Future Problem Solving, junior division, grades 4-6. In 1984, my sixth grade “team” (really just four donks) competed in the three national problems and finished first in the nation in two of them, which meant we got to go to Coe College, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, for the big national final competition.
The way it worked was this: you had a “fuzzy situation” – a description of some future concern like an orbital prison, or a vaccine for 12 different diseases, or things like that involving genetic engineering or what have you – and determine how to solve various issues associated with it. I don’t remember the details or very much about it, because that was almost thirty years ago, and it’s beside the point.
The point is that was the first real trip. That was the first time in living memory I had been outside the South (I was too young to remember the California trip at age 10 months). It was my first time on an airplane. First time changing planes in Chicago (O’Hare hasn’t changed much). We were housed in dorms, with a huge lobby that had free soda and a huge screen playing MTV…which I had never seen before. I must have seen the videos for “The Reflex” and “Legs” and the trailer for “Top Secret” about a thousand times in that week.
I don’t remember how we did – we certainly didn’t place in any exceptional fashion, because I would have remembered that. Instead, I remember things like spending an inordinate amount of time working on Star Frontiers characters and modules – by 1984, it had completely displaced Dungeons & Dragons in the Young Gifted Nerd Role Playing Game rotation – and being intrigued by this new thing I’d never seen called “Dominos Pizza” where you called a phone number and they BROUGHT YOU A PIZZA.
And strangely enough, there was a dance. Or mixer, or something – I don’t know what they called it exactly. All I know is that there was music, and some people in Devo-esque trash bag getups, and I clearly remember thinking that something was definitely wrong and this event wasn’t working for me somehow.
And then, at the pancake restaurant in O’Hare on the flight back, I asked for hot tea and I got a mug and some sort of metal pitcher of hot water, and I was lost.
Different times.