I held this “Groove on a Monday because I thought most people would want to watch the Oscars. As it turned out, most didn’t. Still being predominantly ‘Zoomed people weren’t all that interested in watching. We started out talking about an Explorer’s Club video that was running on Facebook while people were filing in. That Explorers Club used to have regular live events at their NYC center and likely at their places across the world, but for the Pandemic it moved onto Zoom through their Facebook page, which is pretty great because the seating at the events is limited and you actually have to get to the place and book a space, something that seems so far away and long ago at this point. The gentleman speaking was Bill Haseltine and one of our regulars knew his work with human genome sequencing, so we started out talking about that. We then talked about Dr. Scott Gottlieb, vaccinations, and whether the kids would get them, and how we in the US are leading the world in vaccines.
We then talked about the God Gene, the gene that inclines most human beings to believe in a religion, and how this perpetuates because believing in a god makes one more likely to make the scary leap to procreate and raise kids. We talked about how people are moving from blue states to red states and how this might make our country more purple politically. We went from political colors to talking about the upcoming pink moon, the Blossom Moon, and then about a trip to a tulip farm some people took and all the tulips they picked and brought back. Someone mentioned Audrey Hepburn ate tulips to fend off starvation when she was very young, and that tulips are in the onion family. Someone pointed out if you are not given proper nutrition at the right age you can’t put on fat, which might account for her pixie slenderness. Someone talked about a friend who grew up during a tough time in Vietnam and how that person couldn’t put on weight. Of course this led to talking about dieting and the Pandemic pounds some of us acquired, while others lost weight and got on track to exercise more. Somehow body morphology led to arguing Apple vs. PC. And finally we talked about the Oscars and the highlights, the little dance Glenn Close did, the flirtation an older Korean woman had with Brad Pitt as she received her Oscar, and ultimately, the virtues of the Rock and Jason Momoa, whose red carpet interview from years back was memorable for his gracious handling of a tacky request to do a dance from his native island, and who of us preferred whom (the women of the group leaned to the latter, the gents preferred the Rock).
