I love this picture. It captures such a time. It’s me (in the slouchy skater clothes that I thought were cool at the time), Cliff Allen, and Dan Crowell in front of the Huntington Shore Quad, which of course is repping Half Man in full effect.
First of all, this picture makes me remember how much I love Cliff and Dan. Sure, things went sour with Half Man in the summer of 1995, a story for another time. And I was pissed at both Cliff and Dan, each for different reasons, after I was kicked out of Half Man. But this picture doesn’t evoke any of that memory for me. Instead, it brings back the pure love of our friendships back when Half Man started in the Spring of 1993. Cliff and Dan were awesome friends, and today that is the emotional memory that I carry of them.
And then there’s the story behind this picture. It is a return to the scene of the crime, probably taken early in the morning (if my memory serves me right, this photo was probably taken by Mike Appel). This was a time in which I was involved in a lot of somewhat-risky pranks. I don’t remember whose idea this was, but obviously one of us did the spelling to figure out that of the four movies currently playing there was the potential to steal letters to spell out HALF MAN.
What I am almost sure of is that I was the person who went up onto the marquee to make this act of sabotage happen. How does my generally-unreliable memory give me this vivid recollection? Well, I distinctly remember how covered in pigeon shit my hands and clothes were after climbing up on Cliff’s shoulders onto the platform underneath the marquee. The night before this picture was taken, a number of us had done a late-night run to accomplish this feat. It might have been in the summer after school was over, but our clothing choices make me think that it was early in the Spring, which would mean that at the time I was Dan and Cliff’s substitute teacher at Huntington High School. Real smart of me to be the person involved in this caper, much less the one up there changing the letters.
Statute of limitations, thank you very much!