I don't know why I've been thinking about this lately, but I have. And as we all know, that's good enough for Mojo.

Years ago, I had a fun, cushy job in academia, in the AV department of a fairly prestigious college. My job was to order, schedule and show all the AV materials the profs needed for their classes. Back then the majority were in 16mm format (when dinosaurs ruled the earth), which, unlike any of today's formats, really needs to be babysat so the film wouldn't suddenly decide to skip a sprocket and self-destruct. Hence I have watched many, many documentary and feature films in a variety of disciplines--anthropology, foreign languages, sociology, art, psychology, first aid, you name it--as well as all the classic oldies like Akira Kurosawa, Sembène Ousmane, blah blah blah. I mention this not to be utterly pretentious but just as a reminiscence of a really great, swell, fun time in life, where I got paid to hang out with cool, intelligent people and watch movies. Many of them over and over again.

In addition to the classroom showings, the AV department also handled miking the various speakers and events on campus. I had a staff of some twenty students who did a lot of the grunt work, but if a speaker was a big name enough--or if the people were paying to use the facilities for a conference--it was expected that *I* needed to show up, so that *I* could flip the switch and sit there (sometimes the speaker was just UTTERLY FASCINATING, and sometimes they were BORING AS ALL GET-OUT) for the entire lecture. (In their and my defense, if everything was indeed working it was indeed almost as simple as flipping a switch. *I* was there on the off chance that something might go horribly, horribly WRONG, for unlike a poor student I pretty much knew how to jerry-rig a solution or, in the worst case scenario, take full responsibility for the ensuing fiasco. Which, under my watch, I don't think ever got to fiasco status, I'm proud to report.)

(Oh, and another aside: if you are ever called upon to be a speaker somewhere, and you're sitting at the table or the podium waiting for stuff to start, and you're engaged in pleasant conversation with those around you, please bear in mind that, even if your voice is not BOOMING LIKE GOD throughout the whole auditorium rest assured we can hear you JUST FINE in the sound booth. Like you're talking right to us! So if you're just chock full of petty complaints about your colleagues, if there's a live mike within five feet or so of your complaining mouth, you MIGHT just want to consider your words before spouting them. Just saying, is all.)

And one of their yearly rentals was a local high school, who used the college's amphitheater for its graduation. Which meant I had to sit through at least ten or fifteen of these things, about a month after sitting through the COLLEGE's graduation. And while yes, graduation is an exciting time for the graduates and their families, it is considerably LESS exciting for those of us behind the scenes who have to sit through it YEAR AFTER YEAR.

It didn't help me, I suppose, that the VERY FIRST graduation I worked at had MAYA ANGELOU as the speaker. This was in her pre-Oprahfied days, but she was still a Big Name, and engaging and amazing speaker, and no one since ever measured up. For some reason the majority of graduation speakers, I find, are oddly self-involved--maybe it has to do with their celebrity--and, if they're politicians, it is a particularly vile self-serving vote-for-me stump speech with the "work hard, don't do drugs" tag at the end. But Ms. Angelou knew what she was doing, and focused on the students, and being all literate and stuff she was just TERRIFIC. Entertaining, enlightening, the whole nine yards. To this day I bow to greatness.

However, being a person of importance, and having People to do her bidding, one of the things Ms. Angelou's People insisted upon was that, while Ms. Angelou was speaking, we were ordered to turn off the cameras. (Oh, because on top of everything else, Mojo had to videotape things, as well.) This is, of course, their prerogative, for if you have a Big Name and a Popular Brand the last thing you as a marketer want is some bootlegs to start floating around, stealing your thunder. It's even WORSE, of course, if your Big Name is caught doing something not very nice or even mildly illegal within said bootleg, which--let me make this perfectly clear--WAS NOT GOING TO BE THE CASE HERE. Ms. Angelou is one of them classy-type broads, just giving a graduation speech. Nothing off the cuff or potentially embarrassing on the horizon. They were just concerned about Controlling the Brand, and since the school sold copies of the graduation tape to interested parties (yeah, I had to do that as well) they did not want the school essentially selling Maya Angelou tapes. Which is fine. Just fine.

Unfortunately for THEM, chances are if you SPECIFICALLY TELL Mojo to NOT do something, and it is her impression that the END OF THE WORLD is not imminent should she do it anyway, chances are she'll do it just so she knows in her craven, shriveled heart that You're Not The Boss of Her. So gosh, I'm not exactly sure HOW things transpired, but at the end of the day Mojo had her VERY OWN private VHS tape of Maya Angelou giving this wonderful, terrific graduation address, and the school owned a duplicate tape with said offending material judiciously snipped out of it as required, ready for the dubbing station. And I KEPT my tape, for posterity's sake I'm certain, for many a year, and I'd dust it off and watch it now and then when I wanted cheering up and inspiration. For it was all about helping other people and treating them with kindness and other noble ideas. I mean, sheesh, it was Maya Angelou; it was REALLY GREAT.

Unfortunately for Posterity I have since long ago lost track of it; it might be in storage somewhere, or I might have taped over it, or maybe my Favorite Older Sister borrowed it. But somewhere there once was this totally illicit bootleg of Maya Angelou imparting wisdom to young minds, which was just ABSOLUTELY FABULOUS and unless you were there, or you had the great luck to befriend Mojo at that time, you just PLUMB MISSED OUT. And no, should I ever find it, it is so NOT going up on YouTube. Mojo might be a scofflaw, but she does respect copyright.

But this was actually intended to be about NONE of this--although one of my most favorite scenes in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is the high school graduation scene, so if you haven't already GO READ IT--but instead about the high school that graduated every year a month after the college graduation. The high school never had any guest speakers, just the main administrator. But I have rambled on way too much reminiscing, so I will tell you THAT story tomorrow....

Mojo