In an effort to improve team morale in the office, we’ve dedicated a corkboard to the display of pictures of employees and their families. Photos can be from home or in the workplace, current or from years past.
I want to contribute to the effort and burnish my reputation as something of a super-man at the same time. I’ve narrowed my selection down to five photographs from my Swashbuckling Era, roughly 1971 until 1982. I’ve included these below, with captions, and ask your help in deciding which of the group is most appropriate for my desire to maintain a professional reputation.
During my brief stint in the majors (37 AB, 4 hits, .108 batting average, perfect attendance), I was lucky enough to get a game-winning, walk-off HBP (hit-by-a-pitch) to lead my Dodgers to a 5-4 win in a late-season 1972 contest against the rival Giants. This game was known more for the introduction of pie-in-the-face-to-the-hero than for quality play (each team committed 6 errors, and a declining Don Drysdale pitched 5-2/3 innings with his left hand constantly holding his toupee in place), and the tradition lives on famously in post-game interviews today. As you’ll see in subsequent photos, this was my last encounter with shaving cream for a number of years.
In 1975, I turned inward to spirituality on a pilgrimage to Mecca, a small town in Georgia between Athens and Cairo. I used a converted glass-bottom boat to travel backwater swamps preaching my message of love, forgiveness and the value of pocket t-shirts (where you gonna keep a pen in a regular t-shirt, huh?). If you look closely, you’ll see two hoses replenishing my onboard stock of Propofol, the same sedative that killed Michael Jackson but which, when mixed with laughing gas, creates a surprisingly pliant congregation.
By 1977, I had abandoned God and instead sought the pleasures of the sensual. This scene from the soft-core classic I Have Your Pizza Right Here, Ma’am; In My Pants, lives on today as the only pornographic title to contain a semicolon.
After extracting myself from the flesh trade, I embarked on a voyage of real-life exploration. In the piney woods of remote southwest Venezuela, I was the first to encounter and describe a new species of capybara, a large type of South American rodent. Here, I’m seen pointing at it, where it sits just off-camera. My only picture of the actual animal was sadly destroyed by an earthquake.
Ready to settle down by the time I got married in 1982, this photo is from our honeymoon cruise to the Bahamas. While everyone else is happily enjoying the skiff excursion to a private “out island,” note the concern on my face. I’m worried that I don’t, at that one brief moment in my life, have anything to worry about. I also had a snoot-full of Bacardi 151 rum, but that’s beside the point. I was not asked to drive and, even if I were, I couldn’t have found my way back to the Royal Caribbean’s “Adequacy of the Seas.”
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