Join us on a journey of discovery...

In the mid 90's, while attending college classes in the frozen wasteland of Syracuse NY, I had a teacher named Troy Winfrey. He was a genial fellow, longish hair, glasses - your typical grad student press ganged into teaching an unruly mob of freshmen. Most if not all of us were intent on banging out a couple of essays and getting rid of that required second writing lab. Due to scheduling needs, I found myself signed up for "Rhetoric of Science Fiction - T. Winfrey"

What I expected was a boring mess - if I was lucky I wouldn't have to translate anything from Klingon. What I got was a truly first rate education about how to think. Mr. Troy Winfrey was one of my life's best teachers - for he gave me, couched in the comfortable terms of excellent fiction (Gibson, Herbert, Dick and so on) the tools by which I could analyze popular culture and discover where a given social structure had come from, where it was currently, and where it might be headed.

Suffice to say, nary a day goes by that I don't reflect on the single semester of lesson under Troy Winfrey's probably underpaid tutelage. If you're out there, thanks.

Now... Troy taught me that there is always something below the surface of what you read or see - rhetoric. Sometimes it smacks you over the head. Sometimes, it's buried quite deep and you have to look for it. A single work of fiction can mean several different things just to the one person who takes it in, and when you take it in can change what you get out of it.

The late fifties and early sixties in the USA were, according to most sources, a time of great social upheaval. I'm not going to get into my take on the times. I'm not much of an historian. But, in the midst of this turmoil, popular culture was gifted with the work of Rod Serling - "The Twilight Zone."

Much like Robert Fulgham's Everything I Ever Needed to Know I Learned In Kindergarten I think it's pretty possible that everything one needs to know about morality can be learned by watching The Twilight Zone.

Ms. Felicia Hudson (actress, singer, thinker, sometime office drone and great love of my life) and I will be presenting an episode by episode breakdown of what nuggets of truth can be gleaned from watching the trials and tribulations of those who are either trapped or sojourn briefly through the Twilight Zone.

Stay tuned...