Sparta Study
Copyright (c) 1999
by Scott Weisman

When Sparta first started writing, she was genuinely interesting, fun,
and cute to boot. All the male writers were smitten with her,
including Ranger. She had a great time with the peeps. Then she
started going out with one after another. Inevitably, it would be a
short relationship that would end with her unceremoniously dumping him
for someone else. Fracus, then J, then Silvermayne. It would have gone
on too, except for the fact that the peeps got wise to her ways by
this time.

But as I said above, we had some fun times. She came in before Winter
Break of 1987-88, the penultimate period of the penultimate year of
the peeps. Just after the reunion (sigh). There were always things
going on. >From the parties at Stargazer's and Kadula's, to the paint
thrashing episode (which happened after one party), to the Little
Peepy Foo Foo incident with the police, to the Festival of Animation,
to the awesome Spring Break in the Bay Area (staying at Tenar's!) and
Humboldt County (with 'Tim'), and yes, the Grateful Dead at Irvine in
April.

Back to Sparta. By the time the Dead at Irvine came around, or even
Spring Break, her rep as a flirt of the highest order and a
manipulator par excellence (others would use harsher words here) were
well grounded. The walls eventually proved slim pickins, as the peeps
(well, the male ones, the women had been long-wise to her ways) wised
up to her and she had expended most of them in one way or another like
spent fuel rods from a nuclear power plant (ouch!).

She moved in with Stargazer's crowd, who weren't peeps at all (it is
doubtful they even knew about us), and who were into things like the
Rennaissance Faire, then held every spring in Ventura. There she
started going out with more guys who weren't yet wise to her ways, and
she would play petty little games to attempt to arouse some sort of
jealous reaction. Eventually, she would be the one dumped.

Then she picked up the pieces of her ego from the floor, shacked up
with a Navy man and moved to Hawaii. She never really talked about her
father, but her mother was career Navy, and this move was obviously in
fulfillment of some maternal oedipul complex.

Her aversion to Ranger was famous and probably more extreme than any
other writer, probably due to the similarity of their personalities.
Both were kind of slimy, even if she was cute.

She would avoid work at all costs. At Renn Faire, she would flirt
instead of work, which was braiding hair in Stargazer's booth, and
talk others into doing her work for her. The best was her effort to
design a major in school "like Computer Science, but without all the
boring theoretical or mathematical parts." In short, a vocational
degree in programming. When suggested she transfer to a more
appropriate school for that kind of program or change her major to
something to something like Cognitive Science, she said she had to
graduate from UCSD "for her mother," and wouldn't consider any other
major.

The coolest thing about Sparta turned out to be her suitemates. X (her
short-lived chosen peep name) was from Alaska and on the crew team.
She was buff. I sure didn't want to mess with her. Well, sort of (:-).
She was attractive, had a hearty laugh, was loads of fun to get high
with, and had a boyfriend. Oh well. She was very genuine, a serious
student, partied hard, studied hard. She wasn't a writer, tried her
hand at it a few times, but lost contact with the peeps eventually,
since her main affiliation was through Sparta.

M was an interesting case. She was extremely sensitive to physical
contact, especially by men. We who were aware of this quirk had no
problem dealing with it. But there was one time she, X, and I went to
an an appearance of Dr. Rick (a local hypnotist) in the Muir Cafe. She
went up and proceeded to get readily hypnotized. It must have
something to do with her personality. Anyway, this Dr. Rick character
hypnotized a fairly large group of college students (about 20 or so),
and he really has a thing for risque physical gags. I always thought
it was a little peculiar and maybe even perverted, although the
results are usually amusing.

He started with one of his standard gags. X and I had been to one of
these performances before. We were both really stoned with some of
Tim's killer Humboldt. We looked knowingly at each other, but didn't
know what to do. He had men and women in an alternate seating
arrangement and while in their suggestive states, told the women to
imagine that the man to their right just touched them in an
inappropriate way. He told the men they wouldn't know anything. Snap!

The men just stared out to the audience oblivious, while every single
woman stared at the men. Their reactions were almost uniformly
hilarious. They either smiled seductively or glared menacingly. One
girl slapped a clueless guy. I said almost. Then there was Michelle
and the poor unknowing and unwitting SOB next to her. She stood up,
started screaming at him, he understanding nothing, rising and
reaching out to try to soothe her. She slugs the guy in the jaw! I kid
you not. This guy went to the floor. Thank G-d he wasn't knocked out
and didn't have any broken bones, but it wasn't from a lack of
determination by her. Things were much smoother from that point on.