That year is now 31
years past. But it’s one of the more
eventful ones I can remember.
New Year’s Eve, 1989-90. I spent
this in Paris, France. There was a girl
named Mo (short for Maureen? I never
found out – or her last name) who I met at GMU, spring break 1987, and in Paris
at the Air Show in 1989, who invited me to celebrate with her sister, in her
sister’s tiny apartment. Nothing
happened, and I barely even drank. At
six a.m. the sister claimed her BF would be showing up – he might have been a Marine,
I don’t remember as I never met him – and I went home. Except at that time the Paris Metro was
closed. So I had to walk, from St.
Paul/Le Marais, all the way home. I
walked along Rue de Rivoli westbound as far as Place de la Concorde (guillotine
long gone), took a right to the Madeleine (Catholic church designed like a huge
Greek temple) and then went up Blvd. Malesherbes (est. 1861) to home.
21. When I got back to Maryland from Paris, I
reached 21 years old, finally able to legally drink and use my driver’s license
as my ID.
LSAT scores. The
equivalent of SATs, but for law school, is the LSAT. Back then the top score was 48. Coming back from Paris in late August 1989, to
begin my senior year at UMCP, I didn’t have enough time to study for the
September 1989 LSAT exam, so I had to take the December exam, doing my LSAT
prep at White Flint Mall in October and November. However, I was sending out my law school
applications, to all the top tier law schools in the US, around the same time,
so I was sending them without the benefit of knowing my LSAT score. I returned to Paris after the semester break
started, shortly before Christmas. When
I got back in mid-January, my mail was waiting for me: including my LSAT
results. 37 out of 48, well below the
42 necessary to be competitive for top tier law schools, and no time to take it
again (in any case they average the scores of multiple tests instead of taking
the highest one).
So I started my spring
semester of my senior year: Production Management, International Marketing,
Business & Government, Business Policies, and Comparative (Economic)
Systems. By this point I had a single in
Montgomery Hall, on campus at University of Maryland, College Park. I got along fine with the other guys in my
suite, for once. I’ll spare everyone the
litany of horrendous experiences, but suffice to say that living on campus
among strangers gives you a form of education well beyond the classes
themselves.
Marshall combo. I
purchased my Marshall 2554 Jubilee 1x12” 25/50 watt combo from Chuck Levin’s in
Wheaton, Maryland. Finally a decent amp
to go with my Gibson SG and my Fender Stratocaster. I still have it today, and it still sounds
terrific: a warm, full bodied
overdrive. The Jubilee series amps have
a knockdown switch which makes it even nastier and hotter. In fact, Guns N’Roses lead guitarist Slash
liked the sound so much he had Marshall reissue them in his own signature
series. Later, Marshall reissued them
again, the reissues recognizable as having only two front switches. With our fixation on stacks, it’s easy to
lose sight of the fact that combos (A) can be VERY loud, (B) can sound VERY nice,
especially since the amp section is the same design as the one in the 50 and
100 watt heads, and (C) are considerably more practical if you’re playing at
home. Depending on your neighbors, even
a 50 watt combo can get loud enough to elicit noise complaints.
Spring Break. Not
spent in Fort Lauderdale – in fact, none of them were. Georgetown was the first law school to let me
know I would not be attending in fall, politely wishing me luck…somewhere else. I visited Chuck Levin’s again, and saw the
newly issued 1976 Reissue Gibson Explorer (itself a reissue of the 1958
Explorer, though in a color other than korina): black, with a white pickguard
and Dirty Fingers pickups; these high output, exposed coil humbuckers were
another departure from the PAFs which a 1958 would have had. NICE.
I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
April. As the
rejections from Harvard, Duke, etc. continued to pour in, my father in his
wisdom advised me to hedge my bets by applying to second-tier law schools: George Mason (now Antonin Scalia), Catholic,
and American. Sure enough, I got into
all three, but didn’t get into any of the top tier schools to which I had
applied – not even GW or U. Maryland Law (in Baltimore). I chose GMUSL, which had a corporate and
securities specialty track, which was unique among law schools at the
time.
May. By this
time I decided to buy the Explorer. The
I one wanted was sold out from under me, so the store simply ordered another
one from Gibson, and it came two weeks later.
I still have it today, the oldest of my current arsenal. Later on I replaced the white pickguard with a
mirror pickguard, and the Gibson Dirty Fingers pickups with EMG81s – as per
James Hetfield of Metallica, though by now he has his own signature pickups
from EMG.
Classes ended around
Memorial Day. My buddy Phil and I took a
road trip to Ocean City for the weekend, only to find it was raining – and would
be for the entire weekend. So we drove
back, saw “Back to the Future III”, which had just came out that weekend, and
then Honor Among Thieves at Hammerjacks in Baltimore.
June. Back in
fall 1986 I had purchased a Japanese made Fender Stratocaster (black, rosewood
fretboard), to replace my Strat copy.
But later I decided to sell both and buy a US-made ’62 Vintage Reissue
model (black, rosewood fretboard). I
handed both over to my guitar teacher in Paris, Joel, who sold them for
me. I used that money to buy the US Fender
Stratocaster, also at Chuck Levin’s, that summer when my parents visited in
town briefly. In January 2000 I traded
that in for my current Stratocaster, a Mexican model with a humbucker in the
bridge position, black pickguard and pickup covers, rosewood fretboard, and
large 70s style headstock. I’ve since
modified it with locking tuners, a DiMarzio zebra coil humbucker, and a
V-Runner tremelo.
June-July. Summer
Session I. COBOL and Money &
Banking. Normally my senior year would
finish at Memorial Day, the end of the spring semester. I was on a double degree track, 156
credits. Part of that was accomplished
by taking both summer sessions after my sophomore year in 1988, meaning that
summer I did not go back to Paris. The
other part was doing two things. First,
I’d be highly selective in course choices, picking classes which satisfied
multiple requirements. Second, I
frontloaded any classes which were prerequisites for later courses, and left
dead end classes until last. That was
COBOL (the programming language used for payroll systems) and Money and
Banking. Had I not been so clever, I
might have needed the fall semester of the fifth year to finish the 156 credit
curriculum, putting law school off until fall 1991. Again, the way things worked, I was able to finish
college that summer and start law school in the fall.
I stayed on summer
campus housing again, New Leonardtown – as I had during 1988 – but this time I
only needed the first summer session. On July 14, I flew back, overnight, to
Paris. [July 14, 1989 I spent in Paris
enjoying the bicentennial of Bastille Day].
From 7/15 to 8/1, I was
back in Paris for the last time. I can’t
recall much of what I did, aside from Roscoe’s, FNAC, the US Embassy, i.e. the
usual places I’d go. My father was
finally being reassigned back to Washington, the Dept. of Commerce building on
Fourteenth Street and Constitution Ave (Herbert Hoover Building, with the National
Aquarium in the basement, which has since closed). This was ending 11 years in Paris, since
January 1979.
We still owned our
family house in Montgomery Village, rented out to tenants that entire
time despite several even-year visits back.
Since we were only visiting for six weeks every other summer, as my
father noted it made no sense to kick tenants out for those brief periods of
time when a house is rented on a yearly basis.
The flip side was that whoever was doing the property management all
that time dropped the ball big time. The
house was a mess, a prime candidate for withholding the security deposit. My family was due to return at the end of
August, with the sea shipment of furniture to arrive in mid-September. So I had a month to do my best, with my
friend Phil’s enormous help, to undo the damage of 11 years of consistent
neglect. I recall sleeping on an air
mattress during that time and had the entire house to myself. I watched “Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii” on
VHS, rented from Erol’s. The Village
Mall had disappeared, turned into an outdoor strip mall. And the lessons Phil learned with my experience
helped him when his family moved to India but kept their house in Sterling,
Virginia; he was able to act as property manager.
In 1984 my parents
purchased a studio/efficiency in Rosslyn, on the Virginia side of Key Bridge from
Georgetown, a four building co-op complex called River Place. In 1986, our whole family stayed there – two
adults, two teenage boys (my brother and I) and our 11 year old sister, in a
one-room studio apartment. Now it was
time for me to live there myself. Having
lived on campus all four years of college, and at home up until that point
(Maryland and Paris) this was my first place alone. I stayed there from September 1990 to October
2004, when I moved to the place I live in now. From 1994, when he returned from Memphis, TN
until 1998, when he moved in with his wife in Chantilly, my brother Matt lived
with me there too. So for my entire adult life, I’ve lived in
exactly two places outside home or college.
River Place was nice – it
had its own pool. The Rosslyn Metro was
just blocks away. Key Bridge was
likewise down the street, meaning Georgetown as well, if you didn’t mind a bit
of walking. In January 1996, I saw
Motorhead at the Bayou, a club down under the Whitehurst Freeway. When I walked to the show, the neighborhood
was clear and dry. When the show ended,
the whole place was covered in 3 feet of snow.
No vehicle traffic at all, nor any snowplows. Leaving aside snow, Rosslyn features I-66
coming in from Fairfax, Route 50, Route 29, and the GW Parkway, all in the same
place. Now I’ve seen pictures and
drawings of Aqueduct Bridge, which Key Bridge replaced in 1923. For a long time there was literally nothing
at all in Rosslyn. Then for some time
from the 20s up to a few decades ago, Rosslyn was a rundown, dangerous red light
district (gambling and prostitution, maybe some violent crime thrown in as well). By the time I arrived it had
cleaned up, and even featured Tom Sarris’ Steakhouse, now gone. The Iwo Jima Memorial is right across Route
50 from River Place.
George Mason University began in the 1950s as the state university of
Virginia in northern Virginia, University of Virginia (UVa) itself being down
in Charlottesville, southwest of Richmond, and Virginia Tech being in
Blacksburg, over on the I-81 corridor on the way to Roanoke. It soon became a four year college, then a
proper university, with graduate programs.
Around 1981 it acquired the International School of Law, and renamed it
the George Mason University School of Law. By 1990 it was in the former Kann’s
Department store on Fairfax Drive in Arlington.
After I graduated, in 2000, it moved next door to a new, purpose-built
building, with the old building fenced off, now being demolished to make way
for another school building, presumably not with escalators.
Law school was a much
more intense animal than college.
Everyone had to be an excellent student just to get in, whereas UMCP had
quite a few slackers. This hit me with a
grading curve producing C’s, whereas B’s were rare for me at UMCP. A fellow UMCP grad, Ira Mirsky, was there as
well, though we weren’t close friends back at College Park. A closer friend was John Greenside, who I
knew from GMU undergrad, one of Phil’s best friends. These days he’s married with children and is
a successful attorney down in Virginia Beach.
Anyhow: we had assigned seats,
and the professor had a seating chart and would call on you by name. None of this college business of disappearing
in a crowded lecture hall. First
semester was Torts, Property, Contracts, Quantitative Methods, and Legal
Writing. I had Robert Bork for
Constitutional Law in second year. Welcome
also the Socratic Method, wherein the professor gets us to examine cases and
determine exactly WHY they were decided – what the material issues were in the
case. Regardless of what states we would
eventually go off to practice in as attorneys after graduating and passing the
bar, law school would teach us the basic principles which applied everywhere,
and the basic thought processes and logic which lawyers would use as such. It was far more than the mere black letter law,
so to speak. Anyone can open up a
statute book and read a statute, or look up a case, either in the volumes, on
LEXIS, or online these days. It takes a
lawyer to see the bigger picture, to spot the issues, to recognize the core
issues involved in a particular situation.
This is what we learn in law school, why those three years and that J.D.
are so important.
I might also add: to practice law, you have to have a bar
license. To get a bar license, you have
to pass the bar exam (except for Wisconsin).
To even TAKE the bar exam, you need a law degree from a reputable law
school, or the foreign equivalent. “Reading
the law”, an apprenticeship arrangement, is a thing of the past. We had paralegals at the law school who
figured they might as well take the extra step and get that law degree and take
the bar. Some states allow attorneys who
have passed other bar exams and practiced as an attorney to “waive in” without taking
and passing their own bar exams. I passed
the Maryland and Virginia bar exams, and waived in to D.C. and New York.
In December 1990 I
actually went back to College Park for my graduation ceremony from University
of Maryland. I didn’t attend the general ceremony at Byrd Stadium, but did
attend the college-specific ceremonies, both on the same day, at Cole Field
House. Technically I graduated on August
28, which was how I could start law school at GMUSL for the fall 1990
term.
Concerts. The year started off with The Cult, on
their Sonic Temple tour, at the Baltimore Arena on February 8. That and Electric are my favorite
albums. Setlist Wiki does not have that
particular show’s setlist. Then it was Ace
Frehley at Hammerjacks, in March, also in Baltimore. In November, at the Cap Centre (Landover,
Maryland), we saw AC/DC on The Razor’s Edge tour. I seem to recall being in the bathroom when
“Thunderstruck” opened the set. Finally
was seeing Hawkwind, with my buddy Dave, at the old 930 Club in DC, back
when it was at 930 F Street and a fraction of its current size over on V
Street. Despite being closely after Xenon
Codex, they didn’t play anything from that album, nor was there much focus
on Lemmy era (Space Ritual) material, most of it being late 70s stuff I
hadn’t yet heard by that point.
