some light reading for courtney

I apologize for the long set up, but for those of you who have known me in the past four to six years, the end of the ramble may amuse you.

So while Chrissy took to the mountains this weekend for an action-packed weekend of free-range scrapbooking (or something like that), this evening I had dinner with an old high school teacher of mine. A missionary friend of their family from Guatemala is visiting, and the family had invited a few of us they thought would be interested in getting to know her better.

She's really quite a remarkable lady who has seen God and has been Christ in the flesh to so many people. I only got to hear a few of her stories, but these few were quite beautiful and (sadly) exotic to my own experience. Tracy says that the only difference between living "on the mission field" and living in your hometown is where you tend to set your expectations for how you'll see God work. I think she's right.

This really isn't my main point, but it's probably a more important one.

Anyway, another former high school teacher of mine was also among the guests, the one and only Mr. Schroeder. We caught up a bit, and in the course of our conversation he mentioned a name that took me back to my freshmen year at Placer High School.

Sometime that spring we had an assembly in the school's big, orange, theater-style auditorium. Our speaker was a guy in his early thirties, I imagine, who was an adventurer/jack-of-all-trades type. He had lots of stories for us, and I suppose the "educational justification" for him being there was that he kicked butt or something. At least I thought he did.

Anyway, he stuck around and was later a guest speaker in my drama class, where he talked about his experience being a professional actor. He talked about what it took to get cast in the parts you wanted and such, such as learning to ride a unicycle if that's what the script called for. He also said that in your résumé you needed to have something that set you apart, something that made you different. For him it was that he could sing "Take Me Out To The Ballgame" backwards, the last word to the first word.

As a freshman, I thought this was so cool in a quirky, novelty act kind of way. In fact, I remembered this act over the next four years, and when I was a freshman at Vanguard, I pulled it out of my memory, took four days learning how to do it myself (along with "Banner Spangled Star The"), and performed it during Vanguard's annual talent show, "The Big Big Show." It made the splash that I was looking for as a know-nobody freshman, and actually opened a few really amazing opportunities for me in that community.

And, if you've known me for any longer stretch of time in the past four, five, six or so years, then you've probably heard me sing one of these crazy songs once or twice. Once it comes up people won't let you get away without a quick performance.

Including tonight.

I had forgotten the guest speaker's name until tonight. His name is Willie Weir, and this is his blog, and this is his homepage. Hopefully this link will up his place in the Google line a bit ;-)