I REMEMBER EVERYTHING

Posted On 2023-01-02

I remember every little thing as if it happened only yesterday…

I remember the compliments. I move forward by beating myself up, and I tend to not take the observations of others too seriously because on any of several levels people just have no idea. Even praise becomes iffy, because my reality is just different. “You’re smart!” No, I’m just me. Literally woke up this way. Not special, just the hand I was dealt. Any number of even good things get blown off outright if there there was no contribution beyond whatever intrinsic eccentricities I was born with. It’s like being complimented for having elbows.

But when things get through, they stick. I remember the compliments.

My HS art class, I had a painting of a big puma-like cat and needed a particular shade of brown. Some yellow to brighten it up, some black/white to mute it, some green for a little punch, and I had the very lion-like shade I was looking for. This was just fooling around for me, I was gonna get some variation of the color I wanted eventually. But something about the shade made an impression on a guy who’d been kinda watching me work, when the finished pieces were done he called out that shade and how he’d had no idea how I’d gotten it.

There was the guy who decided that the best insulting derivation of my name was “David Pompous Ass”. It was the personal touch that put it over the top. I appreciated the effort.

The girl who wrote in my yearbook that I had the prettiest eyes she’d ever seen. How cool is that??

Graphic Design class, the looks on those folks’ faces after I’d finished my slideshow. If you’re gonna go big, either go last and be the big finish that everyone remembers, or go first and be the impression that dulls everything that follows. They should have made me go last. That’s not true, they should have put on better shows. Those looks of defeat were all on them.

The MacGyver tag. Hell, all of the ego and confidence-boosting that came out of those booth years. First time someone called me boss. Saving sold-out shows routinely. One day I was backing up one of the techs, was mostly just watching him work. At one point he called out over the walkie with a favorable progress response on the projector we were fixing then announced “but Dave’s quitting this week anyway” just for fun. Days later a guy I didn’t even know was like omg are you really quitting? HA

The GM at Glendale. Virginia? Pretty sure it was Virginia. Something with a V. She was anti-Dave at first. She was friends with Heidi (Pacific Heidi, not AMC Heidi), and Pacific Heidi was an incompetent cheerleader who hated me. So when I got to Glendale, Virginia flat-out opened with the bad impression that had been communicated to her by Pacific Heidi.

(And not for nothing, but Pacific Heidi is as good a reason as any for why Pacific/ArcLight deserved to fail. What a poisonous little nest of hypocrites. Servant leadership my ass.)

Anyway, so Virginia started off against me, but to her credit she paid attention and figured it out. When Pacific Heidi tried destroying the circuit’s payroll with a 20% cut in staff hours and I called it catastrophic math, Heidi blew me off entirely. “That’s just Dave complaining again.” This woman was seriously trying to turn an accounting change into an opening to slash payroll and screw both guests and surviving staff alike. Pacific Heidi was a GM who’d held multiple leadership positions with Pacific/ArcLight, and for the single week it would have taken for the circuit to see exactly how bad her plan was, she would have made literally thousands of people miserable. And when a flag is raised, what’s her Professional Pacific General Manager response? Wah, wah. Virginia: “But Heidi… he’s right.”

There was a leadership seminar thing at one point, where at a few points a reference was made to an online thing only some of the attendees had been though. So there’s these references to a “MOOC”, an acronym that only half the room knows to recognize. Over the course of the seminar it became a thing, after a while the speakers picked up on the confusion and explained the term. Later on we broke out into discussion groups to waste time, and Virginia wound up in my group, and the “MOOC” confusion came up. So I was describing the elimination process and context clues I’d been – unsuccessfully – working through to try figuring out what the hell they were talking about, what word this “mook” sound was supposed to be. And Virginia says “I am fascinated by how your mind works” Which…what? Because on the one hand that’s a cool sentiment to hear, but on the other you’re saying that other folks’ minds work in a different way? …HOW???

Going back in time, to the opening of the Promenade and the little pre-opening festival of classic films they were running. The studio’s archive print of ‘Harvey Girls’. Not a backup, not a copy, not print 1419 from the Technicolor archive, the studio’s copy of the film. And Mary pointing at me, “and I want you to build it up”.

I remember all that shit.

My boss after graduation, acknowledging the achievement of finishing school while working a night job as a test case to see if students were a workable labor pool for the position, and then saying “but we’re not opening the position to students because we don’t think other people would be able to pull it off.”

The staff at Sherman Oaks who, after three months of working for me had no idea I was their GM, because “I didn’t act like other GMs”

The lady at Starbucks who remembered my name yesterday, solid months after the Starbucks days required by my shitty old car.

The girl online who called me ‘cutie’. Like, three times!