Make Mine Mike

Are you like me? You can't sit through a lecture, not even as an adult, without doodling crap all over your notebook?

The discussion could be the most interesting thing you've ever heard and still you gotta scribble a portrait of the lady sitting in front of you... or random cartoon characters?

Or weird things come to mind, which you sketch completely out of proportion, like what if your old dog met Inanna's cat?

It reminded me of graduate film school. I enjoyed it, learned a lot... and filled notebooks with drawings -- sometimes about the classes themselves.

One was a script analysis class. We'd watch a classic film for 2 hours and discuss it for another 2. Our instructor was a smart, likable old screenwriter from Czechoslovakia. He'd break down the movie plots with terms like "point of attack" all in his thick accent. Though very educational, 240 minutes was hard to sit through, especially when some pretentious film students would over-analyze every detail. Sometimes it's just a movie, ya poseurs.

So I'd tune out and doodle as my mind wandered. Like what would happen if our instructor went up against another old guy -- like Ronald Reagan -- in a game of hoops? The Czech Maestro vs. the Great Communicator, one-on-one? My money was on our teech. Ronnie's full-court-press would be as effective as his Strategic Defense Initiative.

There were some other drawings, many of which made even less sense... maybe I'll post 'em another time. My friend seated next to me was a cartoonist, too. So we'd pass the time, giving each other random artwork assignments.

He once asked me to depict this loudmouth from our class -- a pseudo-intellectual who made the four hours even longer with his over-scrutinization and auteur-name-dropping pomposity -- getting run over by a steamroller.

No problem, I said. Like that was gonna stop that schmuck?