Another Slice

So they’ve had to cancel training for the men’s downhill at the Olympics.  Rain, sleet, etc.

Some friends went up there a few weeks ago– albeit for free– and were greeted with rain at the bottom, freezing high winds at the top.  And I thought to myself: Sounds like Stowe!

Anyway, back here in Colorado, we haven’t had an epic winter thus far.  (And I bought a new snowblower this past fall.  I should’ve saved my money.)  But at least it hasn’t rained.  You have no idea what rain can do to “dampen” the collective spirits in a ski resort.

Tomorrow morning I’ll probably have to console myself with a mere 6 inches of fresh snow on Aspen Mountain, or out at Snowmass.

I might even wind up, if I dip into the trees, looking a bit like the guy in the picture.  He looks like he could do with a hot chocolate.

Speaking of which, I was driving down my street the other day, and there was a guy walking down the street with his back to me, walking really stiffly.  And I mentioned to my wife, “This guy looks really cold.”

And we drove by, and it turned out to be a neighbor who’s a ski instructor, dressed in civvies.

And the reason he was walking so stiffly was because he’d had hernia surgery the day before.  And he said that he was planning to be back teaching in a few more days.

A Few More Days!  Imagine that!  I don’t know much about medicine, but that’s pretty incredible.  Years ago, I had a roommate who had hernia surgery, and he was laid up for months!  (Granted, his may have been more severe, and he wasn’t exactly a world-class athlete, but still…)

So whatever the mess our health-care system is in, at least sometimes they can actually heal you!

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Now that the Super Bowl is out of the way (as well as, locally, the Winter X-Games), I get a chance to withdraw from spectator sports for a while.  Til baseball’s spring training, at least.

Not being much of a fan of basketball or hockey (on TV), the only sports I’m likely to tune into are maybe the new Hank Haney series with Ray Romano.  Not that I’ll know when they’re on.  I’ll have to check with Number One Son, who’s always watching The Golf Channel.

The topic of TV sports reminded me of a conversation I once had with a neighbor, who used to actually compete at Wimbledon and the U.S. Open, French Open, etc.  (In tennis… obviously.)

Anyway, since she retired from world-class tennis, she’s taken up golf with an equal passion and dedication.  And we were talking once, about something or other, and I happened to mention that I don’t watch golf on TV.  And she was not exactly aghast, but close.  She then said, “And I suppose you don’t watch tennis on TV, either?”

And I countered with something like, “What would happen if I happened to have a brother who was a professional bowler?  Should I expect you and everybody else we know to watch bowling?”

Spectator sports are fine, when all you want is to be a spectator.  (I definitely would’ve felt like that, if I’d lived in ancient Rome and you’d given me the choice of either participating in or simply watching gladiator fights.)

Bowling strikes me as definitely more fun to do, then to watch.  (Even if the beer was free.)  Likewise, golf.

That’s just my personal take.

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Just in case you’ve never actually seen an X-Games monster halfpipe.

In this case, referred to as a “Superpipe,” here’s a photo taken from the bottom, looking up toward the start house.  Those little ant-like creatures in the middle are a competitor and a hand-held cameraman following her.  (The camerman is 22 feet below those folks you can see standing on the lip, to his left.) 

And as with any snow event, it’s a heckuva lot scarier in real life, whether you’re at the top looking down, on even standing up on the lips at either side.

Though I’ve always found this strange:  Ski slopes themselves always seem steeper and more difficult when you’re standing on them in the summer, when it’s just rocks and weeds, and looking down and imagining having to negotiate your way down.  Once there’s a nice blanket of snow, however big the moguls are, it seems a lot easier.  Strange. 

The X-Games organizers put on a new competition this year, at the tail end of Sunday night:  They selected 6 guys (skiers, not boarders) and had them just try to see who could get the highest (above the lip on either side).  No tricks, no style points, just height.  All they had to do was jump real high, then land clean– no hands, no butt slides.

The winner, Peter Olenick (from just down the road in Carbondale), posted a jump of 24 feet, 11 inches.  (And that’s not from the bottom, inside the pipe.  That’s from the lip, which is 22 feet above the bottom, inside.  And remember: It’s built on a ski run, so the whole thing’s tilted… down… severely.  Yikes.)

And did I mention that the surface is as hard as a skating rink?  So you have to be able to ride a flat ski on your way up, then grab an edge real quick when you land.  Obviously, you’re not going in there with standard recreational skis.

You’re not required to do this, when you come out to visit.

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Now that the Winter X-Games are over, it’s time for a much-needed rest.

That last run in the SuperPipe was a killer.  I don’t know how I let Peter Olenick beat me.

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I just added this to the beginning of Chapter One of Risa and the Dog…, so I thought I’d add it to the blog site, as well.  I use the picture, in the manuscript, as a way of visualizing the opening cartoon.

Anyway, this is the restored (c. 1984) interior of Aspen’s Wheeler Opera House.  The vintage fire curtain is a painting of the then-recently-completed Brooklyn Bridge.

Before the renovation, the place was a fire trap.  (Not that those of us who worked in it worried.  The precursor to the Aspen Writers’ Foundation had its offices on the top floor, and we never gave the safety issue a thought.  It was just a long trek up two floors’ worth of rather steep stairs)  A friend of mine who owned an insurance agency couldn’t even figure out how the city could get the building insured, for a while.  But now it’s revamped, and a fun place to go see a play, an opera, a movie, or whatever.

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If memory serves, I think it’s Malcolm McDowell.

When I was in school, an acquaintance of mine spent a weekend at Yale at some “cinema” workshop/festival/seminar thing.  And he wound up sharing a room with none other than HUGE MOVIE STAR Malcolm McDowell.  Who’d become world-famous in Lindsay Anderson’s If.  Then Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange.

My friend said McDowell was a totally British gentleman, charming, soft-spoken, thoughtful, considerate (which must have been a shock, given the roles he’d played), right down to the (unexpected) three-piece Bond Street suits and the Oxbridge accent.

True story.

Later on, I got a kick out of watching McDowell in Time After Time.  Where he played H.G.Wells, and had to time-travel to 70′s San Francisco to chase Jack the Ripper (who’d stolen his other time machine and arrived there first), played by a nefarious David Warner.  The “love interest” in the film was Mary Steenbergen, who went on to marry McDowell– in real life.  (Though that didn’t last, and she later wound up with Ted Danson, if memory serves.)

Next question:  Were Malcolm McDowell and Winona Ryder ever in a movie together?

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Being a big Kurt Vonnegut appreciator (as opposed to just “fan”), I added a note in my “Suggested Reading” category, “Xtra Credit: Books You Might Enjoy (besides mine)”…

… about a new book of previously unpublished stories by Vonnegut.  (Presumably from the 1950′s and 60′s, though the artwork copyrights are all from the 1990′s and 2000′s.)

Now that I’ve read through them all, I have to admit that some of these stories (like much of Vonnegut’s later-years work) aren’t much fun.  I go so far as to recommend not reading the final story, “The Good Explainer.”

It almost seems like the stories in this volume become increasingly dark and un-fun as you read along.

But the first few are GREAT.  Vintage Vonnegut.  Hard to imagine why he didn’t like them enough to publish, when they were written.

One personal note:  When I was in college, I knew a girl who worked at the Sears store in Falmouth.  On Cape Cod.  And she explained to me once that Kurt Vonnegut used to buy all of his clothes there.  (From her personally, I think she meant to imply.)

I soon moved out here to Aspen, and we didn’t have a Sears any closer than Grand Junction, but we did have a JC Penney in Glenwood (40 miles away), so I decided that if the clothes at Sears were good enough for Kurt, the clothes at JC Penney should be good enough for me.

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