WEBVTT

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Hi, everyone.

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For those who know
Steve, you also

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know that there are many
things to say about Steve.

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Tonight, I'm not
interested in expounding

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upon his 80-page syllabus or his
nearly pathological fear of gum

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disease.

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Tonight, I want to talk
about the first time

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I went to Steve's,
office hours, alone.

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When I first opened that
office door, the first thing

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he asked me was
about my last name.

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French?

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I told him it was
Polish from Winetski.

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Ah, he said.

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Let me look you up.

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Before the chance to stop
him, he was already busy

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looking up the history of
my family on the internet.

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He was finally stopped
by an automatic update

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in the browser.

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Seemingly baffled by the
new window on the screen,

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Steve flipped off the computer,
swiveled in his chair and said,

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so what are we here for today?

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Enter the line doctor, the
wonder, the Steve Orlen.

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I didn't know quite what to make
out of that first encounter.

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The conversation meandered.

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He mentioned, as he would later
in a class, that he felt he

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and his wife were
of the same tribe

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and asked me if I had
ever felt the same way

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about a woman I had dated.

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No, I said, Polish
people don't have tribes.

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[AUDIENCE LAUGHS]

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I realized that this was
his smoke-filled world.

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For all of his odd attention
to wheelchairs and genealogy,

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to bald heads and Massachusetts,
Steve can't stand disorder

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unless it's in his office.

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His writing, in many ways,
seeks to draw the disasters

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and messes around us into
a cohesive intellectual and

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emotional thread.

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His constant prodding,
insistent to a fault at times,

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is that effort to
pierce the ordinary,

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to look at the stuff
that holds everybody up,

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that keeps them going, and that
sometimes tears them apart.

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Out of these meditations,
Steve has discovered beauty,

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and with it a way of coming
to terms with the world.

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So ladies and
gentlemen, I give you

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the one, the only, Steve Orlen.

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[APPLAUSE]

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