Buckman in the Aisles!

So I'm walking down one of the beverage aisles in what I think of as my HEB: The one at Hancock Center, the one nearest the Chronicle & its sunbaked volleyball court.

I'm going to restock my weekly supply of Topo Chico, moving toward the cases of that fizzy mineral water stacked to form an attractive endcap across from where the dairy shelves' lighting reflects like mindless consumer optimism off the highly buffed floor tiles.

I'm so busy gawking at the shelves to my right, though, that I fail to see the person coming toward me up the same aisle.

But a hand stops me with a tap on the front of my left shoulder, and I halt and swivel my head to see:

Dave Buckman.

Dave Buckman! Former Chicagoan; longtime improviser & Austinite; husband of Rachel Madorsky; one-fifth of The Frank Mills; commercial actor; co-producer (with Jeremy Sweetlamb)
of this coming fall's ridiculously overstocked-with-talent Out Of Bounds Comedy Festival!

He smiles at me, this Buckman, and he's like, "Hey, Brenner!"

And I smile back, and I'm like, "Hey, Dave Buckman!"
and I notice that he's got earbuds in & attached to an iPod or whatever.

So I ask him: "Whatcha listening to, man?"

I'm figuring on either moving his musical tastes to a more specific position
on my internal Spectrum of People's Musical Tastes … or being hipped
to some new talent that I know nothing about.

"Oh, the Phillies game," says Buckman.

The Phillies game! People still listen to such things in this day and age!

And I follow sports pretty much the way Richard Nixon followed the endochronic properties of resublimated thiotimoline: Not at all. But I know, because I'm as immersed in the general American culture as deeply as the next person, which is probably why this post smacks of Tom Wolfe's exclamatory journo style … I know, I say, that 1) the Phillies are a Major League Baseball team, and 2) they have a particularly weird-looking mascot called the Phanatic.

What I don't know, though, as Buckman and I bid each other farewell there in the aisle of the Hancock Center HEB, what I won't know until I check Wikipedia for the blogpost that I'm working on, is that the Phillies were also the last team that former Houston Astros and Montreal Expos star catcher John Bateman played for.

And that's important to me – insofar as it is important to me at all –
due to a certain obsession of Hyde Park Theatre's Ken Webster.

Yeah, no, I think the word "obsession" is warranted here.

Curious, are you?
Yeah, so was I.

Which is where this blogpost comes from.