November 5, 1998

Glenn to Glenn

Over the past two days, the simpleton mail room has received several dozen copies of a "funny email" reading simply "When John Glenn gets back everybody put on an ape suit. Pass it on." If you're thinking of forwarding a few more copies of this "funny email" to your own friends and family, you might want to reconsider Because it's not just that the message isn't funny, but that it alludes to the wrong movie. The proper motion picture analogue to astronaut Glenn's historic return to space is not "Planet of the Apes" but the classic "2001: A Space Odyssey." Film buffs will recall the ending of that film, in which Keir Dullea spends an unspecified amount of time growing hideously old in a hotel room decorated in high Enlightenment style, returning to earth at last in the form of the Star Child, a supreme cosmic fetus. This is the only ending to the Glenn saga that would not be an anticlimax - the Senior Senator, having already completed most of his aging routine, transfigured with an efficiency befitting the late 1990s. But what would the reborn star voyager's fate be back on our own planet? Would he be (as some naysayers hope) hauled before Congress to explain his role in "stonewalling" Senator Fred Thomson's campaign finance investigation, or to answer to creditors who still have not been paid for Glenn's failed 1984 run for President? Would he find contentment in that most sterling of post-astronautic careers - as a sort of super-expert product endorser? Or would his wise-baby hijinks and earthbound pratfalls provide laughter for millions of viewers on "America's Funniest Home Videos"? Would our grateful nation need to create new and unprecedented awards to honor the immeasurably advanced hero? And after that, what new ideas and ambitions would grow in the Star Child's vast imagination? And finally, could any rewards on our puny planet satisfy the new super-being? Thanks to Josh Ozersky for the concept

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A mystery