January 1991 SOUTH MOUNTAIN MEANDERINGS

By Travis Hardin, poetic license # 30573

AN HONORABLE MAN, I must drink the bitter cup of apology and retraction. Last month's SMM claimed the Grimm brothers were collectors of fairy TAILS. This should have read fairy TALES. Your reporter shouldn't say the famous brothers were promiscuous, knowing nothing of their sex lives.

However, I DO have some contemporary ribald gossip:

Tim and Charlotte Hardy innocently invited the entire SMM staff to a sumptuous Thanksgiving dinner at their house--on Thanksgiving Day, coincidentally--not knowing I had instructed my staff to case the joint for stray goose feathers, etc. In Tim's post-prandial expansiveness, it was easy for a skilled Mensa psychiatrist, also unsuspectingly invited, to coax from Tim details about his youth in the sordid end of the rock-and-roll business. Find one.

Later I eased open the bathroom medicine cabinet. Behind the empty pill bottles, hearing-aid batteries, and Dr. Oliver's Scalp Tonic, against the back wall, I retrieved a dusty, fading picture of famed acid-head and -rock star Bill Cat with his arm around young long-haired Tim, psychedelic guitars swinging from them both. The illegible autograph of the famed Cat was smeared across the center. Puzzle piece two fit.

In further search of alleged deviation, I wheedled my way to The Basement. There I made a discovery: Your squeaky-clean-appearing LocSec gets his pleasure from going among the machines and massaging MULTIPLE DB-25 connectors, both MALE and FEMALE (gasp)! There were three couples within my view--you guessed it--mating. Find number three!

Total debauchery, my friends, right here in River City: SEX, DRUGS, and ROCK-AND-ROLL. Nothing is so heart-rending, is it, as when a hero, cherished by all as a guileless Fred Rogers, rips off his blue sweater and exposes himself before our innocent eyes as a one-man KISS.

Here in South Mountain territory the rest of us are going about our simple lives. Bill Todd has just unburdened himself of a killer essay in his counselling class at Western Maryland College. Carol Baldwin, Bill Todd, and your reporter have been variously buying, fixing, going to seminars for, and otherwise wasting time and money on, computers. (Is anybody enthusiastic about starting a Maryland Mensa BBS? Contact me or Carol Baldwin.)

The long-awaited article about Mensa appeared in Frederick Magazine this month as two paragraphs. Not long, but effective: Carol got a call from an interested Walkersville woman and was pleased to assure the caller that, no, we don't all sit around at social events doing logarithms in our heads.

At December's SMM Pizza Hut gathering we were again pleased to see Bob Pollick, an Ohio Mensan temporarily on assignment in the area. Some Mensans had met Bob at Take With Meals and Western Maryland Happy Hours. Bob shared a riotous Larson-ish cartoon book by John Long ("The Moos Brothers...Read Naked", Pocket Books, 1990). Besides the M's already named, regulars Vince Mooney, Jan and Rachel Todd, Greg Pacek, and Fred and Inge Davis joined in discourse. Rachel, 13 months, has discovered speech and is playing with it.

A happy, if not ecstatic, New Year to you all.