You had me at "Go Speed Racer . . . "

Oh Oh Oh Oh!!!! John Goodman is Pops!!!! Brilliant!!!! Susan Sarandon is mom?

I had this religion professor who was one of those very nice hard asses you come across once in a while. Getting an A in his class was hard. Not malicious hard, he simply made you work for the grade. Now it wasn't like I was the greatest student ever, for I lacked consistency, just every once in a while, I did rise to the challenge. A lot of the time it wasn't worth the bother.

He was this kind of neat guy. He had this long ass beard. When I first heard that Indigo Girls song "Closer to Fine", about the professor of philosophy with a beard down to his knee, that's who I thought of. He reminded me of an Extra from the "The Outlaw Josey Wales" (one of the finest Westerns ever produced, imho.) Thin, kinda hillbilly looking, but very nice. Once when a friend of mine and I stopped by his office for some reason that escapes me now, when we showed up, my friend who got a B in his class and me, who managed to get the A, he looked at us and said "Well hello Summa and Magna!" (We're talking a year after I took the test, he knew how many As and Bs he handed out . . . and to whom.)

Anyway, he was telling us a story in class once, about how he was doing this "Beat" thing, you know, Kerouac, espresso, in Dallas, Texas of all places. (And sorry, but you might have gotten away with that crap in NYC, but in Dallas in the early 60s that s*** was brave.)

But the story was about how he went to see (in his beat regalia) Clayton Moore . . . yeah, the Lone Ranger. And how you couldn't hear a pin drop, with all these Hippies and Beats showing up to hear this guy talk (I'm not sure what the point of the story was, it was World Religions, I was thinking it was about Jesus addressing the multitudes . . . but that was a different class, at least in depth it was a different class . . . )*

So when I heard the Speed Racer music . . . I knew what he was talking about. The story may be crap . . . but I am sooooooo there.

*This was the professor who took off for spelling. Okay, so lots of them do. With this guy, he didn't just take it off once, but every misspelled word. And in the land before spell check and lots of handwritten papers, this was deadly. As said by a friend of mine: "I think I might have gotten the C if I could have spelled Ecclesiastes properly . . . . "