Shoulda Been There

I was reading, just a week or two ago, about the popularity--nay, ubiquity--of Top Ten Lists in contemporary America.

People seem to just love these things. Differing explanations have been offered for this, the most obvious one being that Top Ten Lists give consumers a quick shorthand version of the best things they should be buying, watching, listening to, eating, downloading or whatever.

Also, Top Ten (or 20) lists are a quick-and-easily-digestible version of entertainment. They spring from the same source as the editorial policy that Jeff Goldblum had to follow as a People magazine journalist in the film The Big Chill. His stories, Goldblum explained, could be no longer than it would take the average person to read while taking the average shit. Top Ten lists run in that crowd.

I've seen so many of these things that I began wondering if I could come up with a Top Ten list of my own. But what hasn't been Top Ten listed? Books, movies, plays, CDs; scenes from movies, scenes from plays, tracks from CDs; television shows, celebrity puke moments, sports bloopers, martini recipes...they've all pretty much been done.

But then, as I was lying in the bathtub reading the Los Angeles Times last weekend, (I love to read the newspaper in the bathtub, and there is definitely an art to doing it without getting the paper wet) it hit me that not only do we live in tumultuous times, but we have as far back as I can remember.

Then, suddenly, an idea came to me for my own, customized Top Ten list: Moments I Wish I Could Have Witnessed.

Right away, this called for some ground rules. Making the parameters too broad could result in mere silliness: "Gee, it would have been nice to meet Jesus," that sort of thing. (Frankly, I don't know how Jesus and I would have managed anyway: I don't speak Aramaic, and when he was around, English hadn't been invented yet.)

I decided, therefore, to restrict my Top Ten list of things I wish I had been there to see, to events that have occurred in my own lifetime. No shortage of possibilities there: I'm 50 this year, and have seen much, though usually at a distance, which is the reason for my list.

Here then, are ten moments in my lifetime I wish I could have witnessed up-close, rather than seeing them on TV or reading about them later in a book or magazine:

10. The moment in April, 1970, at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, when Mission Control burst into celebration upon learning that the crew of the crippled Apollo 13 spacecraft had made it safely back to earth.

9. Pope John Paul II's prison-cell conversation with Mehmet Ali Agca, the man who had tried to kill him several months earlier.

8. The night Norman Mailer slugged Gore Vidal at a cocktail party.

7. Televangelist Jimmy Swaggart's tearful "I have sinned" speech after he got caught at a motel with a prostitute.

6. Hank Aaron's 715th home run in 1974, breaking Babe Ruth's record for career homers.

5. The Bayreuth Wagner Festival. (I lived in Germany twice, and never got there.)

4. President Ronald Reagan's "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall" speech in Berlin in 1987. (Ditto: at the time, I was in Frankfurt, just a couple of hundred miles away.)

3. Alexander Solzhenitsyn's 1994 return to Moscow after having been exiled by the Soviet government exactly 20 years earlier. (I JUST missed this, by the way. I was in Moscow that spring, but by the time Solzhenitsyn's train pulled in, I was back in Washington.)

2. The 1974 Academy Awards show, at which David Niven's presentation was interrupted by a streaker, prompting Niven to deliver a truly "withering" quip.

1. The Boston Red Sox' victory in the 2004 World Series.

And I'll brook no quibbling about priorities: these came off the top of my head, in no particular order.

And so to breakfast.