Riding Rockets - Mike Mullane [188]
We were finally signaled to step onto a platform that had been towed onto the field. A narrator briefly traced the history of the space program while various space scenes played on the Diamond Vision. Our part in the program concluded with our introduction as the most recent space shuttle crew. We waved to the audience and we were done. Then, to my amazement, nearby fans leaned over the railing to hand us paper for our autographs and gave us business cards to send photos. Others shook our hands, flashed thumbs-up, and shouted, “Go NASA!” These weren’t space geeks asking for autographs. And it wasn’t the white collar crowd, either. This was the proletariat cheering us on. It gladdened me to see such enthusiasm among average Joes and Janes. ApparentlyChallenger hadn’t diminished the public’s support of the space program, as many of us had feared it would.
That evening, the NFL hosted another open-seating buffet supper for its multitude of guests. Having been burned once, I decided to be very selective in finding a tablemate. Luck was with me. I noticed Annette Funicello and her husband were sitting at an otherwise empty table and steered for their company. I introduced Donna and we sat down for a very pleasant dinner. Annette was delightful. I pried stories out of her about her Mouseketeer days, including how she had been forbidden by Disney to wear a two-piece swimsuit in the movies and how she had received thousands of engagement rings through the mail from “love-struck teenage boys.” I wanted to tell her none of those boys had been love-struck. Like me, they had all beenstruck by the topography of her sweater. But I knew if I offered that opinion I would have been struck by Donna.
Later, as Donna and I walked back to our hotel, she asked me which of the two celebrity women I had met that day, Christie Brinkley or Annette Funicello, was most captivating. Without hesitation I replied, “Annette.”
Donna was surprised. “I thought for sure you would say Christie Brinkley. She’s so much younger and so beautiful.”
“Yeah, that she is. But at dinner tonight I kept thinking of all those times as a teenage boy I had watched Annette on the Mouseketeer TV program while fantasizing what was under the A and the E letters on her chest. And there she was, thirty years later, sitting right across the table from me and I was still fantasizing.”
Donna laughed and offered up the familiar refrain, “Will you ever grow up?”
Chapter 37
Widows
After returning from Miami I fell into the standard postflight depression every astronaut experiences. As Bob Overmyer once said, “Being an astronaut is a ride on the world’s biggest emotional roller-coaster. One day you’re in orbit and talking to presidents, the next day you don’t even have a reserved parking place.” I was way down in the don’t-have-a-parking-place dip. I felt certain it would be several years before I would have any shot at another flight. I was at the end of a long line. There were a hundred astronauts in the office. While I waited I would be assigned to one of the supporting roles of the business: working as a CAPCOM in MCC, evaluating software in SAIL, supporting payload development, or otherwise involved in another support function. While I appreciated the importance of the work, it was mundane compared with the exciting world in which mission-assigned crews lived. I had twice been a resident of that world and I knew. I didn’t want to fly a desk. The wordretirement was frequently on my mind. I knew Donna would welcome a decision to leave Houston. Every trip to the LCC roof was killing her. But, like the good Catholic wife she was, she would never put her feelings first. It would have to be my decision. Other TFNGs had already made theirs. Jim van Hoften, Pinky Nelson, Sally Ride, Dale Gardner, and Rick Hauck had all announced their intention to leave NASA, or had already done so. Unlike some of them, I didn’t have the offer of a high-paying civilian job setting a deadline. I had done no job search. I had no plans for a next life whenever it started,