No. Not Steve Rookey, and not that creepy Steve who worked down on the farm and with Quest and talked about his airplane accident.
I brought this up in the middle of another thread a long time ago, but thought I'd try again.
He was tall and lanky, and had salt-and-pepper curly hair, and a moustache. Very smart. He taught stained glass. He left the program because he thought it was full of shit. I think he had been through the first three propheets.
I remember that the first book he had us read for lit class was Lord of the Flies. (mob rules, anyone?) And I'm pretty sure he was also the teacher who had us read anti-utopian books such as Brave New World, Childhood's End and 1984. (1984 was one of my favorite novels. I even had a copy on my bookshelf in the dorm. Yet I was still unable to connect the dots.)
In a journalism class, he had us read the CEDU newspaper. Then he asked us, "Does anyone know what kind of journalism this is?" Nobody knew. He then wrote "Fluff" on the board, and explained to us what it meant. We laughed.
But I think his crowning achievement was when he got permission to show all of the students who took his classes the movie Brazil. For those who haven't seen this picture, it's a sci-fi anti-utopian flick, where the establishment is totally oppressive and fucked up. Very early on in the movie, you see a huge statue, erected by the government, at the base of which says "The Truth Will Set You Free".
It seems to me that he might have been trying to tell us something. ::bangin::
One time in his stained glass class, I recall saying something silly in a weird voice, just joking around, and one of my other classmates scoffed derisively and said "What the fuck?" Steve just laughed, and said to me "When are you going to realize that you were, are, and always will be this eccentric artist, and not some normal boring person you think you want to be, who is going to get married, have 2.5 kids, and live in a house with a white picket fence?" It scared the hell out of me at the time. Because normal was good, and weird was bad, just like the program says, and I wanted to be normal. I talked all the time about the family I was going to have in my future. But what he said was true. I'm weird and dorky, and definitely not a family man. Being normal goes against my grain. RMA couldn't get the freak out of me, and nobody else can, either.
Does anyone remember this guy? And if so, do you remember his last name? I think he might have been there around late 88 or 89. He didn't stay too long. Neither did his girlfriend, who became a staff the same time he did. They both left together, apparently totally disgusted with the program.
Anyway, here's to you, Steve. Wherever you are.
