RIP Dr. Ruth Westheimer, sex therapist and author! I was her ski instructor in 1999 when she came to Squaw Valley USA (now renamed Palisades Tahoe) age 70 for a celebrity ski “race.” The good ski instructors weren’t interested because it was unpaid but I was happy to volunteer for a few days. She was tiny, so she rented kid skis, kid boots, and kid poles; I took her up the cable car to cruise around the beginner area. She had no interest in my cerebral info-dense “counter-rotate your upper body to move your weight over the new outside ski as you press your big toe and pinky toe and angulate to get on matched edges” instruction, so we just made a few runs each day before hitting the sundeck for some après ski.
It was great to see all the maximum-gnar ski dudes genuinely psyched to see her. “Whoa! Dr. Ruth! The ‘good sex’ doctor! Awesome!” She was gracious and interested in everyone who stopped by. Privately she confessed to being lonely and hoped to meet someone (her husband Fred had died in 1996 after 36 years of marriage).
As spoken of on TV
Days later I was immortalized in Dr. Ruth’s appearance on the short-lived daytime talk show The Howie Mandel Show on January 15th 1999 (I was teaching when it aired but ordered a VHS tape of the episode). Howie Mandel asked her about the celebrity ski event and she meticulously said something like “I had a handsome ski instructor. His name was ‘S’. I skied behind him as he wiggled his behind.” This left poor Howie visibly wondering “What the hell? What kind of an unfunny pointless anecdote is this?”; I thus contributed to his show’s cancellation a few months later. The “race”itself might have been televised early some Sunday morning.
The scam of celebrity events
These celebrity events always claim to benefit local charities, but I have my doubts. Even back in 1999, a decade before influencers on Instagram, the celebrities got free cosmetics, wine, and other goodies from the sponsors, which the sponsors claimed as a tax deduction along with the hotel providing the facilities, etc. Dr. Ruth offered me some of these goodies. I declined; I said the only gift I wanted was a signed copy of her Sex for Dummies book, an extension of the successful “for Dummies” series of books that started with computer guides. Sadly, I never received one.
As I recall the big celebrity in the “race” was Ian Ziering of Beverly Hills 90210 (yeah, me neither). I found another photo that shows Muhammad Ali was there, at the time the most famous person in the world.
tech: Where’s the AI for faded photos?
The faded top image in this post is a scan of a framed enlargement I ordered at the time. Of course when I got the negative enlarged I misplaced it and the original print. Those faded lifeless colors are as good as I could get the scanned enlargement after futzing around with white balance, color histograms, color levels, auto saturation, etc., etc. tools in the GIMP photo editing program for 20 minutes. What is so frustrating is we humans can recognize that a photo has faded; I can even tell without checking whether it’s Kodacolor (reds stay, blues and greens fade and blur, light areas go all-white) or Fujicolor (greens stay vibrant, reds fade). So where’s the tool that lets me tell it “This is a Kodak print of a 25-year old Kodacolor 35mm negative that’s been exposed to bright indoor light for years” and it automatically corrects the color fade?! Or at least, “make the colors in this photo match the less-faded ones in this other photo”? Come on, AI, do your thing!
The otherwise excellent “Enhance” and “Dynamic” buttons in the photo editing software on phones doesn’t work because that software is optimized to correct digital images taken by the phone’s camera hardware, not 30-year-old photochemical artifacts.
Left me in stitches, with the to be expected hysterically descriptive observations thoroughly fitting of my o&o favourite stepson.