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.

Pride Promenade 2008

I was lecturing a few of my boy-toy friends yesterday about how fortunate they are to be of the generation they are (they are in their 20s and 30s) because when I was their age a lot of my friends were getting sick or dying. There was a point in the late 80s and early 90s that I developed an aversion to a ringing phone. It seemed like every day there was more bad news, more people I knew getting sick then finding out they were positive, then they quickly got sicker, and at the time, it meant death, certain, swift and agonizing. It was a terrible dark time. Being a theatre person I think I was more tuned in to what was happening than my straight non-art-ish friends. It was very isolating in a way too -- like living through a terrible, roaring plague while most of the population seemed to ignore it as they blithely went about their lives. It was surreal.

Anyway, enough of that. The Pride Promenade in my town gets bigger every year and this year, like last year, was the best ever (so far). It made me smile until my face hurt. It was a good day to be in the world.

here's a message from a colleague in my newsroom:

"Okay, I hear we're losing 1,000 subscribers a week. We're down 200 employees and need to be down 200 more. AND we're going up on the price of the paper by 50 cents a day. "


and here's what hit the wire today:


California Paper to Outsource Work to India

ASSOCIATED PRESS June 25, 2008; Page B7

SANTA ANA, Calif. -- An Indian company will take over copy-editing duties for some stories published in the Orange County Register and will handle page layout for a community newspaper at the company that owns the Pulitzer Prize-winning daily, the newspaper confirmed Tuesday.


Orange County Register Communications Inc. will begin a one-month trial with Mindworks Global Media at the end of June, said John Fabris, a deputy editor at the Register.
Mindworks' Web site says the company is based outside New Delhi and provides "high-quality editorial and design services to global media firms...using top-end journalistic and design talent in India."


Editors at Mindworks will work five shifts a week for one month, performing layout for the community paper and editing some stories in the flagship Register, Mr. Fabris said. Staffing at the company won't be affected, he said.

Mr. Fabris didn't specify which community newspaper would be laid out by Indian designers.
"This is a small-scale test, which will not touch our local reporting or decision-making. Our own editors will oversee this work," Mr. Fabris said in an email to the Associated Press.

The company declined to release the financial terms of the deal.

Orange County Register Communications has struggled in recent months with circulation declines. The Register recently dropped from the third-largest newspaper in California to the fifth-largest, behind the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, San Diego Union-Tribune and Sacramento Bee.

The company has been through three rounds of layoffs in the past year, most recently in April when up to 90 employees lost their jobs. Employees were also offered a voluntary severance program in 2006.



...We should forget about writing parodies about the death of newspapers. Reality is all too fucking unbelievable.

I just love this guy.

And his song totally kills me everytime I hear it.

Here are the lyrics (because the NBC sensors think none of us have ever heard words like "fuck" and "screw" emanating from a TV).

Come Pick Me Up

When they call your name

Will you walk right up

With a smile on your face

Or will you cower in fear

In your favorite sweater

With an old love letter

I wish you would I wish you would

Come pick me up

Take me out

Fuck me up

Steal my records

Screw all my friends

They're all full of shit

With a smile on your face

And then do it again

I wish you would

When you're walking downtown

Do you wish I was there

Do you wish it was me

With the windows clear and the mannequins eyes

Do they all look like mine

You know you could

I wish you would

Come pick me up

Take me out

Fuck me up

Steal my records

Screw all my friends behind my back

With a smile on your face

And then do it again

I wish you would

I wish you'd make up my bed

So I could make up my mind

Try it for sleeping instead

Maybe you'll rest sometime

I wish I could

note to my co-workers: we are so screwed

Publisher McClatchy Will Shed 10% of Jobs

Newspaper publisher McClatchy Co. said it will slash 1,400 jobs, or about 10% of its work force, the latest retrenchment in an industry where business conditions are turning from bad to worse.

McClatchy, which owns the Miami Herald, the Sacramento Bee and 28 other dailies across the U.S., expects to save about $70 million annually from the job cuts, part of a push to pare costs by $95 million to $100 million over the next year.

The cuts, which it plans to make through voluntary buyouts, layoffs and attrition, come as the weak economy and the housing crisis add to the pressures the company faces as readers and advertisers increasingly migrate to the Web. In May, McClatchy's ad revenues fell 16.6% from a year earlier; for the first five months of the year, the drop was 15%.

The planned staff cuts won't be felt uniformly. The Miami Herald plans to shed 17% of its work force, while the Raleigh (N.C.) News & Observer will lose 8%.

Staff reductions are becoming commonplace in the newspaper industry. In recent weeks, Washington Post Co., New York Times Co., and Richmond, Va.-based Media General Inc. have announced cuts. Earlier this month, Tribune Co., owner of the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, signaled it plans to "right size" its work force.

The reductions are just the latest round for some publishers. McClatchy, for instance, shed about 13% of its work force between the end of 2006 and April. But it said competition and "challenging operating conditions" forced it to step up its cutbacks.
McClatchy has been hit harder than most newspaper publishers. It spent $4.6 billion to buy the bulk of rival Knight-Ridder Inc.'s operations two years ago, just as the industry was entering a slump. It also has suffered from its concentration in Florida and California, states hard hit by the housing downturn. McClatchy blames about two-thirds of its advertising declines on those states.

Last month's showing could signal the company's woes are spreading; its print-ad revenue fell 19.5% in the Northwest, where McClatchy owns four dailies.

Deteriorating industry conditions may force even more job reductions. Last year, print-ad spending in the newspaper industry fell 9.4%, according to the Newspaper Association of America, the worst drop since the trade association began collecting advertising data in 1950. The slide has accelerated this year.

McClatchy Chief Executive Gary Pruitt couldn't rule out more cuts. "We're hopeful we won't need to, but we can't predict the future," he said. "I cannot assure anyone that the worst is over."

fear & loathing in the newsroom

FROM: (Insert name of your managing editor)

RE: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love Layoffs

TO: Staff of (insert name of your newspaper)

This morning, I am announcing an implosion (oops, I mean) a reorganization of our newsroom staff in an effort to stave off bankruptcy (I mean) increase web readership. This is an exciting time for our newspaper, a time requiring our gifted and talented staff to exhibit the teamwork that has made our paper one of the most unprofitable (oops, I mean) most innovative in the business. You are all valuable members of this team.

So it gives me great pleasure to announce that we will fire most of the newsroom, effective Father's Day.

As part of this exciting reorganization, we will immediately dispense with traditional newsroom beats. We’re not doing this because we desperately need to reduce our staff within two weeks or face the repossession of our fleet of delivery vehicles. We would have fired these staffers even if our profit margin hadn’t dipped last month to a level that can best be described as “the unhappy side of cataclysmic.” We might even have fired them if our circulation hadn’t plummeted so low that our Sunday edition is now produced on a mimeograph machine in a retired high school English teacher’s garage.

We are firing you all because the traditional newspaper model is no longer relevant to the lives of our reader (I mean) readers. Take the cop beat, for example, and the story on this morning’s front page about the 53 Boy Scouts hacked to death by the disgruntled Eagle Scout. Now, I’m sure the Eagle Scouts among us are transfixed by the killer’s frustrations with his inability to gain a merit badge in oyster shucking. But it is news reporting about just this sort of inside baseball that lead our readers to ask, “If I read this story, how much time will I have left in my incredibly busy life to go online to search for porn?”

So we’re firing our cops reporters and replacing them with Igor, an unemployed Ukrainian podiatrist who will work out of our new Odessa bureau. Working a computer from the front room of his doublewide on the shores of the Black Sea, Igor will diligently update the web regularly with relevant breaking news from our community. In the Internet age, reporters need not be physically present to cover the events of the day. In fact, given the crushing hours that our surviving reporters will be required to work in our new web-centric paper, we will increasingly base reporters in locales not subject to U.S. labor law or the more-nettlesome tenets of the Geneva Convention (See separate memo on the opening of our new Guantanamo Bureau). Igor will make cop checks via telepathy and report the news he thinks is happening, subject, of course, to all applicable ethical guidelines that make our paper a bastion of trustworthiness. We’re not doing this to save money or because Igor will work for pennies a day or because Igor’s vision of profit sharing is a fifth of vodka swapped between dazed colleagues. We’re doing it because we in management hear disembodied voices that direct our actions. We must obey.

From now on, “beat” is just another four-letter word. After we rip them from you like bottles out of the mouths of babes, we will divide the newsroom into seven reporting “teams.” Admittedly, we use the word “team” somewhat loosely, owing to the fact that mass firings will necessitate that six of the seven will be staffed entirely by rhesus monkeys trained in the journalistic arts. Of course, these monkeys will earn considerably less than union scale, though they are not being hired as a cost-saving measure. Monkeys are natural storytellers who can lead our newspaper into the digital age. We would have hired them even if we weren’t hemorrhaging cash so quickly that key newsroom leaders will soon be asked to rob pizzerias to supplement our fiscal 2008 budget. (We are accepting applications to our new Pizza Team and see this as a growth area in our diversified business plan.)

As we move toward layoffs, we regrettably must fire those reporters with the most experience. We aren’t doing this to rid the newsroom of bloated salaries that we are unable to unilaterally cut due to unreasonable, Paleolithic union rules that rob management of all flexibility as we adjust to Armageddon (dang! I mean) a rapidly changing newspaper market. We’re doing this because older reporters don’t work well with rhesus monkeys. Science proves this.

Now, we understand that some of you may question the need to fire Biff Bifferton, our intrepid investigative reporter of the last 23 years. Some of the more anal among you will undoubtedly point out that Biff spent nine years in a Turkish prison after refusing to divulge a confidential source in his Pulitzer Prize-winning project. Yes, who could forget that this series led to the simultaneous resignation of our congressional delegation, the abdication of the king of Sweden and free prosthetic limbs for 341 crippled children. Others might even recall the way Biff repeatedly ran into a burning building to rescue our entire A Rim copy desk during the Newsroom Conflagration of ’87. And I’d be remiss if I didn’t also mention that Biff saved me from a horrific death with a timely application of the Heimlich Maneuver during a memorable performance evaluation last summer.

But this reorganization forces us to reevaluate old skill sets that just aren’t relevant in the digital age. While we appreciate Biff’s contributions through the years, the type of non-visual, word-reliant, overly complicated public service journalism that has made him a beacon of hope for the poor and dispossessed no longer fits in with the innovative, graphics-happy, web-based journalism we now favor. Remember: We don’t write stories to win awards. We write stories to make readers giggle like drunken sailors at a wet t-shirt competition.

So after the publication tomorrow of Biff’s expose regarding the military’s plutonium experiments on orphans and Golden Retriever puppies, we must bid him “adieu.” Good bye and good luck, Biffster!

But no worries! We will not diminish our commitment to the finest investigative reporting this side of Guatemala . In fact, we are expanding our Investigations Team from four to 10 reporters, a majority of whom will not be primates. We will call this new, revitalized team our Investigative Interns Squad, and it will be composed of students at some of the most-prestigious community colleges in Malaysia . Team members are free to undertake any major investigation in the hours they aren’t maintaining our new Malaysian call center.

We also are offering a voluntary separation program for many veteran staffers, allowing us to clear as if with a neutron bomb (fuck! I mean) to reorganize the newsroom to prevent even more firings. Terms are nonnegotiable generous. We will offer one week’s pay for every six months of service, maximum one week’s pay. These employees will be allowed to keep any unused notebooks in their possession at the time they are escorted out of the building by burly, armed security personnel with instructions to maim anyone who attempts to mess with the monkeys (oops, I mean) to a fruitful retirement. And even more graciously, we are offering free foot care for any terminated employee who can make it to Odessa before the end of the year. (One bottle of vodka will serve as a co-pay.)

We are instituting other cost-saving measures, otherwise it would be necessary to hire even more monkeys. With the continuing rise of health care expenses, it is necessary for the company to find more creative ways to maintain the health of our work force. So beginning Jan. 1, the company will offer low-interest loans for any staffer seeking to visit his or her primary care physician twice during any calendar year. While the medical plan will no longer cover hospitalization, surgery, x-rays, splints, stitches, aspirin, emergency care or the diagnosis and care of any tropical disease resulting in greenish, oozing blisters on the buttocks, we are happy to report that the network of participating physicians has been expanded to include most of Malaysia . We, of course, encourage all employees to regularly visit their village shaman for a therapeutic blood letting to ward off evil spirits before maladies escalate and result in lost time at work.

In addition, our travel budget will be vaporized (oops, I mean)slightly adjusted. Reporters will still be allowed to travel to distant locales to report the stories that have distinguished our newspaper for the last century. But they will no longer be allowed to return. Merit pay raises are being replaced by effusive praise and high-protein monkey chow. And finally, to reduce newsprint costs, we are eliminating our daily financial section and will print stock listings on the foreheads of business staffers, who will be asked to begin their day standing at major intersections in the greater metro area.

We are living through the death of our industry (oops, I mean) a media revolution. I know change is scary. I’m scared, too. See my goose bumps? It’s not easy to fire you. Sometimes, you can be difficult, and most of you are always whining. Firing you gives me a headache. It’s stressful and takes valuable time away from grooming the monkeys. We in management realize that when we fire you, you have a better chance of being appointed the ambassador of Uruguay than of finding another job in the newspaper industry. But once you’re fired and you wrap a blanket of newspapers around your homeless body as protection from the cold, we’re sure you’ll be pleased with our new, revitalized product. And we’re absolutely confident that, as a reader, the newspaper will once again be relevant to your life.

um, okay. Thanks!

My friends, R & M are celebrating their 30th anniversary this month. I asked her the other day how she has managed it all these years. The graphic to the left was her response. Which was quite festive when I opened the e-mail she embedded this into at work.

I had a huge crush on my cousin, Mark, from the time I was about 7 or 8 until I was at least 18. Ten

years is a long time to carry a torch. The coolest thing he ever gave me was a cherry red Frisbee which he had painted my name on, Peter Maxx-style with puffy powder blue letters that looked psychedelic and about to pop from happiness. All my memories of Mark are black and white and there is polka music playing in the background and the smell of beer and cigar smoke and the the clink-clank of our great uncles heaving horseshoes around the back yard. But that Frisbee--the intense colors live in my memory like electrified neon and Kool-Aid all mixed together.

My employer is bleeding money with no end in sight and so we are embarking on the downsizing track. Today I had to lay off two employees with whom I have worked for many years. I have known about this for a few days and the anxiety has eaten a hole in my brain. I feel wretched about it and I wonder what I could have done to save them. Of course, ultimately, it was out of my hands. The decisions came from the top and I was the apologetic messenger. But the anticipation of having these conversations has made me physically ill and in some ways was far worse than the actual conversations which I just wrapped up a few hours ago. What surprised me about it was that the co-worker I thought would melt into an inconsolable puddle of tears took it very well and even apologized to me because I had to go through the trauma of delivering the pink slip. The other co-worker, who has always presented as Zen-like carriage sort of exploded on me in anger and bitterness, which totally took me by surprise. The thing is, all the stuff she vented about is valid and I don't disagree with her. Being a grown-up so totally sucks sometimes.

true love

The kid and I went to the mall yesterday. She wanted to peruse bikinis and I wanted to find the ladies room because my bladder was about to blow--too much coffee and bottled water for my own good. I went off to the second floor of Macy's while she wandered in the junior department. When I finally located the ladies room--tucked behind the bridal registry and the Waterford crystal display, I hit the door with urgency. What hit back was an odor that about knocked the wind out of me. It was intense. Someone had obliviously been ill. I heard water running and low voices coming from the wheelchair accessible stall. Two women occupied the stall and as I entered the one next to it to pee, I heard the sound of paper towels being pulled over and over from the dispenser on the wall between the two stalls and the sound of a woman softly weeping. The other woman was shushing her, saying "It's alright now, don't you worry. I've got you..."

It was one of the most intimate and heart-wrenching moments I've ever witnessed, and even though I couldn't see the women in the stall, I imagined it was an elderly woman being attended to by her daughter.

I did my business quickly and exited my stall, praying that no one (like a gaggle of rowdy teenagers) would enter the ladies room and react to the awful stench that had permeated the room. As I washed my hands, I lingered, considering whether or not to call to the women and offer my help (I worked in health care for several years a lifetime ago) but I thought better of it. Some intimacy is just too intense to acknowledge.

The Devil wears a purple poncho.

God, I miss Howard Cosell.

we played a little hookie last week and went to the Outback Pro-Am in Tampa. The greens were a little sunburned but because we went on Thursday, the crowd was sparse and the weather was Chamber of Commerce perfect. The access to the celebrities was startling to me, being as paranoid as I am about psycho stalkers in public places when there are celebs about.

There was one young woman who seemed to be following Stone Phillips around and I became fixated on her because she looked so odd and out of place. She wore a flowy sundress and high heels for god sake, and she had a clutch purse that she held tightly under her arm. She was alone (which I thought was weird) and she walked from one hole to the next and stood silently watching. She just seemed strange to me and I kept telling the GITB to keep an eye on her in case she made a sudden lunge for Stone (who, by the way, is skeletal and has NO ASS whatever but his swing is tres elegant). I kept thinking about the character in The Natural who seduced Robert Redford's character then pulled a tiny little Derringer out of her lady-like little purse and shot his ass for no apparent reason.

I was amazed by the fact that one could literally come into physical contact with the players.

Case in point: George Lopez broke a stumble on my right boob. He had hit a ball so wild that it left the fairway, crossed a cart path and landed on the opposite fairway. Lopez had to trot across the path, through the onlookers and NBC camera crew, and up a little rise to hit the ball back onto the correct fairway. It was a good hit: he made it up on the green and was closest to the pin. But as he jogged back down the rise, he stumbled a bit and I was leaning against a pine tree minding my own business as he stumbled right into my chest. The GITB was impressed that a boob-graze also served to prevent a spill for George. Hey, you know, whatever I can do to help. Oh, and George is way better looking in person than he is on TV.

Some of the big-name players did have a deputy sheriff walking with them from hole-to-hole, but others didn't. I was struck by the fact that some of the celebs were very patient with their fans. I observed some wonderful moments of kindness and sincerity. Lopez was very patient with every kid who asked him to sign a hat, a ball, or a shirt. There were busloads of inner-city kids who had obviously never been on a golf course before at the tournament that day, so they were everywhere and they didn't realize that when one is teeing off is not the time to shout "Yo! That's Ronde Barber!!!!!" But the celebs were accessible, relaxed and, as I said, super-nice. George stopped over and over to chat with the kids, Ronde too. Vince Gill smiled shyly and nodded his head as middle-age women stopped him as he walked the green to tell him how much they enjoyed seeing him in concert a few years back. As much as I think the celebrity-crazed culture we have is fucked, these guys were decent.

not so sustainable

I have been trying to get with the green thing, honest, I have. I'm a recycling fool to the point that I even fish water bottles out of the kitchen garbage that the GITB has tossed in because that's the only option when the recycle bin in the garage is filled, of course. I have replaced all the light bulbs with the new-fangled bulbs that look like curly fries, and there is nary a spray can in my house. But. I cannot do the reusable canvas grocery bag. I see the good, earnest people of the world in line at Publix hauling their canvas bags filled with groceries and I admire them but I can't bring myself to do it. First, I shop infrequently, so when I do actually shop, it's almost two carts full. So how many cute little canvas bags would I actually need? Like 25? Probably. And I don't want to have one more thing hanging around my house. Especially something that can get stinky because some groceries invariably leak, pee, sweat or in some other way perspire. And then what? I have some smelly, non-hygienic bags stacking up somewhere in my house. I'm trying to go the other way--I have been downsizing like crazy and less really is more. The direct relationship between my anxiety level and the amount of clutter in my house is completely clear to me in my old age. I don't need most of the stuff I own and it's going. Every bag of suff I drop off at Goodwill makes me feel lighter. The compromise with the grocery bags is that I am that pain in the ass customer who slows the line by asking for paper. But I recycle it.

giving up actually works

Living in Inferno can be challenging if one entertains fantasies about daffodils and bluebonnets and manicured English gardens. Such dainty flowers incinerate almost instantly here in the sun and humidity. Pretty much the same thing with grass unless you are okay with pissing away thousands of gallons of precious water every month via an automatic sprinkler system--and for what? So we threw in the towel a few years ago and decided to go with xeriscaping. Our yard now resembles a tropical jungle but that's where we live. My neighbors' carefully cultivated spongy emerald St. Augustine lawns and perversely symmetrical hedges are kind of an odd, anal-retentive contrast. I like my out of control native jungle. And letting it do what it wants yields beauty such as this great bloom. So it's all good.

is it "oy vey" or "oi vey?"

my director wants me to perfect an accent that's "a blend of Russian-Yiddish-Brooklynese." Yeah. I can do that. Especially now that I am working with a dialect coach (a grumpy old man who in fact may actually predate dirt). This is hard work but I have to admit it's a blast.

the lover

My girlfriend, Ellen, is one of those salt-of-the-earth, no-fuss kind of gals who lets most stuff roll off her back, puts up with a lot of other people's shit and when they take her for granted the most, she is still totally there for them, every step of the way. Ellen has not had the most ideal of relationships with her mom and I suspect that her mom, a steel magnolia, would have preferred that Ellen had chosen to lead the sort of life she no doubt had in mind for her--you know--marry a dentist or lawyer (with deep Southern roots going back to the Federalist days) she met while an undergrad at Tulane, have a great house in Charleston or Chapel Hill, and a summer home in Maggie Valley and raise her strapping golden-haired sons to be quarterbacks and/or dental/law students in between Junior League meetings and hosting teas for the Episcopal churchwomen. That would have been just right. But, no, El dropped out of college to marry Roberto, a dude from the Dominican Republic, and they moved to Florida where they reared their two hell-raising, swaggering Dominican boys who did stuff like steal cars and set up a meth lab in the garage. They are good boys now, of course.

After much hyperventilation and drama, mama finally accepted El's life was what it was and they got on with it. It was a fine truce for a while, until Beulah took sick. She suffers from some sort of dementia with a special name that is the last name of the physician who managed to differentiate it from some other dementias but tragically, sort of sounds like what is actually wrong with her. I think it's Looper's dementia. Or something like that. The point is that Beulah now spends all of her time--and I mean every waking fucking minute--fully immersed in a gauzy make-believe world that occupies her as if she is watching a never-ending movie starring Fred and Ginger.

Ellen calls it dementia but it doesn't sound all that demented to me. I think it sounds like being on some pretty damn good drugs. Beulah lives in a fantasy world that comes complete with a 24-7 soundtrack of nothing but Italian opera music. And it seems that Ellen is one of the stars of the opera. Yes. Beulah is having a fantasy/delusion that my dear Ellen is having a wild illicit affair with a sweaty, smarmy Italian tenor. El finds that the most disturbing factor in all of this is that her mom really rags her ass when she visits her in the nursing home about how awful she is being to Roberto via her unfaithful and whorish behavior with The Tenor. Beulah is just appalled. So is Ellen.

"Can you believe it?????" she asked me the other day. "After all these years of treating Roberto like shit, NOW she decides he's the poor wounded party because I am allegedly screwing a hallucinogenic opera star!"

I asked her if Beulah listened to such music when she was coherent. Ellen said she didn't think so. But she's not sure. She doesn't remember.

enough