Writing in a very quiet room at the Hilton Anaheim after a lovely flat iron steak and a Beefeater's martini, eaten all by myself while perusing the program for the Western States Communication Association convention.
I remember the first Western I ever attended. It was in the winter of 1985. I didn't have a convention paper so the school didn't send me down. (Utah was always very good about paying for graduate students to attend conventions when they had papers accepted.) A gang of us drove from Salt Lake City to Denver to see what the convention was like. I remember absolutely nothing of the convention itself. I remember just two things: 1) taking a long walk through Denver and stumbling upon a gay leather shop and suddenly feeling at home in a way I hadn't since beginning the doctoral program at Utah and 2) getting snowed in on the drive home and having to stay overnight in a single room with five other graduate students when I had a paper on Kenneth Burke due the morning after the day we returned and no one was going to sleep. I remember raging against them as I walked around the halls of the hotel in the early morning hours because it seemed like I was the only one who wanted to sleep instead of drink and talk.*
The next convention I attended I DID have a paper. The department sent me to the Popular Culture Association convention in Atlanta in 1985. I was thinking about that today as I dragged my backpack and carry-on through the John Wayne airport. I carried so much less baggage to this week's convention than I took to Atlanta almost 30 years ago. Then I was hauling my overstuffed suitbag AND a smaller suitcase. I carried I don't know how many copies of my paper to hand out.
Oh, that paper. It wound up being published, don'tchaknow. It was a Foucauldian analysis of three short cartoon books by gay porn icon Tom of Finland. I'd kinda scandalized the Utah communication department when I wrote the paper for our "Introduction to Graduate Studies" course in fall, 1984. I thought I was just doing what people did in the academy. Turned out that my use of terms like "fisting" as though they were known by everyone was a bit outre for the department. But back to my suitcase (although not my closet, which has pretty much always had very little in it). I remember how heavy the suitbag and carry on were, filled with papers.
Fortunately, some friends from Utah also had papers. My now deceased friend Mike Swan and his friend from his college days, Scott Schamp. I delivered the speech based on my essay to a room with over 50 people in it (folks at Pop Culture always turn out for the porn sessions.). Did I throw out all the copies people didn't collect? I certainly hope I did, though I don't remember.
For the short presentation I'm giving on Monday, I've brought 20 copies of only 4 pages. It's part of a G. I. F. T. S. panel. These used to be "Great Ideas for Teaching Speech." But now the word speech has become "students," probably because so many programs have adapted the term "communication" rather that "speech." Also, interpersonal, group, and the basic "overview" course are all part of the focus of these panels now and they are not as easily understood as fitting under the umbrella term "speech."
Turns out that my buddy and sometime boss (and sometime underling) Jon B. is also here to be part of a panel on assessment. Fond as I am of the guy, I think I'm too close to escape time to sit down and listen to one more thing about SLOs.
Sadly, the tour of the Queen Mary, scheduled for tomorrow, was cancelled. Oh, as I registered for the convention tonight, I found out that it cost me $10 more to NOT get the journal (to register as a non-member) than it would to revive my membership and get the journal. I decided to spend the extra money so that I would not receive the journal.
Sunday night is the Utah Party and the Sock Hop. Much more on those two events later. Now I think I'll go down to the fancy bar and get some Drambuie.
* It just occurred to me that almost the same thing happened to me in fourth or fifth grade when a group of girls went out with the parents of one of the girls on a boat on the Sacramento River and come 9:00 pm I wanted to go to sleep but all the other girls wanted to stay up giggling and talking. Gosh, I am stick-in-the-mud! Lifelong, it would seem.
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