About Burroughs

OK, you saw Running with Scissors, but the story of Augusten (and his coterie of equally dysfunctional friends and family, including my personal favorite, Drugged Out Debbie) continues in his other memoirs, all of which are amazingly true. (Augusten is no James Frey. My friend Jane actually knew his mother's psychiatrist when she lived in Amherst.) I recommend them all: Dry: A Memoir, Magical Thinking: True Stories, and Possible Side Effects.
Now, about Debbie. Debbie liked to drive, anywhere, at very high speeds, and not always with all of her mental pistons firing, but she would get very upset when other drivers disobeyed the traffic laws. (You know, those who would cut you off, steal a parking space, slide into your lane, etc.) Debbie soon found a solution, aided by the opportunities that her day job at Staples provided. She went in search of porn, and as Augusten says, not just your garden variety porn that can be found on the Internet, but really bad stuff from Scandinavian countries. Debbie enlarged her favorite truly disgusting pictures to poster size, then laminated them so they were sturdy signs, and affixed as captions common traffic admonitions, innocuous stuff like, "Use your signal," "Don't pass on the right," "No tailgating." When someone cut her off or equally offended her traffic sensibilities, she would tell Augusten, who would be riding shotgun, to flash one of the randomly selected signs at the offending driver. The people were so stunned by the horrific visuals that, although they may have failed to see the traffic admonition, they usually drove off the road anyway. If you liked this, you'll love the rest! If not, there's always fiction.

What's Wrong with this Picture?

Nothing is wrong, but neither is it what you might expect, if you are given to stereotypes, that is. The two in the middle are the librarians. OK, you can’t see their comfortable shoes, but neither Plainville’s Peter Chase nor Library Connection’s George Christian are what anyone would expect if, for instance, one were going to be a librarian for Halloween. In fact, the one who comes closest to actually looking like a librarian is the one on the left, but she would be a lawyer, specifically Ann Beeson, the ACLU’s lawyer who defended the Doe family, aka the Connecticut Four, for their challenge to the gag order imposed by the USA Patriot Act. The only one who matches a stereotype would be Kevin O’Connor, on the right, Connecticut’s U.S. Attorney who looks like central casting’s idea of what an FBI agent should look like--Irish, beefy, clean-cut, etc.

These four were gathered at Hartford’s Old State House to be interviewed for CPTV’s live broadcast of “Front and Center.” The small audience was, however, exactly what I expected, lefties all, (except for librarians Louise Blalock and Irene Iwan from Hartford Public, Mona Scully-Smith from Glastonbury, and Tony Bernardo, formerly of Suffield’s Kent Library, plus Jack Bradley, library husband and sympathizer.) They all said what I expected them to say, but I just can’t get enough of hearing about this wonderful episode, a classic case of civil disobedience led by four of my colleagues and friends who just said No to the FBI. (If you also can’t get enough, scroll down to an earlier blog, “The Connecticut Four: Just Doing their Jobs.”)

When Peter talked about the urgency of protecting patrons' privacy in the public library, my heart swelled as if I were hearing it for the first time. I was never able to attend any of the court sessions in Bridgeport or New York, but Ann Beeson was just as smart and compelling as everyone said she was. Unexpected was my reaction to Kevin O’Connor, (who unsuccessfully ran for Congress in the First District against John Larson, and who will, I predict, eventually win national elected office.) Kevin and I don’t agree on anything, but I had to admire the man’s mettle in just showing up in a venue where he was the only one on his side. (It was, however, a little hard to take when he tried to get sympathy for his agents by saying that they worked long hours and were not well paid!) Yes, it was all pretty much what I expected. Peter and George (and Barbara Bailey and Jan Nocek, two of the four who couldn’t be there) are people who will always be what you expect them to be—smart, courageous, pro-active, and secure in their convictions.

I say let’s replace that stereotype embodied in the popular culture by the shushing librarian doll and the countless media portrayals of the bun and the half-glasses sitting behind the desk looking out disapprovingly. Let’s replace that image with the picture above—our esteemed colleagues bookended, not by Patience and Fortitude, but by advocacy and adversity.

You Call Him Skippy?

Skippy? That would be Henry Louis Gates Jr., W.E.B. DuBois Professor of Humanities, Chair of the Department of African and African-American Studies at Harvard University, producer of the PBS mini-series Wonders of the African World, author of numerous books, and recipient of numerous prestigious awards, but Skippy to his friends in New London. It was a great night at The Garde Arts Center this past Thursday. As I was hustling into the theater, three buses pulled up to disembark a hundred Coasties intermingled with literary types and just plain folk from the neighborhood. The occasion was "An Evening with HLG, Jr." sponsored by the Community Foundation of Southeastern Connecticut to promote their "Let's Read" initiative, whose goal is "to get every child in southeastern Connecticut, no matter the town or school or family of origin, to love to read by the third grade." Good goal for a good organization in a region with a high school drop out rate that is way too high.

Skippy was introduced by the woman who cajoled him into coming to New London, Bettye Fletcher Comer, a beautiful woman in a smashing light blue suit who is a retired New London school principal and an old friend. I admit it, as charming as Bettye was, and likewise Alice Fitzpatrick, the Community Foundation's President, I expected Skippy to be a bore. The last prestigious author I heard speak in a setting like this was Mr. Updike, and he certainly was, and so very full of hisself. But Gates (I just can't call him Skippy!) was wonderful and compelling, and as much as I hate it when people say he's a regular guy like it's an accolade, he was. (When I leaned over to Betty Anne Reiter to whisper my amazement, she said that if I had read his 1995 Colored People I would have expected just the man he is.) With none of that academic pretentiousness that I was fearing, Gates began to talk about what it was like to grow up in the Fifties and Sixties in America, in West Virginia, no less. He talked about his family and what he termed their blackest values--reading, writing, and aspiring to be a doctor or a lawyer. He talked about how the factory workers in his home town of Piedmont, WV, were proud of his and his brother's academic accomplishments, how they encouraged him when he transferred from the local community college to Yale. And when he went on to Cambridge (not the one in Massachusetts) he found African teachers and fellow students who have remained lifelong friends.

Gates reminded us that this is the generation that produced not only Beloved, the number one novel of the last twenty-five years, but also Invisible Man, 1965's number one novel of the last twenty five years. Gates was unequivocal in attributing his success to affirmative action, without which he believes he would never have gotten out of the community college, no matter his record of straight A's. (He tells how his older brother was demoted from valedictorian to salutatorian so as not to embarrass his high school, and how his friend Governor Jay Rockefeller re-instated his brother's Golden Horseshoe award which a segregated society had been too skittish to bestow on a black man in the 1950's.) As further proof of the need for affirmative action, Gates brought it home by reminding us that Yale had a quota for Roman Catholics until 1963. In 1966, only six Black men graduated from Yale, compared to 96 in his class of '73. "Do you think Black men got that much smarter in ten years?" he asked. He told us something else I never knew about civil rights icon Rosa Parks. He said, "Do you think she was just tired that day on the bus in Montgomery?" On the contrary, Parks' disobedience was carefully stage-managed by civil rights leaders, and Parks was just as carefully chosen for her role. Months before Parks' action, another black woman had taken a seat in the front of the bus, but she was too dark, and too pregnant with an out-of-wedlock child, not the type they wanted for that historic role. Parks had been schooled in the ways of non-violence, and her looks and her manner were just right for her to be able to represent the race. Likewise, Gates said, with Jackie Robinson, James Meredith, and Charlayne Hunter-Gault.

"What has happened since the Sixties?" Gates asks. He thinks if Martin Luther King were alive today he would say that we need another civil rights movement based on class. Gates would like to see the "Let's Read" campaign go national because he says everything comes from literacy. Gates wants a return to the "barbershop values" of the men who encouraged young men like himself and friends Cornell West and Bettye Fletcher and her husband to get a job, avoid having babies out of wedlock, and never show up without your shoes shined, because you've got to represent the race. "We've got too much bling. We've lost our way and we've got to get it back."

When interviewer Reid MacCluggage offered to donate his copy of Gates' documentary series African American Lives (for whose production Gates credits Oprah Winfrey) to the library, Gates told MacCluggage to keep his copy; he would give six copies to the New London Public library. As Gates said, "If I sell 30,000 copies of a book, that reaches a lot of people, but 11 million people saw that documentary." Oprah's Roots is due out in February, 2007, to be followed by a sequel to Lives in 2008. Gates closed with a good humored account of his induction into the Sons of the American Revolution, for which he was declared eligible after tracing his genealogy with the help of DNA testing.

Henry Louis Gates Jr. may look like a pointy headed intellectual from Harvard, but he's still his mother's son who went to Yale and who came to New London so Bettye Fletcher's students and the students who will benefit from the "Let's Read" campaign will get back in touch with those barbershop values. Thanks, Skippy. We needed that, and you.

Communications 101

Let's face it; those of us whose fiftieth year has come and gone are a little skittish about communications these days. Sitting in an audience watching the twenty-something in front of you madly text messaging while you are just madly bored brings on a certain jealousy. Those of us who are thumbed out when it comes to texting can feel communications-challenged. We've never made a video for YouTube. Our faces are nowhere to be found on FaceBook. And for our ilk, MySpace is just a hangout for predators. When we were twenty, we sat around waiting for our princess phones to ring, and a calendar was something hanging on the wall on which you wrote in peoples' birthdays.
So it was with a certain satisfaction that I read my daughter Liz' first publication--Client Meeting Guidelines. Liz is a 29 year old vice president at a Boston public relations firm. As such, she has the responsibility of supervising many young (younger than she is!) account executives. And, guess what, they don't know how to communicate with us. Frumpy as we baby boomers are, we are the ones who are now in positions where we make decisions about which PR firms to hire. After enough bad experiences, Liz thought it necessary to give these young texters a short course in communicating with us. So go ahead, be smug as you read these examples from Liz' manual, and I'm not making this up, (because I couldn't!)
from Meeting/Greeting the Client:
"Provide a firm handshake and a confident smile."
from Away Meetings: Getting There:
"MapQuest should only be used as a back up for obtaining directions. If the client's website does not include directions, you should obtain directions from your client directly."
from Appearance/Demeanor during the Meeting:
"Do not chew gum during the meeting."
"Appear awake and interested in the subject matter at all times."
from Communication during the Meeting:
"Do not ask obvious questions about the client's business--you should already understand their business."
from Safe Conversation Topics at Lunch/Small Talk before the Meeting:
"Sports: Red Sox (remember, this is Boston!) or whatever team your client prefers."
and my personal favorite, The Maturity Factor:
"Do not make references to your parents or 'going home' to your parents' house."
"Do not make references to 'when you were little.'"
"Do not let the client know if you have just graduated from college."
"Do not make references to keg parties."
"Maintain solid posture and polite table manners."
Heck, we may be old, but we do know all this stuff. So don't feel sheepish about needing a manual to understand web 2.0 and social networking sites. At least we already know not to trust MapQuest!