Wednesday, April 13, 2005

The Blossoming of a Law Student


My Hero

Choosing a career is a tremendous task that is not to be taken lightly. Often people find themselves with "carpet sales in their blood" or a deeply personal experience that let them know that air conditioning repair was their destiny. My story is no less a dramatic and stirring tale.

Like most young men, I initially followed in my father's footsteps, and went to work for him at age 12 at the service station he owned. Not knowing anything about cars, nor caring to, I realized I had to start looking for an alternative career path. So as I puttered along in my job pumping gas and selling cigarettes, doing just barely enough to not get fired (which is ridiculously little if your boss is your father) I discovered a great talent of mine: excuse making. Every angry customer would sheepishly rescind his demands after I told him, "It's my first day" or "There was an emergency and all the management had to leave".

Drifting through the world, only armed with the knowledge that I could convince people of the veracity of my tenuous theories, I turned to the next best source for career information: syndicated television.

Owning a laundromat in Harlem, hosting "Wake Up San Fransisco", or working in a prehistoric quarry all seemed appealling, but none spoke to my talent for being flippantly convincing. Then I found my muse: "Night Court". Everyday at 6:30, Chaka Khan played Night Court's theme song and I knew that antics and innuendos would be flying for the next 30 minutes.

While the show was excellent, the character Dan Fielding, above all others, inspired me towards the law. Here was a man who felt as strongly about enforcing the law as he did in unveiling the lunacy and paradoxes rife within our society. I guess all the other characters were equally committed to those two principles, but Dan was also a ladies man. He was the Fonzi of my generation.

When you're in your early teens, you have no idea how to make women like you. But after watching "Night Court" I knew I'd be just a little more likeable if one day I had a full head of hair, a grey suit, and a rapier wit. These were all qualities of Dan Fielding, my new hero.

The show made him out to be something of a flawed character, a lonely jigalo. I, however, saw him as more of a Nietzchean superman who rejected the morals that society imposed upon him, like respect for intimacy and chastity, while still brave enough to stand up for those morals he did support, like prosecuting that homeless guy, Phil.

So, at age 12, in my living room, I vowed to remake myself in Dan Fielding's noble image. I vowed to go to law school and I fulfilled that vow (after a short career detour as a programmer during the late '90s delusional era when we thought the internet was more than a pornography machine).

Dan Fielding, what became of you? The people at NBC never saw fit to give us a reunion episode but I like to think you had a crisis of conscience and went on to work for a small legal aid clinic, helping Swedish Bikini Team members with their visa applications.