Chapter 22: Movies and Music

Tuesday, September 18, 1984

It turned out that I’d been prescient in picking Hitchcock to rent last weekend. The cinema club was doing a 6-film Hitchcock festival on Friday and Saturday nights. We all decided that, if we concentrated and stayed focused, we could get enough work done to allow us to go.

The Hitchcock films being shown were ‘Vertigo’, ‘Lifeboat’, ‘Psycho’, ‘Rebecca’, and ‘Dial M For Murder’. I’d seen three of those. None of the others had seen more than one of them.

That was only five films. The sixth wasn’t actually a Hitchcock film at all, but rather ‘High Anxiety’, a 1977 Mel Brooks film that was a loving parody of all things Hitchcock. Angie and I were the only two of us who’d seen it.

It looked like a lot of fun! Between that and the football game, we’d be busy goofing off this weekend.

Wednesday, September 19, 1984

We all got on the phone in the evening with the goal of starting to pull the ‘Annie’ plan together. Most of the parents were in from the start, but some were dragging their feet for one reason or another. The Rileys, for instance, were apparently planning a holiday trip. It wouldn’t cover all of the days, but it might conflict with someone else’s schedule.

I caught up with Sheila and Jess along the way. Sheila was stressing about her classes, while Jess was still coasting. She hadn’t gotten any nibbles yet on the acting front, but apparently her agent thought ‘something’ might come up ‘any time now.’

I didn’t get Marshall. He had an answering machine, though, and I left him a message. It’d be good to see him. It’d be good to see Amelia, too!

Thursday, September 20, 1984

It was another football weekend. A&M was playing the (hopefully) hapless Iowa State Cyclones. I lined up for tickets early and got ‘seats’ not far from where we’d been for UTEP.

It looked to be a fun weekend. We would work and study on Sunday. Our first exams were coming up, after all, and we wanted to be ready.

Marshall left us a message saying that he was definitely interested and would check with Amelia and some friends of his. All he needed was the date. Trying to put together too large a group might be impossible. Besides that, we’d all be sitting quietly watching the show, so sitting together didn’t matter that much. If we were there on the same day, though, we could go to dinner beforehand, hang out at intermission, talk after the show, and so forth.

It all made sense to me. I suspected he’d be inviting some of his Booker T. Washington buddies, and that was a good thing. He should. Hopefully, he could stay friends with as many of them as possible.

I made a mental note to try to call him back when I could. I was pretty sure he, like Cal and Andy, was redshirting. If not, it’d be nice to catch a Tulane game if that was somehow possible. We weren’t getting over to New Orleans anytime soon, though, and they weren’t on television here very often.

Thirty years from now, it would have been fairly easy to watch a Tulane game. Now? Unless one traveled to the game, options were extremely limited.

If anything was going to get in our way studying-wise, it unexpectedly appeared that movies might turn out to be the culprit. We’d been seeing a lot, and here was yet another. ‘Cepheid Variable,’ A&M’s science fiction club, was showing ‘Heavy Metal’ tonight. I convinced everyone to go on the strength of saying that, even decades later, it was still notable as an animated movie pitched at adults, complete with nudity and lots of violence.

Some of the sequences had held up better than others over the years, but overall I’d felt it was still good when I’d last seen it (roughly 2019). My inability to settle on a year got me some grief from Jas and Angie, both of whom found it irrelevant just how far in the future it’d been since I’d ‘last’ seen something.

The movie was a hit with everyone. Cammie liked it the least, though she said some of the more gruesome sequences were a good excuse to snuggle up close with Mel. Mel, for her part, agreed that that was a very good thing.

We all agreed that the ‘Taarna’ sequence was our favorite. Even though it was arguably both the most violent and most gruesome, Taarna herself was a kick-ass heroine (and also easy on the eyes), and the sequence was extremely visual, with very little dialogue.

The whole thing was very much ‘not for kids.’ In this case, that was a good thing. Paige, in particular, relished the idea of ‘animation for adults’ and wanted to see if there were more things out there like this. There were a few (several of Ralph Bakshi’s films came to mind immediately), but not all that many, and Bakshi’s work wasn’t all that close to ‘Heavy Metal’ anyway. The ones I was thinking of were definitely for adults, though! And, as a bonus, they already existed!

In a very different vein of animation, but still ‘for adults’ (though much more accessible to younger people than Bakshi’s X-rated films), I was looking forward to being one of the first Americans to ‘discover’ the works of Hayao Miyazaki. ‘Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind’ was out about now, I was pretty sure, but the first English-dubbed version wouldn’t come out for a while — and it was a disaster. Subtitled versions, meanwhile, were far harder to find in 1984 than they would be decades later. Almost no one had the equipment to do ‘fansubs’ yet, nor was it easy to get the movies themselves, and distribution of ‘fansubs’ wasn’t easy, either.

Saturday, September 22, 1984

The Iowa State game was pretty much a snoozer. A&M won 38-17, which made everyone with a date very happy.

Our ears were less happy. UT has a small cannon they fire off after a score (loaded with blanks, of course). A&M, by contrast, has a full-size World War II howitzer. It’s loud! And it’s fired off in the south end zone, right near where we were standing.

No damage done, but that thing is impressive. Howitzer crews must have used some serious ear protection during the war!

The movies were impressive, too. Everyone loved them, though opinions varied as to which was the best. Angie joined Jas and me in picking ‘Vertigo’ as our favorite. Mel preferred ‘Psycho’, which resulted in some teasing (and attempts to reproduce the shower-scene music by both Cammie and Paige). Paige and Cammie preferred ‘Rebecca’, which was my second favorite.

All of us loved ‘High Anxiety’, too. It’s hard to argue with vintage Mel Brooks.

Six Hitchcock(ish) movies in two nights was just about all we could handle (and, according to Paige, about all her butt could handle — which, of course, triggered Angie to handle her butt under the guise of ‘giving it a massage’). That, and we really weren’t used to being out until after two in the morning on back-to-back nights anymore.

Still, we were teenagers, and staying up late was exactly the sort of thing crazy teenagers are supposed to do. Why buck tradition?

Monday, September 24, 1984

We all headed to Rudder Tower, to the same room where the debate had been, to watch Marco Roberts speak at a TAMU Civil Liberties Union meeting. His talk was entitled ‘Human Rights: A Gay Perspective.’

He did a good job with it. As with everything else he did (or so it seemed to me, so far), Marco pitched things in a very even manner, with little drama and many concessions to the more conservative-minded people around him. That said, if you boiled down his talk to its essence, he said, ‘We’re here. We’re gay, and that’s just who we are. And we’re human, too. People need to recognize that, and that we have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness just as much as straight people do.’

He got a warm reception. At least, except from the protesters outside the building. I thought perhaps I spotted our neighbors amongst the protesters, but I wasn’t at all sure of that.

Tuesday, September 25, 1984

We received updated invitations to replace the ‘Save The Date’ invitations we’d gotten for the President’s Endowed Scholar (PES) reception. The reception was to be held on Saturday, October 6th at 7 pm in a large meeting room in the MSC. That was after the football game. I suspected many of the donors would come in for the game and stay for the reception.

It was a risk. If the Aggies didn’t do well, maybe everyone would be in a bad mood. Still, that’s always a risk, and it made things convenient for the ‘Big Money Ags’ who paid the bills both for football and for scholarships, so who could really complain?

We also found out whether they expected our donors to attend. My donor, Malcolm ‘Red’ Bueller, Jr, was planning to be there. So was Angie’s donor, Elizabeth T. ‘Lovie’ Beauford. Jas’s donor, Karl Kleinfelder (no nickname!), would also be there. Paige’s and Mel’s donors were not attending, but they were still alive (and would likely appreciate a note). Cammie’s had passed away years ago.

Angie’s donor attending probably meant that she was fine with Angie, at least if we were correct that the change of donors was because of something about Angie. If it had just been that her original donor wanted his donation going to a specific person, then Ms. Beauford might not know there was anything about Angie to which she might take offense. Perhaps we would find out at the reception.

Jas had our first ‘outsider’ study group tonight. She invited four people from her American Mass Media course. Two were girls (Courtney and Linda), two were guys (Don and Peter). None of them seemed especially memorable, but they were fine.

Jas said that she thought they were some of the more interesting students in her class. All of them were Journalism majors, which meant she might be around them for the next few years.

The whole thing seemed to go well. They set up in the basement living room and came up a couple of hours later.

If we were going to have regular study groups in the basement, we would need to invest in at least a thrift-store couch or two. All we had right now were folding chairs. They did the job for four people studying, but they weren’t at all what we really wanted.

According to Jas, all of them were impressed by the house. Not only that, though. They were impressed that we had a house and weren’t living in a dorm.

We probably wouldn’t have a flood of people over studying anytime soon, but the ice had been broken.