The 1989 University of Texas Symphony Band playing the polka and fugue from Jaromir Weinberger's opera, Schwanda the Bagpiper. Weinberger was a Czech-Jewish composer.
On a day in July 1989 I worked all night at Akin Gump on a special project with legal assistant Clay Bailey. I wonder if Clay Bailey thought I was paranoid and potentially violent. It was in August 1989, about a month later, that another legal assistant, Stacey Schaar, said to me: "We're all afraid of you. We're all afraid you're going to buy a gun, bring it in and shoot everybody."
In any event, the following morning Bob Strauss was coming into the office and got on the elevator with me. He was talking to another person about somebody -- I didn't know who -- and said, "He came into town like the Music Man." Maybe he was talking President George H.W. Bush, who took office in January of that year. Although George Bush had been Vice-President for the eight previous years. So I don't know who it was who came into town like the Music Man. Maybe he was talking about Schwanda the Bagpiper!
At the All-Attoney's Dinner on May 3, 1989 at the Westin Hotel I sat at a table next to Clay Bailey. I remember I said I was like the character in the Henry James short story, The Beast in the Jungle. The story is about a man who lives his whole life believing that he is destined for a special purpose. At the end of his life, he sees that nothing ever happened to him and it dawns on him that his destiny was to be the one man to live a totally uneventful life in which nothing ever happened to him. That was what his special destiny was.
ReplyDeleteJesse Raben sat on my right. Jennifer Meader, Anthony Parchment and Gary Zanfagna -- all aparalegals -- were also at that table. Mind like a steel trap!
I vaguely recall that the project I worked on with Clay Bailey was a document production task for Frontier Airlines.
ReplyDeleteI vaguely recall that on one occasion in 1988, Jack Gallagher sent Antony Parchment to the home of Judge Barrington Parker (U.S. District Court) to deliver a box of documents re: Eastern Airlines litigation. Judge Parker had a conniption fit. "Don't ever come to my house again!!"
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