West of the Moon
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sometimes the answer can surprise you.
So, as promised, my favorite reunion story. (Apologies to those of you who’ve heard this three or four times already.) It happened on Saturday night, the year that I was housing coordinator. Saturday is the best night, for reunion workers. Reunion week starts on Sunday, with very intense last-minute preparation, and then the older classes arrive early in the week, and around Thursday or Friday the older classes leave and the younger ones come in, and all week long it’s just a frantic mess of juggling housing assignments, checking people in, processing walk-ins, fielding complaints, arranging transportation, whatever needs doing. Saturday is the last night, though, and the end is in sight.
By Saturday night, my housing work was almost done. I could finally let go of the complicated scheduling. I took all of the keys for the remaining unclaimed rooms (only about seven or eight, by that point), lined them up on the desk, and when walk-ins showed up looking for housing, I could just hand them keys without needing to worry about how this room assignment affected the big picture. There was no big picture anymore, there was just a slow countdown until final checkout.
It wasn’t just me. By Saturday night, almost everyone’s work was done. The desk still needed to be staffed, so we all still had to sit in that lobby all night, but the stress had drained out of the room, and everyone was very calm. There weren’t a lot of alumni around–Saturday is a big event night–and the staff was slipping a little from best behavior. The transportation coordinator was reading a fashion magazine, with her feet up on the desk. The registration coordinator had smuggled in a plate of cookies from the 20th Reunion reception. The head of the linens crew was playing chess with my housing assistant, and to everyone’s surprise, the linens guy was winning. You wouldn’t think that it would be surprising to find out that any given Harvard student is good at chess, right? But Ron, the linens guy… well, there’s no point dancing around this, he was commonly referred to as “Ron the Stoner Linens Guy”. He was one of the sweetest and least pretentious people I’ve ever met, and of everyone on staff he was probably my favorite to just hang out and chat with, but he also had a habit of taking the master keys and disappearing for two or three hours in the middle of the day, showing up eventually looking a little out of it and asking if we knew where he’d left his walkie-talkie. His work got done, mostly, and none of us minded covering for him with the full-time staff, but I’ll admit that the overall effect led us to be surprised that Ron was also a chess whiz.
Anyway. It’s Saturday night, we’re all relaxing in the registration lobby, and the guy who’s playing chess with Ron notices a stray alum hanging out in the lobby and asks if we can help him with anything. The alum, a good-looking guy who looks to be tenth or fifteenth reunion, no older, says that he’s fine, he’s just waiting for a friend. Ron start to make small talk with the guy, are you having a good weekend, where are you from, etc. It’s calm enough in the lobby that we’re all listening to the conversation without really meaning to eavesdrop. The guy is from Los Angeles, he says, and I think to myself, yeah, I might have guessed that. He’s got a really nice suit, gun-metal grey and very stylish, and a shaved head, and I wouldn’t be surprised at all if he works in the entertainment industry somehow.
Awesome, Ron says. I totally want to move to Los Angeles after I graduate. What do you do?
I’m in a band, the guy says. I play guitar.
Awesome! I play guitar too, Ron says, but I’m between bands right now. What’s your band called?
Rage Against the Machine, the guy says.
(beat)
Ron, I swear to god, took this entirely in stride. He just kind of nodded his head and said, oh cool, I have one of your albums. Meanwhile, everyone else in the lobby was sitting very very still, trying very very hard not to stare, or to make Tom Morello feel awkward. (We did contrive, later in the night when he and his friend asked for van shuttle transportation, to make sure that we assigned the van driven by a student who played bass in a really awesome all-girl punk band, so that she could at least have the chance to meet him. Networking is very important.)
I’m not sure why this story is such a standout for me, in terms of reunion encounters. Part of what happens when you work reunion is that you meet famous people, and part of the institutional culture is to not make a big deal out of it, as is only right and proper. These people are here to spend time with their classmates and old friends, not to deal with the squeeing fangirlness of nineteen-year-old kids. It was really just the incongruity, and the fabulous nonchalance of the moment.
Posted Friday, June 6th, 2008 at 12:37 pm. Filed under: personal > writing and editing.
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OMG Tom Morello!
*syncope*