SOUTH BEND, Ind. (February 22). A cold
front moved in from the northwest. Snowfall here is
about 70 inches a year. Located at the top of the freshwater-bearing
carbonate and sandstone aquifer of the Great Lakes Basin,
the prairie plants native here grow exceedingly green,
but you would not have known it on that day.
Easy now, from the balmy heights of a promising spring,
to pooh-pooh the bitterness of the winter just past--
it is human nature to suppose it was not after all that
bad, but as we all may remember from those early crew
calls, the winters drop pretty dark mornings around
here.
Some say after a few more years of global warming,
they’ll be frying bacon on the mailboxes in the
Bend. That day the clouds carried ice from Minnesota,
which turned to sleet over Lake Michigan, and joined
the snow, already in progress in South Bend, blanketing
the river city.
Some background
Dave Simkins, BOC Chief Archivist (BOC ’74-‘77)
works to preserve the legacy of BOC virtually non-stop.
Dave has made tangible memorials remembering BOC in
one way or another since his participation as a member
of and advisor to the award-winning companies of the
1970s.
Since July of 2001, he has worked on behalf of BOC's
alumni association members to formalize the show's archive,
for the purposes of both reproduction and preservation.
Using his own resources and working from his home in
Pasadena, David’s mission has been to scan, to
one appropriate reproductive media or another, all the
thousands of feet of original film, hours of tape, still
photographs and art, and scripts and production documents
to which BOC is heir.
These boxes of tapes, slides, photos and production
docs constitute the mother-lode of the purest ore of
BOC lore. Samples from this rich vein of core material
have entertained visitors to the BOC Web page, and been
generously made available free and downloadable through
the alumni association site. The original material of
all the BOC stuff will find a permanent home at Grass Roots Media, a South Bend business owned by BOC alums Donnie and Andrea Rogers—where they have a lot of space, an equal
abundance of generosity, and a warm spot in their hearts
for that very nice TV show of local broadcast legend.
BOC brought together hundreds of local kids for twenty
years, who found in the lessons it taught their vocation,
and with Andrea and Donnie, a marriage and business
partnership.
Space
Donnie and Andrea also own the Grass Roots
building (variously referred to among historians of
the architecture of the South Bend city-fabric as The
Prairie Building, or more recently, The Hamilton Apartments),
and spent the morning talking about hosting the BOC
physical archives there.
Andrea and Donnie are renting a clean, well-lighted
space of 1500 cubic feet (eight-by-twelve-by-fifteen
feet) of shelf space to the BOC alumni group, for the
storage of the television show archives.
The alumni organization is paying an annual $1-- at
the organization’s demand. This demonstrates that
the meritocratic ethos of Bonus Points follows BOC veterans into the most obscure corners of their lives. The BOCTVAA management
insisted on making the payment, and Andrea indulged
them in taking it. An additional empty room is available
when needed for the temporary use of BOC for storage
during short-term events, like screenings, seminars,
or conferences.
"Space is a luxury," Andrea
said, sitting at the long conference table in the Grass
Roots boardroom. "I'm just so happy to have all
this space in this building-- we couldn't have offered
that before. This kind of extra space is, to me, a luxury.
I'm storing bikes here, and everything. It's just so
easy and we're happy to do it."
"It doesn't have to be tying up Joe Dundon's garage,"
Donnie added. "He's bringing a lot of stuff over
today. It's a fairly safe place to have everything--
it's dry. We've been here a year, and there've been
no moisture problems down there."
Donnie and Andrea
Once upon a time Donnie Ehmen (his last name has since
been changed to Rogers), a high school sophomore, rode
in from Walkerton and started working as a summer intern
at WSND, the Notre Dame fine arts radio station. Andrea
Rogers, whose father was a professor of literature at
the University of Notre Dame, worked there, too.
At WSND Donnie was a board operator, traffic
manager, and assistant station manager for one summer.
Andrea was a board op.
"Pulled out records for 'Tafelmusik,' and whatever
other program we'd signed up to," she said, mentioning
a well-known WSND local broadcast.
"We'd choose classical music by the length of
the movement of the piece-- I can't just play the things
that I'm familiar with, because how long would that
last? In my family we always played instruments in orchestra,"
Andrea said, "all through fourth grade, through
high school. But-- it's not like I had a really diverse
knowledge of classical-- I knew how to pronounce Bach,
and so on, but I-- it's like, oh damn, we've got to
fill this amount of time, OK, I'm going to pull these!"
"This piece will provide a stark counterpoint
to the piece I played previously," said Donnie.
"Yes," Andrea added. "Stark counterpoint
meaning I don't know what's on it, and I didn't know
what was on the other one."
"But it's thirty-seven minutes long, and that's
how much time I need to fill," Donnie finished.
"I moved to town my freshman year of high school,
from a school of 300 kids to 1400 kids in Clay; and
the next summer got involved in the internship at WSND--
the Fine Arts radio station-- and, actually I had seen
Andrea at school and she was also in that-- in the internship,"
Donnie said.
The following fall of 1984, at auditions for the Beyond
Our Control 1985 company, they bumped into each other
again. Throughout high school both worked in these broadcasting
venues together, hanging out with each other and with
a big group of friends that were involved with the radio
station and Beyond Our Control.
"This Donnie kid just kept showing up at the same
stuff I signed up for," Andrea said.
"It was good," Donnie said.
As a result of his BOC experience (‘85-‘86),
Donnie landed another summer internship with Bill Siminski
producing commercials at WNDU. He again met Andrea at
WSND, accidentally but possibly on purpose moved into
her neighborhood, once gave her a ride home, and the
rest is history. Andrea is now president of Grass Roots
Media. She said she robbed the cradle, since Donnie
is ten months her junior, but they were in college at
the same time. Donnie attended Indiana University, South
Bend, studying scene design and communications at the
same time Andrea attended Notre Dame, studying literature.
"I was doing that stuff, and Donnie was doing,
kind of, technical theater, and more technical kind
of stuff," Andrea said. "The relationship.
And then the company. And then the marriage. And then
the corporation.”
Andrea is president of Grass Roots, and Donnie, vice-president.
Donnie is the treasurer. Andrea is the secretary.
"We forget these things," Andrea said. "We
have to put them down on paper, but we're the only stockholders.
So you've got to kind of divvy those jobs up, and they
only count on paper, really."
Archaeology
Among BOC's time-scattered materials are rumored to
be 2-inch and 1-inch. There is a verified forest of
three-quarter-inch videotape, magnetic sound tape, 16
mm. film, stills, spirit-master reproduced annual production
books, and scripts of teasers, announcer-copy and PSAs.
BOC’s own in-house bi-weekly news broadside, the
"Poopsheet," is in there, too; including editions
of it from the early ‘70s to the concluding annual
reports and printed materials from the show's final
days in 1986.
One of the BOC archive projects in which Donnie and
Grass Roots is participating with David Simkins is in
the preparation of the presentation-room tapes from
the July 2001 BOC Reunion, assembled for that event
by Indianapolis film and video editor and BOC alumnus
Kevin Zimmerman ('73-'76). Using the same material Donnie
will be working on a version of the chronological arrangement
of the archived shows, and from among the 2001 reunion
presentation tapes developed by Kevin, for distribution--
probably in DVD form, but VHS volumes have not been
ruled out.
Describing the scope of the editing work Grass Roots
is doing for BOC, Donnie said, "First off, I'm
taking all the cool display-tapes that Kevin Zimmerman
put together for the reunion, and I'm trying to get
those transferred over to DVD-- with some menu-ing,
so people don't have to watch all two hours, if they
don't want to. If they want to hop to a specific bit--"
"That's the point of a DVD," explained Andrea.
"Exactly. He (Kevin) just found the logs that
he put together. I've got the first one in the machine,
and now that I'm done with the Addy show I can start
turning my attention to get those DVDs rolled out. Once
we get those taken care of, those are going to be fairly
straightforward, because he's done the hard work already,
getting them put together. He also has all the old footage
that he could find transferred to Beta SP, and we've
got that here, now.
"Myself, and Kevin Fye (Washington High School,
BOC '77-'79), and Joe Haase (Penn, '83-'86) are going
to start going through all the old footage and trying
to somehow chronologize it-- that's a word. It had been
suggested," Donnie continued, "that somebody'd
kind of be able to like to see some sort of a chronology.
So we can have all the ’67 bits, and all the '72
bits and all, kind of-- put together; so we're just
going to go through them and establish a comprehensive
log so we can assemble those in a logical order.
"Some of the stuff I've been looking at I could
tell was coming off 2-inch," Donnie said, adding
that an operational 2-inch Ampex VTR machine was rumored
to be somewhere in the South Bend area, and successfully
used to build a recent local broadcast retrospective.
"We have boxes of all those plaques. Best Technician,
Best Actor for whatever years, and everything,"
Andrea said. "It's just so neat to just pull one
off the stack, and say, oh my God I know him!
"We have bags full of three-quarter inch tapes.
It says, Show Number Two, Final. Work Tape Thirteen.
Beyond Our Control. Twenty-eight, forty-four. Show Number
Two, '83. We have piles of three-quarter inch in there."
Growing Grass Roots
The original business was in Donnie's name, and after
getting the official tax ID in April of 1992 he was
actively creating animation components and title graphics
for his clients under the name of Grass Roots Media.
Donnie and Andrea's business started out as a sole proprietorship,
working from Donnie’s house. Now located in a
spacious building at 115 N. William, in downtown South
Bend, Grass Roots Media, Inc. is a multi-service media
production company, offering location and studio videography,
digital audio recording and production, Avid non-linear
digital editing and linear video editing, Lightwave
3-D animation, DVD authoring, and multimedia encoding
for CD-ROM and Web.
Jointly helmed by Donnie and Andrea Rogers, Grass Roots,
Inc. is officially the landlord of the Beyond Our Control
TV Alumni Association's physical archive of the show.
In January, BOC signed an annual lease with Avilys,
the company Andrea and Donnie own to manage the Prairie
Building itself, where Grass Roots and a number of other
businesses are located. Grass Roots is an S-corp, and
Donnie and Andrea formed an LLC to buy the building,
naming it Avilys. The word "avilys" means
"bee-hive" in Lithuanian.
"We were still living on Donnie's salary from
WNDU, when he was full-time, that I was full-time Grass
Roots Media, and then-- he'd work the morning shift,
and he'd come back at one o'clock and then join me.
I've got the numbers downstairs. It was real money;
it wasn't huge money, but we had clients. On a regular
basis."
Dave Miller of Absolute Recording in South Bend was
the first Grass Roots client. An "audio guy turned
video guy," Donnie did some animations for him.
"Even when I was doing scene design I was involved
in computer-- interested in computer graphics and seeing
the direction things could change. At the time I evolved
into more or less a full-time job at the station, because
I hadn't finished my degree yet-- but the station, WNDU
luring me away with an internship and then a position--
cash meant a lot to me," Donnie said. "And
I saw a lot of potential in computer graphics and stuff,
and so on my own took out a bank loan and bought a great
big Commodore media computer and started doing computer
animations in a spare bedroom.
"Dave kind of found out that I was doing this;
I didn't seek him out at all, but he found out about
it, and so I started doing just logo animations for
him to dump off to huge three-quarter inch tapes for
him to use in his facility over in Elkhart. "He
was primarily in audio recording, and he had at the
time a really nice video editing facility over there.
Local commercials, industrial videos, a lot of manufacturing;
this is the JACo pop-up RV for 1992 and things like
this," Donnie said.
"At the time when a nice facility meant you could
still get away with editing on three-quarter inch,"
added Andrea.
Then, the Grass Roots studio complex consisted of a
Commodore Amiga 2500-- the only machine at the time
that could do full-color, or at least high-resolution,
multiple-color animation, in real time.
Donnie was able to script the animations, play them
back, and lay them off to tape, for use within larger
projects. Most of Grass Roots early work was making
titles and process graphics-- pieces, parts moving together,
a company's logo flying in and doing something. In his
bedroom Donnie would then lay the animation off on a
little three-quarter deck, found with other old BOC
stuff saved from the WNDU dumpster at the close of the
show in 1986.
In the final, liquidating days of the "Beyond
Our Control" TV show, the huge old 5850 machines
used to make BOC-- big, beige three-quarter inch videotape
recorders on their way to some Michiana landfill-- found
their way into Donnie Roger's bedroom and formed some
part of the original Grass Roots physical plant. "Big
Sonys. They were sitting in my basement. I just fired
them up, and spooled the tape off," Donnie said.
"To have some more up-to-date stuff I bought a
couple Super VHS machines, and some editing software,
that also ran in the computer. And at that time I had
started testing a video product called a Video Toaster,
for a company out of Kansas.
"I heard about what they were developing, and
wrote them-- or, actually called them-- called their
tech support guys and said, 'What are you doing? What's
this box going to do?' I was really interested, and
just started hammering them with questions. And they
offered to make me a tester, so they sent me one of
the pre-production models," he said.
"The Toaster is just-- it's really sentimental,
and I think it's kind of cool that, twelve years old,
it'll still power up and do exactly what it was intended
to do the day it was made. You don't find that with
anything else," said Donnie.
"We have serial board number zero zero zero zero
eleven. An emotional attachment, obviously," Andrea
added.
The company has an Avid Media Composer Suite, an Avid
Express Suite, and just added an Avid Express DV, for
jobs that don't need all the horsepower of the larger
composers-- smaller jobs which, according to Andrea,
"don't need the real-time effects, don't need five
million layers of video, only need four, or six, or
something."
"That's on the same suite as the video authoring
software," Donnie said.
"We're also beta-testing some new DVD authoring
software for a company called Sonic, and they do a lot
of leading DVD stuff right now; and so we're-- I'm testing
a new package of software for them right now."
Grass Roots also runs a Pro Tools Audio Suite, hooked
up to a voiceover booth, and has a small shooting space
with a Chroma Key wall for product-shots and stand-ups.
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In 1993 Donnie and Andrea realized they
couldn't keep making incremental jumps in editing equipment,
every nine months or something. They decided they had
to take the plunge, and get a loan. Grass Roots had
been doing industrial or educational projects, or high-end
consumer projects, on Super VHS and Hi-8.
"Nothing I'd really want anyone to broadcast,"
Donnie said. "But this-- goes back to our first
client, Dave Miller-- he was deciding at that point
to get away from three-quarter, and he started to invest
in Beta SP gear. He wasn't necessarily interested in
re-outfitting his entire editing suite, with his old
three-quarter inch gear. So we talked to him enough,
and we explained to him what we were thinking of doing,
and that if he was going to be investing in Betacam
SP gear for his shooting, we'd do the same on the other
end and be able to be his post-house.
They started to talk to one or two banks, but then
a local leasing business, Freeman-Spicer Financial Services,
through rep Ed Lennie, put together a debt structure
for the Grass Roots expansion, allowing Grass Roots
to be among the first South Bend-area shops to offer
Avid-based non-linear videotape editing.
"And it's certainly what other people were using,
too," Andrea added, "so it's not like we were
putting all our eggs in the Dave Miller basket. It was
just one indicator."
Andrea wrote the business-plan. Grass Roots finally
got a Betacam SP deck; in the fall of 1993 the two had
the financing figured out, and, at the end of December,
Grass Roots's Avid Media Suite Pro arrived.
"Christmas Eve," Donnie said.
Local Color
"I can see the mayor's office from our window,
here," Donnie said. "When they're making a
pitch for a convention, Mickey Dobsky from the city
gives us a call and says, ‘Hey, will you-- we
need the mayor to do a quick stand-up—‘"
"So the mayor walks down and we chat and put him
in the studio and shoot him on the Chroma Key wall,"
said Andrea.
Grass Roots occupies almost half of the William Street
building. A conference room and kitchen are shared space.
The growing media business is the dominant presence,
employs six people, and owns the property.
Nowadays at Grass Roots there are moments when everyone
who's anyone in South Bend is passing through here.
The video business-- and all of the boutique businesses
around it-- benefit by whom might be coming into the
building, to work with any of the others.
Grass Roots just finished a project for the local ad
club, producing the local "Addy" yearly commercial
Awards Banquet, on February 21st. The production included
image-magnification of live action, and pulling pre-produced
material and timing the projection to match the action
on the dais.
"Pulling in stuff I'd learned from-- I realized--
going through it last night, and pulling in things that
I'd learned when I was Bill Siminski's intern at WNDU.
Pulling in things that I'd learned in the company, with
Denny," Donnie said.
St. Mary's University in South Bend is also a Grass
Roots client, in the school's development of a Web-downloadable,
interactive video project to attract student tuition
dollars to their educational program, an increasingly
competitive market.
"We shot a spot this year on 24p (24-frame ‘progressive
scan,’ video). And the stuff looks gorgeous. We
used one of the big Sony 900s; Rick Thompson down in
Indy's got one, and he came up and shot for us. Stuff's
gorgeous," Donnie said. "We just got our--
our-- got the digi-betas transferred to SP. For our
final cut. The client was real happy."
On a spot for South Bend's Goodwill Industries Donnie's
idea was to mimick the graphics from an old Volkswagen
TV commercial.
"All the graphics for the commercial were done
shooting this graphics board and then keying it in,
making it look like a cool old TV spot. And that's all
stuff I learned working at the TV station with Bill
and Denny. Because aside from just my time with the
(BOC) company, I spent eight years working with them
as peers at the TV station and learning from them." Donnie said.
"I still cherish that-- knowing how it was done,
knowing the new ways we have to get it done faster,
cheaper, cleaner-- but knowing how to go back and get
that old look if you want it. That spot we did-- it
was one of the spots that won an award last night."
In the first week in February Grass Roots completed
a project for Porsche. "A multi-media company in
town, in our humble little Mishawaka, got the contract
to do a CD-ROM that's going to-- I think it's going
to be in all the new Porsches-- to tell the owner, give
the owners a little history of the company, and a little
bit about their car; and things like that," Donnie
said.
"Part of the roll-out to the new Porsche Cayenne,
their SUV. Think of a Porsche station-wagon."
Scott Wadzinski was lead editor on the Porsche project,
is a senior editor at Grass Roots, and cameraman. He
is reputed to have great mechanical gifts-- a man who
can fix anything. Scott is also qualified on the Avid
Pro Tools setup.
"Call him on down," Andrea said. "’Oh,
it's a loose whosawhatsit; I'll get out the soldering
iron and we'll just. . . .’ He can restore a Studebaker!"
"He thinks he can," said Donnie, and laughed.
Maria Rogers, Andrea's sister, is Project Manager for
the production facility, handling the scheduling of
edit suites or booking a five-man shoot in Florida.
Maria makes sure that everybody has the information
they need when they need it, matching up the people
and the projects.
"She's very organized, and keeps things running
smoothly," Andrea said. Kendra Ervin came to Grass
Roots just over a year-and-a-half ago part-time, and
has recently taken on a full-time schedule as an editor
on the Avid and some DVD, working closely with Donnie.
She is qualified in Pro Tool sessions.
"She'd be sort of like an assistant producer kind
of person," said Andrea. "Sara Hack is our
newest person, and just started at the first of the
year. She gets here at eight, makes the coffee, opens
things up, interacts with the clients, and she's our
first line of defense, on the phones. She's just such
an asset.
"I am not a morning person," Andrea decisively
said. "All my thirty-five years I've never been
a morning person."
Public Service Announcement
It's not all business with these people.
"Way back in the seventies," said Donnie,
" you might remember 'Fast Freddie and the Playboys.'
He was like this first-- male stripper. He went on Donahue,
and they had stories on him on ‘20-20’.
His sister found all these old news tapes of his appearances
on the news and Donahue and things, and his appearances
on local TV in Hawaii, and all over the country."
"All on three-quarter inch, dusty three-quarter
inch. He died-- I don't know, recently, or a couple
of years ago," said Andrea.
"The family-- they heard about Uncle Fred, but
they didn't know-- his act was pretty tame-- but nobody'd
ever seen him perform! So she brought in all these dusty
old three-quarter inch tapes, and we put them all on
a DVD for her so she could give it away to the family
for Christmas," Donnie explained.
"It was hilarious. The old commercials and the
way TV was done, then," he said. "You just
had this set with a-- I mean it was so BOC. Because
now-- I mean, BOC was so much more like real TV, then,
than real TV is now; if that makes sense. But they were
so much closer to real TV, then. The local menswear
commercials from Honolulu-- because he was on TV in
Hawaii a lot. Their morning show in Hawaii had all these
local commercials, with guys holding up a flowery shirt
in front of a palm tree and talking about their deals.
"Just being able to see all that stuff was great,"
he said.
In the coming year the Grass Roots managers hope business
will hold steady, with no big patches of slow time.
Since editing is at the end of the production time-line,
if the ad agencies are not getting a lot of business,
then the producers aren't getting a lot of production,
so even as work picks up, a post-production house like
Grass Roots, working at the end of the food chain, is
likelier to be kept waiting for work.
"I'd like to give everybody a raise, myself most
of all," Andrea said.
"But I'd just like to stay busy enough-- we've
had enough ego-stroking projects that we feel like we've
done enough stuff that's either fun or interesting or
worthwhile, or of a caliber that gets noticed-- so the
main thing, now, is just to-- to stay busy enough, and
keep everybody humming along," she mused.
According to a feature on Grass Roots which appeared in
the February 10 South Bend Tribune Business Weekly,
Donnie and Andrea bought the building housing Grass
Roots (and now the BOC archive) in August, 2001. The
article enumerated 17 full-time workers in the building,
along with interns, part-time workers and clients, spread
out on 2,800 to 3,000 square feet on each of three floors.
The building was built in 1907, and at one time was
called the Hamilton Apartments. "Somewhere back
in the ‘50s or ‘60s they enclosed the porches
on the front and turned it into offices," the Tribune
Business article quoted Andrea. "When the building
became available, Grass Roots Media, now in its eighth
year as a corporation, was renting the first floor of
the Grace Building at 314 W. Colfax Ave," she said.
The reasons and attractions which sold BOC on partnering
with Grass Roots in preservation of these historic materials
are clear: a clean and secure physical space, owned
and competently managed by a caring dual-career BOC
alumni couple, vested in a media business, and operating
in South Bend: virtually the Fertile Delta of BOC, centering
Berrien, Cass, and St. Joe counties.
Among the Avilys Buildings tenants, Dave Coleman and
Kevin Fye helm Imagine Creative Design. The company
specializes in graphic design, and designs some animation
components. Imagine Creative Design did the Grass Roots
brochure and rate card. The Big Idea Company is run
by Lou Pierce, a broadcast consultant. Phase Two Architects
consults in the design of commercial and industrial
buildings. Ad Images is run by Jim Rogers. No relation
to Andrea and Donnie.
"Just a bizarre coincidence," said Andrea.
"He's the tallest guy, here!" she said. "The
biggest guy! But he has the smallest office! No, I'm
not kidding you! It's seventy-three square feet!"
"Hunkered over this very tiny I-Book, doing all
of his work." he said.
"Oh, he's very funny," she said.
Coda
"We're now teaching students at St. Mary's how
to use a Panasonic mini-DV camera; and a great, color screen that flips out on the side.
"I told them, used to be the viewfinders were
black-and white not that long ago. And you white-balance,
and you just hope it's right, and they were like,"
Andrea gasped dramatically and clutched her jersey,
"don't you understand?
"But I'm thinking about when I was taught how
to use a camera at BOC, and it's the same stuff that
I'm using now," Andrea said.
Asked if his BOC experience was sticking with him,
Donnie laughed and said, "Yeah, yeah-- I mean--
Andrea's here."
"And Joe Haase," said Andrea. "He taught
me three-quarter inch linear editing."
"Joe Haase and I paralleled each other for like--
for a while. He'd get a job somewhere and I'd go get
a job there, and we went to IUSB together, and we shared
a house together for a while," said Donnie.
"There's not a day goes by that we're not somehow
touched by Beyond Our Control in one way or another," he said. "Just because I-- I've always-- we're constantly seeing
people who were in the company at one time or another,
even if they're not in the business any more. Whether
it's contacts at WNDU, or WSBT, or wherever."
The current archive project he is working on with Kevin
Zimmerman's materials, and the potential work involved
in developing a chronological archive for the three-quarter
inch tapes of the show Donnie said will give him a chance
"to connect with people."
Using Kevin Zimmerman’s logs, Donnie and Andrea
hope to chronologically order and formally archive that
specific material for whatever curatorial purposes may
present themselves in future. For the remaining material,
when this massive archive effort has finally concluded
(within a year, according to the best current estimates)
Donnie and Andrea’s Grass Roots space will continue
to provide a permanent home, back in South Bend, for
all of BOC’s precious TV relics.
"And-- yeah, keep in touch. And not a day goes
by-- not a day goes by I don't think about Denny,"
he said.
In Andrea's office, a bass-violin rests on an instrument
tree. A famous drawing of Don Quixote is on the wall with
the quote, "and so from little sleep and much
reading, his brain dried up and he lost his wits."
Regarding the very nice TV show, Andrea had this to
say: "I want to thank my mom, for letting me take
the mailbox off the house, three Saturdays in a row.
Just all the props-wrangling that our families put up
with for BOC shoots, and-- I just started thinking about
all the Saturday morning craziness.
"The BOC thing? It's sort of a matter of convenience,
that I'm involved," she said. "I know that
that sounds sort of lame, but I-- because it's all happening
right here, I really don't have to go to a lot of effort
to participate. If I had to travel, if I had to make
long-distance phone-calls-- if I was in another part
of the country..."
It is a room reflecting clear personal tastes, with
flowers and sunlight and clean, straight walls. She
bows a few notes on the bass, making deep thrumming sounds that
resonate with the firm hand on the bow; the strong pinch
on the strings. Sheet music on the stand reflects the
winter sun onto the ceiling of the room.
"But being a teenager is a painful time and a
difficult time of your life," Andrea continued,
and put the instrument back on its rest. "And closer
to that time I wouldn't have wanted to, sort of, think
about it a lot and revisit it-- now it's easier. I can
look at pictures of me in high school, and it's not
so awful. But-- that's the perspective of time and age,
so."
Donnie and Andrea had decided in the afternoon to open
up the Grass Roots studio to any casual strollers of
the old BOC stripe who happened by, or whoever else
had gathered at their door. This last gasp of winter
drew a number of BOC people from around South Bend to
meet at the William Street building. There was coffee
and soft drinks and booze if you wanted it, graciously
provided by Grass Roots, and hilariously enjoyed by
all.
By the end of the day, when BOC Secretary Erik Möllberg
and his new dog, gangly and happy and friendly (the
dog-- although Erik himself indeed has some of those
qualities), got into Erik's blue pickup, the snow drove
hard across the parking lot from the northwest. It was
a slushy, sleety snow that stuck to the eyebrows and
lashes. But it had been a great day. The morning was
industrious.
That afternoon an ad hoc BOC gathering ensued where
nothing significant, organizationally, was discussed
and nothing decided-- in which fact probably lay the
greatness of it. The finest days are often kept, by
a mischievious Providence, from any rememberable, tangible
significance, oftener spent in solitude than in company.
Great days spent in the company of others result from
an unusual and wholly unpredictable good feeling among
them, not unlike a rainbow appearing out of a clear,
blue sky, or the sudden rapture of congregations. The
people involved in such phenomena are themselves always
innocent of annoying planning, ignorant of any pettifogging
ambition to material accomplishment or social acceptability,
and innocent of any associated anxiety among their companions--
yet are somehow wholly, unintentionally and inchoately
satisfied with them, and themselves. The chances of more than a handful
of such days in a lifetime is slight, unless one is
a sailor or a vagabond, and like the Kraken of yore
they can never be credibly described afterwards.
In the magic hour, at dusk, the sky glowed cool white.
The light was pale and refrigerator-florescent behind
the bright overcast, until the sun was well-down. Then
another, dark snowfall muffled the whine of the tires on the
highway, sharpened the eye, attuned the hand on the
steering wheel to any sudden slackness, any sensation
of drift. The fanatics of an adolescently headlong but
antique creed went their middle-aged ways safely
home.
Photo credits: Phil Patnaude and BOC. |