Kate Downey: I Love Buzz Aldrin

After watching a documentary about the moon landing, Kate Downey comes away with a love of all things Buzz Aldrin.

Kate makes you fall in love with things you thought were boring. As the co-founder and Creative Director of Caveat, she heads up a team creating live shows that make you a little bit smarter and a little bit drunker. Previously, she directed Shakespeare and opera with the Public Theater and New York City Opera, and helped build Museum Hack, a renegade tour company at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. If you've seen any scientifically inaccurate whale illustrations from the 17th century, please alert her @wrongwhale on IG and TW.

This story originally aired on December 27, 2019 in an episode titled “Shoot for the Stars: Stories about people who look to the night sky for inspiration”.

Story Transcript

It’s 2015. I’m in my Brooklyn apartment and my kitchen is very dirty. I am looking for something on Hulu that I can watch while I clean, something kind of mindless. Normally, I would watch 30 Rock or Parks and Recreation but, honestly, I had watched them all. So Hulu suggests something for me to watch. It’s a documentary. It’s called For All Mankind and it has something to do with the moon landing.

Now, I am a theater person. I went to school for theater. I was a theater major, I do not recommend. I make my living directing Shakespeare and opera. I give renegade tours of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Basically, I am your go-to girl if you want to know who was sleeping with who in the Renaissance. But science, not so much.

My dad got me a subscription to Scientific American and he said, “You are going to find this so useful.” And I did, because it was the perfect width to hold my door open when I went outside to walk the dog.

So I didn’t know much about the moon landing but I was pretty sure I knew all the important parts. There is blast off. There is ‘One small step for man,’ one whatever for whoever, right? There is when they stick the flag in the moon and that’s it. That’s pretty much all the parts of the moon landing.

So I turn on this documentary and it turns out to be all of this previously unreleased NASA footage from the whole mission. Stuff that they didn’t broadcast at the time because it was too boring or too undignified, or maybe it was a security risk. I don't know.

At first, it’s just shots of the astronauts training or getting suited up or saying goodbye to their families and I’m like, “Great. I am going to scrub the stove to this.” And then blast off happens and that’s great because that’s always really exciting, and I watch that. And then I think, “Great, next stop, one small step for man, etcetera.”

I didn’t know it takes three days to get to the moon. They're basically on a road trip for three days from the earth to the moon, and I have been on a road trip. I took a road trip once from California to Philadelphia right after college with two guy friends of mine and it was very similar. There's really crappy food, there's no personal space, nobody sleeps.

And these astronauts were taking video diaries of their time in the space shuttle or the space craft. And I was watching them do what any of us would do on a three-day road trip in zero gravity. They were flicking food at each other and catching it and doing flips. They were getting on the radio and pranking Mission Control and calling them nerds. They were listening to music on a cassette player. Sinatra and Merle Haggard were the two big favorites of that trip, apparently. On my road trip, we mostly listened to Basement Jaxx, so same.

So I’m watching this and I’m thinking, “Man, I thought the moon landing was very technical and very mechanical and sterile, but this is really human.”

So they get to the moon and they do all of the historical stuff, all the stuff you know, you know, one small step, putting the flag in the moon, etcetera, and then it happens. The astronauts on the moon, Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong, they start going down this checklist that NASA has given them.

NASA is big on checklists. NASA needs them to test out different ways of moving around on the moon because they'd done the math and they're pretty sure that they know the best ways to move around on the moon. The moon is 17% of earth’s gravity and these astronauts are wearing these very chunky space suits. They're not sure what the best way to move is going to be so they needed the astronauts to test out these methods of mobility, which we call walking, or hopping, or skipping. They're not sure which one is going to work out best.

So while staying in view of the camera that is mounted on the lunar lander, these astronauts start walking and hopping and skipping. It turns out skipping on the moon is really fun. And you just see these astronauts bouncing around in front of this camera like they're in a bouncy castle. And you can hear them over the radio to each other and they're going, “Yahoo!”

And, I kid you not, one of them is hopping around and goes, “Boopty-boopty-boopty-boopty-boop,” over the radio.

So over this part of the documentary, Buzz Aldrin has a voice over. And he's watching this and he says, and I’m paraphrasing, “It’s so easy to forget the danger that you're in. At any point, we could have tripped and ripped our space suit and died in the vacuum of space, but we were having so much fun.”

These guys were the first people to set foot on a planet other than earth. And even with all of their technical training, even with all of their checklists they couldn’t help themselves. The first thing they had to do when they got on a foreign planet was dance and sing and joke around.

So I am weeping, fully weeping in my apartment and I will not finish cleaning the kitchen today. And in that moment I fall in love. If I was a deeper person, or a smarter person, I guess this would have been the moment that I fell in love with science or like the spirit of adventure. But I am not that deep so I straight up fell in love with Buzz Aldrin.

This documentary made me want to learn more about Buzz Aldrin, which was weird for me because normally documentaries did not make me want to learn more. After I saw March of the Penguins, I did not obsessively Google penguins. I Googled penguins the normal amount. But I had to know more. I had to know more about the second man on the moon.

And I want to be really clear here. Just so we’re clear, I was not in love with 1969 hot astronaut Buzz. I was in love with present-day, 85-year-old Buzz Aldrin. So here are some things I know about Buzz Aldrin and I would like for you to know them.

Buzz Aldrin’s mother’s maiden name was ‘Moon’. That’s real. So he clearly loves his mom.

Buzz Aldrin goes to middle school science fairs. An 85-year-old man goes to middle school science fairs and tests out the hover crafts. He loves kids.

One time, a man came up to Buzz Aldrin and accused him of faking the moon landing, and Buzz Aldrin punched him in the face. He's so passionate.

Buzz Aldrin demanded that we go to Mars before Elon Musk was born. He's not Elon Musk, which is a quality I really look for in a man.

After Apollo 11, Buzz Aldrin became a car salesman and never sold a single car. I love an underdog. What can I say?

Buzz Aldrin got his PhD in Manned Orbital Rendezvous, which was not a thing that anyone had ever done at that point. He got the nickname ‘Dr. Rendezvous’, which is objectively a hot nickname.

So Buzz Aldrin took over my life. I started talking about Buzz Aldrin everywhere, including on my tours of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. You'd be surprised how many paintings at the MET feature the moon and how few people want to hear about Buzz Aldrin on an art tour. Instead of reading fiction, I read his autobiography. Now, the only episode that I wanted to watch of 30 Rock was the one where Buzz Aldrin and Tina Fey yell at the moon together.

When you fall in love with someone, you start to love the things that they love. Their fights become your fights. I couldn’t believe we had stopped exploring space. How dare we! How dare we not try to dance on more planets! I started researching the history of NASA, the history of space exploration to try to figure out where it went wrong, why we stopped. The answer is budgets, politics and not being afraid of Russia anymore.

I started researching the history of astronomy and physics and how gravitational waves might work and how stars are formed. And I started talking to anybody who would listen about all this stuff and telling them how important it was that we go to space, that we keep dancing on planets.

My tour guide company started sending me to more science museums and less art museums. I started Googling jobs in science communication. I started really considering trying to get a job where I could talk about space all day. But I felt like a fraud. I wasn’t a scientist. I hadn’t gone to school for this. I was just a twenty-something who had a big, weird crush on an elderly man and it had led me down a weird path.

And then I thought about my life as a theater person. That had also started with a big, fat crush when I 12 years old on an age-appropriate person that I actually knew. His mom ran the community theater in my neighborhood and I signed up for every act in class and did every play, because that is what the man that I loved loved. And as the years went by and my crush faded and I kept doing theater, I felt like a fraud. And when I applied to college as a theater major - I do not recommend - I thought to myself, this is stupid. You just got a big fat crush when you were 12 and now you think you're a theater person? Later, I realized it doesn’t matter.

When I was working for the public, when I was helping to direct professional opera in New York City, no one gave a shit that I was only here because I had gotten a big, fat crush 15 years ago. So I quit my job as a tour guide and I joined my business partner Ben to launch a theater on the Lower East Side where people can nerd out about the science that they love no matter how they fell in love with it. And that theater is Caveat where we are all standing today. Thank you.