ululate!

My old Georgetown classmate Dikembe Mutombo, word-famous basketball player and titanic humanitarian, has died of brain cancer at 58. I saw the cancer-diagnosis news two years ago but had lost track of Dikembe; I'd heard he had glioblastoma, for which there is no cure, but I can't confirm this. Every news outlet is merely saying it was "brain cancer."

Dikembe and I attended the same French-theater class at Georgetown, whose culminating project was a large-scale production of Paul Claudel's La Ville, an allegory of Claudel's conversion to Catholicism, with the city representing Claudel's very soul. Dikembe, who hulked over everyone else, played the towering, white-robed angel who appears in the middle of the ruins of the burned city (i.e., the glorious moment after conversion) to impart wisdom and proclaim a new phase of existence:

Ô vous! Ô camp des hommes malheureux!
Je viens, et non pas la nuit, mais le jour est dans le milieu de la ville!

Oh, you! Oh, you group of miserable men!
I come, and not the night, but day is in the midst of the city!

I remember that, one night during a performance, Dikembe fucked the line up, mixing up "night" and "day," more like a devil than an angel. We had a good laugh afterward. Another incident, not so funny, involved a poorly secured stage light that dropped from the ceiling, nearly killing Dikembe as he stood in the center of the stage.

Since Dikembe and I were both language majors (I'd been a French major), we both graduated with the School of Languages and Linguistics, nicknamed LingLang by the students. (It's now the Faculty of Languages and Linguistics, subsumed by the College of Arts and Sciences.) He was the last "M," and I was the first "N," so I was literally in his wake.

Dikembe and I were never close, but I remember conversing with him in French about things like karate (he said he'd practiced le karaté de la rue, i.e., street karate), and he was always a trip in drama class. Our oddball prof, Monsieur Bensky, was being driven to distraction by the pressures of putting on a huge production that used thirty-some students plus a bunch of stage hands and other staffers, but even Monsieur Bensky had to smile at Dikembe's expansive personality and sense of humor. Dikembe went on to much bigger things and lived a worthy life. I'm sad for his family and friends and teammates, and I hope he's somewhere good, shooting hoops or hanging with family or just being happy and enjoying all the good karma he'd built up in life.

In other news, I see that Kris Kristofferson has also died. He was 88. Ya' didn't quite make October, Kris! I generally hate country music, but I enjoyed Kristofferson's gruff stylings as well as his acting (I remember him best in the TV miniseries "Amerika," opposite Robert Urich and as Whistler in the Blade films). As a singer, he wasn't one of those nasal, twangy idiots who make me cringe (here's a good one with Johnny Cash), and as an actor, well, he didn't have much range, but he did very well within the range he had. RIP.

[Credit to my buddy Mike for the news about Dikembe.]