My Week with Everything – Thursday

Crazy little thing called Fan
Thursday, April 4

I’m taking a moonlight stroll along Cape Doom with Charlie Rivkin. I’m trying to let him down easy. Charlie, I say. I just don’t think this relationship is going to work out. It’s not you. It’s me. Well, it’s the movies, actually. He says this time it’s going to be different. The Muppets are playing themselves this time, and nobody sings. I ask if Miss Piggy’s in it. He says, sure she is. I shake my head. That’s what you said last time, Charlie, and she didn’t get on screen until like minute seventy-five. I can’t keep going through this. It’s just not fair to us, Charlie, to what we used to mean to each other. Charlie points up, towards the night sky. I see a bright light, slowly falling to earth. I shade my eyes. It’s an enormous egg, drifting silently to the ground. It settles on the beach with a soft thunk. I’m the only person that saw it. Nobody else bought a ticket.

My alarm clock switches on, and I wake up to NPR. A woman is talking about corn. I blink sleepily as she explains about the book she’s written on the history of corn. She goes all the way back to the Aztecs. She can talk intelligently about how the development of breakfast cereal technology affected corn production over the last hundred years. It’s pretty impressive.

And it makes me wonder. At some point, I guess you just wake up in the morning and say to yourself, well, I’m a woman who knows a lot about corn. And then you write a book, and that’s pretty much your identity for the rest of your life.

I wonder if she ever gets tired of corn. I can imagine her being on the radio, somewhere in the middle of her book tour. She’s been talking about corn nonstop for weeks. And someone finally asks her, So what is it about corn that fascinates you? And she just snaps. Oh for Christ’s sake, stop asking me about CORN! I’ve had it up to HERE with corn, corn, CORN! The interviewer is taken aback. He stammers and asks what she wants to talk about. And she says, well, let me tell you a few things about wheat.

There’s corn fans. Who knew?

And, now that I think about it, there’s fans everywhere. On my way to work, the subway car is full of ’em. There’s a guy wearing a Phillies hat and reading the sports pages. Obviously, he’s a baseball fan. There’s a young woman with a Free Mumia T-shirt, and she’s reading Noam Chomsky. Looks to me like an anarchy fan. The woman sitting next to me has a tote bag with a verse from the Gospels on it, and she’s underlining passages in a Bible. Apparently, she’s a God fan.

I know Star Trek fans, and figure skating fans, and pot smoking fans. I have friends who are leather fans, who show off their new accessories and complain about how their favorite bar went out of business. I know politics fans, who talk about voter turnout and City Council meetings the same way I talk about why Muppets Tonight got cancelled.

Now, when I call people fans, I don’t mean that everybody likes something. I mean, obviously, everybody has their own tastes and interests. But there’s a sure way to tell when someone’s crossed over from just liking something to being a fan of something. Just listen for The Fan Conversation.

The Fan Conversation is the same conversation whenever two fans of any kind get together, no matter what they happen to be fans of. There’s three topics.

#1. It’s not as good as it used to be.

#2. Where did you buy that?

#3. How do we get more people to be fans of this?

So here’s an experiment. Listen to sports talk radio for a while, and count how many times one of those three topics comes up. Then go to a Star Trek convention and do the same thing. It’s the same conversation, everywhere you go.

Same deal, by the way, with God fans. In fact, It’s not as good as it used to be, Where did you buy that, and How do we get more people to be fans of this? is pretty much the abridged version of the entire history of Christianity over the last two thousand years, from Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation to the Crusades, from Vatican II to the WWJD bracelets. No offense meant to Christians; it’s just an example. Those three sentences are the history of everything.

So the only difference, really, is that sports fans and God fans and politics fans are all fans of proper, grown up things, and I’m still a fan of the same thing I was a fan of when I was three.

When I get home from work, I log on to the Tough Pigs message board. I’m currently in the middle of a really bitter argument with some people who don’t like Elmo. They say that thanks to Elmo, Sesame Street isn’t as good as it used to be. I say that Elmo attracts more kid viewers, and it encourages more kids to be Muppet fans. We’ve been going back and forth like this for months. I wonder if it’s too late for me to sign up to be a corn fan.

My goldfish Dorothy says that today she wants to learn about growing up. I shrug. Don’t we all.

by Danny Horn