Gillian Hamburger is a torch-head and proud of it.
Gillian is deputy director of the Olympic Torch Relay arm of the Salt Lake Organizing Committee. Once the flame for 2002 is lit in Olympia, Greece, sometime next November, Gillian will be one of a small group of people (torch-heads) who will be with it every step of the way as it makes its way across the ocean and around America for 13,500 miles and 65 days, touching 46 states in the process.
Ultimate destination: Olympic Stadium at the University of Utah.
It will not be Gillian's first time shepherding the flame. Prior to the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, she spent 84 days and covered 15,000 miles as the torch relay wound its way through 43 states. Salt Lake's route, as announced this week, will be slightly fewer miles and days than Atlanta's but will hit more states.
Gillian can't wait to reignite her relationship. She has a flame for the flame. She carries a torch for the torch. On that 84-day journey to Atlanta, she can't remember a single day she didn't cry, and they were good tears. Every day was like watching the last five minutes of "An Affair to Remember."
You wouldn't believe the good feelings that simple flame brings to people, Gillian says. In three words, "It's just magical."
It all begins amid great dignity in a grove of olive trees in Olympia from whence the ancient Olympic Games sprang. On a sunny day, and under the auspices of the Hellenic Olympic Committee and the direction of a high priestess surrounded by vestal virgins, parabolic mirrors are rolled into place to intensely focus the sun's rays onto the wick of a torch.
Once lit, the torch sets off for Athens, some 100 miles or so distant, carried primarily by Greeks whose ancestors did likewise 2,000 years ago and more. Only these days they wear clothes.
After the parabolic mirrors, the high priestess and the gallant run through Greece, then it's up to Tom Lazour to keep the flame alive across the ocean.
Tom is Delta Air Lines' Olympic coordinator. It's his job not only to make sure the flame makes it safely on board Delta's special triple-7 "Soaring Spirit" Salt Lake 2002 airliner, but to make sure it stays lit.
Like Gillian, Tom is a veteran of Atlanta's torch relay and he won't soon forget a single minute of the 14-hour flight from Athens to Los Angeles in the summer of '96. That's because he couldn't sleep.
"Every time I'd start to nod off, I'd panic and think the flame was going out," recalls Tom. "I'd keep opening the curtain and checking on it. It was like my baby."
It would be beyond embarrassment to have to go back to Olympia and ask if they could light it again.
But flame and flame-keeper disembarked in Los Angeles just fine, albeit slightly sleep-deprived.
At least this time, Tom will only have to stay awake about 10 hours, since Salt Lake's flame is scheduled to first touch down on American soil in Atlanta.
Which is when Gillian and her fellow torch-heads will take over. They'll baby the flame a quarter-mile leg at a time across Texas and the deep South, through the Carolinas, north to New England and New York, across the Hudson and on to the hinterlands.
We'll first see it cross into Utah four days before the 19th Olympic Winter Games are scheduled to start on Friday, Feb. 8, 2002.
By then, it will have the momentum of two continents, an ocean and 45 states behind it. The fire will be on fire.
But trying to describe it just doesn't cut it, says Gillian Hamburger, curator of the flame. Just wait, she says. You'll see. And bring a hanky.
Lee Benson's column runs Sunday, Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Please send e-mail to benson@desnews.com and faxes to 801-237-2527.