Cheers!

One summer when my kids were young I wanted to get season passes to White Water for the three of us but it was one of those times that we were closer to poor than rich and the $60  that they would cost was not in the budget.

I began searching for a way to come up with the money. Nobody was buying gold jewelry back then, even if I had had any.  If I got some kind of job for the summer it would defeat the purpose, when would we use the passes?  And I was afraid to go to the parts of town where I could sell my blood, though I did think about it.  (What can I say, I have a fertile imagination.)

Then, in the newspaper, I saw the answer to my prayers.  Oklahoma University Health Sciences Center was conducting a study and they would pay you if you participated!  Weird, maybe but not as gory as selling blood.  I called them and they accepted me.  It was a study of the effects of alcohol on the brain. I assured  them I did have a brain. It did not have alcohol on it.  I would be in the control group. (I know what you're thinking but the possibility of being in the other group didn't even come up!  I don't like the taste of it, anyway.)

Now, doing something weird, like being a guinea pig, and looking like you are going to do something weird are two different things.  I was going to a university campus. I would look the part. When I was in college we wore plaid skirts, white  shirts and knee socks. (Stop smirking! We were the good guys during the sixties)  That probably wouldn't work even if I could fit into one of those skirts anymore. I decided to go for the college professor look. Blazer, plaid skirt (I used the rubber band trick) white blouse and panty hose. (So, maybe I hadn't seen a college professor in a few years.  I had seen plenty of black and white college movies on TV)  I ditched my contacts for my glasses.  Tried a pencil behind my ear but it may have been a bit much.  I looked very intelligent.

They should have given points just for locating the place in the maze of buildings there at OU Health Center and finding a place to park, but after walking thirteen and a half miles or so, looking like a lost, absent-minded professor, I finally located the building I was searching for.  I approached a white-coated lady sitting at a desk.  She looked over her college professor glasses at me.  She didn't seem to think I was an Intelligent Colleague. "Please fill out this form," she whispered. "Dr. Basin will come to get you when you are finished."

I took the ream of paper from her and sat down to fill in the blanks. They wanted information going back beyond my childhood clear into the womb.  They wanted to know my genealogy.  They wanted to know my lifestyle and habits.  They wanted to know what I had for breakfast. They wanted to know the last time I had a drink containing alcohol--in weeks. Math! There went the Intelligent card. I was about to flunk the test and it hadn't even started. There were no calculators in sight.  Okay, I can do this. There are fifty-two weeks in a year. Josh is eleven, but his birthday was a month or two ago.  I was pregnant nine months.  But he was ten days late.  But I didn't know I was pregnant at first. But I didn't like the taste anyway. I wrote down 626 weeks.

Dr. Basin came to get me.  She wore a long white coat.  She didn't  seem to think I was an Intelligent Colleague either. Why hadn't I thought about the white coat bit? She said, "My, my.  Six hundred and twenty six weeks!" There was a long written test, the "if train A leaves the station at 5:42 a.m. and train B leaves LaGuardia airport on Tuesday, what will be the overtime collected by the conductors on board?" type of test.  I was hopeless at those when I was in school and twenty years later, things did not look any more promising.  I thought of water slides and the Lazy River ride and persevered. I had no more than half a page finished when a bell rang.  "Pencil down, please." No one met my eyes when they took me to the next cubicle.

The next twenty-eight, okay, maybe two, hours were filled with flash cards, matching pictures, sorting the flash cards into groups, matching more pictures.  Dr. Basin had the voice of a computerized recording. "Which is the same?  Which is different?  Is this better?  Or this?"  I thought nodding off might make them question which group I was supposed to be in. I fought it off. Three days, okay maybe two hours later, someone said  "Next cubicle, please."

The next cubicle was a darkened room where an attendant fitted my head with a flexible salad colander. Or something like it. They attached electrodes all over my head, but first squirted the holes of the colander with something squishy. I answered the same questions, but this time sitting in sort of a flight simulator. "Push the red button when the light flashes." I managed not to nod off one more time.

Finally I stumbled down the hall, picked up an envelope with my hard-earned $60 and went out to search for my car,  KY jelly glistening all over my head.  Several white-coated people passed me.  I nodded in my professorial way but they didn't nod back.

About a week later, while floating down the Lazy River at White Water, it dawned on me.  If they didn't succeed in driving me to drink that day, I must have passed the test.