I had this whole intro worked out in my head where I was going to compare the venerable Duffs Gamblers to Steven Segal, in the sense that they are/were both hard to kill. Silly, right?

The whole dumb idea reminded me of a professor I had in college named Alan Dumas. I was a student of journalism some years ago, and Dumas taught a class I took on feature writing for magazines.

Dumas (in the habit, far right) had indeed written features for magazines, but he’d also worked as an actor, a television producer and a radio show host, and the class was more about being resourceful and creative in approaching whatever you were doing. A good example of the kind of homework Dumas gave would be an essay he assigned around the holidays.
“Write something with the sole objective of getting me to cry. If you can make me cry, you will get an A for the semester. I don’t even care if it’s total bullshit. Just make me cry.”
Another time he brought in a local writer and comedian named Don Becker who had a hook in place of one hand. After about ten minutes of the class asking him boring, safe questions about landing writing gigs, Dumas exploded: “Isn’t anyone going to ask him how he lost his fucking hand?!”
Segal and Dumas are forever fused in my mind because he told us a magnificent story once about a couple of pieces he did on the “actor.” When he learned that Segal would be traveling to Naropa (a progressive Buddhist-influenced university in Boulder, Colorado) to give a talk on his experiences with Buddhism and how Holiness, Penor Rinpoche, had recently proclaimed him a tulku (the–excuse me, I’m throwing up in my mouth–reincarnation of a Buddhist lama). Dumas wrote a puff piece about it for The Rocky Mountain News. He did this to bait Segal and it worked. The ponytailed black belt agreed to a sit-down interview, in which he talked about going deer hunting on the very same trip to the Rockies.
The second story Dumas wrote called Segal out as phony; if memory serves it posed this basic question: what kind of Buddhist and animal rights activist goes deer hunting for sport? Dumas said a few days later Segal left a threatening message on his answering machine.

Dumas’ was the only class I ever felt shitty about missing. About a year after I finished school, I found out that he died in April of 1999 of a heat attack. It was especially upsetting because he was a young guy. He taught me ways to hone passion subtly and cut corners gracefully, and he got me truly excited about writing. I remain indebted.
On a lesser note, The Gamblers expired earlier this week when a sprightly little kitten blasted them from the inside out with his wee shotgun.