ConChat with Science GoH Stephanie Osborn
1) What was your favorite cartoon growing up?
Oh dear. This will give away my age. (Like my face doesn’t.) There are three that stand out from when I was VERY small: the original Jonny Quest, the Lone Ranger cartoon, and the original Space Ghost. There was another cartoon that tended to pair with Space Ghost, and had some semi-primitive family with some odd pets, including a blobby thing; I can never remember the name of it. But it made less impression on me, except in that even as, maybe, a first-grader, I looked at it and thought, “Either a spaceship crashed on that planet and their pets became the primitives’ pets, or else this was once a much higher developed planet that something really bad happened to and the civilization crashed.” So I thought the possible back history was way more interesting than the cartoon.
And this is completely aside from Looney Tunes, which is (or should be) on everyone’s list.
2) What is your go to comfort food?
Mac & cheese. Mom used to fix it for me when I was a kid and had been sick, especially if it was an intestinal bug. I always knew, when I got mac & cheese, I was getting better — because she wouldn’t let me have it until she thought my tum could handle it.
3) What was the first book you read that you have gone back and read over and over again?
There are actually two series that come to mind, and they are books that I still pick up and read to this day.
One is the complete Sherlock Holmes canon — someone gave me The Hound of the Baskervilles as a child. I was really a bit too young and imaginative for it, and the hound scared me badly. But the Holmes character intrigued me enough that I never forgot the story, and when, many years later I found the complete Holmes collection in the school library, I checked it out and wagged it with me for months as I read my way through it, soaking in the stories.
The other is the Anne of Green Gables series. I had a great-aunt who liked to travel in the summers, and she went to Prince Edward Island and brought me the eponymous first book of the series from the island. I fairly devoured it, because I could so relate to Anne Shirley. So then, every Christmas (and sometimes birthdays) after that, for as long as that aunt lived I guess, I got a new book in the series. But my family evidently had trouble getting the books, and to this day I’m still getting my hands on the later books in the series and reading them. I had no idea there were so many.
4) Current favorite song?
Oh, I don’t really HAVE a fave song, and never have had. I have the earworm of the day, but no one fave. My taste in music is very eclectic and ranges from classical and baroque to big band, the odd opera, Broadway show tunes, film scores, pop, all versions of rock, rap, etc.
And yes, I’ve been in a few musicals myself. I love ’em that much. (My fave productions I’ve worked include Sondheim’s Into the Woods, Webber’s Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and Darion/Leigh’s Man of La Mancha. For years after, you could start me at any point in Dreamcoat, and I could sing my way through the rest of the show.)
I guess the last song I can remember getting thoroughly stuck in my head for days was Pharell William’s “Happy.”
But as I write this, I’m literally only an hour out from a trip to Disney World, and yesterday I was wandering around the Studios theme park, saturating my brain in TV and film scores. That was fun, because my husband and I — and a few bystanders — were playing a kind of “Name That Show” game. I was pretty darn good at it, though I have to admit that there are certain musical themes that John Williams uses that cause several of his scores to mix themselves up in my head. Did you know, for instance, that the first Superman movie’s main score is an inversion of the main score from Star Wars?
5) Current favorite TV show?
Oh geez. I’m kind of in an, “I don’t like anything they’re playing” phase at the moment. I kept up with several shows in recent years but they’ve all jumped the shark in my opinion and I lost interest. Or else they canceled the ones that I felt held great promise but never found their audience.
That said, I’ve been watching Sherlock, Elementary, Agents of SHIELD, Supergirl, and The Flash fairly regularly. I loved Downton Abbey, though I came in on it only a few years before it ended, and I miss it. The ending was perfect, IMHO. I watch Doctor Who when I can, but we don’t get any of the BBC channels on cable, so it’s kind of hit and miss.
