The Magic Medium

I was recently asked to speak to the staff of WTBU, the student-run radio station at Boston University. What follows are my notes for what I considered sort of a pep talk.

I love radio because it’s the ‘magic medium.’ In some ways, it’s the most intimate medium.

You really feel this when you listen with your ear buds – or headphones, for oldsters such as myself. It’s like inviting a stranger into your skull.

Radio is also under appreciated. We might ask someone about radio and they’d say, “Oh hell, I never listen to radio.” Then we’d ask to count the radios in their house, and there would be 16 of them. That’s the case in my house, at least.

Radio really put the mass in mass communication

Think about how communication began. We were a bunch of sweaty and unhygienic cave persons. We made sounds, but they were usually in response to something – perhaps when a mastodon boardchecked you on the way to the salad bar.

But then, one day, a cave person made that greatest of all discoveries. He or she made a sound that had a meaning. Suddenly, a sound could mean a thing.

“Unh!” suddenly meant much more than unh! Maybe it meant, “Have you seen my keys?” or “Are you sitting on the remote?”

What a liberating moment that must have been. Cue Richard Strauss. I’m having a 2001: A Space Odyssey flashback.

At another point, someone invented writing, and that freed us from limitations of time and space. Lots of scholars have written about that and imagined that moment. (I’m thinking Wilbur Schramm, Carl Sagan, and maybe some other dudes and dudettes.)

So ponder that moment your own bad self. Imagine it. Hell, go ahead and grok on it.

We were no longer limited to our signal fires – or as far away as our SHOUT could be heard

And that led, eventually, to radio.

Writer Edward Jay Whetmore called it “the magic medium.” True that, Brother Edd. (He likes the double D’s.)

I like to think that radio was as revolutionary socially as it was technologically.

Just think about it. For the first two-thirds of the 20^th century, we were an apartheid nation.

We don’t often use that term when talking about the United States, but that’s what we were.

We had separate water fountains, separate bathrooms, separate schools. And the United States Supreme Court said it was all right. Things could be separate, as long as they were equal.

Think about that era and the self-delusion of that time. I admire people who challenged the status quo.

Journalist Harry Golden  was one. He wrote about the civil rights movement in his odd little newspaper, The Carolina Israelite.  Satire was his primary weapon.

Golden came up with “plans” to resolve the racial issues in the South.

For example, he noticed that black people and white people could shop in the same store, but black people couldn’t sit at the same lunch counter as white people. The problems occurred, he realized, when people sat down. So he suggested ripping out all the chairs in stores. He called this the Vertical Negro Plan.

He also noted that in communities where there was a lot of black-white animosity that white people didn’t object when an Indian person – someone dark-skinned but wearing a turban – moved into a white neighborhood. He suggested issuing turbans to all African Americans. He called this the Turban Plan.

He also noticed, in that separate water fountain era, that if the whites-only fountain had an out-of-order sign on it, white people had no problem drinking from the “colored” fountain. He called this the Out of Order Plan

That reminds me of the time Golden was visiting his son in Gainesville, Florida. He was taken to the emergency room for some reason and as he lay on the table, he looked up and saw three thermometers in a rack on the wall. They were labeled “white,” “colored” and “rectal.” This was a sign of hope, he eventually wrote. It was a sign of gradual integration. (It was also a sign that all assholes are alike.)

OK, so let’s get back to that foolish concept of a society that is “separate but equal.” You’ve got to admit it was easy to maintain. Set up different schools. Don’t rent to black people in this neighborhood. Write ordinances that tell us where black people sit on the bus . . . .

Those were Jim Crow laws. But there was something that didn’t obey Jim Crow laws: The air.

We can’t regulate the air, and radio travels through the air.

They couldn’t legislate what you listened to in your home.

At night, that weird thing happens. I’m not an engineer, so I can’t explain it technically. I just always thought of it as a magic time. After dark, suddenly you could hear voices from all over the place, voices you couldn’t hear during the day.

You could hear WLAC in Nashville all the way from Tallahassee to the Canadian border.

Imagine you’re Bob Zimmerman, a high school kid in Hibbing, Minnesota. There isn’t a single black person in town. But at night, up in your room, you hear the music of black America on WLAC. That makes you want to hear more and know more. And that eventually makes you want to become Bob Dylan.

And even earlier: Imagine you’re a black kid living in segregated St. Louis.  You listen to the ‘Grand Old Opry’ on WSM radio and hear the voices of the old, weird America. And though you’re black, you grow up steeped in the white traditions of country music.  That’s why —  when you grow up and become Chuck Berry  – all of those great rock’n’roll songs you write carry that narrative tradition borrowed from white country music.

Black America met White America through music, through  the music played on radio. Once we were all dancing to the same beat, Jim Crow laws didn’t have a chance.

The walls came tumbling down. Separate was inherently unequal.

So think of radio as the most subversive medium. It played a huge and often unheralded part in igniting a social revolution.

Radio also gave me my love of music.

Growing up when I did, when radio wasn’t stratified the way it is today, I could turn on the No. 1 AM station in Dallas and hear Frank Sinatra followed by James Brown followed by The Beatles followed by The Supremes followed by Dean Martin followed by Otis Redding . . . . and on.

Young people think I’m a crackhead when I tell them what radio was like when I was a kid. But I’m not making up this stuff.

It was anarchy, and we’ll never hear the likes of it again.

So the next time you sit down behind your engineering board or pull the microphone close and prepare to go on the air, just say this to yourself: “Radio changed the world. I work in radio.”

Some notes on Hunter S. Thompson

These two pieces were written at the request of Martin Flynn, the Irish writer and keeper of hstbooks.org. I just did “The Kathleen Dunn Show” on Wisconsin Public Radio, and some of these issues came up, so I thought it might be worth repeating them.

1. The Hunter S. Thompson / Raoul Duke Confusion:
A Man and His Mad-Dog Image

I was a reporter, and anyone who’s worked in that lonely trade knows the frustration. You know a story. You know what needs to be said. You just can’t find anyone to say it.

Hunter S. Thompson as a young man in Puerto Rico

You can’t make up a quote. Given the rules of journalism, you can’t do that shit. So you struggle and sometimes your story falls short.

However, in Gonzo journalism the rules – such as they are – are quite different.

Raoul Duke began appearing in Hunter S. Thompson’s writing back in the days when he was the sports editor of the Command Courier, the official newspaper of Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. It was the late fifties and when Hunter couldn’t find a bystander or a source or an expert to say what he wanted, he quoted “Raoul Duke.”

Hunter, of course, was Raoul Duke.

Looking back on Hunter’s stories, you see quotes from people named Duke and Bloor and Squane, and they are all Hunter Thompson. He invented these people to say the things that needed to be said. It turned parts of his journalism into fiction, but he was fond of reminding his readers that there was often greater truth to be found in fiction.

Raoul Duke has a special place in this pantheon of phantoms. It was the name Hunter plucked from his past to use as his nom de plume when he wrote “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” for Rolling Stone. The work was serialized as the work of Duke in two issues in November 1971. (Hard to believe that that magnificent bit of prose is  forty years old.)

As a young reader, I was confused. Who was this Duke guy and why did he have his messages sent – as reported midway through one of the episodes – care of someone named Hunter S. Thompson?

The confusion continued with regard to Duke and Hunter. Where did one stop and the other begin?

Hunter as "Raoul Duke" -- by Ralph Steadman

All these years later, we know much more about Hunter and Duke and Las Vegas. Hunter was compulsive about documenting his life, in photographs and on tape.

Now that selections from his personal tape recordings have been made available to the public – in a handsome boxed set edition called The Gonzo Tapes – it’s possible to hear his dictated observations and comments as he lives the experience that became “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.”

He certainly doesn’t sound like a foaming-at-the-mouth madman running amuck in Las Vegas. If anything, he is the opposite – lucid, inquisitive, thoughtful, observant.

But in the writing, he took himself and amped up the madness lurking in his brain. And that’s when Duke emerged.

What happened in Vegas didn’t stay in Vegas. But Hunter took those events – and his personality – and heightened the reality. He once told me, “I warped a few things. It was an incredible feat of balance more than literature.” When published in book form, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was credited to “Hunter S. Thompson,” not Raoul Duke.

Problem was, readers thought the exaggerated caricature called Raoul Duke was Hunter S. Thompson. Though they shared the same DNA, they were not identical twins.

The Duke caricature followed him the rest of his life. It was a role that the real man could easily adopt and play, pleasing his fans. On signal, he could perform as Duke. But he was not the same without an audience.

And so he was caught in the duality. He had created the Duke character, one of the great literary inventions of his time. It was a brilliant achievement. And it was also a burden. It might have been a trap. If he cast off the Duke persona, would his readers follow him? Or would it be like slitting the throat of the golden goose?

It was a problem he wrestled with, apparently without resolution, until the end of his life.

2. On Finding a Style: Can Anyone Write Gonzo Journalism Today?

It’s not hard for me to recall my life as a college freshman. When I was a young and impressionable writer, I fell under the spell of Hunter S. Thompson.

It was the early 1970s and after reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and his presidential campaign coverage in Rolling Stone, I became a committed fan.

I worked for a small daily newspaper in the Midwest then, and we passed around the newsroom a tattered and disintegrating Fear and Loathing paperback and spoke of it as Holy Writ.

I once tried to write like him. I went to Naked City, Indiana, one of the Midwest’s largest nudist colonies, to cover the Mister and Miss Nude America contests.

It was a disturbing and weird day, ripe for the gonzo-journalism treatment, with pantsless grannies and nudist master sergeants weary of the voyeuristic mobs that came to watch strippers strut and body builders romp naked.

But after two long Saturdays struggling with the story, I came to this important conclusion: only one person could write like Hunter S. Thompson. And it wasn’t me.

As I said, I was young (17) and impressionable. I’m glad I figured that out then, rather than wasting a few years of this short life imitating someone else.

Since becoming a teacher, I’ve faced the same problem from the other side of the table. Young people, enamored of Thompson (or Vonnegut or Foster Wallace or Didion . . . fill in the blank) say they want to write like their hero. “You want to write gonzo?” I ask the Thompson fans. “Sure, go right ahead.” When they fail miserably, I tell them, “See, only one person could write like that and he’s dead.” Pause. “But only one person can write like you.”

Hunter S. Thompson may be the best friend a writing teacher can have. He gives us an example of writing with wit, grace and a unique style. And those who try to imitate that style soon learn how much work went into creation of those masterpieces of non-fiction writing. Through trying and failing to write gonzo, students learn how to unmask their own (pardon the redundancy) style.

So don’t write gonzo. Write what you write.

In another context and speaking of another great artist, Johnny Cash once wrote this:

There are those who do not imitate,
Who cannot imitate
But then there are those who emulate
At times, to expand further the light
Of an original glow.
Knowing that to imitate the living
Is mockery
And to imitate the dead
Is robbery

There are those
Who are beings complete unto themselves
Whole, undaunted, — a source
As leaves of grass, as stars
As mountains, alike, alike, alike,
Yet unalike
Each is complete and contained
And as each unalike star shines
Each ray of light is forever gone
To leave way for a new ray

Johnny was writing about Bob Dylan for the liner notes for Nashville Skyline, but these words might just as well have been written about Hunter.

Order Outlaw Journalist here. 
Hunter S. Thompson returns in my next book, Mile Marker Zero. Learn more here. 

A book to treasure — and to share

I’m one of those book psychos who alphabetizes everything and protects dust jackets with Mylar covers.

Karen Russell

But there are a couple books in my library that are not in such pristine condition — and I love them.

I’ve been thinking about Kinflicks a lot lately. It was a book that made you use words like “rollicking” to describe it. A big, lumpy, episodic novel, it was filled with white trash, decapitations, lovesick lesbians, fake boobs and family with a serious case of death addiction.

Look at it: the spine is broken, the pages dog-eared and like worn cotton in the hand, and a coffee circle graces the cover.

It is an appreciated book. I lent it to a dozen friends over the years and it helped create a bond and common language between us.

I’ve been thinking of it lately because Karen Russell‘s book Swamplandia (Knopf, $24.95) reminds me so much of Kinflicks.

Swamplandia is outrageous in all of the right ways. And one of those rich, engrossing novels you can’t stop reading but, paradoxically, don’t want to end.

Set in a faded adventure / nature park in South Florida, it’s a strictly mom and pop operation until the sainted mom dies.

Dad, the alligator-wrestling Indian chief (“Chief Bigtree”), carries on with the help of his devoted but hapless family, including Ava, the plucky and astonishingly literate teen-ager who narrates the book.

Russell is so great at creating atmosphere — you can smell the caked, dried alligator dung — and in building eccentric but entirely believable characters.

Like Lisa Alther, the author of that long-ago Kinflicks, Russell has virtually come out of nowhere and become a literary superstar. She had one well-reviewed book, of stories but this novel had the wit and confidence of a mature writer — yet Russell is still an infant in writer years.

This is one of those books to a pass around and share and discuss with friends. And if you’re worried about your nice hardcover getting disfigured, then here’s some good news: it just came out in paperback.

My local library — a love note

Cohasset is such a great little town. There’s a great public library and I take the boys there at least once a week. Jack is in a Young Writers’ Workshop there this summer.

It’s sweet, I tell you, sweet. Living here is like living inside a Norman Rockwell painting.

My friends out there who are book lovers — you need to check out the Paul Pratt Memorial Library. It’s worth a thousand mile drive.

It’s a beautiful library with an excellent collection and all. But they also have great deals on books for sale.

I think some of the wealthy denizens of Cohasset — and that might be the whole town, save for us, the Cohasset Hillbillies– go out and buy books, don’t read them, then donate them to the library for resale.

For a buck!

So I haunt the joint.

This is my haul for today:

• Thunderstruck by Erik Larson
• Manhunt by James Swanson (about the Lincoln Assassination and the search for the conspirators)
• The Given Day  by Dennis Lehane (his big historical novel about Boston)
• The Lay of the Land by Richard Ford (because I need to read more Richard Ford)
• The Italian Secretary by Caleb Carr (been a fan of his since The Alienist and this is a Doyle-sanctioned Sherlock Holmes story)
• Stranger in Paradise by Robert B. Parker (A Jesse Stone novel. I always learn something from reading a Parker novel; the dude wrote as if he was charged  by the word)
• Lake Wobegon Summer 1956 by Garrison Keillor (always preferred his monologues to his writing, but the prose is still fun to read)
• The Hot Kid by Elmore Leonard (see note about Parker, above)
• Nineteenth Century Art by Ariane Ruskin (a big-ass picture book)
• America’s Railroads by Don Ball, Jr. (another big-ass picture book)

I would have gotten another Parker book, but I ran out of cash. By the time I went home and came back, someone had picked up that beauty.

A library is such a wonderful thing, and this one is so friendly. They even let Jack check out Mad magazines. Does it get any better than that?

Across the great divide

It was about a father and son traveling cross-country on a Harley Davidson, riding through the upper Midwest with a married couple following on their motorcycle. For Robert Pirsig, the trip was an opportunity to grow closer to his son, a young man on the brink of madness. But conversations are difficult at 70 miles per hour and so Pirsig turned inward.

His account of that trip, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, was Pirsig’s meditation on parenthood, the nature of “quality,” and what C.P. Snow called “the two cultures” of science and the humanities. The companion for the trip (John, husband of the couple) was a perfect example of the latter. When a small rattle in the engine caused Pirsig to motion for a rest stop, he sat in the grass and began analyzing the problem, discussing possible solutions. As he talked his way through the diagnosis, John’s eyes glazed. He was on the “humanities” side of the line with no interest in ever crossing over.

I read that book when I was a teen-ager and it set an agenda for my adulthood. I saw myself in John, but wanted to be more like Robert. I’ve always admired people who traveled well in both worlds, but as I lurched into maturity and became a journalist, I recognized the defining characteristic of my tribe: We don’t do math. Yet we share with mathematicians the joy of solving problems, of fixing things.

In the intervening three decades, technology has changed that world and blurred the lines between those cultures. To succeed in my field today, technical skills with Web design and photo manipulation are in greater demand than traditional storytelling ability.

And so as we face this wondrous New World Order in which technology feeds every move, it troubles me that that there are new divisions.

In the mid-1990s, as my world moved from paper (where we proudly called ourselves “ink-stained wretches”), it seemed that culturally, we were headed the wrong direction. One of the great moments in American history came in the 1830s, with the democratization of the media. Until then, newspapers were the property of the privileged class. But the “penny papers” that arrived in the 1830s suddenly put information within the reach of damn near everybody. Symbolically, the cost of citizenship was one cent. Newspapers began carrying stories about the rest of us, not just presidents and wealthy merchants. Stories of drunkenness and marital brawls made the paper. People who couldn’t read suddenly had a reason to learn. These new stories tapped into that basic human need for dirt on the neighbors. The literacy rates skyrocketed.

In the mid-1990s, as newspapers started migrating information to the Web, I held up my hand and suggested pause. Back then, a computer cost $1,500, effectively pricing millions out of information that had been theirs for a quarter. I feared we were developing a class system of information-haves and information-have-nots.

I raised the issue and was immediately excoriated by critics and colleagues as a Luddite. The same thing happened a decade later when I argued in another essay that technology undercut serendipity. I suggested that when it’s so easy to find exactly what we are looking for, we miss all of those things we didn’t know we were looking for. The newspaper remains a brilliant invention for a number of reasons. Each turn of the page presents opportunities to learn something you didn’t know you were interested in. The problem with the Internet is that its efficiency – leading you immediately to what you want – undercuts the element of chance. It’s akin to browsing in a bookstore. Do we do that anymore, I wondered, when we can one-click on Amazon.com and find exactly what we want?

When that essay was picked up by the New York Times’s College site, it was – thanks to the Web – available everywhere on the globe. A few months after it appeared, I inserted my name and “serendipity” into a search engine and discovered all hell had broken loose in the blogosphere. The BBC did a story on the outrage suffered at my hands by technobloggers. My essay had infuriated techies and I was seen as one of those “humanities morons.” Cyber insults were flying and several bloggers speculated I was a knuckle-dragger who didn’t even have an e-mail address. So, of course, I e-mailed them. “I enjoyed your essay,” I began, “but you obviously know nothing about me.” I suggested that we talk about our different views of the world.

No response. Not one. None. Zilch. Nada.

And I thought: How sad. This great technology that can bring us closer together is driving us apart. I’d reached across the world to try to start a conversation with someone I’d never met, but he was more content to pound away on keys in his intellectual tower rather than talk to me.

That article led to an invitation to speak to a group of scientists at the World Technology Summit, where we discussed the lost art of serendipity and the role that happy accident – finding something you didn’t know you were looking for – has played in both art and science. It was the kind of exchange I wanted my original article to inspire.

But the difference was that we were all in a room, looking in each other’s eyes, having a conversation. How 20th Century of me.

Think about it: We write intimate details for a world of strangers to see on Facebook, but we don’t know our neighbor’s name. We “tweet” our most mundane activities on Twitter, yet recoil when a friendly stranger commits the sin of asking, “How’re you doing?” We pontificate ad nauseum in our little half acres of the Web, but don’t engage in any meaningful conversations with other living, breathing beings.

Facebook, My Space and other sites are called “social networking,” yet they drive people off to solitary hives behind computer keyboards, where they are anything but social. Facebook asks users to friend people they want to list on their sites as their “friends.” But are the real friends or only “Facebook Friends”?

Unfortunately, if we raise questions and look at the social impact of technology on our culture, we are immediately tossed into the don’t-get-it dustbins of mouthbreathers who “can’t accept technology.”

I accept it, understand it and embrace it. But as someone who’s spent four decades involved in the merchanting of news on this planet, I have some concerns. We live in an information-choked culture and when we allow search engines to do our thinking for us, we run the risk of building further moats to isolate us from the rest of humanity.

When I defend newspapers and lament their demise, critics assume it’s because I can’t deal with new technology. Not at all. In the new world order, you build your own “newspaper” online through news alerts sent to your mailbox. That practice has some serious social consequences.

Your news alerts breathlessly inform you of the grocery-store sightings of Kim Kardashian and new recruits for the alma mater’s football team. Steadily, those alerts will diminish your humanity. Will you put “starvation,” “injustice” and “racism” in your news alert? Will you ask your search engine to send you stories to ignite your moral outrage, or pique your curiosity about innovation?

We will be informed of the most recent Third World celebrity adoption, but we will know nothing of the suffering in our hometown. We will be kept abreast of fashion trends, but not to prejudice. It is possible to travel through this world, considering yourself well-informed, yet never confronted with information that might irritate, anger or upset you. One of the definitions of journalism has always been to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comforted.” Yet we allow technology to numb us to others.

We bow before technology and allow it to lead when we should instead lead technology, using it to help us have productive and useful lives. But beyond that, we need to unlock technology’s potential to make us more human, to help us become more compassionate and social. Technology can help us embrace the flesh and blood rather than celebrate and perpetuate the synthetic humanity online.

We need to motion for a rest stop, and this time, we have something bigger than a motorcycle to fix.

Take us out to the ballgame, then take us on a thrill ride

Will you look at this beautiful thing?

Harvey Frommer‘s Remembering Fenway Park (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, $45) is more than a picture book about one of America’s last two remaining great old ballparks. It’s also the perfect Father’s Day gift.

It is that, of course, and this will look swell on all of the best coffee tables in America.

But Professor Frommer (Dartmouth, dude) is a historian and the history he has compiled is just as stunning as the pictures he has assembled.

Though Frommer has written serial narrative histories, what he has done in this book — and in its companion volume, Remembering Yankee Stadium, which turned out of be a eulogy for the House that Ruth Built — is to assemble the story of the ballpark in its own words.

And by ‘its own words,’ of course, we mean in the words of those who love the place.

Frommer has put together and affectionate yet-not-sentimental account of this ballpark, which opened to the public the week the Titanic sank. (Just last week, the Fenway tenants, the Boston Red Sox, announced plans for its 100th anniversary celebration next season.

In an era of instant disposability, a place like Fenway Park (and there aren’t too many places like Fenway Park), should be treasured. After years of building ballparks that looked like spaceships from bad science fiction films, Major League Baseball began embracing its past a couple of decades ago, and began building stadiums that emulated the classic era. Baltimore and Cleveland both did good jobs copying that style.

But Fenway and Wrigley Field in Chicago don’t have to copy anything. They are originals, and they’re treasures. If you’ve never been there, get Frommer’s book, then book your ticket.

And now, a great mystery: The incredible Michael Connelly keeps the hits coming.

A few years ago, the toughie critic Janet Maslin of the New York Times seemed to think Connelly had a problem: he was too prolific.

For readers who love his novels, that’s no problem.

He made his bones with his masterful detective novels starring hard-bitten jazz aficiando and Vietnam veteran Harry Bosch. Along the way, he’s introduced a journalist (Jack McEvoy ofThe Poet and The Scarecrow) and FBI profilers Rachel Walling and Terry McCaleb.

He had to kill off the McCaleb character because Clint Eastwood played him in the movie version of Blood Work and the Steely-Eyed One so overshadowed the much-younger-in-real-life McCaleb that readers would think of McCaleb as Dirty Harry.

A few years back, Connelly gave us The Lincoln Lawyer, his legal thriller starring Mickey Haller, Harry Bosch’s half-brother. That series took off and now Matthew McConnaughey may have turned that into a movie franchise.

The Fifth Witness (Little Brown, $26.95) is another Mickey Haller book and it’s one of those truly ripped-from-the-headlines stories, as the foreclosure crisis leads to a murder.

It’s a book you devour as much as you read. It’s another example of Connelly’s craft and a good reason why he’s usually mentioned in the same breath as Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain.

And there’s another novel, The Drop — featuring Harry Bosch — due in October.

Since when is being prolific a bad thing?

Hockey, I am learning how to love you

I didn’t grow up in a hockey town. I was nowhere near a hockey town. But my college roommate was from St. Louis, so he insisted we listen to St. Louis Blues games at night on KMOX, which we could pick up well enough in southern Indiana.

I tried to pick up the art and science of the game, but to no avail. Everything about it was foreign to me, including many of the players, who seemed to have French names.

The color commentator was former player Noel Picard, who had an indecipherable French Canadian accent. The play-by-play dude would say, “Noel, what did you think of that?” and Noel would say, “Ah hoody hoo ha mere, ah hoody rama.” Couldn’t understand a frickin’ word of Noel’s vowel movements.

I’ve enjoyed reading about the Bruins since moving to Boston last summer, and I watched game highlights. There’s a lot of sports history to soak up – about Bill Russell, Red Auerbach, Ted Williams and all of the other sports greats. The Ted Williams of hockey is Bobby Orr. There’s a statue of him jumping right at you in front of the Garden.

It’s a steep learning curve and I don’t claim to have made much progress in my climb up Mount Hockeyknowledge. Still, this past week, we’ve all been gathered around the television for these playoff games.

I’m loving it, but am still ignorant of hockey.

So I  spent some time doing hockey research and I thought: what in the hell ever happened to Noel Picard.

Happy to report he’s still alive. I saw a YouTube report about Noel’s latest job, working as a Montreal security guard.

And then I discovered what a small damn world it is.

I found a clip of Bobby Orr scoring that winning goal in the 1970 Stanley Cup Final – the goal after which the made that leap that is now embronzed.

It was Noel Picard who tripped Bobby Orr, setting up the iconic photo from the 1970 Stanley Cup. And that photo was the basis for a statue.

I’m reeling from this new weenie roast of hockey knowledge, when I end up at a fine eatery in the North End. I’ve beaten the rest of the dinner party to the restaurant and so I repair to the bar, where I share the room with only the bartender, a young guy – and former Rollins College ballplayer – named Michael.

Of course, we watch the NHL Channel and talk hockey.

If I wasn’t a hockey fan before, I am now, thanks to Michael. I have a couple beers and when I cash out, Michael gives me another one on the house, just because he enjoyed talking about Monday’s game with me.

Hockey is the number-one source for male bonding.

By the way, the statue of Paul Revere was directly across the street from the restaurant. As you can see, even Paul has gone hockey crazy: