard it. At first I thought one of my friends was putting me on. More than once I expressed my doubt about the veracity of his claim to be Studs Terkel, almost to the point that he was beginning to get a little irritated with me. :)

Well, he somehow finally convinced me that he was indeed the real McTerkel. And then the poor man had to endure me gushing profusely about what an honor it was to have him call me, about how I couldn't believe it was really him. Then (a bit apologetically), about how I'd read "Working" and loved it, and really meant to read the rest of his books, especially "Hard Times" and "The Good War."

Long story short, he eventually asked me if I'd drop by his office at the public radio station where his program was broadcast, and be one of the interview subjects for his next book. So I headed downtown to the WBEZ offices, where Studs and I chatted for more than an hour while his signature tape recorder captured every word.

And that was the problem. I tried to give him thoughtful, pithy answers to his questions about what the neighborhood I grew up in was like, stuff like that. But I was only in my 20s at the time, still kind of naive and a bit of a crusader. And it probably didn't help that I was feeling kind of down on my old neighborhood and former cohorts at the time, as I'd recently made an abrupt and unexpected return to life in the suburbs after five years at university. So I came off sounding a bit, hmmm...not much like myself at all.

I think it was a combination of me being a little bit shy and nervous under the circumstances and Studs sort of leading the interview a certain way to get the information he needed from me, then just taking little bits of our conversation--sometimes out of context--to use in his book.

But for whatever reasons, in the finished product I come across as a sort of cigarette-smoking, gum-chewing, street-corner or barroom philosopher, a little on the self-righteous side. To keep with that total blue-collar vibe to my character, he never even mentions the (Vietnam-related) opinion piece I wrote that had inspired him to look me up in the first place. So yeah, I'm one of the subjects in one of Studs' books. But I ain't gonna tell ya which one or under what pseudonym. ;)