Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

Left to right: Light with schmutz, microphone in heavy fur coat, Guy the cameraman.

1) I shot some photos of Frank with Roland, Guy, and Rob just at the moment before they started.

But I left the camera cable upstairs, and now I can’t go tromping up the stairs get it because the “So, what is a quark?” phase of this interview has started. Footsteps in the background would not be a good thing.

In fact, I’m pinned down in the kitchen, eavesdropping and (of course) typing this. Thank heaven for Airport wi-fi!

2) Roland wants some still photos on his camera also, for newspaper ads. I’m willing to take them–but Amity’s would be much better! And she has been darn nice about all the interruptions to her graduate work, over the years, when Mom or Dad suddenly needs a photographer.

Of course, a quick call to her cellphone failed to reach her, and the crew should be finished and out of here in an hour…so I sent her an email and (one more desperate measure), I’m blogging this call for help.

Frank is sitting in the dining room chair, getting lit for the camera.

“More schmutz,” says Guy. Schmutz turns out to be two pieces of
waxy-looking paper he hangs in front of a light that is shining on
Frank.

“Why is that schmutz?” I ask.

“That’s just what we call it,” says Guy. “The real name, the brand name for it, is actually Opal.”

Something with a pretty name like Opal gets nicknamed “schmutz”? It must be a guy thing, Definitely, a guy thing.

Three very nice young tv-crew-men are downstairs getting ready to
interview Frank, so of course I decided it would be fun to live-blog
this unusual event.

Roland, the interviewer from Sweden, is young and tv-good-looking–he has already
interviewed two US Nobel laureates before he came here–visiting Minneapolis and
Santa Barbara.

Guy, the cameraman who also does lighting, lives in Wellesley. Rob, who does sound, is also a local freelancer.

They’re setting up lights and cameras and microphones all over our
house’s familiar spaces, while Roland and Frank chit-chat about physics
and travel.

Rob dangles a huge microphone in a thick fur sweater (a “Rykote windscreen”) over one of our dining room chairs.

Guy pulls down the shades in our dining room so that he can take full control of the ambient light.

More soon….

Stockholm University students have their own Nobel tradition–new
laureates are invited to a December 13 ball, then inducted into “The
Supreme Order of the Ever Jumping and Smiling Green Frog.”
Their actual paper snailmail invitation contained no email address or
URL. For information about this unique event, it had to be Google once again to the
rescue!

The guest of one 1987 Nobel-winner describes a banquet with drinking-songs followed by “hi-jinks.”

From a detailed diary of 1996 Nobel-guest adventures kept by David Mermin: “between midnight and 1 the
culminating event of the week takes place… details of the lunatic ceremony are lost in the
fog, but somehow it manages to culminate in all six of the
1996 Nobel Laureates in Physics and Chemistry lined up together and
uttering cries of “Rivet, rivet” while squatting on their haunches and
yumping up and down. A fitting end to a can-you-top-this week.”

Stockholm University science students explain the frog insignia: “The Frog is made out of an alloy of lead with
bismuth, frog-ish green and tied in a very special way. The Insignia is
supposed to be weared with tail-coat for the gentlemen and
evening-dress for the ladies. When a Frog-member dies, the relatives
are asked to send the Insignia back to the Order or to destroy it.”

Frog-members also get to drink
pea soup with brandy in March–the group’s only other official event.
Thank you, Google–jumping and smiling will be on Frank’s Nobel week
schedule!

In the summer of 1969 or thereabouts, I drove to Alaska with my brother
Kevin. We lived on honey and peanut butter sandwiches for three months,
sleeping on a plywood-and-foam-rubber “bed” we’d rigged up in the back
of a Jeep station wagon. Nobody had heard about seatbelts way back
then–if we picked up more than a single hitchhiker, one of them would
have to ride flat on the bed.

At night, in the pine woods, the northern mosquitos were huge. We
carried yards and yards of mosquito netting to slam in the car doors
before falling asleep. One night, Kevin slept with his arm against the
netting–it swelled up to the size of a big hock of ham.

It was one our way north–in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory–that Kevin
met a girl from San Francisco. She was beautiful and sweet and kind of
crazy. Her name, she told us was Strawberry. Strawberry what? Just
Strawberry, she said. She gave him her address, and on our way back we
detoured all the way down to Haight Ashbury to find her. She’d moved on
elsewhere but we stayed a week with two childhood friends who were running a candle store…

Now, back to Alaska–up near Mount Denali, we fell in with a bunch of
glacierologists. None of us could sleep through the sunlit midsummer
nights–the world was just too exciting and too new. We talked for
hours, hiking through gravel-strewn landscapes past moonlit boulders,
eating gigantic pancake meals topped off with our peanut butter and
honey. (We started off with a full gallon can of each, and had some left even when we got home in August.)

Sailor Bill was one of our hitchhikers–quite a bit older than most, he
seemed ancient to us. (He was probably ten years younger than I am
now.)  Sailor Bill had spent many years as a hobo, and told us he
know how to ride the rails. When he saw how tempted we both were by his
stories, he told us about one boxcar misadventure.

He had been partying with a woman who wanted to go with him as he
hopped a train. He knew a crossing where freight trains slowed way down
and hobos could climb aboard. They’d ride in a boxcar for a couple of
days–she even brought a suitcase along for the ride. But after the
train slowed down and they both hopped on, he discovered something wrong
with the car. I don’t remember what the problem was–maybe I didn’t
understand it back then, but it was serious. They would both be killed
if they didn’t get off the train, fast, but now the train itself was
speeding up. And the woman couldn’t understand what he was trying to
tell her–she didn’t want to jump off, and the train was going faster
and even faster. “Thank god for the suitcase,” Sailor Bill said.
“Arguing was no good–but when I threw her suitcase off the train she
finally gave up and jumped off herself. Boy, was she mad at me–and I
just saved her life.”

He probably saved my life with that story of his. Thank you, Sailor Bill, wherever you are.