The other evening at Anna Bannana's, a faculty member in some other department insisted on engaging me in conversation. He was reasonably entertaining, in a mildly obnoxious but fairly pleasant way. He seemed to take quite a liking to me, although I kept explaining to him that what he, like so many other people, likes about me is my willingness to listen to other people's bullshit.
He told me that one night he had been with a group of friends at the Saigon Passion, back in the days when it used to be upstairs at 808 Ke'eaumoku St. He was sitting in one of the booths with a group of friends, engaged in a fairly spirited conversation and not paying much attention to the dancers. (Typical academic!)
Finally one of the dancers got off the stage and came over to his table, and said, ``Dr. X, don't you recognize me? I'm one of the students in your freshman class.''
(He didn't say how naked she was at this point, which allows me use my imagination to embellish the story to my own taste. I imagine her having thrust one breast within inches of his face.)
The thing was, though, that the class in question was a large lecture class, and no matter how intently he studied the students subsequently, he was never able to identify which one of the women was her.
Of course I have to consider the fact that earlier he had been unwise enough to reveal to me that he had once been an Associate Dean in the Division of Natural Sciences. So I have to consider the possibility that he may have made up the story of the dancer in an effort to convince me that he really was a human being in spite of his previous associate deanship.
He was short of cash, so I finally bought him a beer. ``But don't you ever tell anyone that I bought a beer for an Associate Dean,'' I said.
``EX-Associate Dean,'' he insisted.
March, 1996