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Show Acting Alone Page 4 hoo-yah, hoo-yah I always say; I always say. . . The freshmen all agreed on something serious that Sam missed in this blast of synthesized rock. Something about Iran. Or welfare fraud. Or being overrun. That did it. Sam lumbered to his feet and began a loud, beery lament. He was cutting in on the conversation, trampling it flat, causing the social process to take an unnatural twist - but that was his job. He may have been a mere gradstudent himself, but he was Teacher. No talking - "I want the red wine," he moaned, "the blankets, the folksingers, when I_ was eighteen, the cheap green Mexican dopesmoke over Sonny Terry, I want my little Jewish prepschool friends who burned^ money outside the Buffalo Springfield concert, I want the communists, the sideburns - they weren't allowed enough time to play themselves out - synthetic death! Synthetic death!" Sam grabbed Shannon's sweet little shoulder and breathed down through her giggles. "Please let this be merely the illusion of this agricultural college, let me ignore the meaningless night, the senate's shift right, the fall of Birch Bayh. There's something strong, something I love here, something I'm drowning in, and I don't know what it is -" Even as he moaned these things, he knew that the old standby New Left nostalgia was not located anywhere near the true source of his anxieties. Still he went on for a while. He was Teacher. Now, Sam was large. Closer to seven feet than to six-and-a-half feet. He weighed over 300 pounds, a bit of it unreclaimed chubbiness. But, with his padded-shoulder jacket concealing the few extra rolls of secular humanist |