Time for an auto-bio blog. This is part 1 of “why the Rhinos?”
Imagine the mid ‘70s. Two college students at a remote college in upstate New York (RIT – Rochester Institute of Technology) (BTW no longer so remote) on a Saturday evening, settling down with some alcohol (18 was legal age back then so don’t call the cops on me) – I am guessing either wine or white Russians (if Mark is reading this – my cohort in this adventure – he may have a better memory. Watch for future edits). We decided to select from the vast (basically 4) TV channels and perused the TV Guide (printed-very pre Internet times).And we hit the jackpot (sorta). A movie on PBS (should have been a warning sign) called Rhinoceros. Nothing special there – but the lead actors were Gene Wilder (young-uns out there may know him as Dr. Frankenstein in Young Frankenstein) and Zero Mostel (a major 60s/70s comic who had the comic genius and physicality of a later Robin Williams).The two had acted in a number of films and we enjoyed them both, although Rhinoceros was unknown to us (note that this turned out to be the last movie they acted together in). Settle in. Start the drinks. Start the movie. Oh my god (I would say OMG but we did not know about text shorthand in the 70s). It was so weird (a future blog will go into how weird). An existential play with 2 great comedians and a gaggle of well-known character actors including Karen Black. Suffice it to summarize that everyone starts changing into Rhinoceroses including Zero Mostel. It was amazingly strange. And we were hooked. I do not remember the first rhino gift exchange but for years thereafter, we would find and exchange rhino based collectibles. Our greatest initial find was the BetaMax version of the play (I subsequently obtained the VHS and DVD versions). Besides the connection to this “marvelous” movie (first rating we saw for it had no stars – just the word “Bomb”; although in more recent years I have seen it with 3 stars in part due to the aforementioned last paring of Mostel and Wilder), it was fun to collect because unlike elephants and cows and such, rhino collectibles are not overly common. Eventually graduation and geographic dispersion reduced out interactions and gift exchanges but I kept collecting for myself. Many stories I will save for the future. I will note I was known as the Rhino lady at a San Antonio African import store and I have gotten to feed two Rhinos and pet 3. I have well over 400 types of collectibles (so please do not buy a rhino for me – I have it. Unless you locate a rhino mailbox-then let me know), I mostly have stopped collecting (although the rhino mailbox is still on my list) but my children have kept my collection growing (they know most of what I have already). As I wrote earlier, more tales to tell but I will leave those for future blogs. The next part of this tale will be a closer examination of the play.
Thank you for reading. Feel free to comment and/or subscribe. I will continue to refine the site. For the near-term I will try to rotate between more auto-bio blogs and more philosophical ones. We will see how it goes.
Rhino Ramblings 