Fray issue 2: Geek: True Stories of People Taking Things Too Seriously

$12 US

$17 INTL

Tell your stories.

Geek

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Fray is the quarterly of true stories and original art. This is issue 2.

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True stories of people taking things too seriously.

Intro

We are everywhere.

We are superfans, wonks, ’philes, ’heads, enthusiasts of the sublimely obscure. We are people who care too much about something others do not really understand. We make the world go ’round. If you’ve ever been into something so much your friends wondered about your sanity, you’re a geek, too.

This issue of Fray is for you.

Fear the Jacket by Ramsey Sibaja

Fanatics by Evan Yarbrough

Contents

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Stormtroopers in Love

41 Vinyl Fetish

Interview by Leah Peterson

Story by Lance Arthur

Photos by Red and Jonny

Illustration by Dwayne Clare

12 The Really Real World Story and Illustration by Derek Chatwood

15 The Poo Rooster Story and Photos by Eric Hardenbrook

16 Nerdkore Painting Interview by Heather Powazek Champ

20 Pocket Pride Story by John A. Pojman

22 One Rail to Rule Them All

43 Playing the Part Story by Claire Carter Illustration by Stefan Grambart

44 Confessions of a Professional Fire-Eater Story by Kate Kotler Illustration by Goopymart

47 The Cult of Colbert Story by Alice Hunt Illustration by Meg Hunt

Interview by Derek Powazek

48 Next Stop, Basement

Illustration by Chris Bishop

Story by Lindsay Champion

24 Dig, Poop, and Roll Story by Rachel Fershleiser Illustration by Scott Vanden Bosch

27 Hormones and Celluloid Story by Eric Spitznagel Illustration by Mitch Ansara

30 Fray Geek Centerfold Pull-out Poster by Derek Chatwood

35 Windhammer Story by Rob Weychert Illustration by Kevin Cornell

37 Pillowfight!

Photos by Daniel K. Gebhart

38 Star Wars Memories Story by Adam Rakunas Illustration by Alan Defibaugh

Illustration by Andrew Wilson

50 Memories of a Fickle God Story by Scott Rosenberg Illustration by Mal Jones

52 Ever the Bride Story by Audrey Kentor

53 The Doctor Is In Story by Nikol Hasler Photo by Kat Berger

54 Now They’re Sixty-Four Story by Jack Boulware Illustration by John Reddinger

56 Secret Keeper Interview by Deborah D. Lattimore

58 Football Fixation Story by Kyle Psaty Illustration by Jeff Coleman

Contributors Adam Rakunas is an Evil Marketing Genius in Santa Monica and a geek for kitchen tools because avocados don’t come pre-sliced. giro.org

Chris Bishop is an artist and designer in Washington, DC, and is a geek for video games because he never grew up. chrisbishop.com

Derek Powazek is the founder of Fray in San Francisco and a geek for Star Wars Lego because he sees spaceships in his dreams. powazek.com

Alan Defibaugh is a professional illustrator in the Washington, DC, area and is a geek for screen printing and oil paintings because he has yet to learn either. alandefibaugh.com

Claire Carter is a role-playing addict in Australia and is a geek for all things Joss Whedon because he’s a God.

Dwayne Clare is crushing his soul making doors in Chilliwack, BC, and is a geek for ugly art because even ugly art can transcend brutal reality. dwayneclare.com

Alice Hunt is a writer in Killadelphia and is a geek for British comedies because they are not Yu-Gi-Oh. goodbyechains.com Andrew Wilson is captain of the Super Nintendo Preservation Society of San Diego and is a geek for low-fi videogames because he dreams in 8-bit color. andrewandavid.blogspot.com Audrey Kentor is a perfectionist in Seattle and a geek for information because the library is the most exciting place in the world. iamnotdisposable.weebly.com Bruce Byrne is a superhero in Sarasota, Florida, and a geek for photography because it lets him freeze time. bjbyrne.com

Clark Wimberly is a dude in Austin and is a geek for everything because he can never get enough. clarklab.net Daniel K. Gebhart is a professional photographer in Vienna and a geek for weird pictures because life gets too straight sometimes. danielgebhart.com Deborah D. Lattimore is a photographer and writer in Nevada and is a geek because she has written almost every day in a journal for the last 45 years with the same pen. deborahlattimore.com Derek Chatwood is a very tall man in Seattle and is a geek for anything that can’t easily be explained by science, because it usually makes for great television. poprelics.com

Eric Hardenbrook is a project manager for an architecture firm in Harrisburg, PA, and is a geek for D&D because he can spot an old module in a box at a yard sale while still in the car across the street.

Eric Spitznagel is hiding under his bed in St. Augustine and is a geek for ghost stories because he currently lives in a town that appears to be entirely haunted. spitznagel.net Evan Yarbrough is an illustrator and Flash designer in Los Angeles and a geek for ’80s sci-fi movies because they warped his little mind a long time ago. evanimal.com Goopymart is really artist Will Guy in San Francisco and is a geek for holographic crayons because holographic children need art too. goopymart.com Heather Champ is a professional cat herder in San Francisco and is a geek for old cameras because film is not dead! hchamp.com Jack Boulware is a writer in San Francisco and is a geek for people who are geeks, because although their passion can seem freakish and insane, it’s a purity of focus for which the rest of us are secretly jealous. jackboulware.com Jeff Coleman (aka Isaac Priestley) is a rock musician in Austin, Texas, and is a geek for kung fu movies because Hwang Jang Lee killed a man in the army. weracketeer.com

Band Geeks by Bruce Byrne

John A. Pojman is a nerd in Baton Rouge and a geek for pocket protectors because he claims to have the world’s largest collection. pocketprotectors.info John Reddinger is an illustrator in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and is a geek for Post-Impressionist Symbolism, because there ain’t no party like a Pont-Aven party. johnreddinger.com Kat Berger is photographer in Milwaukee and is a geek for roller derby because she likes to skate and tackle. ellagraph.com

Lindsay Champion is a freelance writer in New York City and is a geek for musical theater because real life doesn’t have enough shuffle-ballchanges.

Mal Jones is an Artist in Alexandria and is a geek for comics because they’re awesome, yeah! maljones.com Meg Hunt is an illustrator outside of Phoenix and is a geek for adventure games because they make her brain feel happy. meghunt.com

Kate Kotler is a writer and a geek because in her younger days she got paid to stick fire in her face. bitchbuzz.com

Nikol Hasler, mother of three recently transplanted to New York City, is a sex geek because she feels uncomfortable talking about anything other than sex. midwestteensexshow.com

Kevin Cornell is a short, bitter man in Philadelphia and is a geek for finding fault with the youth of today because he is confused by technology. bearskinrug.co.uk

Paul O’Sullivan (aka Drout750) is a professional purveyor of awesome in Los Angeles and is a geek for fuzzy animals because they are the stars of the internets. drout750.com

Kyle Psaty is a working writer, a part-time student and a full-time fan in Boston and is a geek for more than just sports.

Jorge Pinto is an illustrator in Mexico and is a geek for oldschool video games because he played too much Maniac Mansion as a kid. heroeslocales.com/jorgepinto

Lance Arthur is chilling in San Francisco and is a geek for MST3K because he’s made of liquid metal. lancearthur.com Leah Peterson is a writer/ photographer/video-er in the Los Angeles area and is a geek for colors because she can’t stop separating and lining up the crayons, markers and jelly beans. leahpeah.com

Richard Stevens is a brain geek because he learned at an early age that genetics are nothing but a suggestion. clango.org Rachel Fershleiser is a writer, editor, and bookseller in New York City and is a geek for iron-on letters because she’d rather wear her brain on her chest than her heart on her sleeve.

Ramsey Sibaja (aka Raz) is a lifelong comic aficionado in Atlanta and is a geek for all things Spider-Man because who wouldn’t love to stick to walls and bag a hot redhead for a wife? razcitystudios.com Red and Jonny are two married artists in Canada who are geeks for Star Wars because they bought a Stormtrooper helmet on their honeymoon in 2006 and have been taking photos of themselves in it ever since. flickr.com/photos/redandjonny Rob Weychert is a graphic designer in Philadelphia and a geek for chess because he gets his kicks above the waistline, sunshine. robweychert.com Scott Rosenberg is a writer in Berkeley and a geek for whatever he is writing about at the moment because otherwise writing is just too hard. wordyard.com Scott Vanden Bosch is an animator in Melbourne and a geek for robots because if he wasn’t so human he would be one. scottvan.com Mitch Ansara (aka Spacesick) is a freelance illustrator in Toledo, Ohio, and a geek for movies, TV, music, and everything ’80s because his mama raised him right. spacesickart.com Stefan Grambart is an illustrator/ designer in Ottawa, Canada, and a geek for miniatures because painting little statues isn’t frustrating or timeconsuming. stefangrambart.ca

Staff Fray Issue 2: Geek. Copyright 2008.

Cover: Nerd Crest by Clark Wimberly.

Derek Powazek Frayer-in-chief

Magdalen Powers Fray is supported by our subscribers.

Join us at www.fray.com/subscribe.

Managing Editor

Chris Bishop

Illustration Editor

Stormtroopers in Love Interview by Leah Peterson, Photos by Red and Jonny Red and Jonny bought their first Stormtrooper helmets on their honeymoon, and haven’t stopped taking photos of themselves in them ever since. Leah Peterson asked Jonny why.

When did you buy your first Stormtrooper helmet and why?

We bought our first helmet at a toy show in Toronto. We started taking photos of each other in it immediately.

It was our little joke with each other.

We thought the photos were hilarious.

We kept taking the helmet wherever we went, for a laugh. It was a long time before we posted the photos on the internet. I would post them for my friends to laugh at on Quake3 World Forums. I’ve been posting there for almost 10 years, and they were the ones who convinced us to get a Flickr account. The next thing we knew, they were all over the internet.

When you were growing up, were you fans of science fiction?

I have always loved Star Wars. It was the first film I ever saw in a theater.

Red was raised without television, and never went to see films. We aren’t necessarily fans of sci-fi. We don’t read sci-fi novels or watch anything else space-related. There’s just something about Star Wars that we both connect with.

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What were you like as kids?

I was a wild child. What I call a University Brat. My mother traveled around Ontario, Canada, from university to university, getting her degrees. I was raised on television.

My mother would drop me and my brother off at the local theater, and we would spend all day watching films.

That’s how I saw Star Wars so many times. Red was a country girl. She spent her childhood much like Laura Ingalls in Little House on the Prairie.

Lots of running down hills of flowers.

And chores. Lots and lots of chores.

Tell me your getting-engaged story.

We met nine years ago at a dance club. We both loved to dance, and we would always gravitate towards each other on the dance floor. We would talk and flirt with each other, but neither had the guts to tell each other how we felt. Then we both went off to college. I studied art, and Red studied environmentalism. Nine years later, we met up at Red’s sister’s wedding. I told Red that I was always in love with her, and that I’d carried around an old photo of us all these years. Red then said she had always felt the same, and had also carried around a copy of the same photo. When I heard that, I got down on one knee and asked Red to marry me. Red said yes and we were married one year later.

How many photos do you have in Stormtrooper helmets?

At least a thousand. We don’t post all of them. There are lots that we just keep for us. This all started as an inside joke. We never expected anyone else to find them funny. We love all the attention our photos have gotten, and we’ve made some great friends with them, but there’s still some we keep for ourselves.

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Stormtroopers in Love continued from previous

What is the craziest place you’ve taken photos in the helmets?

Niagara Falls. We went there on our one-year wedding anniversary. We put on our wedding clothes and walked around Niagara Falls. People were yelling congratulations to us from every side and taking photos of us. It was awesome. Then when we were taking photos of ourselves with the helmets on, a group of Chinese tourists ran up to us saying “WE KNOW YOU! WE KNOW YOU!” in broken English. They described all our photos, and told us we were in a Beijing newspaper. We couldn’t believe it! These people see us in a newspaper in China then travel all the way to Canada for a holiday and run into us on our wedding anniversary. It was mind-blowing.

Do you take photos the same time every year or in the same places?

We try and take shots every weekend in different places with different ideas that we come up with over the week.

We always come home with ideas saying, “We gotta try this or this!”

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Which one is your favorite photo?

The hay bale series is great. The one of Red on the hay bale is gorgeous. And the one of me with my tie flying in the air is just brilliant. But really our alltime favorite is the scan of the article that Star Wars Insider magazine did of us. That was the Holy Grail. We just could not believe that our little inside joke had gotten us that far.

What are you guys like in real life?

We both have very serious government-type jobs that we can’t talk about. We spend all of our free time creating art. The Stormtroopers in Love series is just a small part of our work. Something we do for fun. It still amazes us that people find it as funny as we do.

Do you consider yourselves geeks?

I am a lifelong geek. I was the dork who wore suits to school in grade 6.

I’m a spaz and always have been. A D&D dork. I lost three years of my life to Quake3 Team Arena. I also collect copies of Catcher in the Rye and Jumbo Machinders. The greatest day of my life was marrying Red. My advice to every geek out there is: hardcore geek girls are so very rare that when you meet one who shows even the slightest interest in you, ask her to marry you immediately.

What is your plan for world domination?

Just to live happily ever after and make money from our art would be a dream come true. f

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The Really Real World Story and Illustration by Derek Chatwood Squibs are those little packs of fake blood that trigger to pop when an electric current is applied. So it looks like you got shot, on cue. The squibs were in the grocery bag.

No blood, just a little something to break the “bullet” holes in the bag. The blood squibs were lined up behind the bag, under his shirt. So when he was shot on camera, it would look good, like he was gut-shot for real. Except there was a chunk of metal or plastic lodged in the barrel of the revolver, left over from a tragic series of mistakes made during an exhausting film shoot. So when the gun fired, it may as well have been loaded with a real bullet. He went down, the squibs went off, blood spattered, and the director yelled “cut!”

It took the cast and crew a good minute to realize something was wrong. He wasn’t getting up. He lay there, the fake blood masking the real wound in his abdomen.

They were ninety minutes from the nearest hospital. The last night of shooting. Six days from his wedding.

And that’s how Brandon Lee died.

I feel a connection to The Crow. I found most of the comics in a bargain bin. It was beautiful, angry work. The creator lost a loved one, and poured his loss into this art,

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this story. It was the first comic I read that wasn’t a comic.

It meant something. It was trying to be something more.

I wanted Brandon to play that character, years before there was a movie. I wanted Brandon to make a dozen movies, two dozen. But The Crow more than anything, The Crow first. I carry a weird bit of guilt for that. Probably doesn’t help he’s buried a few blocks from my house. Next to his father.

The Crow taught me how to use ink. The Crow taught me that a person could write and draw their own story, and publish it on their own terms. The Crow taught me that people I thought I’d see grow old and do really interesting things, could just end, and vanish away. And the survivors, the people who knew them, and how they could feel guilty in large and small ways, for their deaths.

There’s a scene in The Crow, when one of the bad guys realizes Brandon’s character is back from the dead. He knows this because he’s the guy that shot him dead. And he says to him, “You can’t come back. This is the really real world. You can’t come back in the really real world.”

He was the actor who shot Brandon dead.

It always makes me cry. f

Stuffed Animals are People Too by Paul O’Sullivan

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The Poo Rooster And Other Chicken-Related Items My Mother Collects Story and Photos by Eric Hardenbrook My mother collects Rooster- and Chicken-related items. You name it, she has it. Does your soap dispenser crow like a rooster when you use it? How about your fridge magnets? She’s got two of those that make moving the shopping list a little “Old McDonald,” if you know what I mean. Chicken slippers, rooster trivets, trivia books, videos, a weather vane, toy chickens that lay eggs, jewelry, door stops, wallpaper, artwork, clothing, wine bottles and stationary all add to the collection. It is in every room of her house – despite my father’s protests.

Listing the individual pieces makes it seem like it’s a gaudy, expansive mess. It’s not. Most of the figurines are contained in two curio cabinets in the living room of my parents’ modest ranch house. The other things are more subtle – or more insidious, if you’re being cynical. The wallpaper is a great example. It’s a light wheat color for the largest portions of the walls in the kitchen with a simple border along the top. The border shows various colorful varieties of roosters. Faded lightly into the background of the wheat color is a faint chicken wire pattern. If it wasn’t pointed out, you might not notice it. Once you’ve seen it, you can’t ignore it. The kitchen becomes the coop. Then you notice the toaster cover is a rooster. So is the cover to the butter dish. The pictures on the jars on the counter are roosters too. They’re color-coordinated. They match and they fit. They Are Everywhere.

When I first told my wife about it, she wondered why anyone would want a collection of chicken- and rooster-related kitsch. I had never given it a second thought. It was just something mom had always done. Aunt Joyce collected owls.

It has become something of a challenge to find new and interesting chicken or rooster items. Laugh if you want, but Picasso painted a rooster once. A rooster and foliage scene created from the punched metal lid of a fifty-gallon drum is hanging in the coop – uh, kitchen – now. The six-foot-tall plastic bird was rejected as too big for the house (along with being ugly as hell). Real, actual, live chickens are against local ordinances for the area where my parents live. My father is now pushing to have a chainsaw sculpture made from a log placed in the front yard.

I have discovered that my geeky nature has deeper roots than I thought. My mother’s lifetime of keeping her eyes open for something new makes my room-filling, 30-year-old collection of Dungeons & Dragons rulebooks, supplements, artwork, and miniatures pale by comparison. I think I’ll keep my eyes open for a copy of Ghost Tower of Inverness that isn’t as battered as mine next time I’m out – along with rooster- and chicken-related items, of course. f

Eric Interviews His Mom Are there any special rules to the collection?

Yes. No salt-and-pepper shakers. Those are too easy, too common. At this point I’m looking for things that are different from what I have.

Different from what? What kinds of things do you have already?

You mentioned a few of the ones you remember, but I’ve got a lot of other things too. I’ve got chickens made from silver, gold, cut crystal, coal, malachite, antique ivory, crushed and molded pecan shells, and hand-blown glass. There’s a hand-carved wooden pickle fork with a rooster on top. There’s the antique tin toy that rolls and lays eggs, the rooster coin necklace, and even the fertilizer rooster.

Oh yeah, the poo rooster. I forgot.

Where’s the farthest place you’ve gotten a rooster or chicken item from?

Two that are from other countries.

There’s one from Mexico that a friend sent back from vacation, and the Russian nesting dolls.

Do you have a favorite from the collection?

Well, it’s very difficult to choose. I am particularly fond of the Murano-glass rooster. I also really enjoy the one made from the lid of a fifty-gallon drum that’s in the kitchen. It’s a nice way to recycle, don’t you think? I’d have to say my favorite of the whole collection is the next one we find. That’s really the point of the whole thing.

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Nerdkore Painting Interview with Jeremiah Palecek

by Heather Powazek Champ

The dramatic chipmunk, the Star Wars Kid, Mentos in Diet Coke.... They’re the memes you’ve seen online, and Jeremiah Palecek has painted them all. Heather Champ asked him what inspires him about our weird geek obsessions.

Tell us a little bit about yourself.

I started painting very young. My grandmother was an eccentric painter who lived outside of a small town in Kansas. She made these huge paintings of rotting wood and other very natural themes. She was a very hardline atheist and strong woman. She also told everyone in my family to shut up if they ever talked to me when I was painting. So I learned very quickly that if I was painting I didn’t have to answer to anyone. I liked that.

I grew up in North Dakota, in Bismarck, which is like the Siberia of the North. My father was a anti-nuclearwar activist and classical radio DJ, and my mother was a feminist who started safe houses for battered women. So they were very supportive of painting and strangeness.

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My first real hardcore studying in painting and drawing started when I was, like, 19, when I moved to Connecticut to a school called the Lyme Academy of Fine Arts. This school was totally conservative, but I am very happy that they taught me a very strong foundation in color, paint application, and all that other stuff. So I studied here for a while, but (sorry to say for the school) I felt a bit constricted, so I chose to transfer to The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Once there, I was blown away by the museum. Growing up, I only saw paintings on TV and in books, and seeing them in real life made no sense. Anyway, I toughed it out, spent a year abroad at the Glasgow School of Art in Scotland and then squashed my remaining credit into a winter term and snatched my BFA up from SAIC.

I love your meme paintings. What got your brain firing about memes as subject matter?

It was just a natural continuation of how I’ve been painting for years. There wasn’t any certain video which popped out. I paint virtual media. I started painting scenes from Ricki Lake and Top Gun over ten years ago. Then I was painting video games, and I was watching a lot of videos so I was like, “Hmmm, there’s a painting in this,” and so I made it. That’s a problem I have. I just see paintings everywhere, and I can’t keep my ideas bunched up.

Sometimes I write them down and just do ’em. Others time they stagnate on the barstool with one of my friends.

Which of your subjects would you most like to go out to dinner with? What do you think you’d talk about?

I could definitely chill with the Star Wars kid because you know, everyone is awkward at age 14 and 15. I feel bad that he transferred schools and was made fun of for his video. I guess he probably wouldn’t see my side. But I think about the Star Wars kid the same way I think about goth kids: they just perfectly embody what its like to be that age (sorry, older goths). I don’t understand why people would ridicule them when their style fits so perfectly. What would we talk about? The age difference would probably screw up a normal encounter. Yeah. Probably be hard to talk with the Star Wars kid. I guess I’d be more likely to start doing shots of tequila with La Pequena, the Chilean transvestite midget. I’m sure that s/he would be fun as hell to party with.

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Nerdkore Painting

continued from previous

Paint is an interesting respite from the speed of life online. Why paint?

I love paint. It’s physical and sexy. I think virtual media is in the proverbial ’90s of its existence. It’s like watching Fresh Prince or playing Sega. Totally clunky. It’s going in the right direction, but I think sites like YouTube and Digg and all the bloggers are just babies in something which is going to become something we can’t envision yet. I just hope it doesn’t become completely overwhelmed with ads.

It’s like my parents. They like newspapers. They like holding the paper in their hands and having that

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experience with the newspaper, so they may be more likely to respond to someone making newspaper paintings. The thing with paintings is that when you paint something, people think its true. It’s immediately given more credence, just by switching the medium in which the viewer experiences it. That’s why I think I’m pretty safe. It’s a medium which has stood the test of time and still remained relevant. For better or worse. People like shooting films on 16mm and seeing DJs spin records. I know, it’s the 21st century, but it’s hard to fall out of love with extremely sensual mediums of expression. f

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Pocket Pride Story by John A. Pojman

I bought my first pocket protector in 2001 from the American Chemical Society, of which I am member. I started collecting seriously in 2004, purchasing pocket protectors on eBay. My collection survived Hurricane Katrina. Although our house in New Orleans had 7 feet of water, the collection was on an upper floor.

During our exile in Baton Rouge, I spent part of every day searching for pocket protectors. Last year I scanned the entire collection and put them online.

My favorite pocket protector is one made from alligator skin that I

had custom made. Other favorites are ones from NASA because I worked on NASA-funded research for many years and supervised an experiment on the International Space Station.

Pocket protectors appear to be a uniquely American contribution to fashion. I have yet to meet anyone outside the US who has heard of them, let alone seen one. I do have a NAPA auto parts pocket protector in Japanese.

Once I wore a Hilti (maker of drills and chemical anchors) pocket protector to a Hilti facility in Germany. My hosts thought it

was some new type of name badge that was given to visitors and had never heard of a pocket protector.

Apparently, mine was from the US division.

Some people have suggested that pocket protectors encourage a stereotype of science as a male profession, but my students have no such reaction. Most of them have never seen one before. They just find them quaint and a bit odd. f See the collection at pocketprotectors.info.

This story originally appeared in LAB Magazine: lab-zine.com.

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One Rail to Rule Them All Interview by Derek Powazek, Illustration by Chris Bishop In the backyard of a suburban home in Fremont, California, is the Niles Monorail.

It has one stop: the house of Kim Pedersen, lifelong monorail fanatic and founder of The Monorail Society. The Niles Monorail is no longer running, but the society is, and the obsession lives on. We asked Kim what makes him a monorail geek.

When did you see your first monorail?

It was 1959 when Walt Disney first showcased his monorail on the Disneyland TV show. I never missed the show. I was seven years old. I just loved the futuristic rocket ship look of it that Bob Gurr had come up with, and at the same time I was mystified as to how that big train clung onto the narrow beam.

How did the Niles Monorail come to be?

I wanted to build a backyard monorail as far back as 1969. I still have a sketch I presented to my dad to run a hand-cranked monorail down the side of our Bakersfield home and into the backyard. He turned the project down, which is probably a good thing, because my design had some serious flaws. Flash forward to 1989, when I became even more enthusiastic over monorails and founded The Monorail Society, and the idea popped back into my head.

This time it was my own house, and I only needed approval from my understanding wife.

What is it about monorails that inspires you?

The monorail is the most misunderstood and underutilized form of transportation on the planet. Disney didn’t intend to typecast monorails as theme park rides, but that’s how it turned out, at least in the USA. Thankfully other countries see the value of monorails and are building more of them. They are quick to build, use far less construction material than other grade-separate

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rail systems, they don’t block out the sky like elevated heavy or light rail, they are incredibly safe, and no other rail system can touch monorail when it comes to reliability and low cost to operate. Oh, and did I mention: they’re hecko cool and sexy! The goal of The Monorail Society is to get the word out, and hopefully get more of them built.

We’ve got over 500 pages of monorail information and pictures at monorails.org.

What’s become of the Niles Monorail?

Well, I’m no great engineer, and there were some flaws to my design. I thought a solid 4x8-inch beam of wood would stay solid, but it turns out that when weather-exposed it gets softer with time. It just got to the point where the beam bent a bit too much under the weight of human riders. I still have the train stored here, but the Niles Monorail is no longer rideable. The good news is that the track is still capable of supporting my next project.

What’s your next project?

The Niles Garden Monorail! I’ll use the same track as the Niles Monorail, but I’ll use it for a remote-controlled scale monorail train. It will look just like the real transit monorails in Japan, Malaysia, Las Vegas, Disney systems and other straddle-beam monorails, but it will be scaled to riders like Barbie or G.I. Joe. Garden Railways are a popular hobby these days, but I don’t think anyone has tried a monorail, certainly not on this scale! f

Sci-fi Movies by Mal Jones

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I discovered what may have been the banana peel on the slippery slope between animal lover and freaky fetishist.

Dig, Poop, and Roll And Other Awesome Things that Naked Mole Rats Do Story by Rachel Fershleiser, Illustration by Scott Vanden Bosch

The first time I saw a naked mole rat, I was wearing a hot pink unitard. My undergraduate modern dance company – shudder-worthy words, I know – was performing in “Boo at the Zoo” in Philadelphia. As best we could tell, this quaint Halloween variety show was designed to keep young witches, goblins, and Bratz Dolls safely inside the wholesome city zoo and off the dangerous city streets.

We decided to forego our Rape of Nanking docudance to Pink Floyd in favor of a family-friendly Rusted Root number with feathered masks. Afterwards, eight bewildered Disney princesses heeded their mothers’ demands that they clap, and we threw on flip-flops and hoodies, and wandered off to enjoy our free zoo admission.

As two freshmen dancers debated the humanity of caging animals for our own entertainment (“It’s conservation!” “But that gorilla looks like my grandpa!”), my eyes fixated on something that resembled no creature I’d ever seen. To this day, the closest description I can muster is an uncircumcised penis with an overbite.

I watched his fleshy pink body scuttle improbably quickly down a plastic tube to join the squirming pile of brethren below. They were repulsive and adorable; all wrinkled skin and tiny claws and outsized teeth. They were also, I soon learned, extremely unusual.

One of my lifelong peeves is people who say things are “very unique” – uniqueness is a binary trait, folks.

But my love for naked mole rats causes me to abandon grammatical specificity entirely. They are very unique!

Extremely unique! Uniquely unique! They are, I would

argue, the most unique creatures in the world.

Mole rats are eusocial, which means they live in colonies like ants or bees. They are the only mammal that does. When a new animal becomes the queen, her vertebrae separate until she is the longest in her group.

They are the only species on Earth that changes size based on social hierarchy. That’s like if President Obama grows six inches when he’s inaugurated next January (my lips, God’s ears). And they’re nearly blind, nearly cold-blooded, and run just as fast backward as forward, so they switch directions frequently as they travel their underground catacombs, and look totally drunk.

I geeked out for at least fifteen minutes at these amazing facts from the informational signage before pressing my face to the glass and hanging with the little guys for an hour more, until my sisters in spandex tired of the whole zoo, and dragged me away. After stumbling upon something so sublimely strange, I found it difficult to keep it to myself. I rattled off mole rat factoids in classes, dance rehearsals, and frat houses. Soon my homemade I ‚ Naked Mole Rats T-shirt was earning horrified stares all over campus.

When you have an obsession as obscure as mine, people find it simple to buy you presents. Over the years I’ve accumulated an Errol Morris documentary, a Kim Possible toy, several plush lumps resembling a variety of tragically depilated mice and rabbits, and no fewer than three copies of a godawful middle-grade novel about a divorced dad bedding a zookeeper.

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Dig, Poop, and Roll

continued from previous

To be fair, it’s been something of an easy way out for me too. The first writing I ever got paid for was a series of blurbs on New York’s greatest attractions for the Village Voice. And wouldn’t you know, there was soon a paragraph on naked mole rats in a garish plastic box on every corner in the five boroughs, plus an extra 50 dollars in my pocket.

During one of my frequent Google searches for mole rat iBook backdrops, I discovered what may have been the banana peel on the slippery slope between animal lover and freaky fetishist. The National Zoo has a 24-hour live naked mole rat webcam. And, oh yes, it’s as amazing as it sounds. No longer did I need Gawker, AIM, and then-nascent Friendster to avoid my hilariously ill-fated publicity career. I had my nude rodential compatriots, and as I watched them dig, poop, dig, poop, and roll around in it, I felt all my anxiety melt away, down the little plastic tubes that were a mere Fung Wah bus ride away, in our nation’s capital.

My love for naked mole rats causes me to abandon grammatical specificity entirely.

They are very unique! Extremely unique!

Uniquely unique!

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On rare occasions, I visited DC to ogle my bald buds in person. Okay, I was technically visiting a boyfriend, but he soon proved less deserving of my love than even the mean mole rat who stepped on his friends’ faces to reach the center of the huddle. And as the allegedly human male wandered away to take a cell phone call from the “friend” I think I sort of knew, even then, he was cheating with, I remained calm. I watched the colony habitat, and giggled as each funny little guy ran backward, trying to dig where there was no dirt.

On a bad blind date years later, a dull investment banker tried to tell my fortune with questions from a pop psychology email forward. He asked my favorite color, number, and food, drawing parallels from each to an aspect of my personality. “Favorite animal and why?” he asked, deep insights at the ready for my inevitable reply of “Puppies because they’re sweet” or “Lions because they’re strong.”

He stared, mystified and embarrassed, as I nearly jumped out of my seat, enthusing on idiosyncratic individual roles, devotion to the society, poor eyesight, squishy bellies, and trait after bizarre trait that set this creature apart from any other on the planet. After a long swig of Scotch, he gave up and told me he didn’t have any idea what this meant for my romantic future. I’m starting to think that maybe I do.

I just hope he has a webcam. f

As I sucked the plasma from her jugular, I realized that something embarrassing was happening a few feet lower.

Hormones and Celluloid Story by Eric Spitznagel, Illustration by Mitch Ansara

Hollywood mogul Robert Evans once gave some sound advice to aspiring actresses. “If you’re ever approached with the line, ‘You ought to be in pictures, I’m a producer,’ tell the guy to fuck off. He’s a fraud, and the pictures he wants to put you in don’t play in theaters.”

He’s absolutely correct. I know this for a fact, because I used to be one of those “producers.” I was in the movie business for a short time during the late ’70s, so I know what it’s like to sweet-talk starlets with hollow promises. But in my defense, I didn’t fully comprehend the depravity of my profession.

I mean, c’mon, I was only ten.

Though my brother and I never expressed an interest in films or filmmaking, our grandmother gave us both 8-millimeter cameras for our respective birthdays. I’m pretty sure she did it out of spite – not directed at us, but at our parents, whom she considered “uppity” (i.e., unimpressed with her money and the intellectual authority she supposed it gave her). What better way to show her displeasure than by monopolizing her grandchildren’s affection? When she failed to wow us with spätzle, boiled to a flavorless mush (like all German cuisine), she decided to buy our love.

Not surprisingly, it worked. Every child, if given the chance, is a whore.

Being in possession of such an expensive camera, I had an epiphany about my future. I wanted to be a movie director. I idolized George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, whose names I’d recently learned. My path was clear: I’d been put on this earth to make the film classics of tomorrow.

I would create the next Raiders of the Lost Ark. Or the next Jaws. Or even better, a combination of the two. Maneating sharks battling Nazis! I was just the visionary to bring that eye-melting spectacle to the screen.

Sadly, my dreams of cinematic glory were all-too-quickly snuffed out. My feature debut – a less overtly brawny version of The Incredible Hulk – was a disaster, due mostly to my inability to wink. I can close both eyes, but not just one. The dailies were useless – I had nothing but long, lingering shots of trees or a patch of grass just to the left or right of the actors. Occasionally the cast would try to jump into frame, but I always pulled the lens away before catching any of the action.

I didn’t mind giving up the directing duties to my brother. He had better instincts, and an almost superhuman control of his eyelids. I

preferred acting anyway. That’s where my passion lay. That and producing. I loved helping my brother storyboard his shots, and collect the perfect props, and learn obscure filmmaking terminology. Our favorite phrase was “We’ll fix it in post” – a hopeful prediction, especially given that our editing facility consisted of a cement block and a razor blade.

But above all, I loved helping him pick the cast. There was a power that came with deciding which of our friends would get the meatiest roles.

“You’ve got a nice energy,” we’d say to the school bully during cattle calls.

“But the camera adds ten pounds.

Think you can drop some of that girth in a week?”

We did mostly remakes. We didn’t have much luck with originals.

Our first project as a filmmaking team was a sci-fi thriller called Battle Beyond the Universe, which suffered a premature death because of creative differences. I argued that the title was absurd, as there was technically nothing “beyond” the universe. My brother shot down all of my rewrite suggestions – Battle Beyond the Galaxy, Battle in a Black Hole, Battle Near That Big Celestial Body Over There – and it ended in a stalemate.

Like the most cunningly run

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Hormones and Celluloid

Hollywood studio, we learned from our mistakes. Rather than churn out more flicks with new and untested stories, we just made our own halfassed remakes of the most popular movies of the day. The Sting. Close Encounters of the Third Kind. And of course, the Star Wars trilogy.

Casting was easy. Scott Saunders, with his rugged good looks and willingness to punch anybody smaller than him, was a natural as Han Solo.

Mike Charter, who was just one

continued from previous

color-coordinated sweater away from being entirely orange, was C-3PO. My brother was Luke, because he had the shag and, more importantly, final cut.

And I played Chewbacca, not for my hair, but because I was tallest.

But we had no Princess Leia. This was probably because we didn’t know any girls. I mean, we knew them, we just didn’t talk to them.

Desperate times called for desperate measures. With our parents’ assistance, we managed to set up a

meeting with a girl down the block named Suzie. She didn’t have any acting experience, but she was a brunette and she was, as none of us would ever have admitted under even the most severe torture, kinda hot.

Hot in a prepubescent girl sort of way.

Hot as only a ten-year-old boy could appreciate. Meaning, publicly with indifferent shrugs and privately with lurid fantasies involving robot slaves and blasters and her dressed in a slutty Leia bikini.

My brother and I spent an afternoon at Suzie’s house, lounging by her pool and talking with her mom about Suzie’s imminent stardom.

Actually, her mom did most of the talking. When we left, we were confident that we’d sealed the deal.

We had devoted an entire day to swimming with her, and listening to her parents lecture us about curfews.

And, because we were gentlemen, we treated her the same way that we wanted to be treated: like an amputee panhandler in the subway. We avoided all eye contact with her, and I think she respected us for it.

Weeks went by, and we never got the call. Finally, her dad phoned our dad and delivered the boom. It was a pass. Suzie wished us well with our Star Wars project, but she regrettably would not be able to participate.

We did the movie without Leia, and, remarkably, the plot still held together. Granted, we’d whittled it down to a concise six-minute segment involving Darth Vader, played by repertory cast member Andy Kalchik, getting pelted with dozens of cardboard boxes. (Yes, I’m aware that this isn’t a scene from the actual movie. It was conceptual piece.)

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From the Internet by Jorge Pinto

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Pull-out poster! Gently pull pages 29-32 here.

Strongest One There Is by Derek Chatwood

Fray Geek Centerfold

Pull-out poster! Gently pull pages 29-32 here.

Story of My Life by Jorge Pinto

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Hormones and Celluloid

forgotten the whole debacle, we got a call from Suzie herself. She wanted to be in one of our movies. Panicking that we might lose her yet again, my brother and I put a second-tier script into quick turnaround. I’d been working on a retelling of the Dracula legend, but hadn’t gotten further than “Dracula walks into bedroom, bites sexy lady on the neck.”

For our purposes – and our budget (8-millimeter film cost a lot in 1979) – it seemed like enough to greenlight the project.

We delivered the script to her and she hastily agreed. For lack of any competition, she got the female lead – which, for convenience, we’d renamed “Suzie.” And in an undeserved turn of good fortune, I was cast as Dracula.

Not because I was in any way suited for the role, but because I owned my own Dracula cape and vampire fangs.

(It’d been an unusually fortuitous Halloween season.)

On the day of the shoot, I was a little nervous. I’d never been in such close proximity to a girl before, and I was terrified of repulsing her. To be on the safe side, I doused myself in my dad’s aftershave lotion. I even used it as hair gel, which didn’t go so well.

It left me with an oily Gordon Gecko look. I guess it worked for the part – the extra sleaze made my Dracula super creepy – but it didn’t exactly put Suzie at ease.

The moment of truth arrived.

The camera was rolling, and I climbed onto the bed, hovering over Suzie like a creature of the night, albeit a creature of the night that was easily intimidated by the opposite sex. I leaned closer, sinking my fake fangs into her soft, tan neck. She writhed in pretend ecstasy/pain.

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It was a convincing performance.

Too convincing. As I continued to suck the plasma from her jugular, I realized that something really, really embarrassing was happening just a few feet lower.

I had a boner.

It wasn’t a typical, run-of-themill boner either. It was a boner that refused to be ignored. The kind of boner that can open locked doors. A boner like a karate chop. A boner that alters your entire body chemistry. A boner that wants to evolve and grow opposable thumbs and develop its own civilization. A boner that could get you expelled from school.

I don’t think anybody in the film crew saw it. But Suzie felt it.

How could she not? It was like I was jabbing a garden hoe into her ribs. Her face convulsed into an expression of pain and outrage.

“Ouch,” she yelled, loud enough for everybody in the room to hear.

“What the heck is that? It hurts!”

I didn’t dare move. If I slid off the bed, my lack of professionalism would be … hard to miss. But for anybody paying attention, it was pretty obvious what was happening. Though I was lying horizontally across Suzie, my lower half was clearly elevated at a higher angle. It was an affront to the laws of gravity. Something was keeping me aloft, and it didn’t take an

advanced understanding of calculus to figure out what that might be.

When she’d had quite enough of my unwelcome pecker-poking, Suzie pushed me away and ran out of the room. I covered myself with a handful of pillows and hoped for the best. If my brother had any idea that I’d more or less thrown Suzie from the bed like a penile catapult, he wasn’t letting on.

“I shoulda known this was gonna happen,” he said, rolling his eyes. “She was flakey from the beginning.”

“So true,” I agreed, trying to concentrate on unsexy thoughts. “Her heart just wasn’t in it.”

We waited there for a few minutes, maybe half-expecting her to come back. And then my brother threw up his hands and said, “Okay, that’s a wrap. Let’s take five, and then I’m gonna need twenty to thirty cardboard boxes and Andy dressed like Darth Vader. We’re doin’ a sequel.”

I smiled. My boner wasn’t going anywhere, but it appeared that the movie didn’t need me anymore. As the crew broke down the set and prepared for the next shoot, I just sat on the bed and enjoyed the throbbing in my pants, imagining that Suzie was still lying underneath me. Only this time, she liked it.

And that, in a nutshell, is why I can’t watch a Dracula movie without getting an erection. f

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When my name finally rang out, I realized why my preparation had been so casual: I wouldn’t be the one performing.

Windhammer Rockin’ the Philadelphia Air Guitar Championship Story by Rob Weychert, Illustration by Kevin Cornell

Backstage, an hour before show time, the cramped green room buzzed and shuffled with conversation and preparation. Rhinestones and tassels adorned leather and denim, which adorned bodies aged eighteen to forty-eight, travelers hailing from as far as West Virginia. Many were veterans of the air guitar stage, and some had competed as recently as the previous night. Having failed to capture the titles in their home towns of New York, Boston, and Washington, DC, they were trying for a second, third, or fourth time in Philadelphia.

I had no such experience. Just a few days before, I didn’t even have plans to compete, and less than a year before that, I was unaware that anyone even had the option to make such plans. My eyes were opened, as so many others were, by the documentary film Air Guitar Nation. It chronicles the 2003 search for an air guitarist to represent the United States for the first time at the World Air Guitar Championships in Oulu, Finland. The contestants’ pursuit of that dream is predictably comical, and watching their frenzied undulations around a muchmaligned imaginary instrument had caused me to respond in a way I’m sure is quite common: “These guys are so lame.” But my superiority came from a different place than most. It was pride speaking, to be sure, but my pride judged not the behavior itself, but the quality of the behavior. “I could do this so much better.”

Months later, as my seasoned opponents discussed the carefully calculated strategies behind their forthcoming performances, my boastful statement seemed naïve. I’d decided on my stage name, song selection, and costume in an instant, and I’d rehearsed twice. Others in the green room sounded like they’d recruited focus groups.

“I did Metallica in DC, but Philly’s more of a bluecollar town, so I’m going with some Priest tonight.”

“I saw a whole bunch of Poison memorabilia at the Hard Rock Cafe today, and I’m wondering if that was some kind of sign.”

“That guy who did ‘Higher Ground’ the other night should have been disqualified – he was playing air bass for half the song!”

The rules – there are more than you’d think – explicitly state that the air guitar is the only instrument that may be played during a performance in the competition. The judges, who are usually local musicians or radio personalities treated to a generous dose of social lubricant, are rarely as pedantic about the rules as the more serious contestants. Scores are based on three judging criteria: technical merit, stage presence, and “airness,” which is described as, “the extent to which the performance transcends the imitation of a real guitar and becomes an art form in and of itself.”

As the house lights went down, the audience made its desire to experience that art form known. The emcee took the stage and began warming up the crowd while my competitors and I waited in the wings. I double-checked my costume. Jeans? Check. Combat boots? Check. Black leather chaps? Check. Fuzzy, blue athletic wristbands?

Check. Bare chest? Check. All that was left to do was to wait for my stage name to be called. When it finally rang out, I suddenly realized why my preparation for this night had been so casual: I wouldn’t be the one performing.

Windhammer took over without a word, pouring himself into me, beginning with my heart and lungs and spreading outward. As each cell was possessed, it shared its

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Windhammer

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newfound immortality with its neighbors until none were left to convert. My Irish pallor gave way to an unearthly glow.

My body was stolidly walked onto the stage by its new occupant. To say he was confident would falsely suggest that failure was even a possibility. His stare pierced every eyeball in the house, and those who managed to avoid it directly were startled to attention when it bounced off the rear wall and stabbed into their retinas through the cranium-coated pulp behind them. He was a being of such pure will that outside forces could not possibly have brought about his existence. He had created himself, and whatever emotion his makeup allowed was dutifully focused on his sole purpose: to rock.

Windhammer assumed the power stance, spreading his feet apart and bending his knees slightly to achieve an impenetrable center of gravity. Some of his competitors preceded their performances with the ceremonious presentation and last-minute tuning of their phantom instruments, often with the assistance of an unworthy roadie. Windhammer had no need for such theatrics. He didn’t intend to pantomime the movements of a guitar player backed by a prerecorded song. He would generate the song himself, pulling it from the air and hurling it mercilessly at his audience.

There was a breathless pause, and it began. Amidst seven forceful windmill strums, Windhammer stood his ground, traveling down the scale and back up, accompanied by a high-pitched wail and sustaining the final chord for a few seconds over a thunderous drum fill. The scale repeated, the wail’s pitch increased, and the

He had created himself, and whatever emotion his makeup allowed was dutifully focused on his sole purpose: to rock.

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drums cascaded into the audience through a sweeping, pointed finger. The vocals slackened a bit on the third goround, temporarily taming the maelstrom, only to erupt into an ear-splitting scream on the fourth and final bar of the intro.

Windhammer’s left hand was a blur. His right hand dashed up and down the invisible fretboard, furiously articulating chords in unprecedented contortions. If anyone witnessing the light-speed riff even had a chance to wonder what the hurry was, the abrupt emergence of the solo answered their question. It announced its presence with a shrill battle cry, a single, piercing note clearing the way for an eager battalion of its siblings. With ferociously wide eyes, Windhammer orchestrated the invasion effortlessly. Each attacking note was brought into being not just by his hands, but by his whole body. The air guitar swayed and lunged with his body, and his body swayed and lunged with the music. The three were one.

When it was over, both the audience and the judges loudly signified their boisterous approval. Some of the subsequent contestants managed to trump Windhammer’s score, but he still qualified for the next round and was ultimately named the victor.

There wasn’t much time to bask in the glory. The venue was double-booked, and we were rushed out to make way for the hundreds of Roots fans lined up around the block. But Windhammer wasn’t about the limelight, anyway. He had already vanished, giving me back my body as quickly and silently as he had taken it, perhaps responding to a plea for a mind-melting rock explosion in some other dimension.

All I could do was smile. For years, I have clung to a buoyant, youthful admiration of a rock and roll that has as much to do with stagecraft, mythology, and libido as it does with composition, dexterity, and tenacity. The latter ingredients had eluded me, but the former had found an audience, likely made up of people who, like me, sometimes enjoy music best in the company of their bedroom mirror.

I changed out of my costume on the sidewalk as I watched the venue change hands. Most of Philadelphia’s citizens were unaware they had a new hero, and that his mortal vessel would be riding his bike home. f

Pillowfight!

Union Square, New York City Photos by Daniel K. Gebhart

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Star Wars Memories Story by Adam Rakunas, Illustration by Alan Defibaugh

I wish I could nail it in specific terms.

One of the defining works of my generation, something

as moving as Woodstock, something that has been with me as long as I can remember, has shaped my view of the world, something that will go down as one of the greatest stories ever told ‌ and I still can’t wrap my mind around it.

I may not be able to give you an encompassing whole,

but I can certainly give you its parts.

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It’s 1977. I’m three years old, and my family has moved out of the city and into the suburbs. Me and the neighborhood kids are in our pajamas. We’re all piled into the back of Dad’s giant yellow Ford truck. The sun is setting as we pull into the drive-in; Brian’s mom has given us a giant bag of popcorn from Fedco.

I remember curling under blankets as the sky finally grew dark. I remember Mom and Dad monkeying with the speakers in the car. And I remember that thundering music as the main titles flashed and the sound of blasters as Princess Leia’s ship was captured by Darth Vader.

We all fell asleep somewhere after Luke left Tatooine.

Mom carried me to bed, which had Star Wars sheets, naturally.

It’s 1981. I’m seven, and I’m in another fight with Brian, who lives across the street. There are five kids on the block who are all the same age, and we all, of course, have the same toys. Another day in the sandbox is over, and we’re taking our toys home. Except for the Darth Vader.

“It’s my Darth Vader!”

“No, it’s mine! Yours is the one without the cape!”

“It’s mine!”

After an hour of watching our bickering, the neighborhood moms settled on a novel solution: they use a hot nail to burn holes in the feet of all of our action figures.

One hole for the Baers’ toys, two for the Rakunas’, three for the Oberreuters’. The fights stopped and we kept playing.

It’s 1984. I’m ten years old, and I still can’t get Star Wars out of my system, even though Return of the Jedi has been gone from theaters for a year. It doesn’t matter; I want to be Boba Fett for Halloween.

I make gauntlets and chest plates out of cardboard as my mom makes a papier-maché helmet by wrapping strips of newspaper around an inflated balloon. I carried my old Han Solo blaster with me as I went door to door. “Oh, a spaceman!” cried one old couple after another. I don’t think I could have explained to them who I was.

I probably couldn’t have explained the Boba Fett Underoos I had, either.

It’s 1991. I’m seventeen, it’s Christmas, and Mom and Dad give me Heir to the Empire, a brand new novel that continues the adventures of Luke Skywalker and company.

I read it that night.

It’s awful.

So are all the other Star Wars spinoffs that come out over the following years. Comic books and novels, RPGs and card games, even the Super Nintendo games just don’t live up to the movies. We watch them over and over in college, creating elaborate drinking games.

“Drink every time Luke whines!” someone yelled.

“Christ,” I muttered, “we’ll be unconscious before they get to Mos Eisley.”

I still miss the movies.

It’s 1997. I’m twenty-three, out of college, and working. A group of us have ditched the office for the afternoon to go to the nearby theater.

Star Wars is being re-released.

I stand in line with guys who are my age, who had the same toys, the same Halloween costumes. Mike, our giant supervisor who works as a bouncer on weekends, is not with us. He’s off at a toy store in Van Nuys, thirty miles away, because he heard there were some new Princess Leia action figures still left on the shelves. His eyes bugged out when I showed him the toys my parents had stashed in the attic. Jabba the Hutt sits on my desk, his dais now a container for my loose change.

We walk into the theater, which has an equal number of twentysomethings and eight-year-olds. The lights go down, and I’m bouncing up and down and laughing at the pure joy of seeing the giant yellow words scroll up the screen as John Williams’ music pumps out in THX.

I wonder what the eight-year-olds are thinking.

Maybe it satisfies a deep-seated need for myths in our time.

Maybe it fills a simple need for spectacle. Maybe it’s grand opera with lightsabers, or just Flash Gordon with better effects. I don’t know.

What I do know is that I love Star Wars, and I wish I had children of my own so I could pile them in the back of a giant yellow Ford truck and take them to the drive-in, where we would sit in wide-eyed wonder as the music thunders and the titles scroll up the screen. f

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You had to handle them with the same sort of care one might give a priceless vase.

There were gold ones and platinum ones. They held their data in a rippled channel, read by a jewel-tipped needle. They were called LPs, and I loved them.

Hi, my name is Lance Arthur and I have a

Vinyl Fetish Story by Lance Arthur, Illustration by Dwayne Clare

Back in the ’80s, Sony and Philips agreed on a new digital form of distributing sound. It was called a Compact Disc, and it killed the long-playing, black vinyl, single-grooved record album. They said it was a vast improvement over the old-fashioned, outdated analog platform because CDs were virtually indestructible, could hold 70 minutes of music to an LP’s less than 50, you didn’t have to turn them over and, hey, they were compact! The sound would be better, too. After all, nothing ever touched the music.

I love CDs. When they first came out, all CD players were a grand a piece and the only source for CDs was Europe so you had to pay $25 a pop for them. I paid $30 for a fresh off the German presses The Dreaming by Kate Bush which I actually stole out of another buyer’s stash.

I bought them to play on my second-generation $450 Yamaha player that had this little tray that slid out – cool! – instead of this door that popped up on the top. Remember, at the time you could buy vinyl for $8.98 list, or $5.99 on sale. US-produced CDs were $15.95 if you could get them.

The record companies said the price disparity was due to “supply and demand” and that CDs would soon cost no more than LPs. Wonder where that promise went.

I stopped buying LPs and looked for everything on CD. I went to Aron’s on Melrose in L.A. and rummaged through their slim CD supply instead of going through their fantastic used albums and import bins like I used to, finding treasures of my own that other people saw as trash. I wouldn’t buy the new album of my favorite artists unless it was digital. I started bringing in the albums I had purchased for one song only (Pearl Harbor and the Explosions for “Driving”) and trading the credit for CDs of albums I already had. My goal was to replace them as they were available, clearing away all the big black platters for

shiny silver discs. Get myself modern. Digitize.

But my favorites were not the big label mainstream albums. They were Carolyn Mas. Fun Boy Three. Bill Nelson and Lene Lovich and The Boomtown Rats. They were Yellow Magic Orchestra. Ultravox. Simple Minds.

CDs were being manufactured for the Springsteens and Madonnas. Chances were I’d have to wait a long time and some of them would never be out. So I decided to keep my vinyl and the little pops and scratches that became part of the music that I loved – and love.

What I loved about albums was the art of the presentation. Double-album sets were unheard of except for the biggest players, or groups who had just had monster hits. Fleetwood Mac followed up Rumours with Tusk.

Prince, who was then the artist known as Prince, released 1999 and merely because it was a double album and he wasn’t a big artist (yet), it was looked at as a huge ego boost for a temperamental brat. Some albums had stickers and posters hidden inside. The covers were gold embossed (Scritti Politti) or had cut-outs that the inner sleeve showed through (New Order’s floppy-disk inspired Blue Monday).

Talking Heads released a limited-edition clear plastic sleeve for Speaking In Tongues designed by Robert Rauchenberg.

Mine’s all yellow now.

Now there’s a whole generation for whom vinyl LPs are a curiosity. LPs are put out by Pearl Jam as Special Editions. Matthew Sweet and Lenny Kravitz put the sound of groove-inspired cracks and noise as preludes to the clean, pure, digital sound. The record companies have discovered that they can resell all the back catalogue music to fogies like me because either we can’t find our old albums or we got rid of them too quickly. They took up space and gathered dust in the face of easy-to-store,

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Vinyl Fetish

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convenient, plastic-encased discs. My own collection was kept in boxes from move to move. I didn’t hook up my turntable. I forgot my old friends.

Then, one day, I had this song in my head I couldn’t get rid of. It started as this little snatch of notes ricocheting off the windmills of my mind before it fell into a puddle and the expanding rings went looking for a lyric. I could hear the affected, faux-Brit voice singing above the electronic drumbeat rhythm. I knew that I could not remove it until I exorcised the musical demon. So I opened the boxes and went digging through the albums until I found it.

A black cover with a bucking bronco built from the green stick-figure digit parts from every 80’s clock radio. The EP title, Digital Cowboy, angling away from the center. And the O.M.D. knock-off band: Our Daughter’s Wedding. Not even one-hit wonders. No-hit wonders.

But I bought the album and I had to hook up the Bang & Olufsen Beogram RX2 into the decidedly ’90s surroundsound capable Sony and pump the circa 1981 slice of pretechno New Wave out my speakers into my head to join the lingering memory echo. Suddenly, I was on the floor digging them all out. All my old friends in their cardboard sleeves. Genuine VH1 Flashback time.

It’s not that I’m nostalgic for hisses and pops. I love CDs. But there was something about the care and feeding of vinyl that I miss. You had to love them like you loved your music. You had to wash their surfaces with Discwasher fluid and zap the static away with ion guns.

You had to place them in their inner condoms, covered with lyrics, before slipping them home in their flat, hard sleeves. Touch only their edges.

Now we live in the age of pure digital delivery. We can hold the entire contents of a vast library of music in the palm of our hand, quite literally, and grab more and more music from the shared libraries of others. Music is provided in a form that can’t be touched, which is perhaps the most honest form of a type of art that is only heard and not seen. My iPod Classic has the capacity to hold up to 40,000 songs, according to its manufacturer. That’s about

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3,600 LPs of music, a volume that I would have to dedicate an entire room to were it still trapped in gleaming black vinyl.

The music is now arguably more pure and distilled than ever. It is produced and recorded in a digital manner, archived and distributed in a digital manner, and the art of the record sleeve and the lyric insert has been almost entirely lost in the translation. The eager unwrapping of a 12-inch disc, the careful cleaning, the loving maintenance, the setting of an accurately balanced tone arm to its rippled groove, the rainbow-striped stacks of LP covers, it’s all gone, replaced with the antiseptic and decidedly unsexy act of simply purchasing a large enough hard drive to house the anonymously simple bits and bytes that add up to what was once an absurdly sensual process.

It appeals to some part of me – the anal-retentive part, no doubt. But their lack of perfection, their demand for attention valued what was held inside their single groove so carefully cut onto a master disc somewhere in a hermetically sealed vault. This music was dug into the surface, extracted with jewel-tipped cartridges on rumblefree surfaces. Not floating before a laser’s eyes, untouched by human hands. Not bits and bytes arranged just so on a mirrored surface. Not perfection, which is not art. But imperfection, which is human. f

Playing the Part Life in the MySpace Role-Playing Underground Story by Claire Carter, Illustration by Stefan Grambart When people ask me about me and my fellow MySpace role-players, I say we’re like Harrison Ford in The Fugitive, only less ruggedly handsome for the most part. We are a subculture that has been steadily growing since the launch of the social networking site in 2003. We are the hunted.

The mistakenly accused.

Every month, MySpace deletes a handful of us for breaking their Terms of Service by the very definition of role-playing – impersonating someone without their consent (which, you know, is not easy to obtain when that person happens to be a two-hundred-and-somethingyear-old ex-vampire with a soul). We fight back, not with evidence and a well-timed battle with a one-armed man, but with pure persistence. We believe that MySpace is a better place with our community in it.

“Role-playing gives us a further step into the characters we love. Most see it as a haven for lifeless geeks, but it’s the complete opposite,” one roleplayer told me. “It contributes in expanding our imagination, our ability to write, and pushes the possibilities of evolving [the characters] in a way the series/ film never could.”

There are hundreds of different fandoms veining out across MySpace – you just need to find them. Be your taste Blade, The Matrix, Firefly, or Buffy, to name a few, you’ll discover there is a community dedicated to furthering stories created by individuals whom we, as role-players, truly admire. For myself, I’m an unapologetic Whedonverse Geek. I can honestly say I have yet to meet a role-player who’s not proud to be counted among the fans of Joss Whedon’s work.

“Joss gave us all something magically intangible. He gave us strength every week to keep fighting whatever demons we were all battling at the time,” says

another longtime role-player who writes as Cordelia Chase among other Whedon characters. “To me, it was a gift that, at times, I could never hope to repay, but maybe I can help remind him that what he wrote, his vision, was important.

To me. To all the Whedonverse role-players who refuse to let his story, whether it’s of the one girl in all the world or of the vampire with a soul, die.”

It’s an exciting time for Whedon fans, with Buffy Season 8, Angel: After the Fall and Serenity: Better Days series all within months of one another, and that excitement is certainly palpable within the realm of the MySpace role-play scene. I can speak personally when I say that it’s peeled back another layer of potential for what we dub “storylines” within the fandom. That’s the really wonderful part not only about role-playing these characters, but about Joss Whedon’s worlds as a whole.

There is nothing that is out of scope, too far beyond reach; that is his legacy to us. That sometimes the geeks come good.

Some of us are women playing male characters, some of us are men playing women. Some of us are gay, some straight, some of us live across the Atlantic, but we all find that one common thread that unites us: love of these characters, this fandom – and our inherent geekiness.

“I get to exercise a part of my imagination and personality that is the complete opposite of who I am day to day. To become a sadistic, sexual, evil hero is wonderfully liberating,” wrote a female portrayer of Spike, while another who smirks and simpers her way across the site with the best of us as Angelus added, “It’s the only outlet I have that keeps me sane.”

As for myself? I can only echo the very fitting words of Buffy alumni Jane Espenson: “There’s no job that’s better than this.” f

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I’d tried bungee jumping, motorcycle riding, and stunt driving. I’d learned how to hammer a nail into my nose. But it was fire-eating that turned me into a fearless badass.

Confessions of a Professional Fire-Eater Story by Kate Kotler, Illustration by Goopymart I don’t remember why I decided to try fire-eating as opposed to say, swallowing razor blades or some other dangerous geek stunt. I think it was to impress a guy.

I was in a traveling variety arts show that I had written with my friend Lyra, which included improv comedy, low-cut shirts, bawdy drinking songs, and a daring straightjacket escape which left me nearly naked on stage.

We were playing a renaissance fair when I met an escape artist named Brian who would change my life.

Brian’s acerbic nature made my knees wobbly and my head spin. One night, while Brian was plying me with wine in an attempt to get me fully naked, he made an offhand remark that the show was “girly.”

“Girly?” I asked with an eyebrow raised. “Why?”

Brian grabbed the back of my chair and pulled me in.

With his mouth about a millimeter away from mine he said, “It lacks danger.”

Lyra was skeptical about adding fire-eating to our show, but I told her I would do all the dangerous stuff. I found diagrams of how to build torches online and bought fuel (basic Coleman’s naphtha used in camp stoves and lamps), it took me a while to work up the nerve to stick a lit torch in my face.

I remember standing on stage, Lyra nearby with a bucket of water and a blanket in case I set myself aflame, holding the torch above my open mouth. I looked at the flame, burning low and blue, trying to will myself to put it in my mouth.

I paced the balcony of my motel room in Hammond, Louisiana, waiting for my mom to pick up the phone at home in Ohio. She sounded happy to hear from me. “How’s the tour?”

“Good,” I said, biting my lip.

“Are you going to get a chance to go to New Orleans?”

“Yup, we just booked a gig at a club on Bourbon

Street,” I said, knowing what was coming next.

“Oh, Kate!” She sounded so genuinely happy. “That’s so great! When did that happen?”

“Last week,” I said taking a deep breath, “A club owner saw the show the day we added fire-eating and asked us for our card. We went down to the city to meet with him–”

“Katie, did you just say fire-eating?”

“Yes, we went to New Orleans and booked a full fire-eating show to run at the end of December and all of January.”

“Fire-eating?” I could hear the shock in her voice.

I’d done a lot of wacky things in the past, but this was different. “Like sticking a flaming object in your face?”

“Yeah, Mom.” I began my rehearsed speech. “It’s no more dangerous than drinking a cup of really hot coffee.”

“Well that’s just…” I could hear my usually supportive mother struggling. “Here, talk to your father.”

She put down the phone and I could hear her say to my dad, “Jesus, she’s eating fire now, Gary!”

“So fire-eating, huh?” Dad said. “That’s pretty cool, Katie!”

When performing stunts, I’m always very cautious. As harmless as I’ve professed fire-eating to be, it’s still fire, and it still burns if you fuck up.

That fall I’d met a magician named Kevin who’d suffered third-degree burns all over his chest because of a blow-back (when a “spit” fireball blows back at you).

My friends Todd and Allyson (a married partner act) had told me all about the fire-eating accident that left Allyson with very bad scars all over her neck and chest.

And they were the lucky ones. I heard about performers who’d died after inhaling a flame, burning themselves from the inside out. I also read about the effects of ingesting naphtha over the long term, naphtha being a known carcinogen.

I did it anyhow.

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Confessions of a Professional Fire-Eater It was a blazingly hot day in the desert at the Northern California Renaissance Pleasure Faire, and we were on show number three. I hadn’t had a chance to drink water or eat bread, so I was starting to feel “fuel drunk.”

I paused for a moment as I held the torch about three inches from my mouth – the suspense being that which adds that extra “oomph” to the experience for the audience – I regarded the hypnotic curl of black smoke and flicker of the orange-blue flame on the torch, and inhaled the scent of the burning naphtha – a scent which I had grown over the past year to find as alluring as men’s cologne.

All of a sudden, I felt someone push me to the ground and a wet towel being thrown over my face.

Since I had been less than diligent in shaking the excess fuel off of my torch – since I was fuel-drunk – I didn’t notice when lit naphtha dribbled down onto my face, causing it to burst into one blue flash of flame.

Lyra and our stage manager pounced on me in an instant. Even if they hadn’t, it is doubtful that I would have been seriously injured from the flame, as naphtha evaporates quickly and I would have had to been soaked from head to toe in the stuff before it would have caught my skin on fire. The more immanent risk was of the fuel having dripped onto my costume or into my hair. That could have been deadly.

Once the flame was out and Lyra helped me to my feet, whispering in my ear what had happened, I went right on with the show. I was told later after the hullabaloo subsided that it was a very impressive sight, my face on fire. I had singed my eyelashes and eyebrows, giving me a weird look of constant surprise. People thought it was done on purpose.

I think we gained a lot of fans that day.

I was standing on stage at the Krazy Korner bar on Bourbon Street. In one hand was an unlit torch and in the other was a drunken tourist boy. I was attempting to perform the warm-up to my solo act, in which I light an audience volunteer’s hand on fire for a brief moment.

Under the best of circumstances, this stunt was risky, and one which most fire-eaters wouldn’t perform. You know the saying, “don’t work with animals and children”?

Fire-eaters add “rubes” to that statement. As a rule, most do not work with the non-geek. But I was a fearless badass.

The rube in hand wasn’t my problem at the moment, though: his friend at a table in the front row was the one giving me a hard time. I wasn’t just dealing with the average stupid drunk heckler – this time I was dealing with a physical heckler drunk on sugary Hurricanes from his trip up Bourbon St.

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continued from previous

He kept grabbing at my foot, leaning forward to try and grab me and my attention. The laughter of his buddies – including the one on stage with me – egged him on.

My usual tactic when dealing with hecklers of any kind was to ignore them – after a few well crafted heckler shoot-downs thrown at the offender – because paying attention to them only feeds their desire to act idiotic. But this guy just kept at it.

The final straw was when he, annoyed that I wouldn’t pay attention to him, drunkenly wobbled on stage, coming to over to me and putting his arm around my shoulders as I lit another torch for my final stunt. I looked with panic off to the side at guitarist Big Willie, who slid off his stool to get a bouncer to remove the rube who was now trying to reach around my cleavage (which is ample) to grab my lit torch.

I grabbed his outstretched hand and twisted it behind him, pulling up just enough to bring him to his knees.

While holding him down, I extinguished the torch in my mouth and leaned forward into our stage microphone to say to him: “Buddy, I am going to guess you leave Bourbon Street tonight having learned at least one lesson,” I paused and looked out at the audience, “Don’t ever fuck with a girl who has a lit torch in her hand.”

As the crowd erupted in laughter, I let his arm go and he tumbled forward into the arms of the bouncer waiting to escort him and his buddies out onto the street.

Looking back at this time in my life, I don’t think that my 34-year-old self would have ever let my 25-year-old self attempt something as stupid as fire-eating. It’s dangerous in ways that you can’t even imagine, beyond poisoning and burning. I’ve been asked countless times by friends to teach them how to perform fire stunts, and I’ve said no every time. I had to teach myself how to do it, and the information is readily available online. But the truth is, there’s not much to teach. You just have to be brave enough to tilt your head back and stick it in.

I will happily talk shop and swap stories of my heyday with those who are foolish enough to actually pursue fireeating. I point out to all of them that the reason I’m around to swap stories, amusing them with tales of bawdiness and bravery, is because I got out of the trade before I got sick or hurt myself badly.

Fire-eating definitely changed the direction of my life, but I was burning and poisoning myself for the entertainment of the crowd every time I put a torch in my mouth. That’s why, eventually, I stopped.

Still, I love being able to say with a straight face, “I used to be a fire-eating badass.” f

The Cult of Colbert Story by Alice Hunt, Illustration by Meg Hunt

I’m in DC’s National Portrait Gallery with a friend, on an unreasonably cheery February morning, standing at the back of a queue for what must be the city’s best-trafficked restrooms.

They’re nice bathrooms, to be sure, but the real draw is the portrait of Stephen Colbert hanging just above the water fountains. It’s not a great portrait (digital on canvas, 2006), but we huddled masses flock to it anyway, because it is a holy relic and we are proud citizens of Colbert Nation. The tide of it-getters ebbs and flows, but the crowd is ebullient whatever its size.

I feel connected to my fellow Colbert Nation citizens. If nothing else, we’ve all annoyed the woman at the information desk who’s clearly sick of pointing people to the portrait, so we’ve shared that special experience. We are strong! We are Americans – the good kind, the kind that’s well-informed, well-connected, and somewhat obnoxious about it! We are a group, we are a movement, and even if we don’t love each other right now, we probably could if we tried.

But it’s not all sweetness and light. Every nation has its undesirables, and the Colbert Nation is no exception. Another friend who attended a taping (while seven months pregnant, earning her a front-row seat and a quick chat with Stephen) waited to get in for hours behind an unsettling young woman wearing a “Mrs. Colbert” sash and a homemade homage-to-Stephen T-shirt. According to my friend, this taping was the end of an era for her: she had been to see the show once a week since its inception, but after that night’s performance she was banned from the set for six months so that other, ideally less creepy people could see the show.

I envy the freaky Colbert people.

They enjoy their pastime to a lunatic degree. They live and breathe strange fan art where Stephen is a Japanese schoolgirl and Paul Dinello is his strict yet alluring senpai. I cannot say the same. Yes, I dig him, and have for years. Yes, I’ve been to a pair of tapings and I’ve got the poster of his portrait.

And yes, I no longer watch The Daily

Show because it just doesn’t seem funny anymore without him. But something is holding me back from throwing myself fully into the Nation, becoming one with my fellow fans, maybe joining up with something larger instead of soaking in the radiation from my TV and the buzz in front of a Smithsonian bathroom. f

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The best way-off-Broadway production of Phantom of the Opera nobody ever saw.

Next Stop, Basement Story by Lindsay Champion Illustration by Andrew Wilson My grandfather took me to see Phantom of the Opera for my tenth birthday. As I sat in the front row, I was mesmerized by the strobe lights, the organ solos, and the haunting tale of a deformed, misunderstood man forced to live in the catacombs of the Paris Opera House. As a third-grader from the suburbs, the story spoke to my soul. Those entrancing songs! Those powerful actors! I knew my life would never be the same.

When I returned home from my grandparents’ house, I held a meeting with my next-door neighbor, Callie, who had just turned 11. She had never expressed any interest in Broadway or musical theater, but I informed her that we would be performing a full-length version of Phantom of the Opera in my basement.

Callie looked unsure, but I managed to convince her that spending all our time in the basement was the best possible way to spend our summer. This was the early nineties, and Callie was wearing an oversized T-shirt with matching cotton leggings. I had a more sophisticated style and chose glittery spandex biker shorts paired with black cowboy boots. Plus, I already had pierced ears. Clearly, I knew what I was talking about, and Callie had to follow my lead.

“The show will be stunt-casted,” I announced, not actually sure what I meant. “The role of the Phantom will be played by me.”

“But you’re a girl,” Callie said.

“Yes, but the role of the Phantom is so passionate and tragic, and besides, we’re not friends with any boys.”

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Next, I doled out the less-important roles, all of them, to Callie. As suspicious as Callie looked when she left my house after the meeting, she still returned to my basement the next afternoon for vocal rehearsal.

During vocal rehearsal, I would blast sections of the Original Broadway Cast Recording on my boom box, and make Callie write down the lyrics – at least, what we could hear.

“I think they said, ‘turn your bass away from the tarish light of hay,’” I told her. “Callie, are you listening?”

She was scribbling frantically, still trying to write all the lyrics from the last song, but I was too impatient.

“Callie, Phantom of the Opera is a very sophisticated piece of musical theater. If you aren’t ready for this commitment, just tell me.”

“No,” Callie panted. “I’m ready, I’m ready.”

Dance rehearsal was the following afternoon. I stood to one side of the basement and clapped out the rhythm to “Masquerade” as Callie tried to please me with steps she had learned in ballet class.

“No, no, no!” I threw a cassette tape at her feet. “That’s nothing like what I saw onstage last week! Take it again from the top. And concentrate this time!”

Callie’s face was dripping with sweat, but she persevered, even when I threatened to cut her from the number.

As rehearsal went on, Callie’s roles got smaller and smaller, and I started relying on the vocal stylings of stuffed animals to fill gaps in the show. But after three grueling months of rehearsal, we were finally ready to perform. I had spent hours dragging our props and costumes down to the basement and setting up folding chairs for our audience. On the day of the show, I knocked on Callie’s front door, and her mom answered. Apparently, Callie was tired and needed a rest from Phantom of the Opera for a while. Callie and I didn’t really talk much after that.

The basement performance was postponed indefinitely. To this day, I’m still ready to reprise my performance as the Phantom in any upcoming regional productions you may know of. Please keep me apprised of any future opportunities. f

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50

An aquarist is a sort of God. And at first, I was a loving deity.

Memories of a Fickle God Story by Scott Rosenberg, Illustration by Mal Jones As sixth grade waned into summer vacation in 1971, I had a dozen aquariums to keep clean and sparkling and filled with life: three upstairs in my room, the rest down in the basement.

I had guppies and swordtails and platys, tetras and gouramis and barbs. I had live worms in the fridge – clumps of wriggling brown tubifex in one-inch plastic containers, awaiting feeding time. (Ah, my forbearing parents.) And there was algae, algae everywhere.

The cichlids in the 29-gallon downstairs had spawned; their eggs were hatching, filling the top of one tank with the tiniest fry – little eye dots attached to transparentspeck bodies. These tiny sproutlings of life would fast become food for bigger fish – Mom and Pop among them – unless immediately sequestered in foster care.

Nature is red in tooth and claw, and fin, too: the child aquarist learns this up close. There was goodness, also, of course. As with the mouth-breeders: they’d hatch their eggs in Mama’s mouth. The fry would nestle safely – no eating their young here! – until grown big enough to survive on their own.

And there were miracles. Upstairs, the community tank – the urban melting pot of my aquatic universe, where multiple species coexisted in relative harmony – had recently experienced its very own resurrection.

King Dojo, my kuhli loach, had disappeared. This was not unusual; these loaches are wriggly scavengers, snakelike but clownish, with narrow bands of orange on a brown background and comical barbels on their faces, and they hang out under rocks or bury themselves in gravel, so you don’t worry when you don’t see them for a few days.

But mine had been gone for so long that I took him for dead. One day I was cleaning a filter that had been off the tank for a couple of days, and noticed my loach nestled in the bottom under a damp piece of glass wool. Poor desiccated dead thing, I thought. But when I put the filter back in the water, King Dojo swam off as though nothing had happened.

What do you do to commemorate such an unlikely blessing? I composed a cantata on the piano in honor of the restored monarch.

I was always drawing maps and writing histories and assembling dynastic charts for my fish; they were my very own Middle Earth, requiring just a little care and Tetra-Min to animate my epic narratives. I loved these worlds that I presided over. For a while.

Two years or so, my enthusiasm lasted. When it began to wane, so too did the quality of life for my charges. The algae went unscraped. The live feedings grew sparse. Over time, my visits to the basement tanks dwindled, and they sank into brown neglect. Fish died, one by one, as fish will do, and I did not replace them.

I’d become a bored god.

I abandoned my fish, not without guilt, as I moved on to other, drier preoccupations: first, the history of the American Civil War, then games – in that electronic dark age, we played our battles with die-cut cardboard units and hexagon-gridded maps. Later, it was Diplomacy, and Dungeons & Dragons, and publishing mimeographed magazines about Diplomacy, and Dungeons & Dragons.

The power of each new interest almost entirely obliterated its predecessor. I was a serial geek: one passion at a time, each one a buffer for my surfeit of adolescent obsessive capacity, absorbing all the insecurity of teenagerhood in a warm, welcoming, bottomless pool of fascination.

Later, as puberty crested in waves of loneliness and doubt and desperation for romance or sex or just any sort of girlfriendly experience, all of which seemed entirely unattainable at the time, I clung to my knowledge that, whatever happened – even If I’d been fated to a lifetime of isolation – a haven always awaited me in my obsessions.

This got me through to the other side of the desperation of my age. I knew I could always build a world for myself, and that world would welcome me. I would just have to learn not to abandon it. f

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Ever the Bride Story by Audrey Kentor

“I found the perfect dress,” my mother crowed over the phone. “It’s Vera Wang, and the shape you like! It looks kind of wrapped or layered all the way down, and it has a big soft flower on one shoulder.”

“Oh, that one,” I responded instantly, visualizing the ivory trumpet-shaped gown prominently advertised in this season’s Inside Weddings. “It’s okay, but you have to be pretty tall to pull off that style.” There was a pause on the other end of the line as my mother tried to figure out how I knew exactly which dress she meant without even seeing the picture she had clipped.

Hello, my name is Audrey, and I am a bridal magazine geek.

Go on, ask me if I’m engaged. Well, I will be eventually, and that’s a good enough reason to start planning now, right? You can find me surreptitiously passing the magazine aisle ten or fifteen times in the local drugstore, pretending that I’m looking for the “kitchen gadgets” section. “No new issue of Brides yet?” I think after each pass. “The Knot? Modern Bride?” With each negative. I become more frantic; what if there are no new magazines?

Finally, I throw myself on the mercy of the nearest hapless employee. “DON’T YOU HAVE MARTHA STEWART WEDDINGS?” I shriek.

“Uh,” replies my victim, trying to disentangle himself from my hysterical grip, “It’s right next to Martha Stewart Living.”

Oh. I rip the magazine off the shelf and retreat.

As I head home, the heart-hammering experience of the drugstore only builds. The anticipation of cracking the cover! Will this high-gloss book of dreams truly show me the ultimate dress? Ninety-seven amazingly useful ways to save? The accessory to end all accessories?

Finally, I make it home, and shut myself in my room before my roommate can see I have indulged in yet another ten-dollar magazine I can’t afford. I systematically tackle my prey, dog-earing especially compelling pages.

I expertly navigate the distinctions between channel-set and pave shanks, mermaid and dropped-waist silhouettes, burgundy and cranberry votives, and varying shades of

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white, off-white, ivory, cream, eggshell … I am a walking wedding encyclopedia. When I have compiled several fully dog-eared piles, I sort through them again, tear out the pages which make the second cut, and sort them into my wedding-planning folder along with printouts from such online meccas as The Knot and Brides.com. Even websites are not safe from my frenzy.

And yes, I have a wedding-planning folder. It’s one of those accordion-style types that has tabs for different categories. Mine includes: rings, dresses, accessories, venues, décor, catering, honeymoon, and advice. I’ve left out photography and music (because even the highestgloss advertisement won’t reveal much about them), bridesmaid dresses (in an attempt to resist the urge to choose the “perfect” one, and then shove both my 5'2" and 5'10" best friends into it), and invitations (because I need something left to do after we chose the venue, after all). As for the guest list it’s far too early to have? Don’t check the “miscellaneous” spreadsheet in the unmarked folder on my desktop.

But this is not just some sentimental obsession! It has a greater purpose, a deeper meaning! I have a dream!

A dream that someday I will throw a 200-guest burgundy and gold soiree in an architectural salvage warehouse!

A dream that I will wear a blue dress down the aisle! A dream that my bridesmaids and I will bond over manipedis! My magazines allow me to dream. I can choose everything, imagine anything, explore my deepest desires (to be unique!), my values (recycled-paper invitations, local organic fare), and even those preferences I am even embarrassed to admit to myself (sometimes I almost like those awful poofy ballgowns!) As many aspects of my life change rapidly, bridal magazines let me stay in touch with my identity and try on new ones in safe, private ways. I know that someday I will have to make final decisions rooted in reality. But until then, I can have as many dream weddings as I can imagine, and be as many fairy-tale, modern, sexy, adventurous, blushing, bold brides as I want to be.

And after that? Well, my best friend is still looking. f

I could be at a quilting fair and inevitably I would be standing with my back pressed against some batting, discussing the finer points of someone’s sex life.

The Doctor Is In Story by Nikol Hasler, Photo by Kat Berger

“People really do these things?” She whispers as she barely grazes a pink glitter strap-on with her fingertips and I consider a three pack of the new vibrating condoms on the market. I can’t see much point to getting them in flavored, as a vibration in the throat seems less than comfortable.

This shop, which is less than half a mile from my house, carries only a tiny taste of what is available on the toy market, but their movie rentals span a sizeable warehouse with all sorts of specialty genres. Having not even made it past the edible lingerie, I am reconsidering our day trip and thinking we should get only the essentials and get the heck out.

She had been cutting my hair in my kitchen when the subject came up, as it always seems to with me. I’m not complaining, really. I don’t mind hearing about how difficult it has been to get the new girlfriend to really let go of her inhibitions. I am genuinely interested in the way certain positions seem to cause my friend a lot of abdominal cramping. I don’t bat an eye when the voices lower and I am on the receiving end of classified nakietime information. It’s only when I consider that I am the only one that these people talk to this way that I start to wonder what it means about me.

I used to beat myself up over it. I would come away from a girl’s day out at the antique stores, having freshly discussed the alarming raise in the instance in STIs in middle schools and this old, nun voice would creep up on me. “There you go again! You harlot!” fussy old Sister Stodge would lay into me. But then the sister would have her own questions about masturbation. Even the characters chastising me in my head really just wanted to dish about the one subject I seem to just draw people into a comfort zone over.

I am a total sex geek. I’m not a know-it-all, and I’m so tired of defending myself against the uppity folks who believe one ought to have an education in something before opening one’s mouth, but that isn’t to say that I am not learning new things all the time, or that I have a foot in the door of the sex industry. All I am is a woman with an interest and the ability to get people to say things out loud that they usually keep clammed up in their panty drawers.

“Yes, people do these things,” I say.

I smile, handing her a pair of crotchless panties as her eyes widen and she carefully tests the openings of panties on hangers. As a freshly married recent graduate of a Christian Missionary College, I expect more resistance to the items I put into her hands. Had we not just discussed the effects that her new medications are having on her libido, and had her mother not called her twice in the last hour to see if she is making a grandbaby yet, that resistance might have come.

That night, as I settle in with my stack of reference materials in search of the best way to help fluffybutterfly92 in Middle of Nowhere, America, figure out why her boyfriend can’t seem to keep an erection, I wonder about my friend as she tries on her new attire for her husband.

Am I just some pervert in her eyes now? Will things be strained next time we get together for coffee? Was she just being polite by joining me at the store, and what was is like for her to see me in my element, recommending the kind of lubricants that would help her create lubricant of her own? I don’t have to sit long with those thoughts before my phone is flashing a new text message.

“When do we go back? He likes the socks with the bows!”

I adjust my glasses on my nose, pat myself on the back, and think there may be a place for a bad girl like me after all. f

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All aboard the “Magical Mystery Tour” en route from London to Liverpool.

Now They’re Sixty-Four Story by Jack Boulware, Illustration by John Reddinger A grazing sheep lifts its head as two buses roar through the English countryside, blaring loud music. If this sheep understood language, it might recognize the lyrics: “Close your eyes and I’ll kiss you, tomorrow I’ll miss you!” These are the Magical Mystery Tour buses, traveling from London to a week-long Beatles festival in Liverpool.

The tour’s Pied Piper is Charles F. Rosenay, a Connecticut DJ with dyed blond hair who has hosted these excursions for 18 years. I sit with Rosenay and he excitedly describes a worldwide circuit of festivals and tribute bands named Fab Faux and Banned on the Run. I don’t know exactly what to think. I mean, the Beatles were a great band. But they broke up 30 years ago. Two of them are dead, another got knighted, and who knows what happened to Ringo.

The fans chatter and swap trivia. This $2,500 trip is their biggest of the year. Most are friendly and middle-aged, wearing ’60s-style granny sunglasses. Some are collectors, others are here to meet “dignitaries.”

Rosenay also produces a Rolling Stones-themed tour.

So what’s the difference between Beatles and Stones fans?

“Stones fans party a little more. They’re hung over every day.” He thinks a moment. “Stones fans also don’t want to hear anything about the Beatles.”

Beatles fans hate being compared to Star Trek fans, but both groups share a similar insane enthusiasm. One woman is on her ninth trip. Some married couples first met each other on the tour. A gray-haired man wearing a John Lennon T-shirt approaches Rosenay, and asks if he can play his audio cassettes.

“Wait a while,” says Rosenay.

“But these are a set,” says the fan, revealing his meticulously packaged homemade tapes. “With Gerry and the Pacemakers.”

“In a while. The videos are playing right now. It’s better if they can both watch and listen at the same time.”

The guy nods, and takes his seat. Soon, he will get to play his music.

Rosenay turns to me: “You gotta be diplomatic.”

We stop at a roadside restaurant for a remarkably bland English lunch. I feel left out. I wonder, will there ever be music nostalgia for my generation? Will I ever tour the sights and smells of the hometown of Aerosmith?

After a ferry ride across the Mersey River to Liverpool, a woman runs off the boat, falls to her knees, kisses the ground, and exclaims: “I made it! I can’t believe I’m here!

We’re in the Holy Land!” Locals waiting for the ferry watch this scene without expression. Happens every year.

There are certain rules if you want to be a Beatles tribute band. Rule 1: Sound exactly like the Beatles. This is God’s music. Don’t ruin it. Rule 2: Look exactly like the Beatles. Mop-tops, pointy boots, vintage guitars. The amplifiers, strangely, can be modern. Rule 3: Guitar cords shouldn’t pop out of the amps, as in the unfortunate case of the first band, The Remnants.

Headlining the evening is Neil Innes, songwriter for the Monty Python group and genius behind the Rutles, a Beatles parody act from the late 1970s. Between songs, Innes describes how strange it is that the Rutles have become part of the Beatles culture. After all, he was making fun of the Beatles at the time. He asked George Harrison for advice, he says, and Harrison told him why not, “It’s all part of the same sloop.” The crowd sings along with each Rutles tune. Who cares if it’s parody, it’s still the Beatles!

Most of the Atlantic Ocean’s shipping comes through the shipyards of Liverpool, a raucous working-class city with a regional accent similar to Scottish. But tourism has now surpassed the shipping industry. Half a million people come here each year because of the Beatles. Down in the narrow streets of the Cavern Quarter, nightlife is booming.

The reconstructed Cavern Club, alleged birthplace of the Beatles, features a tribute band from Brazil.

But after hearing nothing but Beatles for 14 hours straight, I need a break. They were just a band. They didn’t walk on the moon. I wander the gray streets without purpose. Tourists are discouraged from going out after dark, but the most threatening presence tonight is packs of teenagers – sturdy girls in poofy hair and too-tight dresses, and pimply hooligan boys in untucked shirts. One drunken girl stumbles up to some guys and slurs, “You’re gorgeous! And you’re gorgeous!” She points at me. “And you are, too!”

I come upon a roofless church, majestically pillared with ivy crawling out the windows. A plaque on the wall reads: “This church, completed in 1831, suffered serious bomb damage during the blitz of May, 1941, was purchased by the city from the Church of England in 1968 and together with the gardens which surround it is maintained as a place of rest and tranquility.”

It hits me. This is the essence of post-WWII Liverpool – the church, the Beatles, the Cavern Club, all of it. Nothing ever dies in Liverpool, it just crumbles into history. And someone will always want to look at the corpse. f

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Secret Keeper Interview with Frank Warren by Deborah D. Lattimore

Frank Warren is obsessed with secrets. He receives more than a thousand a week in his mailbox. What began as a temporary community art project has evolved into PostSecret.com, which displays these anonymous postcards from all over the world.

How has hearing all these secrets changed your life, and your sense of private and public?

From the over 200,000 secrets I have read on postcards, I have learned three things. One, young people today are drawing a new and very different line between their private and public lives. Two, each one of us has a secret that would break your heart. If we could remember and remind ourselves of this, I believe the world would be more compassionate and maybe more peaceful. Three, large numbers of us pee in the shower.

Since first introducing PostSecret, have you noticed any changes in the kinds of secrets people send to you?

The secrets that I post act as a model for future confessions. So I try to display secrets every week that reflect the full range of our emotions – the funny, sexual, hopeful, remorseful, and soulful.

How many postcards do you receive?

I get about 1,000 postcards a week. Not long ago I asked Kathy, my mail carrier, what her favorite secret was. She said it was the one that read, “I used to work at the post office and we used to read everyone’s post cards.”

Do you have any secrets?

I have one of my secrets in every book. Kind of a Hitchcock thing, I guess.

What do you think the world would be like if no one had any secrets, if we all said exactly what we felt when we felt it?

Wow, I don’t think I would want to live there.

I believe that keeping secrets is a very human thing and makes our lives more interesting. I believe we all have secrets that we would be better off sharing with someone we trust. But I think that we all have secrets that are best kept private. f

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Football Fixation How one zealous spectator became an authority on the New England Patriots Story by Kyle Psaty, Illustration by Jeff Coleman

There was a time in the early 1990s when Bob Hyldburg thought he was pretty knowledgeable about the NFL’s New England Patriots.

That was before he became obsessed with New England’s statistical history, a pursuit that eventually earned him a side job working for the National Football League as an on-site, game-day statistician.

Today, he’s arguably the biggest single-team geek following professional sports in America.

I met him during the 2007 NFL season, while walking through the halls of Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Mass., with former Patriots defensive back Ronnie Lippett.

As assistant coordinator of the Patriots Alumni Club, accompanying former players on private suite appearances is a regular game-day activity for me. We were entering the next suite on our list when a man with a salt-and-pepper beard materialized, thanking Ronnie for meeting with him a few weeks earlier.

The stranger was quite cordial and businesslike, and Lippett was conversational, so the interaction caught me off guard for its normalcy. Usually fans just drool or stutter when they see former players in person. I also noticed right away that he was wearing an NFL credential granting him access to pretty much the entire stadium, including the suite level we were on.

Later, Lippett told me he was really impressed with the stats this guy, Hyldburg, had compiled about his playing career.

When I approached him to learn more, Hyldburg agreed to meet me at his office in Braintree. Although his number-crunching hobby has become something more, he still makes his bread as an accountant.

“Now that I’ve been doing so much work on this Patriots stuff, there probably isn’t a question about the Patriots that I don’t know [the answer to],” he told me. “I don’t know how many prizes I’ve won that I’ve given to other people because I knew some answers.”

When you win trivia contests as often as the 49-yearold Hyldburg does, giving prizes away is the best way to show friends you’re not crazy. A big-screen TV, a chance at a $250,000 basketball shot – he hit the rim – and dozens of victories later, Hyldburg is a bit more confident than he was in the ’90s.

His obsession with breaking down and sorting the team’s sizable record of statistics began in 1994. In an effort to memorize the jersey numbers of his favorite past

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Pats, Hyldburg got his hands on a Patriots media guide – something every professional sports team compiles as a reference for the press. He was shocked to discover the jersey numbers for about 60 former players weren’t listed.

Fourteen years later, a mildly neurotic fixation with filling in statistical gaps in the team’s 48-year history has grown into a massive volume. Somewhere along the way, Hyldburg decided to publish the work.

Total Patriots: The Definitive Historical Book of the Patriots is slated for hardcover publication by Triumph Books in 2009, but Hyldburg says it’s been “nearing completion” for over a decade. He also says he doesn’t have any idea when it became a book. For him, it’s been a puzzle for which more pieces kept turning up.

“In the process of doing all this, I found numerous errors in the media guide,” he says. “Probably fifty.”

Patriots spokesman and Vice President of Media Relations Stacey James couldn’t verify that statement, but he has been impressed by Hyldburg’s dedication to the team’s history.

“There’s a few guys on our statistics crew that certainly have the same type of interest in statistical analysis, and have published books,” said James. “But the commitment that Bob has made to this project and the time that he has committed to something that he clearly has a lot of passion for – I’d say he’s unique in that.”

James went on to explain that many of Hyldburg’s most interesting submissions to the Patriots are historical timelines of individual records. These begin with the initial records set in the team’s adolescence and chronicle each new benchmark up to the present day.

It seems he also finds the common threads in each historical fact and files them under every related category.

For example, he could tell you who was the third receiver to break the record for longest touchdown catch. If that catch happened to be made in December, he could also tell you who was the next receiver to catch a longer touchdown pass in the month of December.

Hyldburg has stats for all of the nearly one thousand current and former Patriots players, and he estimates spending more than fifteen thousand hours of his free time researching and compiling all the information. For the mathematically challenged, that amounts to more than seven years’ worth of forty-hour workweeks, or approximately twenty hours per week since the project began. Whenever I find an obscure player in my work, I

call Hyldburg or send him an email to test his knowledge.

I’ve never stumped him.

But there have been roadblocks along the way for the self-acknowledged math nerd. Imagine, for example, what it’s like living with him. With so much time spent thumbing through pages, checking and re-checking facts, how can he find time to mow the lawn?

Hyldburg confessed that his wife has “asked me a thousand times, ‘When’s this book going to be done?’ The only thing that I’ve been able to tell her is that if you get any nonfiction reference book and look at the number of people involved, you’ll see. I try to give her perspective that this is a one-man project.”

What makes the mammoth undertaking more staggering, and perhaps more frighteningly obsessive, is that much of the information will never make it into the book because it is simply too obscure. For example, he’s given me an appendix of Patriots players who grew up in Massachusetts that I don’t think anyone other than myself would have much use for.

“The book will be about six hundred pages,” said Hyldburg at our initial meeting. He sounds frustrated. “I sent twelve hundred pages to the first publisher and said, ‘Here’s everything; we can edit from here.’ They sent it right back and said, ‘Edit it and then we’ll get together.’

“Some of this stuff is very interesting and very dry.”

Coming from Hyldburg, the words “interesting” and “very dry” gel in a sentence without seeming oxymoronic.

His enthusiasm seems to still be waxing. I asked him what he’ll do with his free time when the text is finally in print.

“Keep updating it,” he replied. “Get a website. Come up with new trivia questions. Meet more new people”

If there’s one thing all fanatics have in common, it’s a senseless and seemingly endless devotion to whatever they’re fanatical about, regardless of the monetary or time commitments. As long as the team keeps playing, new players will continue to become part of the legacy. His puzzle box will grow ever bigger, and he’ll continue to piece it together. The project isn’t about completion. It’s about the journey. f

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