Large Talk

The other night my wife and I made it out to a birthday party. Neighbors on the other block, close to em but not too close, forty years old! A spread! A band! A birthday party at a venue!

I ran into an old co-worker from MPR and discovered that her husband was a professor at Macalester. That level of connection to my life (my dad was the president of Macalester from the mid 90s to the early 2000s) is a pretty well-worn lane at this point. Me and said employee of Macalester go through a pretty normal dance “how is your dad? what is he doing? I heard about your mom? Did you go to Macalester?”. A fun dance but one with predictable moves. But turning on one fact made this particular interaction quite different. The professor, let’s call him Jack, partially because I think that’s actually his first name, was also the son of a college president. I didn’t think of this as a uniquely unifying experience to be perfectly honest with you. But perhaps that’s because I’ve never had the opportunity to talk to someone in that position.

It brought up lots of feelings I had about moving across the country and being the son of a president at age 15. I believe there are a couple outrageously positive things about one of your parents becoming a college president that need to be said straight out. First off, unless your parents really mess it up, you should be moving up a couple tax brackets. It was a high paying job then, it’s even higher paying now. Money gives you a lot in this society and I have benefitted greatly from my dad locking down a job in the low six figures before Y2K. Nice job literally dad. Second, living in a mansion was largely an amazing experience for my family. We paid ZERO dollars to live on Summit and Fairview in St. Paul. I threw concerts in high school for my bands and others that could comfortably accommodate 100 stinky high school kids in the basement. I rehearsed with seven piece bands for hours in the evening while making somewhat minimal impact on my parents’ area. We drank budget impacting levels of Schweppes Lemon Sour and Maraschino cherries seemingly with no one noticing. When my mom did the think the sound from the rehearsals was too much she had someone from Macalester come in and install sound proofing that I’m going to guess would cost maybe $3500 in today dollars. I had once forgotten to write/learn a bassline for a recording session for OddJobs in my early college years. As I was very stressed out and trying to rush to learn something I decided I would save time by dropping a banana peel into the toilet after I peed to shave the handful of seconds it would’ve taken to visit the garbage can. Turns out that’s a stupid idea. Stupider still is to not tell anyone smarter than me right away about putting a banana peel into the toilet. Days later I realized that that the toilet isn’t doing the old flushy-poo routine it’s designed to do, instead the banana peel has become some sort of feces condom capturing well, the feces. A plumber came and took care of that idiocy with an implement called a snake that all my plunging couldn’t have matched. If I could find the man who had to plunge a banana out of a toilet because the president’s kid dropped a banana in a toilet I would treat him to a night on the town at a watering hole of his choice. These are all perks: Money, mansion, music and free plumbing. But there are a lot of non-perks to be perfectly honest with and that’s what me and Jack honed in on. Not negative, but not perks. Neutral and negative elements of having your family be a public adjacent private family at a higher education institution.

My dad got the job when I was in tenth grade and I hadn’t been conditioned for what being the son of a president is like. I don’t know how you do get conditioned to that, but my dad didn’t live a president-in-waiting type of life before becoming a president. He was the Dean of Faculty but I never went to any ‘Dinners with a Capital D’. I don’t know that he did either. Dinner at the McPherson household was largely a fend for yourself affair. I usually had dinner with Mama Celeste on the pizza box staring back at me and that was about it. When my parents told me we’d be having “a lot of Dinners” in Saint Paul I legitimately thought I would be a part of all them. I mean why not? I need dinner too. One of the first “Dinners” happened before I had even started at St. Paul Central High School. My parents informed me I wasn’t invited to the dinner, I’d go down to the kitchen and get a plate from the caterers who would be working in the kitchen and I’d eat it upstairs in my bedroom. I wouldn’t even be with Mama Celeste anymore. Just so lonely. Don’t know anyone for hundreds of miles besides for my parents and can’t have dinner with them.

I communicated my calibration of what “Dinners” meant with Professor Jack over the din of the band at this party and he understood. His daddy had become president of a University after Jack was already in college. He came home to a mansion but he wasn’t living there. He told me that what it did show him was that the whole affair/charade: the fancy talks, the passed hor dourves, the clinking of glasses - it was all a sham. Or if not a sham, it was a lane that Jack wanted none of in his professional life. At this particular soiree it was wildly apparent to me that Jack was telling the truth. He didn’t look like one of those men who loved parties and pretended to hate them. He looked like a man who was happy to be out with his wife, but might be even happier to be at home with her.

I like parties, they energize me. I like spinning a yarn. I like hearing a joke, I like introducing people. I like finding out that people listen to me on the radio, or play Trivia Mafia or have seen Heiruspecs a couple of times. If you see me at a party I don’t look like a guy who would be just as happy being at home with his wife. But I have been involved with a lot of the fancier parties both with my dad and with being a musician/radio host. I’m talking about parties where Kofi Annan uses your first floor bathroom or where Amy Klobuchar cuts in front of you to get a carrot. I’ve had fun at these parties, but generally the further I am from the center of the party the better. Run a little trivia for the fancies, play in a jazz trio, set up the Dessa band for a fancy MPR fundraiser on lake parkway in Minneapolis. I think I played a party for August Wilson at Saint Paul Hotel in the mid 90s with Walker-West Music Academy. Great stuff all around. But holding court with the famous, with the money people, I enjoy it if I can do it on my terms, if it’s on someone else’s terms, stressful.

I told Professor Jack another success story from my years being the son of the president of Macalester and now I’ll tell you: I was a pretty observant kid, kind of saw how stuff generally went for the parties at the house. Caterers and some event staff show up two hours before. Ovens get going, little weird go-karts in the back by the garage. Lights get turned on in parts of the house we never use. Smells start coming out that smell like catering cooking, not like us cooking. Then maybe one hour before the liquor people show up. Different go-kart. Ice noises. Bottles. A couple workers have a cigarette outside. Lots of white button downs over t-shirts. Someone yells out “WHAT HAPPENED TO ALL OF THOSE MARASCHINO CHERRIES???? SARA DRIVE BACK TO 1600!”. Anywho, some random Sunday I’m hanging around the house like a teenager and I know there is supposed to be an event at our house that afternoon, some post conference gathering. But I notice that it’s only the liquor people around. One go-kart. No smells. Less cigarettes. I decide to call up this lady Erlene who was the big boss in charge of all the fancifulness that happened around Macalester. I’m proud I did that, things felt a little off and I wanted to help. Being a president is a family business, I’m sure my home girl Chelsea Clinton would’ve done the same for Slick Willy. As the phone is ringing I don’t realize that Erlene is about to perform for me a sound that we all know well in adulthood but didn’t know yet in our teenage years. I tell Erlene that the liquor people are here for an event but I don’t see her and I don’t see food. Erlene then says nothing, opens a calendar and then silently says “shit”. I just hear the “shit” in the back of her throat like she has a banana condom on, capturing all the shits that usually come out. She then tells me to get dressed and that she needs my help, she forgot to book the caterers. She pulls up in the back alley and drives the seven hundred feet to the Whole Foods at the end of the block and we race through and buy I don’t know maybe $250 worth of all sorts of foods I have never heard of, including dolmata. I will forever think of Erlene when I eat dolmata. I don’t know if Erlene really needed my help. If you give me the option right now of buying $250 worth of food in a big ass hurry without or without little Jimmy, the imaginary current son of the President of Macalester, that’s a hard pass on Jimmy’s help. But I don’t know, Erlene took my help and I felt spectacular for it. We put the food on plates. She showed me that karate chop with your hand move to make the napkins look nice (the Internet doesn’t know about what I’m talking about, maybe it’s a secret beteween just me and Erlene).

I told Professor Jack all of that over the din of the band and we reached an easy impasse. I clearly had a lot rawer feelings about my time as a son of a president than he did. I maybe not so clearly had also had a THC edible before I came to the party and I wasn’t sure if we had been talking for seven minutes (acceptable) or over fifteen minutes (a little too long to talk to rando professor plus one at a gathering). We found our way back to our spouses but I felt really engaged, really activated. Maybe my next step is to talk to more children of college presidents, find out what it was for them, what they felt like. Maybe we have something in common and I hadn’t even considered it. Strange, but beautiful, an inspiring talk with a kindred spirit that recharged me in many ways.