The ticket wasn’t hard to get. Steinem was still a name, still famous enough to fill a
room, just not the best room
on campus. We were gathered along the sidewalk, waiting to file into Alumni
Gym, hardly used anymore except by the kayak club
rolling their boats in the basement pool, the brick facade of the place done up in a
land-grant version of institutional gothic
like all the other old buildings on The Hill, the symbol of the university. From
where I stood in line a half-dozen people behind her,
Sandi Sentell was the celebrity. An aura still hung about her that on Saturday
afternoons in Neyland Stadium had illuminated us all.
Back in the early days of autumn I’d somehow gotten first-row tickets for the
UCLA game. Terrible seats, really,
corner of the end zone in the student section, too low, no angle on the field, but
every time the network television camera
swung to take in Sandi Sentell hoisted joyously aloft, I was in the shot for family
and friends to see. And here she stood on a late spring evening,
waiting in line like the rest of us. Fame is as fleeting as anything else—the simplest
solvent will break it down
and send it seeping into the groundwater. If you’re given a daubing of celebrity it’s
honorable to do some good with it,
to help the massed ticket-holders clarify and concentrate their passions towards
some constructive end. When the line finally moved,
she looked over her shoulder toward Cumberland Avenue where the late
commuters were formed into a line of their own, one to a car,
unaware of us or who was slated to speak, the hooded disks of light in the traffic
signals grown more insistent against the gloaming,
and then a moment’s pause at each change to green before the straining of the cars
joined into one plainting hymn.