The Kingdom of CART

Back to the ALDAcon Sponsorship Committee....After scoring so well on my first assignment, Caption First, I felt like nothing could stop me. And the next organization on the list further fed my uncharacteristic buoyancy. Kind, kind Lois again had ceded me rights to friendly fire: the National Court Reporters Foundation (NCRF) and its director B. J. Shorak. It's hardly a secret that B. J. and the NCRF are among ALDA's most enduring friends.

I knew this first-hand. A few weeks after Jerry Miller treated me to the real-time demonstration in the courtroom, he invited me to attend the National Court Reporters Association (NCRA) convention in Orlando, Florida, all expenses paid. At first I'm thinking: Who wants to go to a court reporters convention? What fun is that going to be? Why not just sit in a library for a few days? Or watch ink dry?

I mean, how much fun could a group of court reporters be? These people work in courtrooms day after day year after year, silently typing, silently typing, silently typing away on their uniquely weird machines. Then they go home and feed the cat, right? I had people like that around me 40 hours a week: encyclopedia editors! Our idea of a high time was going out for nonvegan food. With kefir milk. I didn't need to travel to Orlando for kefir milk.

But what the heck, an all-expenses paid trip: nobody ever offered me one of those before. Maybe I could make a side trip to Epcot Center or Sea World to make things interesting. And they invited Karina, too, who was not an encyclopedia editor. Or a court reporter.

Well, the NCRA convention was an eye-opener. It took place at the Orlando World Center Marriott Resort, a quantum leap from my usual away-from-home lodgings of choice, Motel 6. The Marriott had an 18-hole golf course, a full-service spa, a 24-hour fitness center, lighted tennis courts, and a huge, huge outdoor pool that proved a fabulous place to get a tan (this was back in the days before everyone used SPF-90). (It was also the place that I first met Marylyn Howe, the wild woman from Massachusetts who subsequently founded ALDA Boston and the ALDAcon karaoke party.)

The ballroom where the NCRA banquet and entertainment took place was pulsing with people dressed to the nines....could these be court reporters? I had my wedding suit on and I felt pathetically underdressed. Toto, I don't think we're at World Book anymore. Dinner included the most remarkable slice of prime rib I've ever seen. So remarkable that, with Karina's urging, I ended two years of vegetarianism and scarfed it down. Then the dancing started and, woo-hoo, could court reporters hoof it! I bet they could go 15 rounds of karaoke and stay upright.

Some of CART's greatest pioneers were at the convention, among them Marty Block, who was the very first realtime reporter, the first to caption ALDAcon, and co-creator of the term CART; Joe Karlovits, who founded VITAC, now the largest captioning company in the United States; and Saint Woody Waga, who has done CART at ALDAcon forever and a day and who gained canonization when he received the ALDA Angel Award in 1995. Also the irrepressibly effervescent B. J. Shorak, then NCRA's director of technology. B. J. really connected with Karina, and so I got to know her well by chasing their shadows. A year or so after the convention, B. J. invited me to join the board of NCRF, NCRA's nonprofit arm, probably because it gave her another chance to see Karina, who was invited to interpret. Or maybe the invitations came in the opposite order, I don't remember.

So it was with irrational exuberance that I typed my email to B. J. requesting ALDAcon sponsorship from the NCRF.