Off to see the Wizard

I took my five-year-old granddaughter to see a stage production of The Wizard of Oz, Sunday night at the Music Hall in Fair Park. We had good seats (thank you, Craigslist!), and it was fine as far as G-rated family entertainment goes.

Broadway caliber it was not: The Dallas Morning News’ drama critic had complained that the production was a bit cheesy and amateurish, and I have to admit that I’ve seen better acting and singing in any number of community theaters.

But never mind. Isabella and I share a love of the 1939 Oz movie, which we have watched together so often that by now I have memorized every line of dialogue, every song lyric, every bit of business.

Sometimes she will request an Oz song from me, usually a medley of the introductory solos sung by the Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion and the Scarecrow (whom Iz charmingly refers to as “the Squarecrow”). She was fascinated by the whole stage show, although it may say something about the human actors that she was most impressed by Toto. “He’s a real dog!” she whispered, ecstatically.

Oz fanatic that I am, perhaps it was fate that I once met Judy Garland’s daughter. (No, not Liza Minnelli – Lorna Luft.) With my talent for completely useless trivia, I know an unhealthy amount about the Oz movie.  Things like: Buddy Ebsen was supposed to play the Tin Man, but he turned out to be deathly allergic to the metallic makeup and had to be replaced by Jack Haley. But you can still hear Ebsen singing in the chorus of “We’re off to see the Wizard…”

I can tell you that the Munchkin Coroner, Meinhardt Raabe, is still alive at 93. I know that Margaret Hamilton, the Wicked Witch of the West, suffered a terrible burn during one of her pyrotechnic vanishing scenes.

I know that Texas native King Vidor (who survived the 1900 Galveston hurricane) shot the sepia-toned opening scenes of Kansas with the still-amazing cyclone effects, while credited Oz director Victor Fleming was busy with Gone With the Wind.

It’s odd to realize that the film’s signature song, ”Over the Rainbow” almost didn’t make the final cut, thanks to MGM studio execs who thought it slowed down an already-long film. Fleming was perfectly willing to let the song go on the cutting-room floor. The songwriters, Harold Arlen and E.Y. “Yip” Harburg, desperately pleaded their case to Louis B. Mayer himself, who relented — and they were vindicated when it won the Oscar for Best Song.

I still think it’s too bad that the film didn’t use the song’s introductory verse:

When all the world is a hopeless jumble
And the raindrops tumble all around
Heaven opens a magic lane
When all the clouds darken up the skyway
There’s a rainbow highway to be found
Leading from your windowpane
To a place behind the sun
Just a step beyond the rain…

Happily, they used that verse in the stage version, and it almost made up for everything the production lacked, even the Music Hall’s bad acoustics. Seventy years on, the magic of Oz is still there for those who await the rainbow.

Mr. Wright and the spiral of life

There’s a good story in the New York Times about the exhibition celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Even people who haven’t been there often recognize this landmark on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, just off Central Park. It is one of the last great works of architect Frank Lloyd Wright, who died at age 91, six months before the museum opened in 1959.  He spent 16 years working on the Guggenheim, which is one of his most recognizable buildings, probably rivaled only by Fallingwater.

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (NYT photo)

The Guggenheim was a huge controversy in the 1950s. It was called an eyesore, an anomaly, a parking garage masquerading as a museum. I suspect it would still be considered radical today if it had just been designed and built in a major American city by one of the world’s great contemporary architects.

But when I walked into it, I immediately knew what Mr. Wright intended a visitor to feel. Suddenly I was inside a chambered nautilus, that “ship of pearl” as the poet Oliver Wendell Holmes described it: enclosed in spiraling circles and flooded by an ethereal light.

I’ve been an FLW fan for a long time, and any time I am in a city with Wright buildings in it, I try to visit them. I haven’t gotten to them all, by any means, not even close — although I am well acquainted with both of the Wright buildings in Dallas (the Gillin House, which is a private residence in North Dallas, and the Kalita Humphreys Theater building on Turtle Creek). There are so many more Wrights I want to experience, because every one is beautiful and memorable in its own way.

Mr. Wright was a singular genius, and he well knew it. He once remarked airily that he could merely shake his sleeve and ideas would fall out – and he probably did not exaggerate much there. He led an outrageous and controversial life, to be sure. But he was a particularly American kind of genius, one who built for millionaires and for ordinary people alike. He came from the Midwestern prairies, and his love of the American landscape — of its hills, trees, deserts, rocks, skies and water – is evident in every one of his designs.  

Every time I walk into any Wright-designed building, I am amazed and uplifted not just by its beauty, but by its organic quality. For something so completely man-made, every Wright building owns an essential connection to the earth — one that began with Mr. Wright’s turn-of-the-century Prairie houses in Oak Park, Ill., and continued right into the dawn of the space age with the Guggenheim.

Call me Climenole, wordsmith for hire

An Alexandrian  colleague recently suggested to me that, in this current media crisis, laid-off journalists  are suffering a sea change: transforming themselves into experienced (and in some cases fairly expensive) wordsmiths for hire. 

For as newspaper and magazine staffs shrink and shrivel, hundreds of ex-journalists are of necessity becoming commercial writers: publicists, corporate spokespeople and freelance “communications” specialists who wield the English language for a living.

 

Full disclosure: Occasionally, I do this very thing myself. In a practical sense, I find it very much like what newspapers call ”rewrite”: taking feeds of information, quotes and statistics from other reporters and reweaving the strands into a story. Or in the case of PR, not into a story but a press release, or a pitch letter. I have editing experience, I’m a clean writer, and I’ve always been pretty good at rewrite, and so I’m finding the transition to freelance PR writing is not too difficult. 

Here’s the thing: There are plenty of educated business people in this country who are very good at what they do, but who either don’t have the time to write, don’t like to write, or aren’t particularly gifted in writing clear, persuasive English. I have always known I could not do their jobs as well as they do. Now it turns out they can’t do my job as well as I do, either. And so they’ll pay me to do it for them.

When you’ve been a writer all your life, and especially when you’ve been paid to write plain English for a living, you tend to take your ability for granted. It’s surprising to discover how many people do not take it for granted. 

To me, language is just a skill I was born with, one I honed professionally for 30 years. To those who don’t like to write, or who can’t do it so quickly and easily, such adeptness verges on a sort of voodoo magic, rather the way we mere mortals regard the Warren Buffetts of the world. I can’t imagine how the Oracle of Omaha does what he does, but I can admire how brilliantly he does it, and I would gladly hire him to manage my portfolio, if only I could afford it.

Needless to say, my services do not cost as much as even one share of Berkshire Hathaway. And I doubt I’ll ever turn my rewrite capabilities into a full-time job as a publicist or spokesperson, as a few of my fellow former journos have done.  Still, it’s nice to know that I can still spin the straw of raw information into the gold of a paycheck. Especially since I am qualified to do absolutely nothing else.

My Alexandria colleague wonders if  “something of the wild and unpredictable [must] inevitably be disappearing from the natural history of human information metabolism in favor of something more… domesticated.” I suspect he is right, at least for those of us who weren’t all that wild and unpredictable to begin with. The gonzo madman Hunter S. Thompson was never my role model. I was always more into the witty, genteel subversiveness of Tom Wolfe.  

But then, the newspaper culture has been becoming more domesticated ever since I got into the business, in the post-Watergate era. Once earnest young Woodward-wannabes with journalism degrees began flooding into newsrooms in the 1970s, the business inevitably lost some of that raffish, Front Page charm that made it so dear to romantic Hollywood screenwriters. The old-school newsmen who kept fifths of bourbon in their desks surely considered us youngsters a bunch of wet smacks — and worse, a lot of us were forgodsakes women.

It’s probably just as well that most of those old guys are gone now, and can’t see what their once-booming business has turned into, and what their starry-eyed successors have become. For them, PR was the Dark Side. For us who have been laid off and who will never have another job in a newsroom, well, PR is what pays the bills, and that’s all we’re really interested in these days.

In his satire Gulliver’s Travels, Dean Swift invented the character of Climenole, who was a “Flapper.” These servants of the Laputa society facilitated communication between their eternally distracted masters by means of a well-placed smack from a blown bladder filled with small pease or pebbles and fastened to a short stick. In a recent piece in the Huffington Post, Erica Jong suggested that perhaps we have become like the Laputans, so distracted by modern technology that we are living more in the virtual world than in the real one.

If that is indeed the case, it may be that the job of Climenole is one with a bright future for ex-journalists. We’ve always been pretty good, after all, at getting people’s attention.

A front page that’s a work of art

These days, when newspapers are playing it so very safe, it’s weird, wild and wonderful to see something as wacky as the Louisville Courier-Journal’s front page as rendered by a Turkish conceptual artist.

Barons of the press who know their readers

Nicholas Lemann has an interesting piece in The New Yorker, “Paper Tigers,” in which he discusses recent biographies of prominent press barons. He particularly addresses Wall Street Journal owner Rupert Murdoch and his likenesses to earlier media moguls such as Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst (as well as the WSJ’s earlier powerhouse, Barney Kilgore).

(Those who, like me, are devoted fans of Citizen Kane will be unable to read the Hearst passages without thinking of Charles Foster Kane and his fictional New York Inquirer, mercilessly mirroring Hearst and his New York Journal.)

Lemann says that each of these media barons had an individual but uncanny knack for knowing what their readers wanted, and each learned how to build a fortune while providing the supply for that demand.

He concludes:

 These days, we seem to be drifting toward the world that media reformers have dreamed about for half a century, where the press is made up entirely of small players. If we get there, we may find ourselves missing the dinosaurs who once roamed the earth.

Why I bought that Geronimo Jackson T-shirt

Anyone who knows me probably knows about my obsession with Lost (currently airing Wednesdays at 8 on ABC).  There are a number of TV shows I like a lot, but only one to which I am an abject slave. This happens to me every once in a while, pop culture-wise. It’s kind of like how I was hopelessly hooked on Harry Potter from Book 1: I was fixated on Lost from the pilot episode on. As a result, I have spent the past four and a half years either (a) watching Lost or (b) waiting like a lost puppy for Lost’s next season to start. Yeah, it’s utterly pathetic. I know.

The Geronimo Jackson ladies’ T

There’s no really good way to explain my infatuation with Lost. Well, of course there’s Josh Holloway, who plays James “Sawyer” Ford, and Henry Ian Cusick, who plays Desmond Hume, and Matthew Fox, who plays Dr. Jack Shephard. They’ve got some mighty good-looking men on that show, and they’re good actors too. Among the women characters, my favorite is Dr. Juliet Burke, played by Dallas’ own Elizabeth Mitchell. And then there’s a whole raft of other characters: Kate Austen, the former fleeing felon and freckled femme fatale; Hugo “Hurley” Reyes, the large and lovable slacker and lottery winner who calls everyone “dude”; Sayid Jarrah, an Iraqi who was tinker, torturer, soldier and spy for the Republican Guard in the first Gulf War; John Locke, whose paralyzed legs and broken back are miraculously healed as soon as he lands on the island; and Sun and Jin Kwon, the Korean couple with gorgeous looks and ugly personal secrets. Then there’s Daniel Faraday, the mentally fragile physicist and time-travel expert; Miles Straume, the sarcastic “ghostbuster” who talks to dead people; and Frank Lapidus, the ace pilot who becomes quite the expert at flying to and from a mysterious island that doesn’t show up on any charts or maps.

The premise of Lost is well-known by now: In September 2004, an Oceanic jetliner breaks apart over the South Pacific en route from Sydney to L.A. A few dozen people from the plane’s midsection and tail section wash up on an island and await a rescue that never comes. Three months later a freighter arrives on an ominous mission, bringing the news that the world believes Oceanic 815 to have been lost at sea with no survivors. Eventually six of the Oceanic castaways return to civilization, a media army and worldwide fame – while telling no one about leaving behind a group of friends who must fend for themselves as the island goes skipping through time.

But the rest of the Lost universe is what makes most of us fans so happily mental. ”The numbers”: 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42. The smoke monster. Dead people who don’t seem to stay dead. The island’s unseen ruler, Jacob. The gigantic remains of a statue with four toes. The hippie-era Dharma Initiative and its indigenous opponents on the island, “the Others.”  Richard Alpert, the Others’ shaman, who never ages.

On Lost, even the good guys aren’t all good, and the seeming bad guys aren’t all bad either. Flawed, complicated, devious and ruthless though they can be, Lost’s villains are some of the series’ most interesting people. Billionaire Charles Widmore, who used to be the Others’ leader, can be appallingly cruel or astoundingly kind, but he’s never predictable. And Benjamin Linus, the rival who ousted Widmore as leader of the Others, is one of TV’s great bad guys. As played by the amazing Michael Emerson, Ben is bug-eyed and shrimpy, but also steely and manipulative. He looks like a complete milquetoast, yet he commands respect, fear, hatred and loathing. Ben can’t be trusted. Ben lies. Ben kills people. Yet the show wouldn’t be nearly as much fun without him.

One of the show’s little in-jokes is Geronimo Jackson, a fictional 1970s-era band whose name keeps popping up throughout the past few seasons. Right now you can find their single “Dharma Lady” on iTunes (they sound a lot like the Grateful Dead), and you can buy Geronimo Jackson T-shirts online at the ABC.com store.

Although I love reading and participating in Lost fansites and blog discussions, I’ve never bought any Lost magazines or action figures, Dharma Initiative-logoed merchandise or other diehard-fan paraphernalia. But for some strange reason, I decided that I wanted a Geronimo Jackson T-shirt, and the other day I got one. Somehow it appeals to me — maybe because I came of age in the ’70s. If Geronimo Jackson had been a real band, I probably would have listened to them back then. Heck, I’d probably still be listening to them: I’ve got early David Bowie in my car’s CD changer right now, and he still sounds good to me after 35 years. 

After this current season, Lost has one more season to go, its sixth, before the series wraps up. I have no idea how the story of the island and its inhabitants will end.

But whatever happens, at least I’ll always have Geronimo Jackson.  

Can you imagine living in a no-newspaper town?

If you doubt that American newspapers are an endangered species, take note of this:

Last week, the Hearst Corp. announced that, unless big concessions are made by employees (both union and non), the San Francisco Chronicle would be put up for sale.  The Chronicle, which was founded in January 1865, is the dominant daily newspaper in the Bay Area, and on the West Coast is second only in size to the Los Angeles Times. 

Since newspapers are hardly a hot commodity nowadays, that means the paper would be shut down soon. Once the Chron’s gone, San Francisco will be the largest city in America — maybe in the world — not to have its own daily subscription newspaper.

Hearst also is about to cut loose the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The P-Iis the smaller newspaper in Seattle, and it has long struggled financially despite a JOA (joint operating agreement) with the dominant Seattle Times. But the Times is in trouble too, and it may not last much longer than the P-I.  Other Hearst newspapers such as the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-Newsare hanging on grimly. Like A.H. Belo’s Dallas Morning News, they are the only dailies left in Texas’ largest cities, which all once boasted two newspapers each. But the Houston Post, San Antonio Light and Dallas Times Herald have all been gone for years now.

Last Friday, the Rocky Mountain News published its final edition after nearly 150 years of serving the Denver area. The city’s remaining paper, the Denver Post, is owned by Dean Singleton’s Denver-based MediaNews Group — which also owns the El Paso Times, the Los Angeles Daily News, the Oakland Tribune and some 50 other papers, mostly in California, New England and New Mexico.

The Denver Post, like virtually all American metro papers, has struggled financially in recent years. How much longer will the Post survive? Well, since it’s MediaNews’ hometown paper, maybe it will last longer than some of Singleton’s previous enterprises. Here in North Texas, then-young “Dinky” Singleton (a former DMNer) tried to revive the old Fort Worth Press back in the 1970s. When the fledgling paper went down for the count, his employees never even got their final paychecks. (I know this because my husband was one of them.)

In 1986, Singleton came into town with much fanfare and bought the Dallas Times Herald after LA-based Times-Mirror decided to sell it.  He kept DTH for less than two years before selling it to an associate who let it die on the vine. The company’s assets were sold to the DMN for $55 million in December 1991, and the Herald was immediately closed down.

This pattern is not particularly new. Afternoon papers, former afternoon papers and less-dominant dailies have been a disappearing from this country since the 1960s. Two-newspaper American towns are rarer than whooping cranes. The only American city with more than two daily newspapers now is New York, which has the New York Times, the New York Daily News, the New York Post and Long Island Newsday. 

However, now even the city with only a single dominant daily cannot count on having its newspaper around forever. San Francisco may be the first major city without its own major daily paper; Seattle could be the second. Who will be third? Fourth? Newspapers — even those that still make money, such as the Austin American-Statesman — are on the block all over the country. Without buyers, they face certain diminution and probable extinction. Perhaps some, such as the P-I and  San Francisco Chronicle, will continue to exist in a shrunken, online-only format. Many will not even survive to that extent.

Many bloggers and online commenters assume that “everyone” gets his news online nowadays. Recent surveys, however, say about 20 percent of American households do not have computer access, and roughly the same percentage of heads of households say they have never sent an e-mail. 

People who live on very limited incomes, people who live in remote or rural areas, people who aren’t comfortable with new technology or who consider themselves too old to learn about it — those people aren’t going to consider a laptop as a viable alternative for news access. They might just watch more TV news. But TV won’t be carrying local obituaries, church news, wedding announcements, crossword puzzles or a lot of other things that ordinary people buy a newspaper for.

Most of the real “news” on the Web, in fact, still comes from newspapers and wire services (which have mostly existed to serve newspapers). A city without a daily newspaper is a city that can  expect to see more corruption in its government, because the watchdog of a local free press will have been muzzled if not euthanized. Good investigative reporting is something you won’t see much of, once the daily paper is gone. Television stations, with their shrinking ad revenue, slashed budgets and news staffs, are under the same constraints as other news outlets; they’re having to do less with fewer resources, too. 

Personally, I don’t want to live in a newspaper-less city.  Maybe it’s just because I’m nearly 55, but I cannot imagine getting up in the morning, having coffee with my husband and not having the morning paper there to share.

I know that a lot of people wonder what the big deal is, why print journalists and others are so sentimental about dead-tree news. That’s because they’ve never really had the newspaper habit. The feel of newsprint in one’s hands –  like reading books instead of computer screens — will never quite be replaced by a Kindle. 

All I can say is: I feel sad for you folks who don’t know what I’m talking about. You don’t even know what you’ll have missed. At least, not until the next piece of Obama-like history is made, and you realize you can’t even buy a newspaper to save for your grandchildren.

UPDATE:  The New York Times looks into the future with this story: “As Cities Go From Two Newspapers to One, Talk of Zero.”

And KPLU 88.5, the NPR station in Seattle, ponders what it will be like for Seattleites to live in “A No-Newspaper Town?” 

The sounds of silence

Good lordy. I just looked at my blog and realized I haven’t written anything new in weeks. And it’s not because nothing has been happening to me, because plenty has. Believe me. I’ve been one busy, busy girl.

For one thing, we bought a new guest bed. I’m sure this sounds like something that would take all of one afternoon to accomplish, but when you are, as I sometimes refer to myself, “technically unemployed,” everything is more time-consuming and more complicated, because you have to find ways to save money doing it.

It was my husband’s idea to buy a new guest bed. He didn’t think the futon sofa-bed we bought merely two years ago had turned out to be nearly comfortable enough for a normal-sized grown person to nap upon.  It was comfortable enough for me, but then I weigh a hundred pounds less than a normal-sized grown person. (That person would be him.)  He thought it would be nice to have a twin bed in there. Something that wouldn’t take up too much room, and as a bonus, wouldn’t encourage us to have undue numbers of overnight guests.

I pointed out that a twin bed would not be long enough for a normal-sized grown person, and what we really needed was an extra-long twin bed — the kind most often used by college students. Those mattresses are five inches longer than a standard twin bed, and thus  they accommodate nappers who are bigger than your average eighth-grader.

Since he is the one who still has a paycheck, I decided he knew whether we could afford this purchase. We could, he said, as long as we didn’t spend too much on it. So I began the search for bedding bargains.

I found a name-brand Twin XL mattress and box spring on a half-price sale at Sears, for $310. I found a steel bed frame at Wal-mart for $40. I found a heavy, solid-wood twin headboard being sold for $40 on Craigslist. I found a Twin XL waterproof mattress protector, a dust ruffle and a vintage Bates of Maine jacquard bedspread on eBay. I bought  a microfleece blanket for $15, and white Twin XL sheets on sale at Bed Bath & Beyond — $10 for a set of two fitted sheets and two pillowcases;  I already had a Twin XL white flat sheet stashed away.  It took me several weeks to get all of this rounded up, and it only cost us about $600, which we easily could have spent for the mattress set alone, were I not the queen of bargain shoppers.  Granted, it cost me hours and hours of my time, but as long as I’m not charging my freelance rates as a personal shopper, time is no big deal.  

My husband, the one who knows whether we can afford things, also decided we could afford a vacation. I suspect this was mostly because he was going stir-crazy after six months of being cooped up in Dallas. Southwest was offering great airfares, so I did all the trip-planning, and we went to San Diego for a seven-night vacay. I found us a wonderful place to stay on Coronado, with a package deal that included a daily gourmet breakfast for two.  We had a lovely time, even if I did manage to lose my favorite Ray-Bans, which vanished and were subsequently found squished, presumably by the wheels of a car. Probably our own car, actually.

Oh, and I’ve begun freelancing, though I’m still waiting for the actual paychecks to begin rolling in. My first “special contributor” byline appeared in the DMN three and a half months after I left its employ. It was an extremely odd sensation to see my name there again.  It’s nearly as strange as realizing that I’m always seeing old stories of mine re-posted on the DMN website, complete with “Staff Writer” and my old DMN e-mail address.

It is even more peculiar to realize that all these months later, my old office phone number has not been disconnected. I’m not kidding — my DMN voicemail still worked when I called it yesterday. Call 214-977-8710 and leave a message; maybe I’ll call back. Or not.  After all, I’m a busy girl with places to go, people to interview and write about, and 500-page books to read and review. Not to mention cooking, laundry, shopping and errands to do.

I never knew it could be this time-consuming to be a technically unemployed housewife. But truthfully? I kind of like it. I think I’m happier and more relaxed than I have been in years. Our house is paid off; our health is good; the grandkids are thriving. Right now, that’s all I can ask for.

What it’s like to win a Newbery Medal

Not that I know this from personal experience. But Neil Gaiman does, because he got woken up on Monday with that very good news. And in typically generous form, he shared it on his blog.

I’ve always thought it would be very cool to win a Newbery. I don’t know that it would necessarily surpass winning a Pulitzer, or the sainted Nobel for Literature, but the fun thing about a Newbery Medal is that it means both kids and adults will be discovering your book for generations to come. Newbery books stay in print pretty much forever, they always carry the medal imprint on their covers, and grandparents like me will buy them for Christmas presents because they feel anything is better for the kiddies  than another Goosebumps book. 

I actually do buy my granddaughter each year’s Newbery winner for Christmas. She’s only five, and so far her father has only read her one of those books for a bedtime story: Kate DiCamillo’s Tale of Despereaux.  (The Despereaux movie was too scary for her to see, and Daddy adroitly edited the scariest part of the book as he read, but she loved the story, just as I had.)

This past October, Isabella got a little brother, Alex, so I started a new tradition. Every year, Alex gets the Caldecott Medal winner for Christmas. The Caldecott’s given for the best illustrated children’s book. This year it happened to be a book I already knew and loved: The Invention of Hugo Cabret, which was both written and illustrated by Brian Selznick. 

There has been a lot written lately about how Newbery books tend to be chosen by librarians whose literary tastes don’t coincide with children’s, how the medal books just aren’t accessible enough for kids to read with real enthusiasm.  I have to admit I wondered a bit about the Newbery Medal book that Isabella got for Christmas this year: Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!: Voices from a Medieval Village, by Laura Amy Schlitz. It’s written in the form of 22 short monologues, is set in England circa 1255, and is not the easiest read even for an adult. There’s some fairly gross stuff in there about a kid helping to deliver farm animals, for example. But it’s got both  writerly imagination and the stink of historical reality about it, making us realize that medieval life wasn’t all just storybook knights and ladies.

I am grateful to the Newbery because it helped launch the career of my favorite childhood author, Elizabeth Enright. She won for Thimble Summer in 1939, but she then went on to write my great favorites: her four novels about the Melendy Family, and her Gone-Away Lake books. She also wrote many wonderful short stories for adults that were later republished in four collections. 

But it’s worth noting that one of the world’s favorite children’s books was not a Newbery Medal book. It was a Newbery Honor book, the runner-up to that yeat’s medalist. Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White is a very nearly perfect book about life, friendship and the enormous power of words. I still can’t read the ending without choking up.

Not too many people these days read the Newbery Medal book for 1953, Secret of the Andes by Ann Nolan Clark. But Charlotte and her web have become immortal, proving that sometimes readers — not judges’ committees — do know best.

Farewell to ‘The Prisoner’

I was sad to pick up the newspaper this morning and read that actor Patrick McGoohan had died yesterday at age 80. (Yes, believe it or not, I still get some of my news first from the morning paper.)

I was, and still am, a big fan of  The Prisoner, the late ’60s cult-classic TV series for which McGoohan was both creator and star. I remember watching the series as a teenager, and later re-watching it as a young adult, marveling not only at the  twisty plotting and clever dialogue but at the fantastic setting of The Village, where McGoohan’s character, a kidnapped secret agent, was being kept as a prisoner known only as Number Six.

For a long time, I thought that The Village was some amazing cinematic set constructed just for McGoohan’s show, rather as Robert Altman had constructed a town in Malta as the set for his film Popeye. Only later did I discover that The Village is a real place: the fairytale resort of Portmeirion, on the coast of Wales. I resolved long ago to go to Portmeirion on some future vacation. And though I haven’t made it there yet, I still hold out hope that the journey could happen someday.

So many bits of The Prisoner are imprinted on my brain, although I haven’t viewed the series in years. The driving, pulsating theme music; the cool car McGoohan drives in London, a vintage Lotus roadster with the very British licence plate of “KAR 120C”; his awakening to the surreal world of The Village, where everyone dresses nicely and wears a badge bearing their number; the Prisoner’s defiant rant, “I am not a number! I am a free man!”; the deferential dwarf butler; the tall guy who looks like an undertaker; the Village’s omnipresent symbol of the penny-farthing bicycle; the bureaucratic “new Number Two” saying, “By hook or by crook, we will”; the mystery of Number One; “Be seeing you”; and the ominous watchdog Rover, a giant balloon-like bubble that chases and envelopes anyone who tries to escape.  I swear that I have had nightmares about that Rover.

When I went online to read more about McGoohan’s passing, I discovered that the cable channel AMC is making a new version of the series, starring Jim Caviezel and Ian McKellen. This, of course, seems like complete heresy — but I’m cautiously hoping to be pleasantly surprised when I actually see the series.

Meanwhile, I also discovered that AMC is doing us the enormous favor of streaming all 17 episodes of the original Prisoner on its website.  Go check them out.

And, oh yes… be seeing you.

I lost my job a week ago…

…and they said it was nothing personal, just the unfortunate result of severe cost-cutting measures and the awful state of the economy, the rise of the Internet and the fall of the American newspaper industry in general, not to mention the grave challenges facing the company if it was to survive. Apparently they couldn’t afford me any more. I didn’t realize I was all that expensive, but there you are.

They thanked me for my more than 25 years of loyalty and service to the newspaper. They wished me well. They promised to send me a big severance check. They said I could leave right away and didn’t have to finish my work or stay to clean my desk. I could clean out my desk the next day, Saturday, when almost no one would be there to witness it.

But since no one was forcing me to leave the building just then, I stayed for several more hours and started cleaning. I completed and sent over a couple of final, extremely minor stories to my editor. Any personal items got cleared off my desk and deleted from the computer; the IT people, I’d been told, would scrub the hard drive.

They hadn’t yet cut off my phone or computer access. So I sent out a mass e-mail to a long list of people, mostly professional contacts and other people who weren’t working in the building. I wanted them to know not to expect to find me there at the paper any more, and to tell them where they should send future press releases. And to say where they could find me from now on, if they wanted to.

The reply e-mails began pouring in almost immediately, and before I left there were scores of letters. All of them used the same word to describe their reactions: “shocked.” Of course, that was what I was, too: shocked, or maybe shellshocked.

I was inside an odd, invisible but protective little bubble that kept me working, e-mailing, talking, and hugging every now-former colleague who came by my desk to commiserate. I even joked around with my friends, making black-humored quips, shaking my head sympathetically in shared dismay, shrugging helplessly in mutual disbelief. Every one of them used the same words: shocked, unbelievable, incredible. They were the ones who were hurting; I couldn’t feel anything, not really. I did, however, take mental note of who in the department seemed truly distressed on my behalf, and who seemed to be avoiding me. It’s funny how you can do that, how easily you can keep score, even while in a state of shock.

I didn’t cry once, not that day. It was very much like when you first hear of a sudden death in the family. You experience both a heightened reality, and a strange disconnect from same. 

Election karma’s gonna get you

After all the nastiness of this election season, it’s a relief to sit down and watch the vote totals rolling in from East to West.

No more campaign ads! No more robo-calls! No more push-polling phone banks! Peace, perfect peace, with  pundits far away, nattering amongst themselves. The defeated will be off licking their wounds tomorrow, wondering how it is that things went so very, very wrong for them. I believe the correct answer there is: “What goes around comes around. You betcha.”  

ABC announced Texas went for John McCain, stating the obvious to anyone who lives here. The pleasant surprise, for me, is that Obama already took Pennsylvania, and ABC says he’ll win Ohio and Iowa, too. I’m wondering what will happen in Missouri, a bellwether state, but when the big burgs of St. Louis and Kansas City report in, I’m expecting Missouri also will show up in the blue column. But I won’t feel really comfortable until Florida’s called — and called with a substantial-enough margin that there will be no attempted theft, no repeat of 2000’s agonizing butterfly ballot/hanging-chad debacle. 

So far my favorite part of the evening, goofy election entertainment-wise, has got to be NBC’s skating-rink electoral map. It’s one of the dumbest things I’ve ever seen, yet I can’t look away every time they show it. I love the people dutifully adding puzzle pieces of red and blue states to the ice out there in Rockefeller Plaza. It’s just a mesmerizingly ditzy idea, no doubt thought up by someone who gets paid six or seven figures to create ridiculous stuff like that. The only thing that could have made it better would’ve been if they’d had swimsuit-clad Miss America contestants carrying out their home states’ jigsaw map pieces. As much as I love Brian Williams, who IMHO is currently the Sexiest Anchor Alive, I cannot believe he didn’t suggest that.  

But the No Showboating Award goes, as usual, to Jim Lehrer and his PBS news team. They don’t make any projection calls of their own; they just report what the AP and other TV networks are saying. They don’t use a lot of fancy CGI graphics. They don’t try to be anything but serious news people. How utterly refreshing.

A new day dawns, with some inspiration from 1932

After the excitement of Election Night, and the satisfaction of seeing this morning’s headlines, more sobering thoughts are beginning to push their way into my mind.

What a daunting prospect the winner now faces.  So many problems to deal with, the mind boggles. But we know the tumbling economy is what drove many undecided voters to Obama’s side. That crisis, in all its many aspects, will have to be his very first priority after he takes office. Even at this moment, he is assembling the team that will advise him on this most crucial of problems.  

I think Barack Obama will have to launch the equivalent of the Manhattan Project on restoring the economy. If he can bring the best minds together to work out solutions that are not only long-term practical but also acceptable on both sides of the aisle in Congress, he will have pulled off a miracle.

No matter what, recovery won’t happen overnight. Yes, Obama may well need two terms to do it, or even just to get the process well underway; that’s how dire things are.

But as I said to my husband last night, Franklin D. Roosevelt needed three terms and a world war to end the Great Depression. And he had no easy time of it, either.

‘When good newspapers mattered’

Today we attended the funeral of former Dallas Times Herald editor Ken Johnson, whose son Clay is a good friend of ours.

Several people gave eulogies, and a couple of old friends talked about when Times-Mirror hired Ken to come and run the Times Herald, back in 1975, I think. They talked a lot about the Dallas newspaper war, about the great stories that were done, the great staffs that were built. And one of his old friends, a non-journalist from Philly, said something about how Ken “ran a great newspaper back when good newspapers mattered.”

My husband and I just looked at each other. I know what we were both thinking: I guess people don’t think they matter any more.

Maybe they don’t.

And yet… everyone ran out to buy copies of yesterday’s newspaper with the historic, front-page news of Barack Obama’s election to the presidency. People wanted to buy copies as keepsakes for themselves, their children and grandchildren — as tangible evidence of a memorable, history-making event. So many copies were sold that the morning’s edition sold out, and the papers had to print up thousands of extra copies. And this happened not just in Dallas, but all over the nation.

What will people do to preserve their memories of great events, I wonder, on that day when there are no more newspapers being printed?

This samizdat presented by Hewlett-Packard

When considering all plausible disasters that might cause a worldwide breakdown in modern communications, I always think of The Stand, the Stephen King opus in which a superflu pandemic wipes out more than 99% of the world’s population.

No internet existed 30 years ago, when King wrote his novel, so television was the glamour medium of the day. It was also the first medium to be disrupted when “Captain Trips” struck.

Broadcasters who tried to tell the truth of the pandemic were summarily executed for treason. Vigilantes used the last TV broadcasts to conduct public executions.

Radio broadcasters’ executions followed shortly thereafter, carried out by military hit squads. Newspapers, in the form of one-page broadside extras, were issued by small-town newsmen — and by the Los Angeles Times, before its presses were dynamited and its remaining workers executed by the Army.

Hmmm. Do we see a pattern there?

My point is that information can be a dangerous thing. It is something that beleaguered governments like to control when it’s in their interest to do so.

If a government arbitrarily decided to disrupt the internet for “security purposes,” who could stop them? What would take the web’s place, if the old, low-tech technology isn’t there when the new, high-tech technology breaks down?

Without print, the last unlicensed, low-tech form of modern mass communication, there would be no samizdats to subvert a massive official corruption. Come the revolution, I guess our Hewlett-Packard Laserjets might have to suffice for a printing press.

 

Panko crumbs: Better than sex!

OK, maybe that’s an exaggeration. But bear with me here.

Since I lost my job last month, I’ve been cooking dinner at home. Dinners out are the first thing to go when you enter this new, straitened lifestyle that does not include HBO or eBay or $100 impulse buys at Target.

To compensate, I’ve discovered the magic of panko.

Two boxes of Progresso panko crumbs sat unopened in my pantry for a month. I planned to try them whenever I had time. And now, as Mr. Bernstein says in Citizen Kane, “I’ve got nothing but time.”

Memories from the archives

This week I spent a day or two finally, reluctantly, digging through boxes holding 20 or so years’ worth of newsprint.

Here was most of my life’s work, and at first glance, it didn’t look like much. It just looked like enough paper to line a thousand birdcages. Enough to train the Obamas’ new puppy plus all the puppies adopted in Dallas for the next year. Pounds and pounds of cheap, moldering, dead-tree newsprint. Yesterday’s news, indeed.

But as I dug through the piles, I found some things that actually made me feel pretty good.

Here’s the two-part series I did in late 1989, “AIDS: The Shadow of Fashion.” It was, as far as I can determine, the first major media take-out on how the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s had decimated the fashion industry, and on the dire effect the disease was having on everyone in the business. The New York Times had to hastily follow us on this one. I know they did, because their men’s fashion writer, Woody Hochswender, told me so. (As it turned out, he used the same ”shadow” metaphor in his lede.) It was a groundbreaking story — even the gay magazine The Advocate didn’t get around to doing it till a year later – but it was, I was told, “too depressing” to run on the cover of the fashion section. So it ran inside, where half of DMN’s readership probably missed it altogether. Perhaps that was the intention.

Here’s a decade’s worth of High Profile cover stories. High Profile was a Sunday section that appeared in DMN from 1981 until 2000; the cover was always a magazine-length profile of a prominent Texan, or someone who had lived at least part of his or her life here. High Profile was a plum job, and undoubtedly the most fun of all the jobs I ever had at the paper. Where else would I have gotten to chat with sources like Cesar Chavez, Walter Cronkite, Ted Turner, Lady Bird Johnson, Tommy Tune, Bobby Short, Otis Chandler, Larry King, Barbara Walters, George Stephanopoulos, James Carville, Dan Rather and Tom Landry?  

 I wrote well over 100 High Profile covers: writers such as James Michener, Anne Rice, Robert Fulghum. Artists such as David Bates and Van Cliburn. Actors such as Kathy Bates, Marcia Gay Harden, Jamie Foxx and Forest Whitaker. (If I High Profiled an actor, and he or she was later nominated for a Best Actor/Actress Oscar, then he or she was obviously fated to win, because I stand at 4-for-4 on that score.) I profiled the president of CNN, Tom Johnson; PBS talk-show host Charlie Rose; pop singer Lisa Loeb; astronaut Mae Jemison. I even profiled a couple of Texas billionaires: Fort Worth’s Ed Bass and Dallas’ Mark Cuban. The story on Cuban ran in late 1999, and in it, I scooped our renowned sports department and broke the news that he was thinking of buying the Dallas Mavericks, which he did about two weeks later.

Who cares what the readers really want?

One of my compadres on Alexandria noted that most of the blogging he sees is simply aggregation or  commentary on material recycled from newspaper or magazine articles and television news shows. This was my response:

There is a good reason why so much of the writing on the web is mere rehashing of print or TV reports. How many people are going to go out and investigate governmental corruption, expose injustices, or uncover violations of civil liberties, if no one is paying them a living wage to do it?

It’s a pretty dang expensive proposition to do the kind of newspapering that uncovers a Watergate scandal, or any other kind of major investigative piece that results in Pulitzer-caliber reporting. Or even the kind of metro or features reporting that may go unsung, and won’t necessarily win big prizes, but that nevertheless changes people’s lives for the better.

In addition, by eliminating so many of the niches in local reporting, newspapers will inevitably lose what once made them invaluable to a wide range of readers, such as:

Those who subscribed primarily for reliable coverage of local food/dining news, or home/garden/design.

Those who wanted expert coverage of religion or science.

Those who enjoyed in-depth, narrative feature writing.

Those who valued wide-ranging criticism of the arts and entertainment fields.

All those readers will rightfully consider themselves underserved when such locally reported elements drop away, one by one, to be replaced mostly with wire-service copy — and not even much of that.

I cannot tell you how many people over the past three weeks have told me: “I just don’t know how much longer we can keep subscribing. They keep taking away everything I like to read.” And this problem is not unique to Dallas. I can guarantee you that from coast to coast, this discontent is rife among the readership at every single metropolitan newspaper in America, as budgets and staff are slashed to cut operating costs.

U.S. newspapers are under siege, desperately struggling to survive in a floundering economy, amid the demands of a new technological world with which we are as yet less than conversant. I cannot pretend to know where the industry’s ultimate solutions, if any, may exist.

All I know is that the answers cannot possibly lie in failing to give the readers what they actually want to read and are willing to pay for.

* * *

By the way, anyone who has not already done so needs to read David Carr’s excellent New York Times piece on why it’s a very bad idea for newspapers to jettison their veteran journalists. His closing words should  cause every newspaper executive in the nation to sleep uneasily:

Newspapers confront tall, menacing seas in the coming year, but it is a sure bet that the ones that dump the ablest hands on deck will be among the first to sink below the waves.

Change as constant and catalyst

Back in 1995, I interviewed a very smart man named Robert K. Hoffman, who informed me:

“Change is not only inevitable, it will wipe you out if you try to slow it down.”

Did I mention that this guy was very smart?

Robert Hoffman died in 2006 of leukemia, at age 59. I often wish he were still here, so we could talk some more about change, and especially about what it means for the media world of today.

Robert’s astute assessment of the inevitability of change has been much on my mind lately, as I have undergone some major changes of my own.  The big one, as readers of this blog know, was being laid off from the newspaper after more than a quarter century as a journalist.

Now, there’s a change that will knock you for a loop. And I should have seen it coming, but I didn’t.

Why should I have seen it coming? Because I know perfectly well that the business I left is not the business I knew in 1995.

That was the year I began using e-mail. I began exploring the web, which back then was a piddly fraction of its current behemoth self. I began realizing, dimly, that this World Wide Web deal was going to be a Really Big Thing.

What I did not realize then was how quickly the web would engulf the world of communications. How, within a mere decade, it would make everything else look not just excruciatingly slow, but so antique as to be positively quaint.

Up till the advent of the net, the newspaper business had moved at what might be called a stately pace. 

It took centuries after 1440 for Herr Gutenberg’s movable-type model to evolve into automated presses run by electrical power. A printing press in 1500 wasn’t all that different from a printing press in 1800. But in the 19th century, innovation began to speed up, as steam-driven, rotary and electrically powered presses successively made it possible to print first thousands, and then millions, of copies in a single day.

It took only a 30-year cycle of late-20th-century modernization for newspapers to evolve from hot type to cold type, then to VDTs (video display terminals, basically big clunky word processors) and eventually to PCs. The arrival of satellite technology and digital production obviated the need for the “backshop,” or composing room. The disappearance of those production jobs was the canary in the coal mine, but few of us on the editorial side spotted it at the time.

In the mid-to-late ’90s, the internet and e-mail began shaking up newsrooms as nothing before ever had. In the past dozen years, the news industry and the entire world of media have changed at a speed I would not have believed had I not been a front-row witness to it.

Lately, I find myself thinking back to this:

When I was in my senior year at the University of Florida, they took our class outside to the parking lot and ushered us into a big tractor-trailer that held a traveling exhibit: a prototype “modern” newsroom with the first VDT I had ever seen. It was about the size of a mini-refrigerator.

We were told something to the effect of: “This, children, is the wave of the future.” I am not sure any of us believed it then, in 1975.

But I sure do believe it now.

The secret of making a perfect turkey

Thanksgiving turkey is an annual chore, and usually it’s an annual bore, as well.

Your basic holiday turkey generally arrives overdone and tasting dull. This is because most people do not know how to properly roast the big bird. They prepare turkey the way their mothers always cooked it: roasted half a day, unto flavorless dryness, as if to ensure the poor turkey is indeed, well and truly dead.

But I’m here to tell you how to do it right. How to have everyone clamoring for more, more, more turkey, the best, most delicious, and absolute moistest turkey you have ever eaten in your deprived culinary life.

Rule numero uno: Take a tip from the chefs and brine the bird.

“Brining” is chef-speak for soaking a piece of meat in salted water.  These turkey tips came mostly from Kevin Garvin, executive chef at Neiman Marcus, with some additional info from the folks at Calphalon.

 You can buy big Ziploc-type bags specifically made for brining, but any extra-thick, securely zipped storage bag will work as long as it’s big enough. Ziploc makes “Big Bags” in XL (10-gallon) and XXL (20-gallon) sizes. I am thinking the XL bag will be big enough for my 14-pound turkey, but a 20- or 24- pound bird might need the 20-gallon bag.

A book to take us worlds away

The Tales of Beedle the Bard

In a week that opened with some very bad news — the death of a dear friend at age 50, from cancer — I’ve been looking for little things to console me. Comforting things like grandchildren… LOST reruns… Blue Bell Homemade Vanilla ice cream. You know, the stuff that makes life worth living.

Books always are a consolation, of course. For one, I have Wally Lamb’s The Hour I First Believed awaiting me. It’s his first novel in a solid decade.

I can’t help wondering if, somewhere inside it, I will find the reason the author chose this particular title. It comes from the second of six verses in that most famous of Christian hymns, “Amazing Grace”:

T’was Grace that taught my heart to fear,
And Grace my fears relieved;
How precious did that Grace appear
The hour I first believed.

A new Wally Lamb is something to anticipate, indeed. But for me, today, there’s something even better:

This morning at 10, the UPS man rang the doorbell and left me a slender Amazon.com box. Today being December 4, of course I knew what the box held, because I’d been waiting for it since July 31. It is J.K. Rowling’s U.S. edition of The Tales of Beedle the Bard. (The UK edition also is on its way, at insane expense, via Royal Mail.)

How happy it makes me to unwrap this little book! Such pleasure is nothing I need explain to any Harry Potter fan, of course.

Like millions of others, I’ve bought and enjoyed everything Jo Rowling has ever put between book covers. Her deft storytelling and subversive sense of humor have made me her abject slave: content to stand in midnight book-release lines, resigned to two- or three-year waits between books. (Hey, at least she never pulled a Wally Lamb on us and made us wait a decade!)

I have lived more hours than I can count in the world of Jo’s imagination, and I consider them hours well spent. Her work is indeed magic, or at least a universal panacea for whatever may ail me.

With Beedle the Bard, I will read slowly, savoring each fable for the first time. In the back of my mind, I will think of the bright smile that I will miss so much, the kind voice that brought such wisdom and strength into our lives.

Two very special women with a gift for words, who even share a name. Goodbye, dear Kathleen.

And hello, Joanne Kathleen.

In attempt to survive, rivals learn to share

For those who haven’t already realized it:  Two longtime North Texas newspaper rivals, The Dallas Morning News and Fort Worth Star-Telegram, are now sharing arts and lifestyle stories.

I’d heard this was happening, and then I began noticing examples of it in print. For example, the DMN’s GuideDaily section featured a story that ran  in the Startlegram, about a show of Italian artists’ Nativity scenes now on view at the Kimbell. 

It ran in the FWST almost two weeks ago, on Nov. 30; it only got into GuideDaily today. The S-T’s writer, Gaile Robinson, was credited as a “Special Contributor,” the usual DMN designation for freelancers. (BTW, Gaile was on staff at the DMN, some 20-odd years ago.)

Visual arts, theater, dance and classical-music reviews will be shared by the two papers. Will TV reviews be next? Movies? Pop music? It’s probably only a matter of time.

Expect to see shared stories also appear in the food and home sections of the DMN, which no longer have any staff writers and depend pretty much on freelancers for local lifestyles content.

Other parts of the newspapers are sure to be affected. Word is that the S-T will take over MLB coverage for the two papers’ sports sections, while the DMN will cover the Mavs and Stars for both papers. You can bet that ever-observant sports fans will notice that, even if the arts and lifestyle coverage changes happen to escape them.

And why would the DMN even bother to maintain a Fort Worth news bureau any more, if the S-T’s writers now are at the Dallas paper’s disposal?

This is happening, of course, to save manpower [read: salaries/benefits] at both newspapers. The end result, inevitably, will be that fewer local writers are needed on both papers, so the staffs of both will shrink further.

And so fewer voices than ever will be heard in the land.

In praise of the permanent sabbatical

It’s been just over two months since I was laid off from the newspaper. In the meantime, we’ve nearly gotten through another round of holidays, and now it’s New Year’s Eve again.

When 2008 began, I had no idea that by the time it ended, I’d be drawing unemployment benefits and wondering what the next act of my life might be. In that first week or month, everyone I knew who had ever been through a similar crisis echoed the same words: In a year or two, you’ll look back and think this was the best thing that ever happened to you. 

In some ways, I’m already feeling they may be right.

I have come to think of this as my permanent sabbatical. Not a vacation, not a punishment: simply a stage of life where I can do only the work I want to do, rather than the work I must do. Nobody is my boss, and only I can decide what assignments I will take. Anything I choose to do as a freelancer, I do on contract.

Several such opportunities now are presenting themselves for the new year, and I will be happy to try them out. I’m fortunate because I needn’t work unless I want to — or so my husband Steve, aka my personal financial wizard, informs me. But I like to write, and people still seem to want me to write, so I think I’ll keep doing it for pay now and then. It is, after all, the only thing I am actually qualified to do.

The funny thing is that, even without paid work to do, I haven’t been a bit bored.  I have had time to do things I like to do, or need to do, or want to do. On some days I might do nothing much at all – and after 31-plus years of working full-time, that’s been a lovely luxury. Better than a day at the spa, truly.