Hello, la, la, la! It's time for more timely insight from America's answer to French Toast. (Don't ask what that means, but it has something to do with a light egg batter and sitting on the griddle for a couple of minutes.) I am now INFAMOUS.  I am infamous according to a recent conversation that I had with a lovely young lady last Saturday night. Her name was Deb and we were having a very coherent conversation about theatre.  It was a shock to me that a.) I was able to hold a conversation about theatre with any level of coherence and b.) it was close to 1 o'clock in the morning and I was still awake, the older I get the harder that is to do.  In case anyone is wondering I was awake until 4:00 in the a.m.
    To get back to the interesting part of this story, we were talking and she must have realized who she was talking too, because her cute little face lit with what was either an epiphany or one of those moments when you realize something.  She says to me, " Are you the INFAMOUS Scott McCormick or just some other Scott?"  For the 27 years my mind has involuntarily chosen to inhale and exhale keeping me in what Socrates might have called a state of being alive, no one and I mean no one has ever called me INFAMOUS.  Incorrigible, once or twice. Intolerant, maybe. Insatiable, yeah. But INFAMOUS, never. I was awed.
    My understanding of the word INFAMOUS comes from banditoes, Nazi war criminals, and former members of the Reagan Cabinet.  She used the word as though I was some kind of lathario or a bastard child of Prince Charles. It had the allure and the wonder of a pirate or a particularly choice seat on the Metro that everyone seems to be avoiding.  In dubbing me INFAMOUS she told me two things.
    The first thing was that people talked about me when I wasn't around.  Now for me that is kind of hard to believe. I have always thought that I was the kind of person that you liked when he was around, but when he wasn't there you almost nearly forgot that you had met him.  I am not looking for any kind of pity about that last statement, so move on and don't look at the car wreck too closely.
    Secondly, I gleaned from her tone that those things may not have always been the nicest things.  That those things that others had said to her about me were in fact naughty.  And as many of you may know I like naughty.  It makes me feel less like "the nice guy" that so many of my prom dates told me that I was.  It made me think that some how I could in fact overcome the curse that had branded me "most likely to not kill any one" in high school.
    The end of this story goes like this.  I talked to Deb and many other lovely ladies for the rest of the evening, and I don't know if it was the alcohol or the infamy that freed me up to be a little less awkward, but I enjoyed the hell out of the rest of the evening and my new found infamy.  If you have been infamous all your life, my little tale may have no significance to you. As you look around at the bodies that have piled up around your throne of skulls you may be yawning, but to me it was nice to have a little infamy even if it grew out of some tour member mentioning me to one cute girl and me hearing about it at some party.
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