Years ago when I was traveling in Spain, I went on a road trip to a small Costa Blanca beach town with a carful of dyspeptic British ex-pats. One night we were driving on a quiet road in the hills above the town when, apropos of nothing in particular, one of my backseat companions pointed out her window at the full moon overhead and said, “I know it’s a horrible cliché and all, but does anyone else ever look at the moon and think, my god, people have stood on that?”

And for a moment the car went silent as we all stopped complaining about our hotel or bitching about the meal we’d just had or whatever it was we’d been doing, and thought to ourselves “wow, she’s right, that’s really something.

You couldn’t do this with Mars. It’s too hard to see. Had someone tried there would have just been some squinting, a bit of confused pointing perhaps, and maybe some arguing about which direction was south. Then we all would have shrugged and gone back to fiddling with the car radio.

Nonetheless, with the 40th anniversary of the moon landing now upon us, it’s only natural to wonder when we might get around to paying the Red Planet a visit. The last time the notion of a mission to Mars made widespread headlines was in 2004 when President Bush, perhaps sensing that his gambit to remake the Middle East wasn’t shaking out so well, announced “a new plan to explore space and extend a human presence across our solar system.” This plan became “Constellation” — NASA’s current human spaceflight program, which calls for the development of new spacecraft and booster vehicles to replace the space shuttle (set to be decommissioned in 2010) and for manned trips to the moon and, eventually, Mars.

“Eventually,” however, can be a tricky deadline to pin down. For instance, in 1989 (on the 20th anniversary of the moon landing), Bush pere made his own Mars headlines, announcing a goal of landing astronauts on the planet by 2019. Shortly thereafter, though, NASA came to him with an estimated $400 billion price tag for the project, and, well, suddenly everyone was a little less excited about the idea than they’d been before.

The current timeline puts a Mars landing at about 25 years out, an estimate that probably sits on the reliability spectrum somewhere between Amy Winehouse and a weekend F train. Interestingly (at least for a naif like myself for whom the idea of a trip to Mars still seems more Buck Rogers than potential reality), the issue isn’t technology, or even money really. It’s essentially just a matter of priorities and politics.

Two Fridays ago, before the riots and the
demonstrations and the millions in the streets, before the killings and
the burning buses and the black-clad stormtroopers clubbing women from
atop their motorcycles, before Facebook went green and Twitter usurped
CNN, before the protests and then the counter-protests, the first,
fraudulent vote count and then the likely just as fraudulent recounts,
before the house arrests and the dorm-room beatings, before the tear
gas and the sniper bullets and the rooftop rallies and the bonfires,
members of New York’s Iranian ex-pat community gathered in a small
meeting room on the second floor of the Grand Hyatt hotel in Midtown
Manhattan to cast their ballots in their country’s presidential
election.

There was no question as to the local favorite. Green dominated the
room. There were green scarves and green sweaters and green socks;
green t-shirts, green tank-tops, green rugbies, green ties; green
polos, green pants, green trenchcoats (one); green handbags, green
sportcoats; a green pork-pie hat.

“Green is for peace, I think,” said a man sitting at a table in the
hallway chatting with a pair of women. “Green is the slogan of this
candidate.” The man himself was dressed in brown. He had lived in New
York for 16 years, he said, but he’d never in that time voted in an
Iranian election. Mir-Hossein Mousavi had drawn him to the polls.

“I think he is a Barack Obama of Iran,” he said. “He can tie the
Iranian nation to the western world. It’s about time for Iran to have
close ties to the United States.”

It was a common theme about the room.

“There’s no reason to struggle, because now there is Obama,” said a
young woman with a green scarf tied around her neck. She had come from
Iran two months ago to study International Relations at Syracuse.

“Ahmadinejad destroyed everything,” she said. “We need someone to
rebuild ties with the UN, with the world.”

Downstairs, a group of ex-pats embraced each other as they passed in
the lobby. A man and a woman, both clad in bright green t-shirts, were
looking around for directions to the polls. “I wonder what it will be
like,” the woman said as they made their way up the escalator. They,
too, had never voted before.

“We just wanted to support it,” said the man. “I just wanted to come
to do my part.”

Two NYU students in headscarves (a relative rarity among those
gathered) stood in line to get their ballots. One recorded the other
with her digital camera as she gave her fingerprint to a volunteer
manning the desk. “Look more excited!” she directed. They disappeared
together behind the potted plants marking off the voting booths at the
southern side of the room. Moments later they emerged smiling broadly,
stopping in front of the ballot box to pose, index fingers held aloft,
for several of the photographers roaming the floor.

“My mother’s family back home is voting this time, and they haven’t
voted in 30 years — since the Revolution,” one of them said.
“It’s a chance to be a part of something. It’s like a new
revolution.”

“There were kids in Iran on the street demonstrating and dancing,
really pushing the boundaries,” said the man in the bright green
t-shirt. “The only time I can remember people dancing in the street and
not being arrested was after a soccer victory or something.”

“Yay!” said a woman in a t-shirt and blue jeans, waving a brown
passport in the air as she deposited her ballot. “That was easy!” The
line was perhaps 20 people deep now, stretching out the doorway and
into the hall.

As you’ll recall from part one of this series, Adam Bonislawski is on a quest to track down the missing Gammators, radioactive teaching devices created in the 1950s and placed in our nation’s high schools. The funny thing is, not all of them have been recalled. This week, Bonislawski goes in search of radioactive waste… in the pages of the Mother Cabrini High School yearbook.

One week and $39.95 later, I am the proud owner of a vintage 1965 Mother Cabrini High School yearbook. I bought it with the vague idea that somewhere in its pages I might find a photo of the elusive Gammator. I did not. The yearbook does feature a relatively lengthy seven-page Science section, though, including a picture of several students crowded around a Geiger Counter — so, you know, we’re in the ballpark here.

Beyond that, there’s something generally delightful about the book, Gammator photo or no. Part of it is simple historical interest — getting a glimpse of life at a New York City Catholic school as it was lived some 43 years ago. Part of it is the section headings, which read like priceless mash-ups of a glowering Mother Superior and an awkwardly dubbed Japanese video game (“Our Senior Dance… We Fulfill Our Capacity for Enjoyment”). Most of all there’s the air of mystery that attaches to such objects. The names and the pictures and the notes combine to sketch the outline of a world that is, in a general sense, perfectly familiar but in specific terms largely unknowable. Looking at the pictures you recognize in them – or, more accurately, project onto them – types and characters and dramas from your own school days. Reading the handwritten notes, you can’t help but concoct in your mind webs of friendships, alliances, rivalries, feuds. There’s no explicit storyline, but there are a million implied. It’s like stumbling upon found fiction of a sort – there’s raw material here for any number of narratives you’d care to imagine.

Of the many great bits in Lolita, one of the best is the passage in which Nabokov lists the names of Dolores’ classmates.

Angel, Grace
Austin, Floyd
Beale, Jack
Beale, Mary
Buck, Daniel
Byron, Marguerite…

Simply by calling role he conjures a menagerie of middle-school types, suggesting with nothing but names a host of characters bustling unseen just offstage. The Mother Cabrini yearbook staffers aren’t quite Nabokov’s match as prose stylists, but there’s a similar ghostly charm to their work.

Also, this – from the acknowledgments section on the back page: “Mr. Sol Stempler, of Paramount Photographers, who always provides us with superlative portrait work, and outstandingly beautiful photographic material, even at great personal sacrifice.” (Emphasis mine) What sort of great personal sacrifices did taking school portraits in the mid-‘60s entail, exactly?

Tune in next week when we join the Mother Cabrini alumni Facebook page and try to get our phone calls returned by the Department of Energy.

In the 1950s and ‘60s the U.S. Department of Energy, under the auspices of the “Atoms for Peace” program, built some 140 gamma irradiator devices which they distributed to schools around the country, the notion being that students might use them to learn about the wonders of nuclear science. Apparently wanting to give these devices the most awesomely terrifying name ever, they called them “Gammators”. Roughly the size of a pony keg, each Gammator weighed about 1,850 pounds and contained 400 curies of cesium-137 – a radioactive isotope that, among others things, has been identified by government analysts as being an especially suitable material for use in a “dirty bomb”.

Which explains why (particularly given our post-9/11 terror concerns) the Department of Energy has been going around to our nation’s high school and university science labs trying to round these things up. Over the last decade or so, crews from Los Alamos have removed Gammators from a number of sites across the country, including several in the New York City area (see page 2 of PDF).

It’s not entirely clear, however, whether or not the government has gotten all of them. Records on the number of devices originally put into circulation seem a bit hazy, with numbers ranging from around 120 to 140 or so. In 2004, Massachusetts Congressman Edward Markey asserted that six Gammators had, in fact, gone missing. He released a letter from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission acknowledging that Gammators thought to have been given to “Montville Township High School in NJ, Aberdeen High School in MD, Mother Cabrini High School in New York City, Long Island University in Brooklyn, NY, New York Institute of Technology in Old Westbury, NY, and an unknown entity named ‘Nippi’ located in either NY or NJ” had yet to be recovered.

In other words, there’s potentially still a fair amount of cesium floating around out there – and much of it, it seems, in the tri-state area. And while we’re not particularly worried about terrorists, say, raiding Montville Township’s science stockroom for dirty bomb material (they’d probably be better off just stockpiling smoke detectors), there’s something undeniably delightful (in a dark, creepy DeLillo-esque sort of way, of course) about knowing that these once-forgotten, now-again-relevant Cold War relics are possibly lurking in the back of a high school’s supply closet just a couple of blocks away.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying we think it could be kind of fun to try to track one of these things down. We’re going to start with Mother Cabrini and see where that leads. We’ll blog as we go, posting updates on our findings or lack thereof. Think of it as a typical magazine story – only done piecemeal, and with all the tedious research parts left in!

Always speak in the ‘I’. This is the First Commandment of the New York Reality TV School.

There are other commandments ­— eight of them, in fact, which school founder Robert Galinsky has compiled in a handout he’ll pass around the class later in the evening. This first one, though, is the most important.
“Speak using the word ‘I’ instead of ‘you’,” Galinsky elaborates, standing in the center of a non-descript Chelsea studio space surrounded by some two dozen pupils and a smattering of camera crews. “If I’m saying ‘you’, I’m telling you what you’re doing. I’m not telling you what I’m doing. I’m not claiming all my power. I want to stand out, so I’m going to speak in the ‘I’.”

It’s tougher than you might think. Even for the kind of hardened egoists like those gathered here this evening. For instance:

“He smells really good,” says a petite black woman about a fellow classmate after having been prompted in an exercise to say something provocative about someone else in the room. “His smell makes you want to move around.”

“Makes who want to move around?” Galinsky asks.

She pauses for a moment, then rephrases.

“Makes me want to move around,” she says.

“Yeah,” says Galinsky. “Now I know what the smell does to you.”

Galinsky (who, as it happens, has no trouble whatsoever speaking in the “I”) is a shortish, forty-something man with dark curly hair and a jaw covered in what appears to be a carefully cultivated layer of stubble. He’s dressed in jeans, a loose-fitting black button-down and a pair of black-frame glasses. He looks, in short, like the sort of guy who’s probably working on a screenplay.

He launched the Reality TV School last June after pet groomer Jorge Bendersky asked for his help in preparing for an upcoming appearance on the new Animal Planet show Groomer Has It. He worked with Bendersky for six weeks, drawing from his years as an acting coach and corporate trainer to put together a program. The groomer finished in the show’s top three (which, as Bendersky notes, essentially makes him “reality TV royalty”), and Galinsky realized he had a potentially hot property on his hands.

Of course, the New York Reality TV School isn’t simply about getting people on reality television. Rather, it’s about Galinsky himself getting on reality television. In a John Barth-meets-Mark Burnett meta-textual twist, about a month or so after the school’s founding some British television producers came across it and decided it would be the perfect setting for a show. A few weeks later, Galinsky was in talks with Roy Bank, head of Merv Griffin Entertainment’s television division. Several weeks after that, they shook hands on a deal.

“The idea is that there are two structures to it,” Galinsky says of the putative show. “The superstructure is the school — that there’s this guy Galinsky who’s been toiling in relative obscurity in New York for 20 years and finally in some ironic way finds his work being effective through the filter of a reality television school. So, one thing that the audience will be watching is the school as a business and how it grows and the staff and all the crazy stuff the staff has to go through in order to make the school work and operate.

“And then the other structure will be following people and watching them go into the school, watching them as they journey to casting calls and put their tapes together and run through the school’s curriculum.”

“It’s just a natural place for drama and story,” Bank says. “The people that go to this school are the same people who are on reality television shows. They’re people willing to expose a raw and real side of themselves to get exposure on television for any number of reasons — whether it’s to win money, become famous, start a career — they all want something, and they’re willing to go on television to get it.”

Not too willing, though. There’s a definite reluctance in the room to cop too readily to reality TV dreams — a self-aware recognition that there’s a certain ridiculousness inherent to the enterprise.

“I’m here as an observer of the human condition,” one student quips when asked what he hopes to take away from the evening. “It’s interesting. You put a bunch of strangers in a room, something always starts.”

“Honestly, I don’t really know what I want out of this,” says a one-time online dildo salesman who refers to himself as “The Poon.” “It’s just always kind of fun being in the spotlight of others.”

Actors make up about half the students in a typical class, Galinksy estimates. “Authenticity” being the name of the game, however, most of them try to fly under the radar.

“I’m in promotions,” says a thin, goateed man when I ask him what he does as we talk in the hallway between sessions. As the evening draws to a close, though, he approaches with a promo card for a movie in hand. He gives the room a quick sideways glance before slipping it to me.

“Actually,” he says. “I’m an actor. I just wasn’t sure if I was supposed to tell you that back there.”
Other, presumably less scandalous, revelations are more freely shared. After a few minutes of stretching exercises, Galinsky rounds his charges into a circle and calls on them one-by-one, asking each in twenty seconds or less to give their name, their occupation, and a secret. A Dutch camera crew moves around the room filming them as they speak, an impossibly cherubic anchor bouncing about the circle like some Reubens rendering of a tabloid television host.

“I have a sexual addiction.”

“I haven’t told my Dad that I’m gay.”

“I once lied and said I was Puerto Rican so I could appear in a Hispanic magazine.”

“I’m moving out of my apartment and my boyfriend doesn’t know.”

“Once I punched a guy in the face at a party because he said that it turned him on.”

“I used to be addicted to cough medicine.”

“I’m obsessed with comic books.”

“I stole a car from my senior prom.”

“I still play with Barbie dolls.”

“At night, I’m out there on the West Side Highway walking with the drag queens.”

“I just had to tear up my entire apartment because of a huge bed bug scare. And I haven’t told any of my neighbors yet.”

“Louder, people!” Galinsky yells.

“This isn’t reality TV. It’s personality TV,” he says. “Whose personality is going to pop? Who’s going to stick in our minds? This is about three things: Confidence. Authenticity. Telling your story.”

It’s about, in other words, figuring out your hustle. And as would befit any serious reality TV aspirant, Galinsky has his hustle down pat. A simple question about his start in the business launches a polished reverie that sounds less like background detail than voiceover narration from an opening credit sequence.

“I drove into the city on December 6th, 1988 with $300 cash and three months paid on a storefront on Ludlow Street…”

His pupils, on the other hand, aren’t quite so ready for primetime.
“So, mine would be called ‘Homeless Homegirl’,” says a manic-seeming blonde, taking the floor to pitch her show idea. She moved to New York three weeks ago, she says. Before that she was sleeping in a van at a campground outside of Denver.

“We’ve got it all figured out. For, like, the marketing, it would be a picture of me in front of the food stamps building over there on Fourteenth. And it would basically… the point of it is to… well, honestly, I need a little help developing it. It’s just that everybody I know who’s been interacting with me is like ‘you should be on a show, you should be on a show!’”

And, well, why not? What would be so wrong with that? It couldn’t be any worse than Big Brother.  And besides, who, these days, can claim to know what people want to watch anyway. As I write, the second most watched video on YouTube is a Scandinavian blonde in a yellow bikini giving grammar lessons while canoodling with her pet Havanese.

“Watch reality TV!” implores casting director and class instructor Risa Tanania. “This is a genre that should be supported. It has offered a space for roles and characters in our community and in our culture that we are otherwise not seeing. I see absolutely no reason why it gets laughed at, mocked.”

Of course, there are quite obvious reasons why reality TV is laughed at and mocked. The business involves a level of spinning and shtick, of self-promotion and self-importance that the average person, looking on from a distance, can’t help but find at least somewhat grotesque. This, in no small part, is why we enjoy it, what draws us to it. It’s a chance to watch our peers make themselves absurd.

And yet, Tanania’s defense of the genre isn’t entirely off-base. At the end of the evening, the class takes part in a Q&A with a panel of reality personalities from shows past, and there’s something undeniably charming about the exchange between the two groups. The reality contestants are treated with a certain deference, no doubt, but it’s a modest, benign sort of thing — the way a couple of college kids might expect to be met upon stopping by their old high school to tell a group of seniors about life after graduation. The fascination isn’t with the strange, fabulous beings they’ve become, but instead with the curious things they’ve done and seen. All things considered, it seems a rather splendidly humane model of celebrity.

And who can honestly say, in this day of webcams and blog confessionals and non-stop Twitter streams, that there’s anything so deviant and bizarre about a person wanting to be on reality TV anyway? Sure, there’s something a bit monstrous about conceiving of yourself as a public character to be played or a message to be promoted or a brand to be marketed, but having been handed the means of production, we don’t seem much able to resist the urge, do we? How much time did you spend last week crafting meticulously phrased Facebook updates? Given the ongoing age of media disaggregation in which we live, you could argue that all Galinsky and his crew are doing is teaching survival skills.

“I don’t care if you’re the best singer on American Idol, he says, standing in the center the class. “I don’t care if you lose the most weight on The Biggest Loser.

“All I care about is that some way, some how, you’re noticed and remembered.”
And if everyone manages to get a little screen-time out of the arrangement, well then, so much the better.