As the week winds down, I have my impending jury duty hanging over my head. By tomorrow evening, I’ll know if I have to report next Monday. Last week, they only went up to juror number 135 and I’m #170 for next week, so I was feeling pretty good. This week, though, they’d called in the entire 450 person panel by Tuesday. I’m really hoping next week is a slow week, but I’m not feeling confident.

I’m sure everybody is aware of the fact that 30 years ago today, the space shuttle Challenger blew up. It’s one of those “I’ll never forget where I was when” events, like the the Kennedy assassination (which I was of course too young to remember) or when Neil Armstrong stepped out onto the lunar surface, or when you heard about 9/11.

I recall quite clearly where I was on January 28, 1986 (I think I’ve probably mentioned it before, but I’ll mention it again because I’m old and old people are always repeating themselves). I was in the projection booth running porn movies at the Franklin Theatre (and, no, I don’t actually recall what movies we were running that week).

It seems rather odd that there was a time when perverts had to go to a movie theater to watch porn (in a matter of a few years, home video all but killed that “theater experience,” and now with the Internet, porn is so ubiquitous that kids are paying their way through college doing it).

Poor Pewee Herman – he was just born a little too soon.

Anyhow, back then I was working double shifts five days a week (something like 9:00 AM to 10:30 PM), and another 10 – 4:30 shift on Saturday. Contrary to popular belief, you do not have to stand there and watch the movie the whole time. Other than the first run-through of the week when I had to at least pay a little attention at the start of every reel to make sure you didn’t splice something together the wrong way, about the only time I needed to look at the screen was when I was getting ready to change over from one projector to the other one (and by the time you ran through these movies for the hundredth time, you could more or less go by grunts, without looking).

Anyhow, so there I was up in the booth reading or something with the radio on, when I thought I heard the DJ say something like “the space shuttle exploded.”

Huh? That couldn’t be right. By this time, shuttle launches were routine – I don’t think they were even bothering to cover the launches live on television anymore (except on CNN, which was an actual news network back in those days).

So I went downstairs where the guy sold tickets. He had a little teevee down there, and we sat and watched the Challenger explode over and over and over again. And then it was time for a changeover.

At the time we all figured that they were all blown up right away and that was that. Sad, but there are worse ways to go. Unfortunately, it’s pretty certain that most if not all the crew members were alive and scrambling to get their oxygen masks on and regain control of the vehicle as they continued up for 25 seconds before watching what was left of their ship stop and then flip around for what must have been a terrifying nearly three-minute nose-first plunge to ocean – which they hit at over 200 mph with a force of 200 Gs.

Ouch.

When most people think of the Challenger, they of course think about Christa McAuliffe, who picked a bad time to try and become the first civilian in space. Not me though. I mostly think of Judy Resnick, who I kinda had the hots for (especially the way her hair floated in zero-gravity).

Amazing how fast 30 years goes by.