Hi, everyone.
For those who know Steve, you also
know that there are many things to say about Steve.
Tonight, I'm not interested in expounding
upon his 80-page syllabus or his nearly pathological fear of gum
disease.
Tonight, I want to talk about the first time
I went to Steve's, office hours, alone.
When I first opened that office door, the first thing
he asked me was about my last name.
French?
I told him it was Polish from Winetski.
Ah, he said.
Let me look you up.
Before the chance to stop him, he was already busy
looking up the history of my family on the internet.
He was finally stopped by an automatic update
in the browser.
Seemingly baffled by the new window on the screen,
Steve flipped off the computer, swiveled in his chair and said,
so what are we here for today?
Enter the line doctor, the wonder, the Steve Orlen.
I didn't know quite what to make out of that first encounter.
The conversation meandered.
He mentioned, as he would later in a class, that he felt he
and his wife were of the same tribe
and asked me if I had ever felt the same way
about a woman I had dated.
No, I said, Polish people don't have tribes.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHS]
I realized that this was his smoke-filled world.
For all of his odd attention to wheelchairs and genealogy,
to bald heads and Massachusetts, Steve can't stand disorder
unless it's in his office.
His writing, in many ways, seeks to draw the disasters
and messes around us into a cohesive intellectual and
emotional thread.
His constant prodding, insistent to a fault at times,
is that effort to pierce the ordinary,
to look at the stuff that holds everybody up,
that keeps them going, and that sometimes tears them apart.
Out of these meditations, Steve has discovered beauty,
and with it a way of coming to terms with the world.
So ladies and gentlemen, I give you
the one, the only, Steve Orlen.
[APPLAUSE]