Heaven’s Gate
66 Stones
ME: Where does our life go? I was a happy-go-lucky teen, playing basketball and dating really cute girls, enduring school so I could be with my friends, but not really interested in what was being taught. Well, mostly. I liked chemistry. And English Lit. One because I loved the subject and one because I loved the teacher.
But all of a sudden, I’m counting down to thirty. I’ve got wives and kids and have been a full-time host of a television show for five years! In the greater scheme of things, five years doesn’t sound like that much. Not like Johnny Carson or Charles Knight or any of the great talk show hosts that I never get to watch because I’m here doing my own show. But in five years on this show, I’ve hosted 779 broadcasts. Try thinking up 779 funny things to say in front of an audience!
You know, guys only have so much interesting material, especially when it comes to talking to girls. They’ve got the smooth pick-up line that they’ve practiced for hours in front of a mirror. Head tilted just right. Disarming smile. Gentle voice and inflection. “Is there a temple where people worship you, or can I simply kneel right here?” Every guy has his trademark line.
There was this garbage collector in New York… I’m not joking, though I guess they’re called sanitation engineers. As he drove his truck in the morning, collecting the cans and dumping them in the back, he’d proposition every appealing woman he met. ‘Appealing’ is a relative term. He liked this one’s smile, that one’s walk, the shape of another’s backside. He was friendly and smiled at all of them. His line was “You’re a princess in this dump, but come with me and I’ll make you queen of the whole landfill.” Hundreds of women he propositioned. Then one day the women noticed he stopped propositioning them. This went on and it was like something was missing from their world. Finally, one of the women got brave enough to stop him while he was emptying a bucket into the back of his truck and ask him, “Why aren’t you propositioning all the women you meet anymore?” He looked at her and that big brilliant smile that he’d always had lit up his face. “Well, princess, I only needed one to say yes.”
Most of us don’t put everything on one line. We use that as a hook to get the woman we’re interested in to go out with us. Then we have to be charming and witty and brilliant and funny so she’ll go out with us again. Now, if you young women have been dating at all, you’ll notice that guys get quieter the longer you date them. Here’s the awful truth. Most guys only have three dates worth of material. If you aren’t married by then, or at least spending most of your time together having sex, he doesn’t know what to say. He’s used all his material. If you make him talk, he’ll have to start repeating himself.
Or hire a writer.
That’s all that’s gotten me this far. I’ve had a brilliant writing team: Frankie and Chuck Curtis. If anything I’ve said in the past five years is funny, it’s because they wrote it. If it wasn’t funny, it’s because I delivered it. Frankie and Chuck are going to join me on the show tonight, along with some other people who have been special in getting XX/XY on the air, or me in the host’s seat.
But where did the time go? My life?
When I was growing up, we always listened to the farm report on WOWO from Fort Wayne in the morning. The host of The Little Red Barn Show was a kind old guy named Jay Gould who had grown up in radio long before television started capturing some of his market.
But he was also a poet. “My life I carry in a leaky pail,” he wrote. “And drop by drop my minutes fall upon the sand, fall upon the thirsty sand and disappear. Nearer to empty my bucket is each step I take, but I must hurry on. My goal lies just ahead.”
Where does life go? Jay died fifteen years ago when I was just thirteen years old. Every morning of my life I’d woken up listening to the Little Red Barn Show. And now as I’m getting ready to ‘retire’ as host of XX/XY, I still think of him.
But let me tell you one thing I’ve learned—not that I’m old enough to pass on lessons to my elders, but to you my peers and viewers, let me say this: It’s better to drink deeply from your bucket than to let the drops fall on the thirsty sand and disappear.
By the end of the show, I’d had most of my family on as my guests. As an official guest, Whitney was in her blue dress “A” uniform. She liked it because she had the option of wearing sky blue slacks with it instead of a skirt. She looked incredibly sharp and we talked about the life of a Marine and some of the places she’d traveled. I interviewed Nikki with Frankie and Chuck. We talked a bit about the plans for our upcoming miniseries, What’s Wrong With This Picture? We planned to start filming about the end of July if we could find a leading actress. But we didn’t let on that no one knew who was going to be in the show yet. Instead we talked about Frankie and Chuck’s new book, Diary of a Trust Fund Baby: What it Means to be Privileged when Everyone is Entitled.
Of course, I had the rest of the Hearthstone Entertainment execs with me. Rose as CEO, Hannah and Elaine as Executive Producer and star of Chick Chat, April as my director, Samantha as my producer. Then I brought Courtney on as I started to talk about what we were doing for the fall.
ME: I’m very happy to have another woman I am very close to as a guest this evening. Dr. Courtney Price is CEO of Price Engineering, a software development company specializing in video and the Internet. Courtney is a consultant for Hearthstone Entertainment and CEN. She is also a part time professor of computer science at Indiana University. Please welcome Dr. Courtney Price. [Courtney enters. Applause.]
Dr. Price, thank you for joining us on XX/XY this evening.
COURTNEY: Brian, if you keep calling me ‘doctor’ I’m going to quit having sex with you. For at least an hour.
ME: Okay. Now that we have the personal relationship defined, let me just say that Courtney and I have known each other for a dozen years and I’m taking her threat seriously. [Laughter.]
COURTNEY: Ladies, never threaten your boyfriend if you aren’t prepared for the consequences. [She reached to rub her butt. Laughter.]
ME: Court, we’ve been through a lot together in the past several years, but we’ve got some exciting things coming up this fall. Let’s talk about our plans.
COURTNEY: Really?
ME: Yes.
COURTNEY: Well, by this time next year, I hope to be a mommy. So really, that hour of abstinence I threatened was as hard on me as on you.
ME: You are? We are? Are you…?
COURTNEY: Not yet. But it’s time we got started.
ME: You heard it here first. So did I.
COURTNEY: Now on a more businesslike topic, I assume you were referring to Date Night In.
ME: That would be a good start.
COURTNEY: How many of you in the audience have been on a dinner and a movie date? [Nearly everyone raises their hands.] That goes right along with Brian’s discussion about how limited a guy’s communication skills are. The dinner and a movie date can get you together with your sweetie for as much as three or four hours and through most of it, you can hold hands, sneak a kiss, and not have to say ANYTHING.
ME: It does make an easy date. Guys, even if you have to sit through a sappy chick flick, you get to sit with her, hold hands, make a good impression as a sensitive guy, and not have to say ANYTHING!
COURTNEY: We’re going to change that up with Date Night In this fall.
ME: You just won the position as my first date.
COURTNEY: In defiance of television logic, we’ll premiere the new show on Saturday, September 4. Labor Day weekend. Who premieres a new series on a holiday weekend?
ME: Let’s find out. [Walk into audience and choose random guest.] I know it’s only Independence Day this weekend, but think ahead—or back—to Labor Day weekend. How do you plan to spend the weekend?
GUEST: Get together with some friends. Probably go to the beach. Uh… We might barbecue or something and sit around watching a DVD.
ME: Would you consider watching a DVD with me?
GUEST: In a heartbeat!
ME: [Returning to chair next to Courtney.] I think we’re going to have company for our date.
COURTNEY: She’s cute. [Mimes to Guest, phone call and ‘Call me.’ Laughter.]
ME: All right. We’ve got another boring dinner and a movie date where no one says anything. How are we going to change things up?
COURTNEY: It starts this summer. Go to our website on July 6 and you’ll get to help define my date in with Brian. Our date is going to include dinner or snacks, and a DVD. You get to make suggestions as to what DVD we should watch, what food we should eat, even what we should wear for our casual night in. Keep it clean. We don’t need your suggestions for what to do when we go off the air.
ME: You’ll find some cool features on the website, including a schedule for new movie openings that weekend, just in case you want to go out instead of stay in with us. There will be links to events happening in your area. There will even be a couple of dating games you can play with your special someone or with other people who are watching the show.
COURTNEY: Before the big weekend, we’ll post what the menu will be and what the movie will be. It will include a list of ingredients for the meal and what needs to be done in advance to prepare. Then Saturday night, tune in to the show with your sweetie. Good old Chef Brian will talk about how to prepare the meal as I get to help in the kitchen.
ME: One of the things I discovered a long time ago is that the kitchen is a great place to bond. You have a topic to talk about, something to do with your hands, and a great result that you can share. Then we’ll watch the movie.
COURTNEY: We’ll hit the ‘pause’ button periodically because we’re on television and have to have a commercial. But while the movie is paused, we’ll continue cooking and eating. We’ll chat about what we’ve seen so far and what we think will happen. You get to chat along, too. We’ll monitor comments during the show and share some of them on the air.
ME: After the movie is over and we have dessert while we talk about it, there will be a forum—is that the right term, Courtney?—a forum where you can talk about what went right and what went wrong with your Date Night In. You can talk about how to improve the next one, and comment on what kind of meal we should serve next week or what movies you’d like us to show.
COURTNEY: It will be fun!
We were taking a big risk integrating the Internet with our show so closely. There was already a similar show running on Friday night on TBS, but it was only 90 minutes, focused on the dinner and then cut to the movie as the Friday night movie. It didn’t involve any audience interaction via the Internet, but if they decided we were a threat to their programming, they could copy us without that much trouble. Time Warner was already making inroads into the Internet market with AOL. Fortunately, most of the Turner stations owned by Time Warner were still focused on showing old movies. Except CNN, of course. It seemed that was where Turner was focusing most of his attention since his merger with Time Warner.
Still, we were hoping to fly under the radar. Turner’s attention was always focused on Rupert Murdoch and I don’t think he recognized that CEN had captured a market that he could have had.
My last guest of the evening was Roz Knightly. She’d made XX/XY Woman/Man magazine successful in its own right without a huge help from the show. I contributed an article each month, but Nikki refined what I wrote so much that it was hardly me writing. Roz came on to interview me. She opened with broad questions and let me launch into soliloquies that she deftly brought back to the point. But eventually, she asked one that would close out the show.
ROZ: Brian, you’ve often talked about your disdain for organized religion, but have never professed to be an atheist. You certainly promote individual responsibility and acting because something is simply the right thing to do. Deep down, what is it that you, Brian Frost, believe in?
I hesitated as I thought about how to answer the big question. Love? Humanity? Goodness? I took a deep breath.
ME: Look at the world around us. You’ll see stones. Rocks. Gravel. Sand. Pebbles. Boulders. Gems. Stones are ubiquitous. We see them in every direction. The whole earth—this third rock from the sun—is made of stone.
We classify them as igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic. We name them marble, granite, limestone, `a`a lava, sandstone, quartz, basalt, slate, coal. We treasure diamonds, rubies, opals, emeralds.
They are all just stones.
We spend our lives ignoring them. Unless we trip over them or bang our heads on them, they are virtually invisible.
But stones are the miraculous building blocks of civilization. We build palaces, cathedrals, skyscrapers, castles, and shopping malls. We carve them into sublime statues that outlive both artist and subject. We engrave them. We stack them into cairns and memorials to great achievements and to great tragedies. We lay the cornerstones of our buildings and our property boundaries, build fences and walls, and make dividing lines between our countries. Stones to keep cattle in and barbarians out.
We crush stones into a paving bed for our roads and highways. We mold them and bake them into bricks to build homes, offices, fireplaces, and barbecues. We grind up rocks and blend the aggregate with cement—itself just more fluid rock for binding—and make concrete blocks to build bunkers and to lay the foundations of our homes.
The vast sandy deserts are no less than the remains of quartz mountains ground down by wind and water into tiny grains—little stones in their most malleable form. Moistened on the beach, we mold them into castles to be swept away by the tides. Under pressure, they can blast the rust from metal and clean graffiti from walls. Ground finely and heated to melting, those little stones turn transparent and we look through them. Our windows—the glass that keeps the heat in and the cold out or vice versa, that protects us from wind and debris, that mirrors our image—are just stones.
Incredible stone monuments are guideposts to the glory of mankind—the pyramids of Giza, the Parthenon, the Great Wall of China, the Taj Mahal, Notre Dame. All made out of stones. And amidst them we find ruins—victims of siege engines that hurled rocks with such force that stone walls fell, or like Jericho crumbled at a shout.
The earliest weapons were no more than stones, thrown at prey or at enemies. We lay in wait and tumbled boulders on the heads of our foes. We set a stone in a sling and brought Goliath to his knees.
Or, on our knees, we present a stone in a golden ring to pledge our love and troth.
Stones can be tools. The miller’s grist stone or the peasant’s mortar and pestle grind grain into flour for our bread. We pound stakes into the ground with a stone to anchor tents when we camp. We strike the stone flint against steel to create the spark that will light our fires. We surround the fire pit with stones to heat our homes and cook our food.
At the end of our lives a stone is engraved to mark our passing, returning to the soil, becoming minerals, absorbed into stone. We scatter the ashes of loved ones among the pebbles and pray for their peace and our own.
Stones simply are.
They have never asked us to believe in them. No stone has ever sent one nation to war against another. No stone has ever demanded that we believe in no other stones, that we love it, or that we bow down and worship it. No stone has enslaved people. No stone has considered one person chosen and another damned. No stone has subjugated a woman or made chattel of her children.
Stones are not capricious. They do not do not care about race, religion, national origin, sexual preference, or economic status. They are not soft for one and hard for another. They are not liquid one moment and solid the next. They don’t give blessings to one and curses to another.
Stones obey the laws of nature. They fall to the ground because of gravity. They fly through the air when propelled by force. They crumble under sufficient pressure. They are nothing more nor less than stone.
I believe my cónyuge and my children love me like I love them. I believe in the brotherhood and goodness of all mankind. I believe in the faithfulness of my friends. I believe in Mom, apple pie, and the American way.
Sometimes I even believe in God.
But when it comes down to it? When I need to depend on something constant and never-failing?
I believe in stones.
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