The Truth about Orkans

I got a little chuckle out of the fact that Slacker 2011 was showing in the auditorium of Muenzinger Hall, the psychology building on the CU campus.

Let me explain: last summer when I was living on the Hill I sometimes cut across campus on the way home from work and noticed that the Psych building was right next to the CU football stadium, Folsom Field.

It made me remember, in a humorous way, the old ABC television show Mork and Mindy (link), which is the only network sitcom ever to be set in Boulder, and which debuted right at the time that my family moved to Colorado in the late 1970s.

The premise of the show, as you may recall, is that an extraterrestrial alien being Mork (Robin Williams) travels from the planet Ork to Earth to study the habits of Earth people. Mindy (Pam Dawber) is a young woman in Boulder who finds him and takes him in. They live together in her apartment (I always remember the Jackson Browne album on the wall of Mindy's apartment in the show---that was the epitome of Bohemian living to me back then).

There's a scene I remembered in the opening credits of the show, in which Robin Williams is standing on the goal posts of Folsom Field. Pam Dawber is standing on the field in the end zone trying to coax him down. Here it is (I love Mork sitting in his rainbow down vest next to Boulder Falls in this clip!):

Last summer when I noticed Muenzinger Hall next to the football stadium, it suddenly hit me: Oh, Mork really wasn't an alien being at all. He was a crazy homeless person from Boulder who was in some observational experiment at Muenzinger Hall in the CU Psych Department. One day he escaped, went off his meds, and Mindy found him on the football field and took him home. Now it all makes sense! OK, I realize that probably doesn't fit with the plot of the show, or that particular episode, but I'm going to keep it as my pet theory.

In any case, just to continue my review of Slacker 2011 briefly, I certainly got a kick out of the fact that 9/11 "conspiracy theories" were mentioned quite copiously in the movie. This was appropriate in many ways, since discussion of the Kennedy assassination was part of the original Slacker in 1990.

The discussion about 9/11 was a bit satiricial in the context of the movie, but I didn't mind at all, or take it personally.

But just for balance, and in tribute to the psychologists of Boulder, I'm including the Youtube video at the top of this post, which I also greatly enjoyed, and which made me feel like I'm in good company with the other "crazies" walking the streets of this town.