Anti-versities- First of Three in a Series....

[captainsblog]

Remembrances are coming fast and furious these days. Cornell has been dive-bombing me with notifications about our virtual 40th class reunion in a few weeks.  Other than meeting one friend one year off campus during the event, I have maintained a perfect record of never setting foot on the grounds during that bacchanal of drinking, nostalgia and fundraising.  Oddly, this year I'm half inclined to sign up, because two longago friends from The Sun are featured speakers at or before the formal weekend event. (I tried getting in touch with one of them a few years back; she helpfully replied, Who the hell are YOU? Maybe the mask will refresh her recollection somehow.)

But that's all in the STILL TO COME category. This very week, more or less, will mark two 35th anniversaries and a 75th birthday which will give me perfect writing material for three days this week.  We'll begin with the one neither of us can put an express date on,  but it was right around now:

Thirty-five years ago, Eleanor and I went out for the first time.

We'd known each other a few months prior, from both joining Rochester's largest United Methodist church a year or so apart.  Asbury is a warm and welcoming congregation (these days, even to LGBTQs despite its denominations continuing medieval prohibitions) that has long been trapped in a High Church/Old Money body.  Back then, adult Sunday School classes could trace their membership roots back to the 1940s. For the then-young adults we both still were, none of these United Metamucil pits had any appeal. We wound up in a "class to be in until you picked a class" class that many 20-to-early 40somethings had founded soon after they joined. We remain friends with really just one of them, but it served as our springboard to meeting more people in a very large place and, eventually, each other.

I was dating another woman in the class when Eleanor first started coming; she had an off-campus BF of her own originally, but both of those relationships ended their courses. We each wrote and taught a class of our own for the group, and got insights into our backgrounds and thinking as we went.  We found we were both children of older parents, each the youngest of three kids, and that our tastes were equally eccentric.  By May of 1986, it seemed the time to take it beyond Hi howya doin, and somehow we wound up in a Rochester cinema for a film that isn't one that Harry would have met Sally at:



Two years after the real 1984 (and the disturbing but wondrous filming of it done that year with John Hurt and Richard Burton), we were watching Terry Gilliam's own view of a dystopic world.  Gilliam was always close to the darkest of Python humor, much of it coming out in his often comic-horrific animations, and the movie's ending features one of the most iconic and forgotten of all romantic exchanges in the history of cinema:

SAM: You don't exist any more. I've killed you. Jill Layton is dead.

JILL: Care for a bit of necrophilia?

We left the cinema, knowing that neither of us would ever be bored by the other.  It took a few months to get her to her first Mets game, a few after that for a proposal, and and well into 1987 for mawwiage to wesult.

Somehow, despite having a DVD catalog of over 1,000 films under our roof plus endless streaming choices now, we did not have this Brazil in the house. (We DO have the travelogue series of that name from fellow Python Michael Palin, but that's not nearly as good.)  Late last week, when these observances started coming home to me, I decided to remedy that, and the DVD of the Gilliam film arrived at my office a few minutes ago. I told Eleanor, who was not having a good day yesterday, that I'd picked this to observe this occasion, and she wibbled. We will be watching it after finishing off The Nevers first half and a ton of other things we have backlogged, but just having it, as a remembrance of how far we've come, is the important thing.