Once upon a time, there was a thing called The Met. In the mid-’90s, its ramshackle office, filled with secondhand furniture and outdated computers, was perched above a bar called the Green Elephant. The weekly’s music editor was a guy called Keven McAlester. Here’s how he was hired. Real piece of work, that McAlester. We called him Archie because Archibald was his real first name (Keven was his middle) and because he was smarter than all the rest of us and we needed a way to take him down a notch or two. Keven did not own shorts. He wore corduroy pants every day, even in the summer. That didn’t stop him from cutting a swath through the mostly female sales department. The other thing he pursued with great fervor was video games, first Maelstrom, then Snood. Especially Snood. Keven was the undisputed office champion of Snood. I’m not sure how much money I lost to him playing that game when we should have been doing our jobs.
All that is background so that you might possibly understand how amazed and delighted I was this morning when I learned that Keven has been nominated for an Academy Award for a documentary he co-wrote and co-produced. A huge congratulations goes out to him. And so does the photo below, taken when the entire Met staff underwent makeovers for some misguided fashion thing we published.
As you might imagine, Keven’s phone is rather busy right now. Via text, he says, “I’m thrilled and honored, and can’t thank Rory [director and co-producer] and the folks at American Experience enough for the opportunity to work on this.” In an email conversation with a couple other Met alumni, he said he plans to play Snood for the rest of the day.
