Chapter 42: Fancy Footwork and Missed Steps

Monday, November 11, 1985

Darla and I caught up a bit in the evening. She had no problem with my dating Amy on Friday. Since Jas and I were going to see the Hubbard Street Dance Company on Thursday (none of the others had decided to join us, which made it a nice couple’s outing), Darla and I decided to maybe see a movie on Wednesday (pending figuring out what movie) and perhaps also do something Saturday.

I didn’t get the feeling that she was ready to end the chase. Whether she was getting more ready to be caught was something we’d have to figure out as we went. I couldn’t do much ‘catching’ as of yet, anyway.

Oh, there was plenty we could do, and perhaps we would. We didn’t have to go from nothing to a home run in one date, and only home runs were thoroughly ruled out. And ... who knows? Maybe home runs being off the table would make second or third base more likely than they would have been before.

A bunch of us gathered in the early evening for that most important college student ritual: picking our classes and schedules for next semester. Most of us already knew about what we wanted — I certainly did — but actually pinning it down and coordinating schedules was work.

Everyone in Martial Arts was planning to return, and I felt certain we would all get in. That made for one easy class pick.

After that, it got interesting.

Those who were aiming more for Business Analysis all needed Business Analysis 303: Statistical Methods, Finance 341: Business Finance, and Marketing 321: Marketing. Those were normally first-semester Junior-year classes on a standard pace.

Sherry and Darla joined us for everything but Statistical Methods. Neither had the math for that yet. Angie promised to whip them into shape on math fast, and I imagined she could. Sherry was plenty smart enough. She just hadn’t been with a group of overachievers like us. As for Darla, she was only one semester away from having the math, and Sherry would be in the same course with her.

Lindsay was in for all three. I hoped she would get in. It was a shame we hadn’t synced up this fall, but we had plenty of time to make that up.

I should have been taking Business Data Processing or its equivalent this semester, but I was free of that. I promised to join the study group all of the others would set up. That was definitely a class that could go in one ear and out the other, as far as I was concerned. Learning to program mid-1980s computers would be irrelevant for nearly our entire group. None of us would be doing much of that.

Well, not Mel, but she wasn’t involved in this. And not Angie, maybe, but she was in her own world nearly entirely, with only the occasional overlap (Statistical Methods, Intermediate Accounting, and Finance, this semester, which was high for her). Her business courses were on the Finance track, but she was still more on the Math track anyway, devouring courses at a pace that had her adviser alternately thrilled and concerned.

At least some people considered her a legitimate prodigy, if a very nuts-and-bolts-oriented sort of prodigy. She probably wasn’t going to advance abstract mathematics or produce world-changing proofs, but she would be able to read things at that level, very likely, and might be one of the best at either finance-oriented math or math-oriented finance.

Quantitative Analysis, in other words, as she had planned. Not a new field, but not a well-developed one. Angie was, almost certainly, the best undergraduate A&M had ever had in that emerging field. She wasn’t the most educated, since there were a handful of seniors and juniors ahead of her, though she was closing on them rapidly. Her ceiling was far higher than theirs, though.

My schedule left me with three open spots for electives. I took Accounting 327: Intermediate Accounting, because most of the others (including Angie) wanted or needed that. My second elective, from my computer science minor, was CS 311: Analysis of Algorithms. I was jumping ahead a year, but that was one of the most theory-based computer science courses, far more to do with math than actual computers. Angie joined me in that because it fit her way of looking at things. I’d struggled with it as an undergrad, but blew it out of the water in grad school. My knowledge was dusty, but it gave me at least one class I knew backward and forward this semester.

My third elective was a pain in the butt to decide on. After much thought, I decided on Political Science 345: Politics of Science and Technology. That seemed like a great fit for someone who might be trying to work right on the line between the two. If ‘Marshall Investments’ (or whatever we ended up calling it) coalesced into (or included) a venture capital firm, as it might well, we would likely be actively trying to influence policy, both to benefit the firms we funded and to benefit society. That obviously assumed that we stuck to our plan and didn’t fund firms we thought would be bad for society. I thought we would, but that required constant focus on the goal.

Tuesday, November 12, 1985

The gods of scheduling had been merciful. We hadn’t had any show tickets during the time I was in the hospital or was the most incapacitated.

Tonight, however, was the next show in our Broadway series: ‘Noises Off’. I would have been fairly bummed had I missed it. The others had heard of it, but only in the vague way that we were all aware of what was doing well on Broadway thanks to being in Drama.

I had become aware of it for the first time when it showed at UT. My guess was that would be within a week or two of now in either direction. It was almost certainly part of this same tour.

I refused to spoil the show for the others. I’d gone in cold and felt like that was a great plan for them. The most I would say was that it was a classic farce and also a great play about actors, and would be particularly entertaining for those of us who had been through rehearsals and shows.

The show itself happens in three acts. Act One is during the final rehearsal for the play-within-the-play ‘Nothing On’, a sex farce. None of the actors is anywhere near ‘final rehearsal’ ready (Steffie Smith would have had our heads if we were as poor a month before showtime, not a day), props are mishandled, cues are missed, and the director does not handle the situation well.

Taken by itself, Act One is really not that funny. For fans of British humor, it’s ‘funny enough,’ in a dry and satiric sort of way. It’s likely much more funny for theater-types — we all roared at parts of it — but I had loved it long before I ever auditioned for anything.

Indeed, I had heard disgruntled theatergoers say ‘I simply don’t understand this British humor’ at that UT show, and some of them left before the second act.

That was a huge mistake. Act Two — set a month later and seen from backstage — relies on Act One to have told you how the show was supposed to go. That’s important, because the actors are incapable of making it actually go that way, both because they’re still unready and because some of them are now at significant odds with each other. The number and nature of the resulting mishaps creates unending hilarity.

Act Three is a natural progression from Act Two. If actors are not necessarily on the same page in Act Two, Act Three is often nearly outright warfare, with actors setting each other up for all manner of awful and embarrassing failures. Things go so far off the rails that the more adept actors simply start ad-libbing everything they can in order to produce a somewhat coherent show — even if that show isn’t even vaguely the show they were intended to perform.

Mel and Cammie served as our ‘control group,’ and they loved it. Not in the way we loved it, because Jas, Angie, Paige, and I had a totally different perspective, but they loved it, which perhaps vindicated first-life Steve’s love of the show.

We all agreed (even Mel and Cammie): if Steffie hadn’t seen ‘Noises Off’, she should. Soon. As quickly as possible, really. Paige volunteered to call her and tell her to spare no expense in driving to a show, presuming it was still touring Texas.

Sadly, while I knew there was to be a movie version of the show, I also knew that the one in my first life had been, at best, a middling success. Too much material and not handled as well as one would have wished. It might be better in this universe, but I wasn’t going to hold my breath.

Wednesday, November 13, 1985

Today was the day all of us sophomores put in our schedules for the next semester. They had changed systems yet again, and we wouldn’t know whether we got the sections we had requested for a few weeks.

It was a bummer, but hopefully it should be fine.

Tonight was another GSS meeting. I wasn’t going, since Darla and I were seeing a movie, but Jas was going along with the others.

In truth, Jas and I were starting to feel a trifle irrelevant, even though we had plenty of friends and were warmly welcomed. GSS needed ‘allies’ less than they had back in the day when the lawsuit was still controversial. Things had progressed the way I hoped they would, with the vast majority of Aggie students simply accepting the verdict and moving on.

We would continue to go off and on, but the gay members of our family would be much more essential to these meetings, particularly because it seemed entirely possible that either Mel or Angie (or, potentially, both, in different years) might one day lead the organization. They both had a lot of friends, and Angie in particular had become adept at making male friends, potentially bridging the never-quite-settled gap between the interests of ‘gays’ and ‘lesbians’.

Some of that bridging was gently poking fun at people who got too worked up about whether a male symbol was bigger than a female symbol, whether one group ‘had it easier’ than the other, and so forth. Both ‘sides’ had far more in common than they had to fight over. Ruffled feathers could be soothed if one merely acknowledged that the other side had good intentions and hadn’t meant any slight.

Movie pickings weren’t the best, but at least there were a few decent options. I decided on ‘Better Off Dead’. It wasn’t the best of the 1980’s John Cusack-starring movies (that would, for me, be ‘Say Anything’ by a comfortable margin), but it was quite good. I shouldn’t know about ‘Say Anything’, but I did anyway.

When I arrived at her dorm at six, Darla was ready, wearing a knee-length green dress that definitely flattered her. I led her to the car, and we drove to a burger place near the movie that I’d heard good things about. It was perfectly fine and I wouldn’t have any hesitation about going back.

The drive, and our dinner, was similar to our other dates. We were two friends talking about everything and also flirting, sometimes shamelessly.

If there was a new insight, it wasn’t that Darla was ready to be caught. She was playing that close to the vest, if she even knew the answer herself. However, it seemed clear to me that Darla wanted the chase, and that meant perhaps wanting a bit more pressure from me.

I would do my best, but I still wasn’t entirely sure of what ‘pressure’ looked like. We would see.

After dinner, I drove over to the theater, bought tickets, and we settled in. It wasn’t too crowded, so we had a row to ourselves.

The movie was about as good as I remembered it being. Since I hadn’t been able to remember any of the plot, I reacted ‘correctly’ to everything.

After the movie finished, she said, “This was really fun! I’m glad you suggested it!”

“I’m glad you enjoyed it!” I said.

We headed out back to the car, holding hands. Once in it, I said, “What do you think?”

She pondered, then said, “Dessert, maybe?”

“That sounds good,” I said. “Maybe dessert and a walk?”

“Oh! I like that,” she said.

I drove back to the campus and parked as close to halfway between her dorm and the MSC as I could. We walked to the MSC, holding hands, and went to a late-night snack place they’d opened this semester. Nothing nearly as good as Hullabaloo Cafe, but it gave students an option for ice cream, shakes, and some more substantial food late at night.

We got our treats (a single-scoop cone each) and took them with us, nibbling away. Our walk took us through the park we’d visited on another date. We talked about the movie, then classes, as we did. We stopped for a few kisses, but none of them caught fire. The cold of the ice cream wasn’t the reason, either. I felt like she wanted them to catch fire, and I did, too, but we just weren’t there.

By the time we’d gotten back to the parking lot, it seemed obvious: if there had been the possibility of us having a moment tonight, we had lost it somewhere between the MSC and here. I simply passed my car by and walked her back to her dorm, holding hands.

The kiss at her door was pretty warm — it might have been the warmest yet, really — but it wasn’t enough to change the course of the evening.

She gave me a little wave as she stepped in. So did Louise, who looked like she was busy with homework.