"We sound like our parents," Tom said. "'When we were growing up, we didn't have any of this newfangled life-extension stuff -- we took our chances with the cave bears and the dinosaurs!'" Tom wore himself older, apparent 50, with graying sidewalls and crinkled smile-lines, the better to present a non-threatening air of authority to the guests. It was a truism among the first-gen ad-hocs that women castmembers should wear themselves young, men old. "We're just a couple of Bitchun fundamentalists, I guess." Lil called over from a nearby conversation: "Are they telling you what a pack of milksops we are, Julius? When you get tired of that, why don't you come over here and have a smoke?" I noticed that she and her cohort were passing a crack pipe. "What's the use?" Lil's mother sighed. "Oh, I don't know that it's as bad as all that," I said, virtually my first words of the afternoon. I was painfully conscious that I was only there by courtesy, just one of the legion of hopefuls who flocked to Orlando every year, aspiring to a place among the ruling cliques. "They're passionate about maintaining the Park, that's for sure. I made the mistake of lifting a queue-gate at the Jungleboat Cruise last week and I got a very earnest lecture about the smooth functioning of the Park from a castmember who couldn't have been more than 18. I think that they don't have the passion for creating Bitchunry that we have -- they don't need it -- but they've got plenty of drive to maintain it." Lil's mother gave me a long, considering look that I didn't know what to make of. I couldn't tell if I had offended her or what. "I mean, you can't be a revolutionary after the revolution, can you? Didn't we all struggle so that kids like Lil wouldn't have to?" "Funny you should say that," Tom said. He had the same considering look on his face. "Just yesterday we were talking about the very same thing. We were talking --" he drew a breath and looked askance at his wife, who nodded -- "about deadheading. For a while, anyway. See if things changed much in fifty or a hundred years." I felt a kind of shameful disappointment. Why was I wasting my time schmoozing with these two, when they wouldn't be around when the time came to vote me in? I banished the thought as quickly as it came -- I was talking to them because they were nice people. Not every conversation had to be strategically important.