ManMan's last girlfriend smacked him around and Slinger's brother was awaiting his next court date and Samurai had open sores on his arms that the doctors couldn't figure out and I, LadyKenobi, was on three or four medications for the treatment of obsessive-compulsive disorder: we were par for the course, then, for a group of people who had met on the Internet.

We were Mayberry residents compared to the action in the hotel lobby, where two women wandered amongst the stained glass windows and mahogany banisters in khaki pants and vampire capes, and where, upon check-in, ManMan had been accosted by a person who wore a Confederate Army cap and followed him about chanting the oath of the Green Lantern. Before the year was out we would be a couple, ManMan and I, forever doomed to flinch when people asked us how we met. Go ahead, honey.... tell them how that our romance blossomed online before we introduced ourselves at a sci-fi convention. See how they run.

I would be attending a writers conference, I told people as I threw more VCR tapes than clothes into a suitcase bound for the Gateway Convention in St. Louis; a meeting of writers, of fellow creatives, purely research... A writer's conference... that was technically true, but what I never added was that the writers I was paying to confer with had once upon a time put words in the mouths of robot puppets and wandered around genuine TV spaceship sets dressed as Krankor, mortal enemy of the Prince of Space.


When a television show wins its time slot, it's a hit; when it pops up in syndication, it's a classic; and when a tiny, frighteningly ardent pocket of the population has the ability to name the guest star, production assistant and art director of Episode Fourteen, Season Nine, that is the kiss of "Entertainment Tonight" coverage death; that is a cult hit.

That is the case of Mystery Science Theater 3000, which ran for ten years on three different low-wattage cable stations and, some time after the last episode aired, can still move legitimate numbers of licensed Post-It Note pads through its fan club. If you've not heard of the thing, or watched it with an indifferent, passing amusement, you are most likely well-adjusted. The sad and the gifted, the academic and the strange flock here, to a man and two robot puppets silhouetted before an old, bad B movie, shouting derision at plots that go nowhere and heaving sighs over monsters with tie-on heads and zippers down the back. "Remember life before this movie?" they will say. "It dares you to watch it." Men who hit women are booed. Women who act with their breasts are laughed at. Godzillas authority as a legitimate menace is called into question. There are references to the Protestant Reformation and Daniel Boone, Longfellow and the '76 Dolphins. It is all very chummy.

Every twenty minutes or so the three leave the theater and offer commentary on the movies progress-- they will openly fret over a lack of plot, or script, or acting, most often all three; or sing an ode to the general badness of the film, usually invoking "Road House"; or discuss, forum-style, why Roger Corman or Edd Wood has done this to us, the innocent movie-going public.

The production value of these little moments never exceeded those of the on-screen films. Sometimes the talent clearly has no idea what the next line is and everyone simply makes do. There is precisely one camera angle. You can hear the puppet's plastic mouths clack, for God's sake. The MSTie-- that is how one refers to oneself, when one is a Mystery Science Theater 3000 fan- delights in the schmaltz, because by God, thats real, that is real fakeness out there. There is no pretension to the contrary, and there are no digitally rendered characters in choreographed fight sequences-- these robots aren't real, these movies are bad, and we are going to get through this thing together, you and I. Everybodys clothes stay on; adorable children are not hugged and small adorable dogs do not hop on the furniture. It was downright revolutionary. A marked lack of bullshit, facing down an industry whose turbines were churned by nothing BUT bullshit: That was the driving force of Mystery Science Theater 3000.


Here is the website for the show, hosted by its most recent cable home, the Sci-Fi Channel.

This is Kevin Murphy, who voiced and puppeted the robot Tom Servo. He co-wrote the series. The first year it aired, in 1990, Murphy constructed, out of Styrofoam, the theater seats projected onto the movie screen. Then he did the lighting, helped direct and write some of the music.

That is Bill Corbett, who was in charge of Crow, the other robot. He also worked on scripts. Towards the end of the series, like Murphy, he often put down his puppet and played a spate of on-camera roles.

And over here is Mike Nelson, the only human in front of the theater screen. He was also the head writer and occasionally the director and the shows principal musician and the vocalist for the theme song. Nelsons educational background consists of precisely one year in college, two semesters at the University of Wisconsin before he was, as he may tell you, asked to leave.

The robot voiced by Murphy was clearly fashioned from a small gumball machine, and Crow looked like what might happen if a hockey mask and a bowling pin got drunk, had sex, and couldnt figure out how to uncouple in the morning. Nelson paced between the two in a blue jumpsuit. A college dropout and two hunks of plastic with their backs to the audience: In America, in the Clinton era, this was honestly the some of the best that television had to offer. It was too far at the end of the bungee cord for America, however, which preferred to watch George Clooney scowl and Calista Flockhart emaciate.

Years ago, years and years ago when there was no website and there was no Sci-Fi Channel and there were no Confederate cap-wearing psychopaths knocking around greater St. Louis, Nelsons part was played by prop comic Joel Hodgson.

Now Hodgson created the series, built from hockey mask and Tupperware scratch the two robots he plopped on either side of him. He designed the set, wrote the theme song, set the gentle fuck-you-dreck tone.

Hodgson wore a red jumpsuit. He was heavy-lidded and scrawny; his sense of humor was downright weird; he couldnt sing or do impressions or act, even, sometimes roving in and out of scenes in a clear miss or jump of a cue. There was something up with his thin brown hair, which flopped and sprang all over the place, very much as if his part had exploded. An episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 hosted by Hodgson looked like what might happen if somebody sat the eleven oclock news meteorologist next to a bong and then threw in a tape of "Bride of the Monster."

People loved him; they loved this Hodgson who had apparently rolled out of his bunk bed and into this movie theater to heap abuse upon Bela Lugosis head just for you, just to say holy shit, this movie sucks, and sometimes life sucks, but we don't have to take that lying down, now do we?

The show was born on a weensey station in Minneapolis, and even as it was issued five happy and steadily booming years on Comedy Central the cast and crew stayed put in Minnesota. There was a movie deal in the works. The fan club was blossoming, the network contracts were fairly generous by industry standards, and the series only became more sweetly earthy as it aged.

And Hodgson.... bolted.

He left, in the middle of Season Five, right there between Episode 511 and Episode 513. He wrote himself into an escape pod entitled the Deus Ex Machina(the premise of the show stated that he and his robots were trapped in space, the wretched movies forced upon them by a mad scientist) and was not heard from again until a brief guest appearance in the shows final season. He passed his hosting duties on to his head writer, the taller, blonder, shinier Nelson, who sat between the puppets and yelled at the black and white tepidity and just horrified the fan base with his Skeffington Formal Wear looks and bald dramatic competency.

When Hodgson left, he creative differenced this and other projected that, but generously scattered in the comet trail of his escape pod was Element Fear. A prophetic vision of himself in that red jumpsuit "signing pictures at an R.V. show" (as the press release said) set off in him torrential waves of alarm at contracting Mark Hamill, Jedi Knight Syndrome ("When all is said and done, I've got a big copyright of Lucasfilm stamped on my ass," the in perpetuum Luke Skywalker once said.) He felt it coming from the start, maybe, from the first year of the series, when he exchanged his real last name for the on-air Robinson. The very idea of a merry-go-round of a career forever involving robot puppets folded Hodgson in half and crammed him into that pod at the apex of his star baby's artistic merit, but he feared something beyond typecasting and a creative squirrel hole. He feared... this:

I am pitched forward, hands on the knees, inhaling my own hair. Scattered behind me on the blacktop are my purse and my camera case. Sling leans against the rental car, shaking her head, and Samurai is exhaling the hack-hack of a Marlboro cough. Disappearing into a side door of the hotel some twenty yards away are Nelson, Kevin Murphy, and Bill Corbett. We have just chased them across the hotel parking lot.

There were four, maybe five college degrees in that car, with Sling and me in the middle of our Masters and Samurai closing in on his PhD. None of this stopped us from piling out at the three of them like Charlies Angels when Slinger screeched, Oh my God, it's them, there they are! and I turned around to see Nelson, Murphy, and Corbett the Holy MSTie Trinity, right there, cutting across the hotel lawn to one of the service entrances the Brains before us (we called them The Brains, collectively, the writers and the actors; anyone leaving their fingerprints upon the show were to be honored with the designation.) I beat on the back of Samurais headrest: "Holy shit, oh my God its Miiiiiiike, pull over pull over!" The car screeched, seat belts went flying, and we tumbled out of the car, we were a litter of golden retrievers, yelling their names and in my case dropping the forehead to the asphalt in homage.

Their reaction to the display was to smile nervously, wave grandly, and walk very fast into the building, presumably to file charges. I leaned back on my haunches, unsure whether or not to be exhilarated.

Samurai lit a cigarette. I hate myself, he announced.

Slinger was still shaking her head. Nah, she said, nah. "I bet they love it."

I had decided to feel a temporary elation tempered by humiliation, and beat my hands on the asphalt a few times. Samurai watched. Who would love that? he said.

"I bet they love it," MyCrowSoft27 volunteered from inside the car (her husband had just run off with her aunt, leaving the family's hard candy packaging business in disarray.) "I bet they really do. Three hundred and sixty-three days a year, they're dads, they're husbands, they're just three more people battling the magazine and TV circuit. They come here"-- she indicated the heinous bourgeois themity of the Henry the Eighth Hotel, there off the highway in St. Louis, Missouri- "they come here, they're rock gods for a weekend. They've got LadyK in her sundress here running at them, hundreds of people packing a room just to tell them how much they rock. I bet they love it." She smiled. "I know I'd love it."

Back in the car, Slinger lifted her feet up and Samurai moved aside his physical therapy electrode kit so I would have more room to search out the amber vial of fluvoxamine I had scattered in my haste to fling myself at the feet of Nelson and the puppeteers who flanked him.

The MSTie is a variant non-subspecies of the Trekkie and the Star Wars freak. Star Trek is out there; its mall-available and its got its own line of Halloween costumes, practically mainstream. The MSTie spits upon the Trekkie-- anyone can buy a set of Vulcan ears and frighten away potential spouses; the MSTie has to fashion our own jumpsuits and bot costumes from scratch. It takes a real man, it takes a real woman, to be a MSTie.

Therefore when the MSTie enters the internet community and the internet community becomes flesh, becomes people rather than aliases, the attachments are instant, defiant, and fierce. It was like joining an underground, double-secret-probation fraternity: the house was dilapidated, the potted plants never got watered, and the rich kids never rushed it, but we all wore the chapter sweatshirt and the parties were never considered successful unless at least one arrest was made.

It was reality whiplash to see them collected all in one place, with skin on, to buy ice cream with ManMan and share a bathroom with Slinger, these people who were not people but formatted text on the laptop. They had bodies, it seemed, and luggage, and shampoo, and jobs, these silent words who sorted episodes by the varying shades of blue and green in Nelsons jumpsuit, who debated, over paragraphs and paragraphs and days and days, which religion Joel Hodgson might practice if any at all, and who noticed, thirty-seven minutes into Episode 217, that Murphy seemed to cough a little bit; was that a planned comment on the movie from Tom Servo, do you think, or a simple esophageal mishap?

Mystery Science Theater 3000 and the internet shared a crib, crystallizing in the double helix of intellectual intensity and a smug familial sense of we get it, pity the fool who does not. It was not a far leap for the first people to mess around with JavaScript to also find hearty amusement in a space-stranded man talking smartass at "Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster." The show toddled forth from Hodgson's mind just as the Internet began its slow lava flow out of research labs and libraries and into corporate cubicles and dorm rooms. By the time Nelson took his seat in the theater, hundreds of little virtual villages had colonized up and down the Web, where fans convened to discuss the show and the general agreed-upon splendidness of it. And like any other community it came complete with resident rulers and strumpets, jesters and sages, peons and minstrels. Exulting in one anothers attachment to the on-screen shadows, they tunneled into its fictional nooks and crannies, nit-combing it for continuity, excavating each New Wave reference and questioning the significance of the patch on the left arm of Joels uniform. Photographs were exchanged and personal-life details seeped onto the screen.

Most of the parishioners, breathing the rarified oxygen of a shared passion, coexisted in a sort of peaceable if rollicking shared consciousness. But when a portion or, in some cases, the entirety of ones social life revolves around a world in which the only other pulsing heartbeat is the cursor, any foreign element, any rift amongst the townsfolk, is analyzed and magnified and personalized and just beaten and kicked at until it is atoms.

For instance.

When Hodgson left and Nelson arrived, a Mike vs. Joel war erupted amongst the faithful, the likes of which cyberspace had never seen. The villages burned, the chatrooms reeled, the caps-lock emails flew. There was widespread condemnation of Nelsons self-conscious high school quarterback demeanor, countered by vilification of the abandoning Hodgson. There was proposed canonization for the new guy and adamant, real-life tears and depression symptoms from those who refused to watch the show without Joel hosting it. There were death threats. The First Amendment was trotted out. Shemp had replaced Curly, the Dodgers had left Brooklyn, and yet the cause of it all, the program itself, lived to mock another day; for, in the end, it was just a TV show.


We stood in line the next day, a line beginning at a cafeteria table where the stars held court at an autographing session. The line slid past the check-in desk, down the hall of conference rooms, around the elevator stall and into the hospitality suite, where a woman arrayed in black leather sold medieval codpieces, beaded hair ornaments, and t-shirts that read "Pimpin' Is Easy When Youre This Good-Looking."

Some of the lower-end beadwork is dangling from my bangs. I feel like Cleopatra; I look like David Bowie. When I move my head the beads tink and click and offset the low murmurs of the fans bending towards their heroes arrayed at the cafeteria table.

Listen:
"Thank you. Really, thanks a lot. Youre awesome, Bill."

"Is the show coming back? We would love for the show to come back. Is it a money thing? Heres a twenty, see if that wont help."

"Oh, dude... dude, man, you guys RULE."

Such things were said because one does not approach two puppeteers and a man noted for his Lord of the Dance impressions and announce, You changed my life, or, farther into the canyon, You saved my life.

That is the core of it, the chorus and the verse that is what sets MSTie apart from the teenage girls sinking their afternoons into "Total Request Live" or the listless couple on the couch in front of "The West Wing": the emotional investment, the personal ties. People did not turn to Survivor for psychotherapy or "60 Minutes" to nudge out the parents that were dying or the new pills that werent working or the teetering skyscrapers with planes plowed into them.

And so ManMan merely smiled and said hello as he came face to face with Mike, and Slinger, when handing Kevin Murphy her "Mystery Science Theater Amazing Colossal Episode Guide" did not say, The show is just about the only thing that makes my dad laugh since the chemo started; we sit and watch and it's just like it used to be.

Instead she clutched at the spine, fluttered the pages against her palm, stared softly down at the cover. Chasing your heroes across a hotel parking lot, you could kind of understand that, but shit, we didnt want to embarrass these people.


That said, I would like to apologize to Nelson for stealing his coffee cup.

This was neither planned nor prayed for, but rather a consequence of showing up for breakfast. Pancakes, maybe a sausage link, orange juice: These are all I asked of life when I met a clot of MSTies at the hotel restaurant. None of us knew the Brains were also there, also after pancakes, when the hostess spread our menus on the table directly across from them there was a great deal of arm grabbing and frantic eye contact and fantastically loud conversation concerning the current status and health of Mark McGuire.

"Shit. Shit." This from Samurai. "I bet they recognize us from the parking lot."

"I know they do," Sling said into her water glass. "They probably think we slipped the waitress a fifty to seat us here. Oh God."

The Olympian gathering Table Five seemed blessedly unconcerned with the excitement or even the existence of the mortals at Table Four. Kevin Murphy, physically unmissible in an earring and a beard and a faded yet alarming aloha shirt, smiled benignly at his comrades and made large, sweeping gestures. He looked as if he had just fallen out of a Beach Boys album or a Hell's Angels family reunion or possibly both.

Murphy.... Murphy, of all of them, would understand the previous days attack by rental Honda. Murphy had taken up three entire pages in front of the "Amazing Colossal Episode Guide" to write about a horrendous encounter with his author-god, Kurt Vonnegut. He called it: My Forward About Kurt Vonnegut. What happened was, Vonnegut and Murphy were staying at the same hotel in Pasadena. And Murphy introduces himself, even though, as he wrote, "It is a cardinal rule of mine never to go up to famous people whom I admire and respect and go all gooey on them. It's embarrassing for them and for me. It's gratuitous; it forces them to be nice and polite even if they feel like poop." And then the next day Murphy runs into him again. And this time some of his castmates are with him, and they convince him that it would be a really terrific idea if they asked him out to dinner. So Murphy does, and of course Vonnegut says he has plans, and then later that night they see him in the hotel bar, dining alone.

Says Murphy: "I've decided that he has every right to turn me down, to weasel out of a gooey dinner invitation from an excited fan, to sit there by himself, in the shadowy coroner of the bar, smoking, eating fish... 'So it goes,' my sorry ass, Kurt. I would have done the same thing." Especially if the excited fan came screaming at him out of a hatchback.

What are they eating, MyCrowSoft27 asked from around a menu.

Food, said ManMan. "Come on. They're people. Don't scare them anymore than we already have."

People... well they were that, poor bastards. People who had moved on to other, more media-respected livings: Nelson had released a book of movie reviews, Corbett was a playwright, Murphy wrote a magazine column. Other cast members were in the arms of network television, special effects consultation, freelance writing. At the moment Nelson, Murphy, and Corbett were preparing to launch a humor internet site. After the Sci-Fi channel pulled the plug, the Brains sold the props on eBay, tucked the puppets into somebodys basement and moved on. It seemed to baffle them, somehow, that in the past two years the rest of us had not. We, the fan base, the bread, the odd and the proud, continued to live in a world in which we owned two VCRs for the sole purpose of trading tapes of episodes not broadcast in years.

The more mechanically inclined of us roamed the Web in search of puppet parts to build robot replicas, and they wanted people to know this; many "bot builders" toted the completed product with them to sci-fi cons such as this one. They loaded the full-sized Crow or the lifelike rendering of Tom Servo into the overhead compartment or beneath the seat in front of them, these people, because they knew.... they KNEW that they would be objects d'awe for the next three days.

At the previous day's panel session someone stood up and asked the writers a question concerning a particular comment spat at a particular movie; the stars, the writers, the very people who had created the thing, written the words and then spoken them on-camera, looked at one another, and shrugged, and one of them gently explained that they generally performed a mental data dump after each episode was in the can; it was a simple matter of creative self-preservation, a defense mechanism allowing the writers to release the jump cuts and stilted dialogue of one film to make room for the next Cold War fiasco. They felt no urgent call to tally up the number of Frank Lloyd Wright allusions spanning across the series; there wasnt a perceived need for year-to-year or even episode-to-episode continuity. Such self-imposed tasks fell to the MSTie, painstaking homages carried out to harness the passion and the gratitude for the show famous only in coal mine shaft slices of the population. Eleven year olds paper their bedrooms with Bop-photographed boy bands; environmental activists chain themselves to sycamores; and the MSTie, lacking a flood of Paramount-backed merchandise and frankly preferring it that way, catalogues the average number of Beatle references per episode.

When the MSTies got hold of a new show, it was lovingly bickered over, peered at from every angle, scrutinized and dissected and burnished until we could see our own reflection in the eyes of those plastic robots. But the creators themselves, once the thing was finished, cast it upon the thin brackish waters of cable television, let it go. Sometimes their handiwork sent back a Peabody Award; sometimes it floated them fans who named puppies and kittens and children after the robot puppets; sometimes it returned network suits who frowned uncomprehendingly; and that was okay. These shows were no longer theirs. They belonged, now, to the MSTie, alone and amused amongst the shadows.

And yet....

And yet, what were the Brains doing there, the lot of them, staying in the same hotel, breathing the same oxygen, eating the same food? Did they need the money? Were they just pushing the website? Honestly, what were they getting out of it, these three days trolling the Timeless Beauty of the Henry VIII Hotel, with its lime-green indoor pool and dollar-a-play pinball machines plugged in alongside the atrium waterfall? Were they compelled to drink from the fire hydrant of gratitude and adulation we ached to blast at them, or were they kindly and honestly interested in interacting with the faithful, truly humbled by the hundreds who came to say thanks and may I bear your children?

Did they miss the dripping media affection lavished upon their peers? Here was Murphy, here was plain old Minnesotan Mike Nelson, (who, it must be noted, kept his name wholesale when he went in front of the camera after Hodgson left) who were integral cogs in a critically acclaimed, ten-year-old television show that had spawned a subculture all on its own, no AOLTimeWarner or Walt Disney to pull it along and yet Letterman never called, Regis did not care to exchange bon mots. Out there in the general public, non-con world they were phantoms, rarely hounded for autographs and attention Nelson himself was once asked if he was recognized on the street, and he looked pained and replied, "Never... but then perhaps I am, and people just choose to run."

Were they merely fulfilling the creatives inherent craving for occasional showers of made-up awards show rose petals and choruses of YOU LOOK FABULOUS, WHO ARE YOU WEARING?"

I glanced up at Nelson, the Heavenly Host, from beneath my lashes and over my juice glass; he was rubbing his eyes, not a glancing wheres-my-contact touch to the lower eyelashes, but a soul-sighing, hands over the face, God-I-need-some-sleep type of thing that suggests either a weariness with the world at large or an unstudied-for economics final in two hours. I watched, fascinated: so, Nelson, The Person, desired pancakes now and again; he needed sleep, and new underwear, and perhaps the occasional hug. Maybe he hated what he wrote five minutes after he wrote it, perhaps those Teri Hatcher-Howie Long phone commercials made him want to die, and maybe, even, like me, he feared and loathed the general populace as a rule but felt compelled to write for it nonetheless.

Midway through breakfast the Brains, perhaps weary of the discomfort we were causing them by radiating our discomfort, filed out of the restaurant. Murphy, passing by Sling's chair, slid her a knowing smile and she rested her head on the table for the remainder of the meal. We gazed upon their unbussed table the scattered silverware, the bacon remnants, the congealed scrambled eggs.

I want Mike's napkin, I announced.

"Why stop there?" said Samurai. "Why not take the entire place setting?"

Because that would be sad, I said.

Just the coffee cup then, MyCrowSoft27 said. "You could share germs. It would almost be like kissing him."

"This is like the time the New Kids On the Block were in town, and a bunch of girlfans converged on their hotel, and they threw a pillow out the window, and there were like hundreds of little teenagers fighting over it, and in two seconds all that was left was feather bits," Sling told the tablecloth.

"I'll even make it easy for you," said Samurai, hefting himself from his chair. He glanced at the empty hostess station, and reached back over the chair where Nelson had been sitting.

"Here", he said, passing it my direction, "look, there's backwash and everything."

Nelsonic DNA, said ManMan.

We can clone him!

Sling wants to know if he drinks decaf or regular.

"Let me see." MyCrowSoft27 intercepted the mug and sipped at the brown slosh at the bottom. Regular, black, she told us.

Don't drink it all, I said, reaching across the table for the chalice.

We trotted out into the lobby some ten minutes later, ManMan with a suspicious coffee cup-sized bulge in the lower right leg pocket of his cargo shorts. Somewhere, meanwhile, the firmly non-jumpsuited Joel Hodgson's unwashed dishes sat unmolested.


I wonder if they ever think of it, I said.

Again with the thinking, said ManMan.

"The marriages that are made and the lawns that go unmowed an extra day and the computers that get upgraded, all because of the show. I wonder if the Brains ever think about all that."

It would probably freak them out if they did, he said.

"Probably."

The two of us were sitting on a bent-over wooden bench facing His Majesty's cracked and weedy tennis courts. There was a white-gold moon that night over Twain country, and ManMan, who had grown up in Hawaii and lived in Colorado, tipped his head at the chick-chirring wail of the cicadas and asked what the hell it was. Yet another bit of living you owe the Brains, I told him during a crescendo, because if youd never seen the show, youd never have come to St. Louis, and you might have lived your entire life never having heard cicadas at all.

Oh please, he said, and fell silent. I scraped at the cracked wood with a fingernail, and knew he understood that far lesser things than a couple of puppets had built icebergs for oceanliners where wide, cold water used to be and carved the Y's of roads less traveled.

We leaned up against one another, the closest contact we dared for the moment; I was in a wretched virtual relationship at the time with Sephimorg, a MSTie of our online community who incessantly made me cry but whom I never met in actual person. The real live body pressed up against me had no way of knowing that within a years time, the two of us would do the whole falling in love thing, soon after which he would field a military call to Korea; that within seven months all that would be left between us was space and unhappy silence.

But if we had known all this, we would turn away, find a wispy solace in the fact that out there, somewhere, on the net and in dorm televisions, Mike and Joel and those robots sailed on just the same, fighting off the lousy movies, orbit after orbit, never entirely sure of where they were or when they would get home.

At the same time, the Brains were at large in St. Louis-- maybe sleeping, maybe drinking, maybe holed up in one of their rooms shaking their heads at the whole sorry lot of us, who would not be there in the first place if they hadnt done so spectacularly well at their jobs, bringing upon their own heads a hoard of pilgrims who paid airline fares and parking charges and registration fees to simply bask in their presence, saying the same thing ManMan said to me that night under the Missouri moon: That damn puppet show.