Last night was the annual membership meeting at my community theatre. It's usually a very acrimonious event -- the annual ritual when the old timers heave themselves from their Barcaloungers and drag themselves away from the shuffleboard courts and some of the ladies ill-advisedly paint their faces up with gallons of oily make-up that probably reached its expiration point at least a decade ago. They come and take up the front rows of the creaky old maple seats and grumble and grouse about how we kids are running the theatre into the ground with our dirty plays that use the eff word and other such indignities we are heaping upon the great old lady (the theatre).

They are all too old now to tread the boards any longer, their advanced years keep them from being able to memorize lines or climb the stairs that lead from the dressing room to the wings backstage. So now they buy season ticktes and come to see all the shows, relegated forevermore to the role of audience member, a painful transition.

So they rail against what time has wrought at the annual meeting every year. It's an opportunity to play one last scene, to "take the stage" in a way. Old battles and rivalries are revisited and bruised egos flame anew. I always find it exhilarating and relish the glimpses I see here and there of great beauty and drama coming from people one would walk past at the grocery store, never guessing that at one time they lit up the stage with a fearfully thrilling portrayal of King Lear or Desdemona. It's something I look forward to every year.

But last night's meeting was such a disappointment. There was no rumbling or grumbling, no one took a pregnant pause and shuffled to their feet to ceremoniously and defiantly nominate a confederate from the floor when the proposed slate of new board members was announced. Margarite, our flame-haired 80-something parliamentarian and Roberts Rules devotee (who bears a startling resemblance to Carol Burnette) was still at her summer home in North Carolina, the first time in decades that she has not arranged her seasonal migration to enable her to grace us with her presence and tsk, tsk and/or sternly correct us when we stepped over the line of proper decorum.

Tim and Lena, a pair of 75-year-olds who met and fell in love 30 years ago while performing in Life With Father up and got married last month after years of loving one another from afar and waiting until they both were widowed to hook up. They moved to New Hampshire to be closer to his kids.

Clark, a mean old kid-hating S.O.B. who has convincingly played the warmest, most loving Santa in Miracle on 34th Street every year since I can remember, is recovering from a stroke and he sat forlornly silent at the back of the theatre, unable to negotiate the downward rake of the floor in the auditorium.
The meeting was quiet and collegial and there was no reckoning -- no arguing or snarky commentary from the peanut gallery as reports from various committees were made. It was as if the backbone of every production (the chorus) and of our theatre -- the old-timers -- had collectively decided to wander upstage and not let any of us know they were exiting and we were left not sure of when they might enter again. It was as if the oxygen had been sucked from the building and replaced with ether.

The meeting was over in exactly an hour and we all wandered out to the lobby and stood over the full punchbowl and murmured, quiet little conversations about vacations and school starting up again and gas prices. I looked around and realized Cookie wasn't there either -- she maintains the same hairdo she has sported since I was in high school- a fluffy blonde pageboy with a slight pink rinse on it so that it resembles backlit carnival cotton candy from across the room. Cookie was a regular on the Jackie Gleason show back in the 1950s and '60s and used to entertain us with backstage stories about how sweet it was. The show taped in Miami and all the June Taylor dancer girls would spend the mornings basting on the beach before the evening shows. Jackie would have flowers delivered to every female in his show before every performance. As a teenager I found Cookie's stories tedious because she kept telling the same ones over and over, so I began to avoid her whenever she spotted me in the lobby after a show and waved a lavender scarf to get my attention. Now of course, I realize how cool her memories are. Cookie is a widow now and she doesn't like to drive at night anymore and she is recovering from hip surgery. As I stood and looked at the platters of pinwheels and brie and crackers it ocurred to me that I should have called Cookie and asked her if she wanted a ride. She hasn't missed am annual meeting in years.

bent

I realized the other day that I have no respect for my boss which is not a good place to be for me. I can't love someone if I don't respect them and somehow, I have always found something to respect about my boss of many years and so I was able to "work love" him, i.e., work for him and be a team player and always do my best and tell him the truth, you know, and feel okay about spending more time with this group of people every week than I do my own family. The usual. Working for a decent stand-up guy made it not so bad if you have to work for a living. But I found myself last week experiencing an emotion when he and I were talking that I have not felt in relation to him before: disappointment. And the cold bucket of water in my face of reality was particularly uncomfortable because as he spoke to me, it became clear that he really does believe his own line of bullshit. He has sold out. He is making the big bucks now and therefore he must speak the party line. It's nauseating to me. I'm not so naive as to think that maybe I wouldn't do the same thing, but I'd like to think that I wouldn't. If they (the hord/borg of smug elitists who have taken over our company) suddenly doubled my salary as they did his, would I willingly bend over and at the same time, blithely allow my colleagues to be shat upon? I hope not. But a six-figure salary does things to people sometimes. I guess the thing that disappoints me the most is that I realize my boss is sort of spineless. Not sort of. He is. He is a coward and this realization bothers me almost as much as it would if I had discovered that he is a closet anti-semite or a gay-basher or an abuser of kittens and puppies.

Rosemary's baby

So I think I may have mentioned a year or two ago that my nutty neighbor's latest get-rich-quick thing is raising alpacas. We popped by to check in on Rosemary and Tina the other day while the neighbors were out of town on an overnighter and I'll be damned if Rosie wasn't in the middle of popping out a kid. Lucky for all of us, I happened to have my camera in my purse--a reporter never knows when one will witness news--and this sure as hell was news since the neighbors seemed to have failed to notice that Rosemary was with child. They were stunned when they returned home to find another mouth to feed. And I'm not sure, but I'm thinking "Tina" may be a "Tim." Um. Yeah. You think?

stopping the presses

I heard a story on NPR yesterday about newspapers that are outsourcing some layout, design and, yes, reporting to India. Two of the newspapers are close to home: the Tampa Tribune and the Miami Herald. I've done some correspondence work with the Herald so this is especially shocking and nauseating for me.

Here's a blog post written by my esteemed comrade, Tim Egan, who speaks for all of us exhausted and demoralized journalists devoted to telling the stories of our hometowns and the people living out their lives there...

July 2, 2008, 7:14 pm

Save the Press

On the lobby wall of the newspaper where I got my first reporting job are the Thomas Jefferson words that journalists like to trot out as Independence Day nears:

“Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”
Of course, Jefferson also said the only reliable truths in newspapers were the advertisements, and that he was happiest when not reading the papers.

But as to his iconic quote, it’s no secret that we’re trending toward the former. And anyone who cheers the collapse of the newspaper industry should consider why Jefferson put aside his distaste for the vitriol and nonsense of the press for the larger principle of healthy democracies needing informed citizens.

Last week, almost 1,000 jobs were eliminated in the American newspaper industry, perhaps the bloodiest week yet of a year where many papers are fighting for their lives. You read about the great names — the Baltimore Sun, the Boston Globe, the San Jose Mercury News — as if reading the obituary page. Rich cities like San Francisco can no longer support a profitable daily paper.
Columnists, reporters, editors, cartoonists and photographers — including some colleagues here at The Times — who brought to life the daily narrative of a city or region have been swept aside. What started as layoffs and buyouts is edging toward closures and bankruptcies.

And here’s the great paradox: all of this bad news is coming at a time when the audience and reach of many newspapers has never been greater. The Internet may kill the daily newspaper as we know it, but it’s allowed some papers to increase their readership by tenfold.

Those who revel in the life-threatening trauma that newspapers are going through, saying they brought it upon themselves by being too liberal, too sensationalistic, too banal — choose your insult — miss the point. People are not deserting these complex and contradictory summaries of our collective existence. Not by any stretch.

Measured purely by number of readers in all formats, many newspapers have never been more successful.

Newspaper Web sites attracted more than 66 million unique visitors in the first quarter of 2008 — a record, and a 12 percent increase over a year ago, according to a Nielsen Online analysis. Forty percent of all Internet users visit a newspaper site. A visitor, it should be noted, is different from a reader, but it’s the measurement of choice.

The Web is the future. And yet, because online advertising accounts for only about 10 percent of total ad revenue, newspapers are hemorrhaging money. In its present form, and even in best-case projections, the Web format will never generate enough money to keep viable reporting staffs afloat at some of the nation’s biggest papers.

That’s the business model crisis, an old story by now, the millstones of capitalism crushing an outdated format. Something new will emerge, a print and Web model.
In the meantime, print reporters strap on the old Webcam, charge up their podcast recorder, grab their notebook and dutifully try to cover a story that now needs to be presented in three formats, or more.

What’s the alternative — the National Public Radio model? It’s possible that some civic-minded nonprofits will end up owning one or two of the nation’s great papers, and operating them as trusts, hands off.

But that’s a limited solution, fraught with problems of control and flexibility, and it won’t keep reporters at city hall in Sioux Falls or the statehouse in Santa Fe.

Another response is goodbye, and so what. Look at the auto industry numbers from this week, with General Motors slouching toward bankruptcy.

Besides, there’s plenty of gossip, political spin and original insight on sites like the Drudge Report or The Huffington Post — even though they are built on the backs of the wire services and other factories of honest fact-gathering. One day soon these Web info-slingers will find that you can’t produce journalism without journalists, and a search engine is no replacement for a curious reporter.

And just how much do most contributors at the The Huffington Post make? Nothing! “Not our financial model,” as the co-founder, Ken Lerer famously said. From low pay to no pay — the New Journalism at a place that calls itself an Internet newspaper.

Yes, the Brentwood bold-face types who grace HuffPo’s home page can afford to work for free, but it’s un-American, to say the least.

Long ago, I was a member of the steelworkers union, and also a longshoreman. If any of those guys on the docks heard that I was now part of a profession that asked people to labor for nothing, they’d laugh in their lunch buckets — then probably shut The Huffington Post down.

Doesn’t the “progressive” agenda, much touted on their pages, include a living wage?
We could be left with a national snark brigade, sniping at the remaining dailies in their pajamas, never rubbing shoulders with a cop, a defense attorney or a distressed family in a Red Cross shelter after a flood.

My lament this Fourth of July is to ask readers to see newspapers as not just another casualty in the churn of business. Sure, reporters say stupid things and write idiotic stories. Everyone stumbles. But on its best days, a newspaper is a marvel of style and wit, of small-type discoveries and large-type overstatements, a diary of our deeds.

We may still prove Jefferson’s preference wrong: perhaps a nation can function without newspapers. But it would be a confederacy of dunces.