Buckle your seat belts in my blog reading public.  It’s going to be a long read tonight for our fireside chat.  Scroll down and skip the prose for the pictures.

So I promise this will circle back to skiing eventually, but right here we’re going to discuss the aforementioned non-conforming conformity.  Or the conforming non-conformity.  I can’t remember which way it went. Oh well.  Let’s just start.

So up until 8th grade I was major league, out of control obsessed with the Beatles.  I could tell you every song, every album, everything about the band.  I could tell you their history, about their time playing the Reeperbahn in Hamburg.  I mean i took it upon myself to learn what the Reeperbahn even is or was in the days when the Beatles played it.  I loved that band.

When I got to junior high school in the god forsaken hell hole we moved to when I was 12, I found out quickly that liking the Beatles was profoundly uncool.  Not only had I made the mistake of having spent the first four years of my life in the wrong country, but now I was listening to the wrong music.  I was still in my Beatles t-shirt in a sea of New Kids on the Block t-shirts.  But I stuck to my guns through it all.

Well in ninth grade, the New Kids on the Block t-shirts got turned inside out and became Pearl Jam and Red Hot Chili Peppers t-shirts.  I stuck steadfastly to my Beatles until a friend made me a mix tape with a few heavy metal songs on it.  Among them was Unforgiven by Metallica.  I really thought this was a great song and they were very musical.  The guys in the band seemed to have some kind of integrity and their drummer was from Denmark, geographically close to Poland.

Music in general in that time period changed.  Pop went quiet for a while and grunge sort of took over.  Music became serious.  Everyone was angry.  At what I have no idea.

A lot of bands suddenly became famous during the time period like The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Pearl Jam and Nirvana.  Still others got more famous like Metallica and Guns and Roses.

As soon as I kind of declared myself to be a fan of this music, I was labeled a poseur.  No where was this more evident than the song “Under the Bridge” by the Red Hot Chili Peppers.  To this day I consider this to be one of the most perfectly created pieces of music ever created.  I remember sitting in my teenage bedroom just listening to this song.  It made an impact that’s for sure.

But here was the thing.  You couldn’t just like the Red Hot Chili Peppers.  One does not simply like the Chili Peppers FOR ONE SONG.  So I found out at the age of 16.  You weren’t a Chili Peppers fan if you just liked that one song.  You were only a fan if you were a Chili Peppers fan before Under the Bridge.

The same went for Metallica.  “Unforgiven” was very popular at the time, but again, you weren’t a REAL Metallica fan if you only liked that one song.  You could only call yourself a fan if you had listened to Master of Puppets and Kill ‘Em All.  The fact that these albums came out when most of my peers were still carrying Flintstones Lunch Boxes to their fourth grade classes seemed immaterial.

There was this one kid who was a fan of Green Day, before they were really popular, before their songs were played at every single prom and college graduation in the Western Hemisphere, including mine.  He was crazy about Green Day and they were poised for fame.  The band was just there on the edge of it.  I knew that once we all started listening to “his” band, he would let us have it because “he liked them first.”

For what its worth, one of the most memorable moments from my college graduation was hearing Green Day’s “Time of Your Life.”  Somehow it felt like exactly the right thing to hear at exactly the right time.

When I went to college, the whole thing got even worse.  In my freshman year, I fell in with some people who were into hard core music.  Well more specifically, my college roommate, who is still my best friend, her boyfriend at the time was a fan of this music.  At the time I would have called him a friend but now I’d call him an age equal peer whose interests dovetailed with mine.  Slightly.

There wasn’t much to do at our upstate college so we went to a lot of “shows.”  This is how the shows went.  We’d be gathered in a room the size of your average finished basement.  Then a heavily tattooed young man sporting many piercings would take the stage.  He’d make a call out to the spirits and begin to yell into the microphone.  This was the “show.”

After the show, everyone would gather back together.  Usually there was a discussion afterwards about music.  But not one where a person could freely express what they actually thought.  It was more a discussion of which bands had “sold out.”  If you think that means that they sold out every ticket at their show, you’d be wrong.  No, it meant that this band had gone corporate.  They had sold out to “the man.”  Even then I found this talk tiresome and boring.  The conversations would go something like this.  A random group member would name a band.  Inevitably, there would be a chorus of “they sold out.”  OMG, their video was on 120 minutes!!!!!!  (A show at the time on MTV that highlighted lesser known rock acts).  (Deepest eye roll).

I think I might have said at some point that I liked Metallica, which was meant with a chorus of “OMG, they SO sold out.”  They were actually popular and popular things were to be derided.  “Popular” things were only liked by the sheeple.  Being a “nonconformist” meant you didn’t follow the sheeple.

I know if you’ve read all the way down to here, you are very tired of all of this.  Don’t worry.  We’re getting there.

I remember even at the time thinking that all of this talk was downright stupid.  It is the dream of every professional musician to make a living playing music.  Only a small percentage of even professional musicians make enough money to live on from their music.  I guess once they did, there would be a bunch of haters nearby to judge them.

After all of this, my taste in music basically became a state secret.  I NEVER shared this with anyone.  I mean why would I after being so harshly judged for it, right?

Then something kind of interesting happened and its connected to skiing.  Thank you for patiently waiting for this all of reach a conclusion.  The ski resorts blast music a lot of times on the slopes.  It adds to the general atmosphere and hey, it makes people feel good.

I was at Wachusett recently and they were playing Good Vibrations by Marky Mark.  Another time I was at Sunday River and they were playing Return of the Mack by Mark Morrison.  At the same resort, I remember there was a band playing Billy Joel covers in front of the lodge.  The music just adds to the great atmosphere at the resort.

For quite a few years, I would tell myself that it was wrong for me to like this mass market, conformist kind of music.  I was a “sell out” for liking these songs, even if I did actually like them.

Last Saturday I was up at Loon, in New Hampshire.  It was one of the top ten skiing days I have ever had in my entire life.  Everything was perfect.  Perfect conditions, perfect temperature.  It just all lined up.

In the lift line, they were playing classic rock, which is usually going in these places.  The Lenny Kravitz song “It Ain’t Over, Til Its Over” started playing at the base lift area.  Everyone was in a really good mood and people started singing along to the song.  I was singing and kind of moving around, as were many of my skiing compatriots.  It was one of those types of beautiful moments you only see in skiing.

I realized at that moment that music should unite us, not divide us.  I know I took too many paragraphs to say this very simple statement, but its true.  I certainly did not stop my fellow skiers and quiz them on when they started liking Lenny Kravitz or if they thought he was a “sell out.”  We just enjoyed the moment all together.

Photos go here.  If you have just scrolled down here, you missed a spirited discussion about musical preferences.  But again, photos go here:

 

 

 

Let me give you an update of the past few days.  On Thursday, I received an email from my trusty activities guide at my ski club.  He was sorry from the bottom of his heart that the scheduled trip to Killington Mountain for this coming Sunday was cancelled.  My heart was broken.

So on Saturday I went to Wachusett Mountain, my kind of back up mountain where I go to get the weekend’s skiing in.  It was a normal sort of a day until about 3:30pm when they kicked us regular people off the mountain for some kind of mountain enforced break.  I don’t understand this but they did run the grooming machines on the slopes.

Then the skied the freshly groomed snow right from the top of the hill to the lodge, basically in a straight line.  It was one of the best runs I’ve had in these 100 or so ski trips I’ve taken over the years.

It is not the winter of my discontent, that is for sure.

Today I took a constitutional around Beacon street to survey the snow and of course to photograph it.  Beacon street is particularly Boston but covered in snow, it becomes SUPER Boston.  Yeah.  That’s the best name for these pictures:

During the Christmas hiatus, I hung out with my family and did what I always do.  I took a lot of pictures.

One night I was explaining to my dad how I take pictures with my 50mm lens, because he has a similar one.  You always know the planes of your photograph and you just compose within that plane.  You have to have a line in your photograph that is either horizontal or vertical and if you have a curve, well, that’s magic.  That’s photography distilled down to its basest elements.

We’re sitting in a restaurant while I’m explaining this and I start flailing my arms around like a flight attendant showing where the emergency exits are.  The people I had just photographed kinda noticed but they didn’t say anything.

Wow, I’m embarrassing.

Anyway, I got some good photos.  I hope!!!!!

Well, it’s 2019 and still no flying cars but I can access all the information mankind has ever produced from thin air.  The future is, um, interesting.

Anyway, that’s not what the fireside chat is about this evening (morning, afternoon depending on your time zone).  I spend the part of the holiday hiatus in old New York.  I was going to entitle this entry “sometimes I don’t hate New York, part the second,” but then I couldn’t get a narrative thread around that and the pictures I took so I chose the title up there.

Of course part of my time in New York was spent at the Metropolitan museum.  I’ve always wondered if I actually like going to museums or if it’s just kind of become part of my life.

But the Met is different.  I kind of grew up there and I do love the place.  And whenever I go to the Temple of Dendur, I say “Joan Rivers carved her initials into that when she was a little girl.”  No, that’s not original.  I got that from Chris March on Project Runway.

Anyway, on this visit I went to the Petrie sculpture garden, to see the Faberge eggs and to a Delacroix exhibit.  I know.  It sounds like the itinerary of a louche aristocrat.

First the Faberge eggs.  We’re about to go off on a long tangent about the Romanovs here so keep scrolling if this doesn’t interest you.

So you decided to keep reading.  I’m very happy.  So the Romanovs.  I blame YouTube for this particular obsession.  I watched a documentary about King Christian IX of Denmark.  I know.  A normal sort of thing to do I guess.  He was a Danish King so this was two obsessions of mine united.  Then YouTube decided that I should watch a documentary about the Romanovs.  And then another.  And another.  I had no choice.  YouTube decided for me.

So I had heard about the Romanovs over the years.  Czar Nicolas was first cousins with King George V of England.  Czar Nicolas’s children were related to Prince Philip in some kind of crazy, circuitous manner.  Somehow someone with the colorful name Marchioness of Milford Haven is involved and related here too.

I always wondered why the Russian czar was related to the King of England and at the same time Prince Philip and my favorite royal rascal and First Sea Lord (best job title ever) Louis Mountbatten.

Here’s a picture I’ve always found to be really haunting:

The kings look like twins.  That’s the young Edward VIII, who would leave behind the trappings of monarchy, into a life of exile with Wallis of Baltimore.  And poor tragic little Alexei.

Anyway so off I went into this deep dive into (kind of) contemporary Russian history.  So Czar Nicolas’s mother was Danish (a daughter of Christian IX) and his dad was Russian but really he was German and Prussian and probably a mix of other things.  Czar Nicolas spoke Russian with a German accent and communicated with his (kind of) German wife in English.  How could you have a monarch of a country that didn’t have a drop of the country’s blood in him?

It seemed like Queen Victoria and Christian IX ran a kind of royal intermarriage study abroad system where the various royals were married into the thrones of Europe, interconnecting them.  What could possibly go wrong???

The deeper I got into my investigating, the stranger it all seemed.  Czar Nicolas’s children, about whom much has been written, were the first cousins of all the major thrones of Europe.  There’s even a story of how the great Sea Lord (again, best job title ever) had a school boy crush on Grand Duchess Maria.  Oh how history could have been different if that match had come to pass.  Here they are, Maria forever young and the fresh faced Sea Lord:

Welcome Sea Lord to my blog.  Hope you find your stay welcoming and comfortable.

As everyone knows, the end of the Romanovs story is shocking and incredibly sad.  Again, connected to my new obsession, I’ve been looking at photos of the young family.  They look like 19th century figures trapped in a 20th century world.

Ok ok ok back to the Met.  If you’re here and you avoided the Romanov tangent, there will be photos upcoming.

So at the Met there is a small collection of Faberge eggs.  Peter Faberge produced jewel encrusted eggs and knick knacks for the royal family.  In one, there is a picture of Grand Duchess Tatiana.  What I find to be so remarkable is that these relics of Imperial Russia are just in a corner.  They are on the way to the elevator to the roof garden.  Until my obsession with the Romanovs was in full swing, I must have passed them a million times.

What strikes me as even more remarkable is that my mother, in the midst of my spelunking into the Romanovs told me that my grandfather’s family, her father had had to flee Russia because of the Revolution.  My great grandfather was a customs officer in the Czarist government and when the Czar fell, the family had to flee.  I had never known this and I’m pretty sure I would have spent a lot of time quizzing my grandfather about what life was like under Czarist rule.

I bet Grand Duchess Tatiana never imagined that a person whose grandfather had had to flee Russia because of the abdication of her father would be looking at her picture on a Faberge egg in a corner of a museum in New York, of all places.

I purposely avoided the bit in the Romanovs’ story about the entanglement with Rasputin.  There was though a picture of Princess Irina Yusupov in a separate jewelry exhibit.  The name Yusupov also figures into the Romanov story as the assassin of  Rasputin was Prince Felix Yusupov.  I wish I had more time to delve into him.  That was a baller before the word baller was even used.  This was a guy whose father gave his mother the tallest peak in Armenia as a birthday gift.  Yusupov went to Cambridge with a retinue of servants and a French couple to cook all of his meals.

What struck me as well was how small and insignificant these two individuals were, how they were footnotes in history.  How very very very sad.

Ok, history lesson over.  This part will be more pictographically centered.

First, Petrie Court and the Greek and Roman statues.  The place where I play this game where I try to find people to “react” to the statues.  Was I successful?  You be the judge:

Then my other favorite game.  The exhibits are full of people and I prefer to focus on them when I photograph the exhibits.  Sure the Delacroix exhibit was lovely and the Armenian exhibit was interesting, but for me, people watching is much better:

And let me throw this last one in there because — THIS GUY IS SO HANDSOME!!!!!!!  Yeah.  We started with a deep dive into Russian history and at the end we’re here gawking at a guy!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  Well, you made it to the end.  Congratulations, although there will be a history quiz soon!!!!!!!

So warm up Christmas is upon us and by that I mean, Thanksgiving.  Uh, that holiday could not come soon enough.  I am very tired and I haven’t had any vacation in nearly a year.  Five days off.  Five days when I don’t have to work or lesson plan or worry if I’m going to make it to my next job on time.  HEAVEN.

Usually during an extended holiday with the family, we go on a little road trip, usually to some thickly New England destination.  Salem, Gloucester or Newburyport.  Now let me back track here for just a second.  My parents are the most New England Yankee Brahmin Polish people on the planet.  Sometimes I truly believe that they are both the reincarnations of some long lost Lowells or Cabot Lodges.  More on those folks in a bit.

Anyway, we’ve made this road trip many a time to Newburyport and hey I like it.  I’m pretty thickly New England at this point as well.  I proudly wear my New England Patriots hat now and I occasionally even drop an R here and there.

We visited our usual haunts.  The bookstore with the cafe in it.  The British store with the insane Cadbury selection.  The olive oil store.  This time though we added another stop.  We went to the Maritime Museum in Newburyport.  Of course there were remnants and reminders of Newburyport’s glorious past as a global whaling power, but there was also a room dedicated to son of Newburyport John Marquand.  Who was he?  Well read on.

John Marquand is a novelist who I learned about in the early 2000s when I was still living in Washington DC.  On my way to work in the morning, every morning, I would read the Washington Post.  One day there was an article about forgotten novelists.  John Marquand was on the list, so I purchased one of his books called HM Pulham Esquire about this Brahmin who suffers in quiet desperation.  Like they all do.  Anyway, it was a rip roaring yarn.

I knew there would be things about John Marquand when they mentioned novelists.  His at home library had been reconstructed in the maritime museum.  I knew some about his background but I decided to look up his biography on wikipedia and boy, was I not disappointed.  Oh, I was not.  I can’t even paraphrase it.  It is THAT GOOD.  I’m going to copy and paste it below and copiously credit wikipedia for providing me with this bio:

Marquand was the son of Philip Marquand and his wife Margaret née Fuller, he was a scion of an old Newburyport, Massachusetts, family. He was a great-nephew of 19th-century writer Margaret Fuller and a cousin of Buckminster Fuller, who gained fame in the 20th century as the inventor of the geodesic dome. Marquand was born in Wilmington, Delaware, and grew up in the New York suburbs. When financial reverses broke up the family’s comfortable household, he was sent to Newburyport, Massachusetts, where he was raised by his eccentric aunts, who lived in a crumbling Federal Period mansion surrounded by remnants of the family’s vanished glory. (Marquand’s ancestors had been successful merchants in the Revolutionary period; Margaret Fuller and other aunts had been actively involved with the Transcendentalist and abolitionist movements.)

Marquand attended Newburyport High School, where he won a scholarship that enabled him to attend Harvard College. As an impecunious public school graduate in the heyday of Harvard’s Gold Coast, he was an unclubbable outsider.

Thanks wikipedia. Thank you very much.  I mean that first paragraph is normal, normal.  Yeah, he was born.  Financial reversals.  Not great.  Eccentric aunts.

But that second paragraph and we are off to the races so to speak.  “Impecunious public school graduate” — you mean he’s poor.  I mean he was poor.  “An unclubbable outsider” — OK did someone’s tea sipping sarcastic Brahmin grandmother write that?  That got more than a chuckle from me, let’s just put it that way.

So yeah, so translation Wikipedia to English is that dude, dude did the work and got himself a scholarship to the Harvard and zoomed back into the elite.  What made Marquand different though was that he choose to satirize the group from which he had come.  A blue blood satirist who had been in the club but had become impecuniously unclubbable but was back in the club to make fun of the club.  Delicious.

I was trying to describe him to my mother and I finally said — he’s like Truman Capote but with less venom, not in need of the venom transplant midway into writing a novel.  Now even I’m tempted to read another Marquand novel.

Anyway, there are photos because there are always photos, that are what else?  Thickly New England.  I wonder what the Brahmin grandmother would say about me.  A foreigner who picked themselves up by their bootstraps?  I mean how unclubbable!!!!!

I have the best schedule.  There I said it.  One time I heard Tom Friedman, the New York Times editorialist say that he has the best job.  He visits different countries and gets to write about them.  Well, fair enough, but I really have the best schedule.  I work Monday to Thursday and I have Friday off to just kind of do whatever I want or what I call rejoining the land of the living.  Now the days from Monday to Thursday are long and I do work on Saturday but its a very good schedule.

A few Fridays ago, never mind how many, a very dear friend asked me to join her on a small road trip to New Hampshire.  Usually I just see it covered in snow, so I thought it would be nice to see it just regular.

Off we went to this antiques shop in the middle of nowhere.  I mean I’m sure it was in the middle of somewhere but I didn’t even really know where we were.  It was raining but as soon as I walked in, I found the shop really fascinating.  Of course I grabbed my camera and started taking pictures immediately.  I quickly asked if I could take pictures in the store and the owner said “just don’t take pictures of me.”  It was kind of funny.  He said it in this dry, droll kind of way.

It struck me that every single object in the store had some kind of separate story.  There was a door that I thought was a door to state legislature because it had the same kind of font on it that I had seen in the Massachusetts State House.  It turned out it was a door that had been used in a TV show to supposedly be the Rhode Island legislature.

There were countless claw footed bath tubs and even a stand up shower.  There were these little bottles that doubtless has some kind of turn of the century wellness medicines in them with names of companies that are far out of business.  There were entire sections with just doors in them or just bannisters, all of different architectural styles and from different time periods.

It was really interesting because truly, every object tells a story about us, who we are and who we were:

The flakes from the sky.  I thought I’d have more time with the fall, but winter is here.

The first snow of the season is again something I have grown in appreciation for since I moved to Boston.  The snow is such an integral part of living here that the first snow is cause for celebration or consternation or whatever.  I know what it means for me.  Time to get my skis waxed and prepare for the best six months of the year.

Today when I saw the snow falling I decide to take a little turn around North Station, where I usually end up on Tuesdays and Thursdays.  Per usual, I was only going to walk a block or two.  My days are exhausting, particularly Tuesdays and Thursdays.  But I kept walking, all the way over to Government Center.  The Soviet city hall is actually more attractive by night, covered in snow.  Oh and I went over to photograph the little area between Haymarket and Faneuil Hall that I call the one block of Europe, covered in snow.  That stretch gets yet more beautiful in the snow.

Let it snow!!!!!!!!

Yeah, that title is funny and here I’m going to muse for a while.  Scroll down if you just come for the photography and not the unstructured musings.

So this past weekend, I visited the Riot again in Pennsylvania.  Those visits are so fun and somehow recharge me and make everything OK afterwards.

So Riot-Mom told me that she had an invite to a birthday party and the name was really long and full of consonants.  I asked if they ended in “ski” and Riot-Mom couldn’t remember.  It was Riot 6’s friend whose birthday it would be.

We get there and I hear Polish.  Everywhere.  Everyone at the party was speaking Polish.  Every single person.  I started joking with Riot-Mom that she’s in the minority this time because we all speak Polish and she doesn’t.  More shocking was the fact that Riot-Mom, despite our 23 year friendship, she had never heard me speaking Polish.  She probably had no idea that I spoke the language as well as I did.

But here’s the thing when I’m around Polish people.  They are always nice enough, but we really don’t have that much in common.  There’s small talk in Polish but we really don’t have that much in common.  It’s a few minutes of fun but then there’s no connection.  I guess that’s kind of sad, but I guess it’s an illustration of how I feel about being Polish.

Every time I teach a class, I come in to the room and I write my first and last name on the board.  There’s always laughter because my last name is so long and full of so many consonants.  Then I tell the story.  Yes, I’m American.  Well now I’m American.  I came to America when I was a little kid and I learned English in nursery school.

But every time I tell the story, it rings hollow.  I know I learned the language because my mom told me I did.  I don’t remember it and as a kid, I didn’t even think moving to a new country was all that usual.  I watched a documentary once about Gloria Vanderbilt, whose life is a million times more interesting that mine and she said if you grow up in a jungle, you think everyone grows up in a jungle.  My parents left their country when I was little and we settled elsewhere.  I mean don’t everyone’s parents leave their country?  I mean isn’t that normal?

I think I was an adult in my 30s when I realized that that isn’t normal.  But the Poland thing has always been there.

As a kid, I had one dream.  I was going to go to the Olympics in 1992 as a gymnast and win a gold medal, but in my dream, the US National anthem is playing in the background, even though as a kid, we were waiting to get our green cards.

For the first seven years that we lived here, Poland was part of my home life but rarely my outside life.  I saw the country on maps and my parents spoke the language but I had no idea about the place.

Then we went to Poland in 1988.  That was the first time I had seen this country in a way that I could even remember.  I remember being shocked that everyone was speaking this language I had only ever my mother and father speak.  We spent time with so many relatives and I spoke my poor Polish with everyone.  Well, tried to.

And we took my favorite photo of all time:

I remember the day really clearly the day this photo was taken.  It was the last day of our visit and my mom decided to take some photos of us together.  There was a thunderstorm outside.  The thunder was freaking out the dog and he started shaking.  In the picture, my grandfather is pushing us together.  I was really afraid of the dog.

Still though after the visit and subsequent ones, I never really felt all that Polish.  A couple of times a year, the Polish thing would sort of pop up in my normal life.  A name or a historical event.  I’d meet another Polish person.  Some awkward conversation would ensue.

One time I remember my dad opening this book and telling me about Poland as a country and then closing the book.  That’s kind of how it always was with that.

When I look at Facebook now, I see all the names of my family.  Mirek, Waldek, Gosia, Halina, I mean it’s all so Polish.  And then there’s me posting stories about turkey sightings in Brookline and professing my undying love for Big Papi.

I’ve never even had a really big group of all Polish friends.  Obviously, I’ve been in places with a lot of Polish people, but I’ve never been in a situation with a lot of Polish people I’m not related to or they are of my choosing.  Among my regular friends, I get to choose but with the Poles, the contact is so sporadic that there’s not a chance to choose the people I really want to be friends with.

At my age now I’m not sure if I’ll ever really feel Polish.  I’ve sort of resigned myself to the fact that I’ll have my name to entertain people with and the language comes in handy when I’m learning cognates in other languages.  I speak the language a couple of times a year, but in a way I feel like some people are the places they adopt, not the identity that has been assigned to them.  That’s where I am, I guess.

Well, let’s see some pics of the happy Polish and non-Polish tots from the weekend:

As a kid I channeled my love of movement into gymnastics, a sport I love to this day.  As an adult, I always feel like I want to infuse my photographs with a sense of movement, like I just caught the person mid jump or mid move.

I hope I have all the right moves (in the photos that is):

A couple of days ago, I was scrolling through social media, as you do.  I spotted a photo of a friend with Cary Elwes, none other than Wesley/Dread Pirate Roberts of Princess Bride fame.  I did what most mature adults do.  I went into a jealous rage.  Nah, I’m kidding.  But of course I also wanted to meet Cary Elwes.  A few minutes later, another friend chimed in that Cary Elwes would be at Comicon, which I had already bought a ticket to attend.

The Princess Bride is a seminal movie for people my age.  I was ten years old when it came out and it was the first movie I was allowed to watch that wasn’t a cartoon.  Naturally, I was obsessed with this movie, as most people in my generation are.  I remember a very long conversation with one of my cousins about how she preferred the evil Chris Sarandon as King Humperdinck to Wesley.  I argued that I preferred Wesley because he was cute as a button.

As the years have gone on, I have further fallen in love with the movie.  There’s the incomparable Andre the Giant, whose size is legendary but warm side was less well known.  Robin Wright told this sweet story about how he used to protect her from the rain by putting his hand over her head.  I also always love Miracle Max, the bitter miracle maker and his shrewish wife.  I spent most of my junior high school years yelling Miracle Max’s lines at random people in my school.  Completely unrelated is the fact that I wasn’t terribly popular and I got in trouble for being too loud a lot.

And Vicinni.  Oh Vicinni.  The annoying know it all!!!!!!  The leader of the rag tag group of sword fighter and giant.  Into adulthood, I have continually repeated his character’s quotes.  I have a former professor who I actually refer to as Vicinni because he’s Sicilian.  And I challenged him when death was on the line and he was not about to die!!!!!  My former professor as far as I know has never tried to start a land war in Asia, although there is still time!!!!!!  I cannot count the number of times I have randomly yelled out “INCONCEIVABLE” when something really obvious has happened.  Lastly, a magnet featuring Vicinni’s smiling face has graced my refrigerator for the past eight years.  Oh and when I go to New York, my favorite Sicilian pizza has Vicinni’s face on it.  So yeah, the man might be kind of an obsession for me.

Anyway, we’re already at paragraph five and I haven’t even started saying why I’m telling you all of this.  So I did in fact attend Comicon and I did get to see the one and only Cary Elwes at the event today.  Did a middle aged Boston school teacher yell out “I Love You” when he took the stage??  I don’t know.  Maybe?

Cary Elwes kindly sat and told wonderful stories about his career.  He described being chided by Al Pacino early in his career for not acting enough and not keeping his career momentum going.  Of course he had his own anecdote about working with Andre the Giant.  It involved Andre the Giant cracking off a fart that probably registered on the Richter scale.  I don’t usually laugh too hard at fart jokes because I generally do not find them funny but when Cary Elwes tells a joke about Andre the Giant farting I mean you kind of have to laugh, so I laughed.  OK because this time it was funny.

Here’s some shots of the man himself at the Q&A:

 

Cary Elwes also told very charming stories about such INCONCEIVABLE things like learning how to sword fight from the same people who taught Errol Flynn how to sword fight.  And then the session ended with Cary Elwes going off to his next destination.  I would have to live without a selfie with a member of the cast of the Princess Bride.  Or would I?

So my friends and I went off to get lunch and relax.  We walked around a bit afterwards.  We spotted some actors from Back to the Future and other movies.  Some actors had crowds next to them, others not.

AND THEN I SPOTTED NONE OTHER THAN WALLACE SHAWN.  Neither of my friends were as obsessed with the Princess Bride or the man himself.  So, I approached Mr. Shawn calmly and told him how much I love his work.  Nah, I totally turned into a teenage fangirl and told him I’d been a fan since Annie Hall!!!!!  (Actually it was Manhattan).  He goes “Annie Hall, you weren’t even alive then!!!!!  Then I did tell him about how I had a magnet with his picture on it on my fridge, about nicknaming a professor after him and how much I loved his character on Young Sheldon.  OK I mean I might have overwhelmed the guy a bit.

Then we started talking about what I did and I told him I was an ESL professor and that I worked at different colleges around Boston.  We had a quite enjoyable conversation about that and then we took our photo.  Per usual I would have just taken a formal, well composed picture of him from far away, but the meeting was so much fun that I decided to put in our picture together.  I know.  I look like Andre the Giant standing next to him:

Another picture of me up here in the 11 years I’ve had this blog???  INCONCEIVABLE!!!!!!!!