I’d lost contact with Ted sometime ago but I still remember him fondly. Mainly for his boots.

He lived as a single dad with his Giants & Barry Bonds mad son in a funky suburb in San Francisco and spent many years travelling the world as a technical director on major special events. Mainly for various IT software businesses housed in the SF region, north to Seattle, across the bay to Oakland and on to Clearview Mountain, south to San Jose…and um… a pretty big outfit found in Redwood Shores.

Ted was/is well respected for his professionalism. He often pled guilty to accusations that he was at times a very odd man burdened with a Steve Wright type of monotone sense of humour. He was as dry as my Grandmother’s tongue.

The thing about Ted was he had great boots. He was universally known for them within the business. They had become his personal signature. And he wore the same boots always. Never seen without them on. They were black and white cowboy boots made from Python skin. When he walked or turned on the balls of his feet they made a really distinct Johnny Cash creaky sound to them. A city slicker through and through, Ted was the quintessential urban cowboy.

Sadly international projects requiring Ted’s expertise and steady influence dried up. The two big boys on the block, Microsoft and Oracle stopped trading body blows with their mega-events and as a result Ted became a much more permanent fixture in SF. To the point that he reluctantly found him signing up to the local union and clocking on at the Moscone Convention Center to button chartered accountant conferences. I stopped working with Tom and not long after my own overseas projects also started to evaporate as marketing dollars were redirected to less in-person engagements.

One day out of the blue, Ted sent me an email with a link to his new website.

He had decided to throw in the corporate theatre caper and become a fulltime federally-granted performance artist. And with that he undertook an exchange to Sweden and brought home a delightful older Swedish girl who adored him and his son to bits. From the photographs, I suspect she too was some sort of… performance artist…

Ted had wanted some feedback on his experimental film that he had posted to his now discontinued website. It was an experimental short film of an installation styled performance. It captured Ted watching television, and then suddenly getting up and brushing his teeth, before returning to the couch… repeatedly… for ten long long minutes… all in his underwear… while wearing… well… what could best be described as a monkey mask with the top of the head cut out. And a collection of red ribbons tucked into the front of his jocks.

The thing that freaked me right out, and there was plenty to pick from, was that on closer inspection, Ted appeared not to be wearing his boots…. at all….oh, and he had only one leg… as such. His right leg from the knee down was missing – I watched slack jawed as he hobbled and hopped from his television couch to the bathroom sink and back again.

I sent him an email congratulating him on his… art… and queried the boot thing… diplomatically of course, as old comrades in arms can.

It turns out that the reason he had been wearing the same boot for years was not so much that he liked it, or that he had considered it a personal styling signature, which it had become, but rather when he got his new leg, he had hastily whacked on his boot only to discover he was unable to get it back off. So being Ted, he shrugged and elected to wear the same boots for years…. And now he doesn’t. Not sure how true this was but I have had no reason ever to doubt him and… it had a ring of Ted to it. Odd man. Interesting man. Really nice boots.

You think you know someone… and you don’t. Hardly ever.