- Home

- The Show

- Production Team
  -- Beth Amante - Producer/Host
  -- Lane Asher - President/Director
  -- Curt Dillinger - Video Technician
  -- Lawrence Slovak - Sound Technician
  -- Bob Warnowski - Helper

- Contact Us

 -------------------------------------
      Previous       Next
 -------------------------------------

During the latter half of my sophomore year, I wasn’t doing very well at school.  My grade-point average hit the lowest ever and I had to drop two classes so I wouldn’t flunk out.  I entered the University of Michigan expecting to be a Chemistry major.  Prior to college, to me, chemistry was alive; it was reactions, explosions, working in the lab.  The way my professors presented it to me as an undergraduate, they thought chemistry was books and equations and tests. It had no relationship whatsoever to the field that I loved.  I was bored.  I saw no future in it and thus I saw no future for me.  The only joy I had was Ping-Pong with Jane. I figured I would just drop out of school and find something else. 

My friend Bill and I had hatched this plan whereby we’d buy some property and open up a dog-boarding kennel called Woodland Creek Kennels.  We were going to build geodesic domes, pipe in music and have pickup and delivery.  It was a can’t-miss proposition.  Somehow, my parents weren’t as thrilled.  Even though I hadn’t done very well in school, they insisted that I find some way to keep going.

They told me that I had to keep taking classes, find something that interested me.  They wanted me to take at least one class in the summer to make up for the credits I lost by dropping those two classes.  If I took one class per semester I wouldn’t lose my enrollment.  It seemed like a fair compromise.  Also, it meant that I got to stay at the U of M over the summer.  That was better than OK with me because I had enjoyed my previous summer at Michigan so much that it was inconceivable to me to go home, or anywhere else for that matter. 

The summer after Katlyn had its own set of rules.  I had a job, a place to live and no pressure.  It was the ultimate in freedom.  I took a class in Science Fiction.  It was a great class.  I got to read Science Fiction for a credit.  And it was taught by a genuine alien!  This was long before they got good at mimicking the human form.  This poor guy had a barrel chest, no teeth in his lower jaw and somebody forgot to tell them that eyebrows on humans only grow to a certain length and then stop.  His must have been two or three inches long.  They were always flopping down into his eyes.

When he spoke, it was always raspy and whistley.  Whatever they used for a voice synthesizer was not in good repair.  Still, the class was interesting. The reading list was some classics and some avant-garde, leaning heavily toward stories about friendly aliens.  I guess it was his job to prep the population for their ultimate exposure.

I’ll never forget the day he explained humor to us.  He told us that jokes are actually “thought viruses” passed on and replicated.  They mutate.  Some people are carriers.  Some people are the sources of infection. When people are “infected” with a joke, they immediately turned around and spread the “infection” to as many others as they could.  You built up the equivalent of antibodies so that if somebody tried to infect you with the same joke, you wouldn’t find it funny any longer.  Somebody asked him what the purpose of these thought viruses were.  He phumphed around, finally explaining something about “getting the distribution channel ready,” it didn’t make much sense.

He encouraged us, not only to read, but to write Science Fiction as well.  I followed his instructions and got my first story published that fall.  It was a love story, of all things, between a sodium atom and a chlorine atom called “Ion, my love.”

That was also the summer of Liz Mitchell, the good girl.  Liz lived in the co-op, kitty-corner from my room.  She was about two inches taller than me and came from Glenview, which I was told was a ritzy part of the northern suburbs of Chicago.  She was a pretty girl, with long dark hair.  She had a wonderful voice and always dressed nicely.  I liked her, I was attracted to her but somehow, she never took me seriously.  I know she was Jewish so maybe she was one of those anti-Semitic Jews.  Or maybe it was because of the dog-boarding kennel.  While she never came out and said it, I could never shake the feeling that she thought she was better than me and that I would never amount to anything.