Faith in Pinball

I’m not a terribly religious person, but you can’t help but feel that someone/something is helping things come together with the Circus project.   The story that follows is just one of numerous examples of what I mean by that statement.

Python’s birthday is on New Years Day, so a couple of us from the team decided to fly up to Chicago and celebrate Python’s 60th birthday with him along with a few extra days visiting.  A couple days after his birthday he wanted to take a trip to his Lawrence, MI farm.

On most of our trips to Python’s, I ended up being the chauffeur.  Of course, like most of our winter trips to Chicago, the weather was not the best and there was considerable snow on the ground, but Python and I loaded up into his Land Rover and we started to head towards Lawrence.

It wasn’t really clear to me exactly why we were heading to his other house, but away we went.  We visited with several neighbors of his before going to his farm, but it’s what happened at the farm that is really the cool part.

Python sent me down to his office in the basement of the cabin and asked me to look for any computer hardware that might be useful for the Circus Project.  I went down and all I saw were super old Windows 95 hardware and an old SCSI Scanner.  Nothing really useful for what we were doing.

Then Python asked me to look for any sculptures of his.  As I looked around something fell of the desk and hit my foot.

Being the old Boy Scout that I am, I bent over and picked it up to put it back on the desk and out of the corner of my eye I noticed it was an old cassette tape, and on the label it looks like it says Circus on it.  After looking at it closer I notice it says “Pinball Circus Speech” along with a couple names.

So I show it to Python and after visiting some more with some local friends of his we start heading back to Chicago.

The entire trip home I’m thinking this is a speech of Python’s where he was talking about Pinball Circus at some banquet or convention.

Now most people don’t have cassette tape players anymore, but luckily Python still did, so we popped the tape in and hit play and … nothing.  So we fiddled with the settings on the player a little and hit play again and we start to hear music.  Well, one side of the tape appears to be a mixtape, so we flip it over and hit play again.

The faces on all of us when we heard what was coming through the speakers was priceless.  It was the original voice recording for the callouts from the Ringmaster and Flippy the Clown.  It even has some of the banter going on between the engineer and the voice guys.

If that tape had not fallen off the table and hit my foot, I don’t think we would have discovered this piece of Pinball Circus history.