Phthursday Musings: Affairs of the World, 1993
or: Whitewater Vapids
30 years ago this month I spent five days in Whitewater, Wisconsin. To the best of knowledge I had never before set foot in Whitewater, and I am quite sure I have never since been.
I was there to attend the World Affairs Seminar, an event which still exists, and which is probably still very magical, even though it is apparently held in Waukesha instead of Whitewater.
My memories of the event are understandably faded, and perhaps to the chagrin of Rotary International District 6270, what I remember might not exactly be what I’m supposed to remember, but these are Phthursday Musings, not Rotary Musings, I’m doing the best I can here, okay?
I have artifacts though, including what I think would hold up in a court of law as proof that I was actually there:
The University of Wisconsin - Whitewater today has an enrollment of just under 10,000 undergraduates plus another 1,600 grad students, with Whitewater itself being a city of about 15,000 people. Illinoisans might regard UWW as fairly equivalent to Western Illinois University according to such demographics, and I know full well a bunch of you are stumbling around on a daily basis thinking, What is the nature of Macomb? and related questions, and perhaps this paragraph will help you.
So anyway my dad drove me up to Whitewater, which was maybe an hour and a half away, and dropped me off on a Monday, I think, or maybe it was a Sunday, and picked me up on a Friday, I’m very sure of that. I was 16 at the time and my time in Whitewater was the first time I’d ever been away from family for more than one night. Imagine how excited I was, being set loose in Whitewater!
Apparently the World Affairs Seminar has 300 high school students attend today, so let’s just stipulate that we had 300 high school students then too, from all over the world, but mostly Wisconsin and Northern Illinois, plus also for some reason like five Bangladeshi dudes in their 30s. I don’t know why those guys were there, but they seemed to have a good time.
We were all staying in a dorm with all of the flags representing all of the places people came from hanging outside. This meant I had a roommate for four days, and that was cool. Alas, I have since forgotten his name, but I do remember that he was from somewhere in Wisconsin, and had red hair, and by the end of the week had formed a doo wop group with three other guys.
I actually only remember two names, DeAnn and Dawn. DeAnn and I liked each other, I think, but look, I was much too dense at the time to actually know what to do with that. She was from a different town in Northern Illinois in our conference. Dawn was from somewhere in Wisconsin like so many others. We and a couple others fell into having meals together and sitting in the auditorium to listen to the important speakers tell us all about the affairs of the world.
What were these affairs of the world? Damned if I know. I only remember one actual presentation, though, which was about NAFTA. Some important Mexican trade representative was on the panel and I don’t remember who else. The whole thing was about how great NAFTA was, so, uh, ok then.
Luckily I still have most of my materials from the week to refresh me!
Here are the titles of some of the presentations:
Trouble in Paradise: Crimes, Drugs and Corruption in Belize
Legal Aspects of International Trade
The New World Order and Rising Nationalism: The Case of Kurdistan
Efforts Towards Stability in the Former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia
And so of course I don’t remember any of this. What I remember instead were five guys all trying to set the high score on some awful car-oriented video game.
And, also, one night, for no particular reason I ever heard about, somebody burned the Canadian flag that was hanging outside the dorm.
I never actually wandered into downtown Whitewater, but I did at one point meander the other direction down to what was apparently the only shopping available, at Wal-Mart. I think my roommate had brought a boombox, and so I must have set my mind on buying something, and so I came back from Wal-Mart with a cassette copy of Dream Police, because, of course I did. I know I’ve shared this one before, but you know you want to see it again:
That copy of Dream Police, which I can’t find today, served me well over time. I still sometimes use “Gonna Raise Hell” to fire me up en route to a race. But more about that some other time.
Why did any of this come back to me today? Because although this isn’t the exact week that I was there 30 years ago, this is the week of the NBA Finals, and that was the week of the NBA Finals, a very exciting NBA Finals indeed between the Chicago Bulls and Phoenix Suns. Game 4 was that Wednesday night, and with so many of us from Illinois, and most of the world at that time being Bulls fans besides, it was a rollicking time in the dorm lounge watching the game.
In the middle of this group was a guy from New Hampshire who claimed the Dallas Mavericks were his favorite time, a particularly unusual thing to claim in a year when the team had just gone 11-71. (I’m sure they would have won more than 11 games if not for point guard Fat Lever being out the entire year with a knee injury.) Anyway, New Hampshire dude, maybe because he needed to be the contrarian, was the only person rooting for the Suns in the entire room. Somewhere I have a picture of him facing the television, his arms crossed over his head trying to call for an intentional foul, with the television screen visible, showing Charles Barkley complaining. Alas, it’s not in my World Affairs Seminar folder, but instead buried in a photo box somewhere, so New Hampshire dude, all I can do is tell the story.
The Bulls won that night 111-105 to take a commanding 3-1 lead in the series, which they would clinch in Phoenix that Sunday on John Paxson’s three. You remember?
Nothing was bigger than the Chicago Bulls in June 1993. Nothing was close.
So my dad picked me up in Whitewater on Friday afternoon, and we headed straight for Beloit, where Riverfest was going on. There I got to see the legend, B. B. King, playing with his boogie band, all wearing Hawaiian shirts. Unfortunately, halfway during the set, it started raining, and did not stop raining.
Inexplicably the festival lineup called for B. B. King on one stage, to be followed immediately on the other stage by Blue Öyster Cult. At the time this somehow made perfect sense to me? So even though we were drenched, we wandered over to the other stage, where a small but raucous crowd was eagerly awaiting their Stony Brook heroes, with a boisterous chant of “B! O! C! B! O! C!” which soon morphed into an even more boisterous chant of “Fuck! The! Rain! Fuck! The! Rain!” and then the show was canceled and we got in the car and fled Wisconsin.
But, look: I got to see B.B. King! I can’t find a video of him and his band wearing Hawaiian shirts, but here’s one from Montreux Jazz Festival in 1993, just a month later, of him playing “The Thrill Is Gone”:
And don’t you worry: I got to see Blue Öyster Cult later that same year, on top of an intense quadruple bill at the MetroCentre in Rockford: Blue Öyster Cult, Nazareth, Uriah Heep, Wishbone Ash. Blue Öyster Cult wasn’t really that great though. The best band of the night was Uriah Heep. I don’t know why. But here you go, “Easy Livin’”, live from 50 years ago!
Anyway, I was 16, going into my senior year of high school, and while I don’t think I was desperate to get away from home, I definitely wanted to get out and do something, anything more. And it wasn’t getting very far, or to any place very exotic, but Whitewater was kind of the first little taste of the idea that I might be around different people in a place where we had to kind of figure things out for ourselves just a bit instead of wander back home and shake all of the generic equivalent of Lucky Charms out of the Tupperware cereal keeper each afternoon.
The funny thing is that all of the topics of the World Affairs Seminar should have resonated more with me because that was the stuff I was into. When I did go off to college I double majored in history and political science! I spent three years in Model United Nations! And yet I managed to completely forget everything I’d ever learned about crimes, drugs, and corruption in Belize. Cool flag though:
Even though I forgot anything I may have ostensibly learned in Whitewater, I remember the video game and the hanging out in the laundry room and the doo wop singers and how bent out of shape people were about the Canadian flag and the guy from New Hampshire and I don’t know, maybe all of that was actually somehow the stuff I was supposed to take away after all.
You are right. It would be fun if others from that event read this and commented.
I saw BB at Braden in ‘95!