“Kurt, hey, come on!” Pat said. “It’s not that bad! You and I can go up in the balloon!”
When Pat said that I thought I was hearing things.
She continued. “I know you can fly it! You’re a smart guy. You went to Yale right?” She stopped to take a breath. “So it looks like a dinosaur. So what?! I can dress like Carol Burnett when she does her Tarzan yell, and do my imitation. You know I’m good at it! Its part of my act at Laugh Till it Hurts!”
Kurt and I reluctantly followed Pat out into the parking lot and watched as she ran ahead and scrambled into the big basket hanging from the belly of the dinosaur.
“I’m sorry Pat!” Kurt said as he ran after her. “I don’t think that will work. What am I supposed to do up there? Interview you!?”
“No! I have an idea!” I shouted getting into the spirit of the moment. “Kurt, you can get into a costume too!” This was easy for me to suggest from the relative safety of the station back door.
It was decided that Kurt would dress up as Mr. T because the A-Team was hot now, and Mr. T. had a good tag line: “I pity the fool!”
Kurt Vaselined his curly hair flat-- except for a hunk in the middle of his head that served to represent Mr. T’s Mohawk. He also took off his shirt and put on a bunch of beads that had been laying around the station since February when Greg went to New Orleans for Mardi Gras.
“Well!” Pat gushed and gave a great Tarzan yell. “Let’s give away some coins!”
It was a beautiful clear day and the dinosaur went up without a hitch. Leo, the WEWO announcer on the ground started the on-air play-by-play explaining that Jane and Mr. T were riding in the WEMO hot air balloon today instead of Jennifer Beal and Kurt Strong for reasons that were left unstated.
At first I, just like Pat, had a lot of faith in Kurt’s ability to fly the balloon. I believed Kurt would be able to host the remote and toss out coins while steering the hot air dinosaur without breaking a sweat, but by Leo’s first cut-in it was clear that Kurt, Yale grad or not, was sweating bullets.
Not only were Kurt and Pat not getting into their new roles, playing off one another, and being cute like I’d hoped, it sounded like they were having a hard time keeping in an upright position and anywhere near the microphone.
Not that any of this was our fault. None of us knew that no one really steers a hot air balloon. We didn’t know that the most anyone can do to control the direction of a balloon is heat or cool the air inside it and hope to catch a breeze going in the right direction. If we’d known that we might have thought to build a few contingencies into the flight plan.
After a very shook up sounding Kurt told the listening audience during one of the cut-ins that he was over one of the three rivers that ran through Pittsburgh, but he didn’t know which one Leo demanded someone get in a car and try to follow them so we’d at least have a general idea where the balloon was heading.
The crew at the station insisted I should be the one to follow because I was a buddy of Pat’s and therefore guilty by association. Even my fear of getting lost or stuck on the wrong side of a bridge or tunnel didn’t get me off the hook.
To make sure I had a clear field of vision, I stuffed my hair under a ball cap and gave the car’s windshield a once over, but all that wasn’t really necessary because by now our dinosaur was hard to miss--hovering not more than 100 feet above Pittsburgh. I could see it skirting the golden triangle, moving in the opposite direction of the produce district where it was supposed to land. It was not so much sailing through the air as meandering around up there.
After a frustrating forty-five minutes of near collisions and dead ends, I ditched my car and went after the balloon on foot. I spent the next thirty minutes running across parking lots, in and out of department stores, and through a series of small courtyards behind apartment buildings.
At the intersection of Kaufmanns Department Store and Three Gate Way Center, I watched as the dinosaur caught a good gust of wind, and swooped over at least one block of buildings. It drifted out of sight and took its time sinking on the horizon. I held my breath and prayed it would come down on clear solid ground.
I caught up with it on a lawn behind a building that might have been a museum. On its descent it knocked over a dozen or so round banquet tables covered in thick white linen. One of the table cloths now draped the dinosaur’s deflating snout and I couldn’t help but notice the remains of what looked like a tasty brunch scattered in the grass.
As I got closer, I could see a bunch of older distinguished looking men and women dressed for cocktails at the Hamptons coming out from behind a row of hedges to reclaim their lawn after it was obvious the balloon was harmless and rapidly deflating.
Kurt and Pat were just creeping out from under the basket. Kurt was apologizing to everyone within the sound of his voice, and Pat was laughing and calling for help in getting clear of the tangled lines that ran from the basket to the dinosaur, so I guessed they were okay. Then it was a race to see who’d get to Pat and Kurt first, one of the people in attendance at what must have been a lawn party, or me. A very trim, exercised, sixtyish female with pale skin, and salt and pepper hair beat me to them by a good fifteen seconds, and she was bearing gifts.
“Here! Take these!!” she handed champagne flutes to Kurt and Pat, or Mr. T and Jane depending on how you looked at it. They gulped down the champagne and held their glasses out for refills.
”Are you part of the festivities? What fun! Who hired you?”
Pat and Kurt were too busy checking their arms and legs to see if they were still intact to answer. So she refilled their glasses and continued. Pointing to Pat, she said “You’re…you’re…” she paused to think. “You’re Jane. Right?” Pat let out a Tarzan yell and explained she was channeling Carol Burnett’s Jane doing a Tarzan yell. To my surprise, that seemed to make sense to the woman.
She then turned to Kurt, “And you’re…Tarzan?”
“No!” a gentleman, also sixtyish, in seersucker pants and a bowtie ran up to join us. “He’s not Tarzan! He’s Mr. T! I Pity the fool! Right? Am I right?”
“Right,” Kurt admitted and sat down on the grass with his head down, but with his glass held out for a third refill.
By then I’d caught my breath enough to ask the woman if she might have enough champagne for me too. When she returned, both she and her husband wanted to know who we were and again asked who hired us.
Since I was the most formally dressed of the three of us in a ball cap, and acid-washed jeans, I made the introductions, adding we were from WEWO and that our dinosaur/flash dance/ silver coin promotion had hit a snag, and we weren’t part of their entertainment. I was prepared to offer a much lengthier explanation as to why we had crashed landed in the middle of their party but it wasn’t necessary because as is often the case, they were more interested in telling us about themselves and what was going on there that day than hearing any more about us.
The woman introduced herself. “I’m Lillian.” She extended her hand to each of us. When none of the three of us lit up with recognition, she added, “Lillian Morris, and this is my husband Robert.”
We all murmured nice to meet you.
“I hope you know you’ve landed at the Pittsburgh Public Radio spring fundraiser.” Lillian whispered, “We have a very large goal this year, but Robert and I have been fortunate enough to line up some very generous matching funds.”
“Great, wonderful, good for you.” Pat and Kurt muttered while I asked myself what matching funds were. “Perhaps you’d like to contribute?” Lillian asked. After five awkward seconds of silence, she asked, “Are you at least listeners?”
Kurt told her he was, and that he was even a dollar-a-day member. Pat lied and said she was too, but I knew she wasn’t, she listened to old comedy tapes in the car and didn’t have a dollar-a-day for anybody. I admitted I wasn’t a listener, but I promised I’d start. It took another ten years, but it was eventually the truth.
“Robert! Guess What? Two of them are listeners,” she pointed to Kurt and Pat, “and dollar-a-day contributors!”
That pleased Robert no end. “Let’s all sit down and talk about this dinosaur promotion. Tell us how it is you attract listeners to your station. We use pledge drives. Have you heard?”
“You go on.” I said to Kurt and Pat, “I’ll head back to the station.” I made excuses to Lillian and Robert about having to deal with the deflated dinosaur that very minute and hurried out to the sidewalk. I stopped and looked back. I would have liked to have stayed a while longer, I would have liked to get to know Lillian and Robert and the entire group of people there that day, but I felt too far out of my element, so I left.
A few people mentioned how lucky we were that there weren’t any serious repercussions from what Pat and I came to consider “our promotion”. There were a few complaints about the lack of silver coins on the ground and no celebrity interview, but that all got quieted down with free albums, and concert tickets and no one mentioned the balloon promotion again.
Except for Pat and Kurt. After their chat with Robert and Lillian at the balloon's crash site, both of them started to move in the crowd they were introduced to that day.
Kurt made enough contacts to get a gig in public radio. Eventually, he moved on to the Washington, D.C. bureau. His ratings were good, and his family was very happy.
Pat began providing entertainment for charity events attended by local TV personalities and various Pittsburgh movers and shakers. A year or so later she left Pittsburgh for L.A. to make a sit-com pilot. She played the funny friend. The show was picked up by one of the new emerging networks and lasted for two seasons.
I've read that Woody Allen has said half of life is showing up. After I saw how life changed for those two after they crashed landed at a party and decided to stay awhile, I've come to believe the other half, the more important half is hanging around.
Maybe if I'd stayed later that day and connected with Lillian and Robert, I’d have met someone who could have introduced me to be the world of NPR and professional fundraising. Maybe I’d have volunteered at a gala and met other people who could have influenced my life. But I couldn’t stay in a place so far out of my comfort zone, even for an afternoon.
There was a format change at WEWO only a few months after the dinosaur promotion. Album oriented rock stations were dying, and WEWO went “Lite”. But I wasn’t around long enough to see who made it through the format change. My husband decided to move again; this time to Miami. I like to tell myself if Miami hadn’t sounded like such a glamorous place to live, I would have stayed behind. You’ll notice my husband doesn’t play a very prominent role in my stories. But the security I found in comfort zones not only kept me from experiencing new things and meeting new people, but it also kept me experiencing the same things over and over again with the same person. So in this case, it was more comfortable to hang around a while longer.
Next Week "Miami"
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