Well, perhaps meeting is a slight exaggeration. But I did sit down with a group including
Roger Ebert one day back in the 90’s. It
was back when I taught English at the University, and used to drop in at the
Faculty Club on Friday afternoons with a group of fellow English
instructors. On this day when I dropped
in, I saw at one end of the group gathered in chairs around a coffee table the
unmistakable form of the man who had helped to make “Two thumbs up” such a
well-known catch phrase.
“That’s a famous person,” I said to a colleague, who nodded
in agreement. We were sitting at the
other end of the group, and I never got introduced to the famous person, and
didn’t say anything to the famous person, which is why I wouldn’t exactly call
it “meeting.” Still.
For however long we sat there the famous person regaled us
with stories of Hollywood, film-making, and
the like. I don’t remember any of them,
but what I do remember is the reverential air that descended on us. Now, this was not a generally reverential
group. It was composed of smart-alecky,
bright young PhD-types whose most common mode was satire or sarcasm.
Sarcasm, by the way, as I notice by perusing dating sites,
has become a positive quality somehow.
Women promote themselves by saying things like, “I have a sarcastic
sense of humour,” though they sometimes qualify this by adding that they are
not mean-spirited or harsh. I don’t
know; it seems to me that the essence of sarcasm is mean-spiritedness or
harshness. When a woman announces that
she’s sarcastic, it’s a red flag for me; I back away, slowly, keeping my back
away from her.
Anyway, our group back then, twenty years ago or so, tended
to sarcasm. Perhaps it should have made
me back away, but then what would I have done on Friday afternoons after a week
of teaching or working on my PhD?
Perhaps I was even guilty of sarcasm myself; I tend to take on the
coloration of the group I’m in … Or can that be true? I often fancy myself as the outsider in any
group I’m in. Does everybody feel
that? Perhaps I became a sarcastic
outsider.
Anyway, on this day with Roger Ebert, no one was sarcastic,
certainly not towards Roger Ebert. “Oh,
Mr. Ebert,” someone would say, “tell us about so-and-so.” Or, “How was it to work with so-and-so?” Or “Is Hollywood
really as nasty as people say?”
I was astonished.
What had happened to the sharp, cutting intellectuals who used to
dominate the group? Had they been
replaced by a bunch of adoring fans?
Does fame have such power? In the
absence of other things to worship, do we turn to celebrities? (Well, the answer to that last seems obvious
now that I write it.)
But there must be some other path besides sarcasm and
adoration, it seems to me. Maybe
treating people as equals, though I hasten to say I don’t mean to put myself on
the same level as Roger Ebert. Or is
that just adoration sneaking in? I did
register that he was a famous person, and I was rather mute that afternoon,
perhaps as a result. Was that just
silent adoration?
And I wonder what the famous person felt about the
adoration. I’ve occasionally been on the
receiving end of that sort of thing: when introduced to the friend of my
girl-friend at the time, who was totally tongue-tied around me, in an admiring
way, because I had just published a novel.
I remember thinking, Well, this is nice in a way, but I’d rather just be
able to talk normally with someone rather than bask in this admiration. But maybe that’s just me.
