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In This Issue

• Life After Graduation? You're Kidding!
• Touched By Tom Brokaw
• Mr. McLaughlin's Culturally Confusing Neighborhood
• Livejournal: Hardcore Gateway(TM) Drug
• Columbia Decompiled
• Looking Back At Evolutionary Monkey Business
• How Right You Are!
• The Fed Kidz Page
• Veganism Sucks
• iPod Shuffle Advisory
• The Great Debate: Tune In or Pass Out?
• Weapons of Ass Destruction
• Letters to the Feditor
• THEY WATCH
• The Blue And White

M. Theodore "Teddy" Holden, I

Tom Brokaw has the strength of five Peter Jenningses.

Edward Rueda

Behold, Tom Brokaw, pinnacle of evolution.

As an intern at Last Call with Carson Daly, I work out. To help employees stay toned, the occupants of the GE Building's top floors and corner offices built a company gym. The average workday finds me rising at the crack of dawn to make it there. This story, however, concerns no average workday.

Working at NBC, it's not uncommon to see celebrities. Around my third set with the medicine ball, Conan O'Brien dropped by for a few reps on the butterfly machine, and the rest of the morning was a revolving door of SNL cast members, corporate execs, and the attendant NBC/Universal apparatchiks. Seven ex-Marines stopped a newbie Dateline staffer when he approached Lorne Michaels. The novice was escorted to the janitor's closet and made intimate with the wet, jet end of a Swiffer WetJet. I was too secure in my veteran grizzle to let his cries distract me from my exertions, but even my lifetime in the trenches could not have prepared me for what happened next.

I remember it was 8:53 because I had been looking at the clock when a stiff gust rumbled through the gym. I looked up, bewildered, and saw the doors blown open, shuddering against their stops, as Tom Brokaw strode through them. When he had retired, he started hanging around the building, nonchalantly roaming the hallways and responding, "Tell it to Williams," if anybody spoke to him. He rolled through the gym lobby, pant legs dancing in the wind produced by his presence. A uniformed manicurist, hunched over and struggling to keep up, cradled his outstretched right hand, and Brokaw exhaled on his five free fingers before rubbing them on his lapel and shooting his cuff to check the time. He announced to no one in particular that he was "a full three minutes ahead of schedule," as aides handed him packets of papers that he glanced skeptically at before throwing them back over his shoulder.

Of the eleven others in the gym, eight sat wide-eyed and slack-jawed, two fell to the floor in convulsions, and one poor soul leapt from an open window, his fall ineffectively broken by Al Roker's Minnesotan housewife interviewee.

Brokaw didn't move in the traditional sense. Where most would walk across a room, he seemed to put his foot out and drag the room towards himself. He stared intently at the bench press. I was sitting on the bench press. He was headed for me. I heard someone shriek, a high-pitched, girlish scream, the kind of sound one imagines a fetal pig making. Later, they told me those were my screams.

Brokaw towered over me like a magic beanstalk. His body was several miles tall, and his head disappeared into the clouds that swirled and crashed above. I tried to flee but succeeded only in soiling myself so terrifically that I checked to make sure I wasn't sitting on my liver. Then without warning, his head rushed down from the heavens and he leaned in towards me: "Son," he said as if reading scripture, "I want you to spot me."  

I blinked. When my eyes opened, I was standing at the head of a recumbent Tom Brokaw, watching him bench-press 700 pounds. In his three-piece suit, he did three sets of ten without breaking a sweat. Three more people jumped out the window.

When he was done, he got up and faced me. He reached down, grabbed a hold of my shirt, and lifted me to his face. Then in that famed, deliberate cadence he said, "Tell your friends about me," and let me fall back to the floor. I wanted to cry out to him to explain. "Wait, Mr. Brokaw, wait!  What do you mean?  Isn't that from Batman?"  But I was suddenly alone. The others in the gym had fled, and all was still except for a few papers tumbling by in Brokaw's exit breeze.

I spent the rest of the day curled up, naked on the floor of the gym shower, crying. He had gone from my life as quickly as he had entered, leaving me confused. What about him should I tell my friends?  That he drove four people to their deaths?  That he travels with a uniformed manicurist?  When people entered the shower, I asked them. None answered, and most stared for a second at my tear-streaked nakedness before dashing out of the room. And so, friends, I'm telling you about Tom Brokaw. He is several miles tall. He bench-presses 700 pounds. He's a freaking rock star.