Monday, March 30, 2015

Another preliminary glance at the Prentice Hall story: A big firm giving a big push

This story is still not guaranteed to appear, but I thought I’d give some early taste

[Edit 3/31/15. Edit 7/8/15.]
As always, there is stuff percolating in my own sphere of affairs for my two blogs, and I should have a short film review coming soon to this blog. I thought I would say something more about the possible Prentice Hall reminiscence that I mentioned in the just-prior post.

I am definitely taking my time with this, and I definitely would like to get to a point where I discuss the letters between myself and the freelancer (from 1998) I mentioned in the prior post. But I’m debating how much detail to go into on the wealth of activity leading up to these 1998 letters. There is great virtue in both alternatives of a detailed and a sketchy approach: the latter would be better for a blog (and most readers), and the former would actually be more suited to the content, which is an enormous area of freelance work over several months that made huge demands on the energy and time of a set of colorful people, which can pose some lessons for aspiring professionals today.


How do people see some publishing stories?

One of the problems I consider is that I never know how my stories of work for certain standard-type publishers will be received on my blog. (And it’s yet another reason I don’t allow blog comments: I could well imagine some responses would be totally off the wall, and annoying just to behold, never mind answering. It actually saves us all headaches if I prevent these.) When I wrote about my work for Jason Aronson, in a couple parts, over a year ago, I thought the account’s points should be pretty clear, the main one being that (along with being a good opportunity of a sort for me) Aronson was quite a cheap place to work for (and, in some practical respects, quite unreasonable). But some readers might have wanted to second-guess me left and right on some aspects of my story, which possibility I wondered about when I saw what variously-blooming interest the story generated over time.

The Prentice Hall story should be more unambiguous, but again, you never know how people will respond to it, especially since a lot of people who are laymen with respect to publishing seem to want to cling to ridiculous illusions they have about the industry (whether complimentary to it or not).

Here’s one example of a point people would need to get straight on--what it means for many workers on a project to be temps. At the PH project, myself, a few other of the proofreaders I was among, and plenty of “compositors” (layout, art-department people) were all temps. As it happened, this high school literature project, in terms of pages for textbooks being laid out for printing, was apparently usually done (in previous edition-years) by an out-of-house vendor. But this time, in 1997-98, it was being done in-house, meaning as a project conducted by PH itself, under supervision by staffers and with many temporary workers brought in. Now how this compared to previous similar projects of PH’s, I don’t know, but this one seemed unusual in involving a huge number of freelancers, a push to get done in a compressed timeframe, and (as had already been in place by the time we temps were involved) a big re-design of the textbooks (which as a general matter was done by staffers, not freelancers). The re-design aspect worked around the fact that there was a lot of content—selections from classical literature (stories, plays, poems, etc.)—being preserved from previous editions, while there were new reading selections put in, and (I believe) all the student-and-teacher-directed copy was written afresh—this copy comprised lessons spelled out in the book, questions, end-of-section tests, and marginalia in the teacher’s editions.

If that sounds like it was a fun project to be part of, it was, but what really struck you (and certainly shaped your ongoing work) was the volume of material, and how much room there was for error just because of the ambition (in terms of volume and time constraints) of the project. For instance, each textbook (for grades nine through 12) was about 1,000 pages; and each teacher’s edition was the same (because the TEs basically took all the student pages, and expanded the page size, on the extra space being all the teacher-exclusive marginalia). So you had a total of 8,000 pages. Now, from July through September 1997, there were three of us proofreaders in the “studio,” PH’s name for the production/art facility. The job of us proofreaders was largely layout-related (seeing if all the copy had flowed in right; if formatting of fonts, etc., was correct; and if colors of type was right—yes, these were four-color books; and generally, what we had to proofread for was sorts of things that meant our proofreading was more of a magazine-mentality type).

There were also proofreaders (and/or copy editors) in an editorial department (some staff and some freelance) that was functionally aligned with the studio (we all were downstairs in the facility), and there were more general-conception-type editors (who were, I think, almost all staffers) who were functionally more administrative, coming up with content ideas, liaising with outside contributors and/or such, and resolving complex content issues, who were located upstairs. This roughly describes the situation. So we studio proofreaders were among the more expendable workers, doing work that was a little more art-oriented than “nerdishly verbal,” but there were plenty of other types of editors around who were additional cooks to stir the broth. [Added 3/31/15: The cast-of-thousands and pell-mell approach of this project was such that, about two years later in maybe late 2000, when I worked as a freelancer under Dee Josephson, a veteran educational-publishing editor under whom I'd worked briefly as a staffer at TSI Graphics in 1999, she had the HS lit textbooks to do minor corrections and changes to, with TSI acting as an outside vendor for this. As an indication of how she found the project in its finished books, she was looking at a page spread in the teacher's edition for one grade, where a chart arrayed lesson points, and it was so busy and cluttered that she remarked, "Where do you put your eye?"--and coming from an editor who had once herself worked at Prentice Hall and who had her own eagle eye, this was a solid criticism.]

(By the way, though I had years of magazine experience early in the 1990s, I was gravitating toward more textual and trade-book-type editing by about 1997, and in fact I was doing detailed copy editing for a small company that spring that was of that textual type. Being roped into the PH work—which I took because it meant such a huge shot in the arm of work time and money—left me feeling there that I wasn’t being used there quite well; I should have been among the more textual editors there, but that’s not how I was brought  in to work there. This touches on an ethical/professional issue my fuller PH story should cover, whenever it happens.)


The point I’m getting at: How temps were used for such a project, and how publishing laypeople see temps

Now, if you just consider all this part of the picture, for management to have 8,000 pages—and keep in mind that various pages could come through in more than one iteration—come through the hands of three people was demanding at best, and doomed to mishaps at worst. (More broadly, there are other editorial situations, at other normal-type publishing companies over the years, that I could tell you about that show that sometimes being an editor is “doing the best you can” under conditions that are [on the management’s part] unrealistic at best and shamefully reckless at worst.)

Why weren’t more proofreaders gotten for the studio in this project? I don’t know. In fact, Mike, the one connected with the 1998 letters, was brought in—again, through a temp agency—in about early October 1997, and was with us the last three months [update 7/8/15: on doing further research for this series, I found Mike started only in early December 1997 and was with us two months, an important difference]. Four proofreaders, and still the work was like a big, ever-flowing waterfall of stuff we all had to be a bit manic (in our respective ways) to keep up with.

Anyway, the point I was originally getting at is that at least three of us editors—myself, Rebecca (who had started a few months before I did), and Mike—were all there through a temp agency. Penny, the other of us four who was basically the first among equals of us (not quite a supervisor), may have been employed directly by Prentice Hall (and, working over time on numerous projects, she had only started there about two years before Rebecca and I were there). The way Penny would talk about how things normally worked there (mind you, a lot of these details I only got reacquainted with in recent weeks, in looking over old papers and a journal), she usually had a fairly mundane time working there as a sort of freelance proofreader (she was actually a TV actress by usual trade), and when the PH high school literature project started, she (and maybe some managers above her) apparently thought it wouldn’t be such a monster, in terms of the need for proofreaders.

But it got evident as a monster pretty quickly by about July. A couple extra proofreaders (as I was told much later), one each at different times, were brought in earlier in the spring/summer, and quickly didn’t work out (one was kicked up into sales, where he apparently fit in [*snort*]). Then I eventually was brought in, and once I got worked into the pattern of work there, I apparently was a good, useful pair of hands, picking up a goodly amount of slack, for about three months before Mike was brought in for the final-push weeks.

Some might say: Aren’t temps underpaid dog-work types? I’ve talked about the nature of editors hired through temp agencies, or the slightly more sophisticatedly-conceived “placement agencies,” before (in mid-2012 on this blog). When special-skill workers are hired through temp/placement agencies (even lawyers can be hired through such agencies), it doesn’t mean the work is menial. And the pay can be pretty good.

But (in my experience) one thing that seems common to many arrangements of this type is that, with respect to your particular situation, there is maximization of the power and privileges of the client company that is using you (in this case, Prentice Hall) and of the temp agency itself (which is ironic, given how little work it actually does in the situation). And you yourself, the temp worker, are wedged between a lot of limits, generally speaking, even if the hourly pay seems to make up for this.

Actually, the temp agency that had me at PH—“Prime Time Staffing” (PTS)—did not position itself in the slightly snooty way (as for “creative workers”) that Horizon Graphics did by about 2001 (or even when I first dealt with it in 1994), or the way The Guy Louise Group did by the time I worked with it starting in 2004. PTS (in 1997-98) saw itself more as a regular temp agency…well, these experiences always have nuances worth analyzing, and PTS was amusing in its own right. A story for another time.

But for now, some blog readers who are under illusions about what temping is might say, “Oh, you were hired almost like some kind of day laborer, and then run ragged by handling 8,000 pages of work? Were you suckered?” Actually, being “suckered” was not the problem I would have focused on here, but there were some technical and ethnical paradoxes or problems that are worth looking at, in due time.

Anyway, that’s a start on the Prentice Hall story.


The virtues of big corporations (arguably speaking)

I had prefaced all this with talking about the PARCC test. I didn’t want people who are worked up by the PARCC to think I had any “inside info” at all specific to that. And my testimony might seem like an old war story from a quite-different time.

But what my story does present is that, when it comes to publishing—an area where typically you, the worker, deliver “cottage industry” skills, i.e., hands-on skills, no matter how big the employing company—the idea that a huge corporation can somehow provide a better product isn’t always true. Economies of scale? Money for fancy production? Big corporations might specialize in those, but when a project needs, in the view of anyone using his or her wits to assess it, time appropriate to do the good hands-on work--and as it turns out, the project at hand is so ambitious and hustled-through that it’s a minor miracle the product even comes out 80 percent acceptable--you have to question what value a big corporation provides (which seems often to be in default mode), other than some arrogant shoving of a huge product into final shape, complete with inevitable flaws.

Thursday, March 19, 2015

My coming story on Prentice Hall, if/when it happens

I am just giving this “teaser”/advisory so you know what I had in mind when I said I had an educational-publisher story to tell, and what its limitations and nature will be.  [Edits 3/23/15. Edit 5/29/15.]

I had worked at Prentice Hall as a freelancer (through a temp agency) from July 1997 to January 1998, and again for short periods later in 1998. The period ending January 1998 was on a massive project involving high school literature textbooks.  Then I worked for them in 2001 and 2002 as a freelancer, employed directly (not through a temp agency), doing seasonal work on supplements for the Humanities and Social Sciences department of their Higher Education division. (Believe it or not, I still have my corporate ID card for them, the big-company kind with a cord on it so you can wear it around your neck.)

As some may know, Prentice Hall, among other educational companies, was bought up by Pearson, a British firm, in 1998. The whole conglomerate in the U.S. has been known as Pearson Education, since. The parent company, of course, is in Britain.

Pearson Education has been in the news recently as being the vendor that made the highly controversial PARCC test. In an unrelated matter, Pearson also moved its headquarters this year from Upper Saddle River, N.J., to Hoboken, N.J. (and this move had been in the works for some years).


What could be ahead, blog-wise

I have a host of memories of my experience of that firm from 1997 to 2002, and I could variously tell a limited story or a fuller story (subject to how much I want this to consume my time and energy).

A way I thought my old reminiscences might be relevant to people today who are up in arms over the PARCC would be, actually, limited. First, I don’t think that members of the public’s protesting to Pearson Education (as has happened, in Hoboken), as if the company was the philosophical or legislative source of the PARCC, is especially useful or quite right. But that’s a minor issue, and whether that seems smart is up to the parents who are offended by the PARCC, anyway. My own years-old story would, not especially enlighteningly, support the question, is Pearson a behemoth of a corporation, or does it act like one? Yes, but would that help people understand the technicalities of the PARCC? Probably not.

From my own angle, I was inclined to write on my blog about Pearson/Prentice Hall starting last year or maybe in 2013, but didn’t feel a driving need to, yet. Today, as I get more “into” writing the blog entry, I am surprised at how much I need to joggle my memory. But as with other old topics, I can work up some nice details and a full-enough account. (And I can provide a pdf or two of something as a visual “exhibit.”)

When I recently found some letters (from 1998) between me and a fellow freelance editor whom I’d worked with in 1997-98, I thought this would provide a good grounding for a way to look at the nature of some of the publishing world, and (not the same, of course) of the New Jersey economy. Along with this, supplying maybe the most fun, I would look at how someone (like the coworker just mentioned) who not only was a professorly type but was from well out of the area—as from Alaska, or Washington State—might reflect on these: the nature of publishing and of New Jersey (naively or not).


A practical spur to thinking anew about Pearson

One thing that got me more motivated to write on Pearson is that it amazes me how tough it is to try to get freelance work there—indeed, since about 2005, when I’ve been more apt to send letters to what few contacts I knew there (none resulted in work). [Update 5/29/15: The way I contacted them, I found after checking records, has been more sporadic than I'd thought. See the last paragraph in this entry in this series for more information.]

I think a large part of the difficulty is something that actually, over the past 15 or so years, has defined changes in the business world in other sectors of the economy, particularly among huge companies (or those that want to seem that way)—that, with computerization, the Internet, and the financial challenges to “big-money” corporations, big companies that used to be able to employ freelancers in a generous way of rounding up a herd of locals (via temp agencies) who were a reasonable drive away have generally gotten to be more of an entity that maintains its corporate power and self-protections by doing the most it can NOT to use local freelancers, but to have workers work in “distance” fashion, sometimes in other states (which can help regarding potential employment-related legal issues, as—for one thing—it may place technical stumbling blocks in the way of a freelancer’s suing the employing corporation, or—as relevant—reporting it to state employment [labor-law compliance] agencies).

Another development is that big corporations go as far as they can to handle lots of other stuff as if they are an entity that is “more massive machine than hands-on men”—with work processes, money business, public relations, and such all using online and other electronic means, and “the little workers” kept as at much of remove from power (or within its clutches) within the bigger machine as possible.

How I mean all this will become clearer when I tell my old war story. But be assured that I have next to no info to give on PARCC, as I only learn about that what I read in the news, which lately seems like a lot.

Monday, March 16, 2015

Getting the Knack/Only in NJ: Beard gone, end of the “senior coffee” season

Finally shaved; “Summer Lite” series ahead; my social-media “footprint” (re Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter)

[Edits 3/17/15. Edits 3/19/15.]
.
A few notes. Some of this may seem "a bit much," but it will let those interested understand more why my blog posts aren’t compatible with on-the-fly, young-American smartphone consciousness, but instead may strike some as about as fleet-footed and party-ready as a bulldozer.

But here, as elsewhere, you may be interested to know that the rationale for action may seem “involved” at first, but shows there was more method than expected in the apparent madness.


No more face looking like “I’m unemployed”

Several mornings ago, on March 12, I finally shaved off my beard. It took work. There were about three to four weeks of whiskers, and in some past year or two, I had already cut off a fairly full beard and knew the process was tough, but for me this was the toughest effort yet.

(Strangely, getting a senior discount [see this entry] because of my appearance was happening decreasingly often, almost as if the coming of spring made me look less pathetic and needing a tiny money break. Arctic February was really the prime time for the senior discount for me. Lately, I wondered if I looked less like “an old man needing a kindly break on the cost of his elixir-coffee” and more like a schnook who was merely less-than-fully-employed [which latter, of course, was closer to the truth].)

As I could only remove sections of beard at a time (and it took three already-used disposable razors to do it), I went through stages (as I struggled over a whisker-stained sink, and with inconvenient distribution of shaving cream) of looking alternatively like (1) someone who could turn up in a religious venue of the type presided over by bearded sorts and plausibly look like someone who could lead the meeting; (2) a magician, or vendor (with foreign accent and American-jovial manner) serving some steaming-hot delight from a street-side food cart; and, eventually, (3) more like myself. (Take your pick as to which looked best by many people’s standards.)

But now (March 12), beard newly off, my lower face looked smaller than before. With my beard, I got used to seeing a chunkier jawline (not that that looked so very great). Now I looked somewhat as if I’d been through a period of being sick, or as if I’d just had an operation connected to my face. Either of which, in a way, was true. [Update 3/19/15: I still got a discount on coffee at a McDonald's yesterday; no beard, so it must have been the seedy winter hat. That hat is a true useful tool--a coupon for coffee discounts in the winter.]


Warm-weather blog plans

I’ve gotten away from posting signposts about blog plans, to some extent. But for those interested, probably starting in May, I will do a “Summer Lite” review series again, on films ordinarily requiring little thought to watch, and hopefully meaning a lot of fun. For instance, I’m thinking of doing all three of the Austin Powers films.


Connecting with me

For weeks, I’ve debated and formulated ideas toward saying the following (apart from the issue of my two blogs not allowing comments): To those who have some notion of connecting with me in other social media, a little helpful note:


Facebook. I have a Facebook page, which I try to use as little as possible. I restrict my “footprint” there—in number of “friends,” and stuff I do there—so much that I don’t even include my sister among the “friends” (which she has puzzled about, understandably enough), though she’s a “connection” with me on LinkedIn (where she is definitely less active). Regarding whomever, I have my hands full enough of other stuff (online or otherwise), so I keep a tight lid on my Facebook activity. Meanwhile, among others I don’t know, there are some who have known me for years (their familiar faces turn up in the list of people suggested for new “friending”) who, it seems, Facebook’s algorithms are apt to recommend—and whether or not these people are (in their own right) really interested, please do not take it personally I don’t “friend” you. Or if I consider it at some point, the decision process may be complex and delayed.


LinkedIn. A similar thing (with more solid rationale) can be said about my LinkedIn page, which I am much more interested in. On occasion I “connect” with new people there; but especially with LinkedIn, which I take much more seriously than Facebook, my selection process for connections is careful. But also, the reason why I connect with some and not others can be (to me) so much a weird judgment call that a given instance can seem to violate my own usual considerations (and, really, strongly held preferences) on that sort of thing. In short, some of my LinkedIn connections are people I don’t really know well, while others who may want to connect with me I have known well in the past. Does connecting with relative unknowns make sense? It is a very peculiar area.

For now, a few general pointers:

* Don’t take it personally if I don’t connect with you, or am slow to. I try to limit some activity on LinkedIn, but not as radically as on Facebook. Regarding LinkedIn mainly, I am rather active in second-guessing why I have already connected with some people, but the original reason I connected with them at all is that—according somewhat with the general (and rather naïve) notion in social media that connecting “can only mean good”—I decided in specific instances there was some good rationale to it (and I won’t be more specific here).

* Some people I have connected with, I have thought I could dis-connect with. Not likely, but possible.

* More generally, I come from a time and region of the professional world where who you “allied” with, grew to know, grew to depend on, etc., was very much a function of prior footwork, hard efforts in scouting up new work, sheer chance, developing trust over time, the sheer good graces of relevant individuals, and the generally “far less connected” world we had then. (I am talking about various kinds of traditional publishing here, not the different animal of medical promotions. And I am not talking about the arena of trade books, which for me [especially when I wrote to editors directly, not using a literary agent] always involved different ways of “pitching myself” and working with potential “patrons,” and was always an area very walled-off from my more hands-on, walkabout publishing work.)

It was all like being a bear that knew where to find the good grub by its sheer dogged, filthy footwork—meaning (in the bear’s case) blisters, getting slammed on the head by dumpster lids, getting shooed away by broom-wielding restaurant owners, etc. Meanwhile, if a bear could use social media to find where all to get “eats” (maybe limited by the bear's ability to access a delivery) (with this media function like that real-life app, advertised on TV, that now allows you to order takeout via a smartphone), the bear situation for us humans might be a little hairier than it is now. As it is, the bears amble around, and get into things only as their four shanks, instincts, and energy, and blind chance, allow.

(The way nice work opportunities could come up in the old days I will illustrate, hopefully not long from now, in a blog entry—probably under the “Running with the bulls” heading—that will look at my experience of working for several months, in-house, on a huge project at one major educational publisher back in the 1990s. I think people will find this entry interesting, in part for its having a possible bit of a topical relevance today, but it will take some time for me to get fully together. Also, I got interested in doing this because I found some old letters related to this gig, and these give a good insight into regional differences among editorial workers—such as [some corrections here] a man with whom I worked, [a low-level communications professor] from Alaska, who would move to Kansas [his family was originally from Washington State, I think], with him in 1997-98 getting used to some of the ways of New Jersey.)

More specifically, in the 1990s, as continued explanation for my modern “reserve”: I scouted up work in very dogged fashion (usually by mail)—and (on a different matter) I didn’t go through my publishing travails in the 1990s looking to make enemies (I think I was good at developing work skills on a remarkably rocky road). Nevertheless, as a general matter (and I wasn’t alone in discovering this), you eventually found that some people became totally “on the outs” with you, either from their side or from your side, whether or not for solidly good reasons (or good reasons considered years later). Today, in this online age, when I see that some of the people who, a decade or more ago, made sharply angled accusations of me, or otherwise became quite alienated from me, now turn up in my fulsome “People You May Know” list on LinkedIn, I have to wonder, is this appearance due to their merely checking me (my LinkedIn page) out (nosily or not)? Or are LinkedIn’s algorithms apt to “be stupid” in fishing out these people as potential connections when, last I knew anything about them (and not that LinkedIn could know this), they had written me off as unspeakably beyond the pale? [Added 3/19/15: Two good examples, so you see I'm not full of BS: One "name card," as I like to call it, has been in for many months, of Maddy C., co-owner of All American Crafts. I worked there 1990-91; last had any sort of potential-pay business with them, re a freelance article, in about 1994 or 1995. My experience there through 1991 ended up scalding and highly informative; it's been many years, and bygones are generally bygones there. And I never had any issue with Maddy; in fact, her husband, one owner, offered to write me a letter of reference, which was not at all likely to come from Cam, who was responsible for my leaving. But I haven't dealt with AAC for roughly 20 years. So it's odd if Maddy is checking out my LinkedIn stuff, but not intolerable of course, and not "threatening" in any way. But curious, and not at all something that would have happened in the 1990s. Second example: a name card for Maria Siano, whom I did a blog entry on in spring 2013, was in my big PYMK list for a long time, and it disappeared after my blog entry appeared. My feelings about her are somewhat ambivalent but generally positive. Things got weird with her in about 2000, after in 1999 I left North Jersey Newspapers, where we worked together. Would she likely link with me? Probably not. Was she snooping on my LinkedIn page? Possibly. Problem? Not necessarily. But again, ethically a little odd compared to pre-Internet business realities and mores.]

(This may seem like a fussy point, but to me it seems quite lacking in good taste and good sense the way social media algorithms in LinkedIn can suggest connections between people where, pre-2005-or-so, these people could well have not wanted to give each other the time of day after a decisively-alienating work brouhaha. And don’t ask about forgiveness. In general, it’s not relevant in the publishing industry, especially in the examples of other workers, usually managers, that I’ve seen—again, the area of the media I’m talking about is that of hands-on, craft-is-important, walk-in publishing work, not trade books or medical promotions.)

Along this dimension alone, the social media “ethos” of “Only connect!” is ghastly-naïve, whether from the side of LinkedIn’s algorithms or (here and there, among individuals) some people’s expansive connection-mania. It ignores the reality of such work worlds as the print media, where bitter office politics shape so much of the ongoing “stage” you’re working on, and can shape your prospects for getting work in the future.

This is to say nothing of the fact that those people in certain areas of the media who have several-hundred connections: Are these connections really close associates of theirs? Could the seemingly proud holders of the connections borrow money from them (from any of up to 90-95 percent of them) for lunch on rare days? I would doubt it.

Anyway, most of my LinkedIn connections (1) I know well in some way, and/or (2) I have had good work experiences with in the past, and/or (3) I worked with 10 years ago or more. Or (4) I know them from another past “in the trenches” situation; or (5) they are family; or (6) they were someone I encountered at a workplace years ago, with me not working closely with the person, but the person was willing to connect with me more recently for perhaps some other reason than our practically being associated today.

In short, my LinkedIn group is small but (per my will) more able to grow than my Facebook group, and my criteria for connecting on LinkedIn is a bit thorny (for me) at times, but usually coherent and something I want to be comfortable with.

Again, don’t take my choice to connect (or lack thereof) personally.


Twitter. As for not having a Twitter account (there is/was an account for a “gregorybludwig” that could be found on Google searches, which started in about 2012 and seems to be from me, but which is a fake, not mine, while I haven’t made an issue of it until now): I can theoretically, believe it or not, post tiny messages (I already do so on Facebook), but one huge reason I don’t have a Twitter account is that that platform really requires you to be ready to go online—to respond to some brushfire, or sudden bubbling-up of wonderfulness tied to your posts—very quickly (wherever you are), which I can’t practically do.

I’m very selective as to when I’m online, so I try to make my chances for online business count; and anyway, in organizing my life right now, limiting my being online is very healthy. It helps both me and you. So, among other consequences, no Twitter for me.

Monday, March 9, 2015

Movie break: Watered-down essence of Woody and a tribute to horror/German Expressionism: Shadows and Fog (1991)

Alternative entry title (maybe you like this better): A Europaisch noir/horror-fest in search of a story: Shadows and Fog (1991)

A visually stylistic treat, but with a tired script

In a sub-series: Backtracking thru the Woodland

Fifteenth in a series: Post–Soviet Union Adventure, Days of Clintons Past: A recollection of cultural ephemera of the 1990s*

[*Note: Slight quibble: This film was released right around the time of the dissolution of the S.U.]


It [making Shadows and Fog] fulfilled that desire that keeps me working, that keeps me in the film business. I do all my films for my own personal reasons, and I hope that people will like them and I’m always gratified when I hear they do. But if they don’t, there’s nothing I can do about that[,] because I don’t set out to make them for approval—I like approval, but I don’t make them for approval.

—Woody Allen, in Eric Lax, Conversations with Woody Allen (Knopf, 2007), p. 127 (speaking in February 2006)


Subsections below:
A story of intrigue and social imposition comes with a sort of ominous tone; an all-star cast is grafted to this
Two plotlines stretch a story beyond mere portentous groping through dark streets
The assorted-candy actor appearances mean a roster helps describe the film
Other character actors add to the stew
How serious need Allen have been here? Problems of varying the artistic seriousness vis-à-vis the real-world correlates

[Edit 3/12/15. Edits 3/19/15.]

This film is worth a look for true fans of Woody Allen, but it has serious problems on a number of levels. It is most interesting visually; in fact, Allen’s longtime cinematographer by that point, Carlo Di Palma, won an award in Italy for his camerawork here (Lax, p. 127). And, finding it visually tasty even on second viewing, I would almost say it’s worth putting on—on a desultory Saturday afternoon, maybe—with the sound off, just to savor the unfolding visuals. But then you might wonder, what story goes with the pictures to let them make more sense? And you put the sound on, and are disappointed, especially if your taste for Allen is limited.

This film is noted as his tribute to German Expressionists of the 1920s and ’30s, such as silent-film director F. W. Murnau (his most famous film is Nosferatu [1924]). The Wikipedia article on Shadows and Fog also suggests it’s a tribute to the world-class writer Franz Kafka; but having cut my teeth on Kafka as among the first adult literature I savored as a 17-year-old, I would say this: (1) Allen is the only mainstream director/writer/comedy expert who could (or even would have wanted to) pull off some kind of adept film tribute to Kafka, but (2) the problem with Shadows and Fog is, with Allen’s following what was fairly much a formula for him in those days (when he worked amicably enough with Orion Studios), his version here of Kafka is so slight and watered-down that it almost seems not worth it for him to have done.

That is, his character Max Kleinman—some kind of servile, status-conscious functionary at a local business in what seems a rather cloistered, grim, riverside, stony old town in Mitteleuropa—is descended on one foggy night by a group of vigilantes (who are local townsmen) who are on the trail of a serial strangler. (The police are no longer effective in the case, apparently.) They want Kleinman’s participation, and for him to be part of the unspecified “plan”….

But before long, Kleinman is wandering alone around the town, occasionally visiting others, not sure of what the “plan” is or what his role in it is, and feeling eminently unsuited for (or un-warm to) his role. Here, Allen is doing the kind of comically excuse-making, nervous nebbish that he could do in his sleep. For us Allen fans, his nebbish usually isn’t hard to take, but there is not much of a story here to go with it.


A story of intrigue and social imposition comes with a sort of ominous tone; an all-star cast is grafted to this

His Kleinman’s being roped into the demanding task of finding a serial killer—who, of course, could also arbitrarily come after him—has (arguably) echoes of Kafka’s The Trial, with its renowned premise of a social process snaring someone in as controlling a manner as it is mysterious and (almost) irrational. Also, maybe this film has a bit of Kafka’s short story “The Metamorphosis” with its parable-like narrative of profound, debilitating transformation.

But Shadows and Fog is fairly weak Kafka—because, in a way, no one does Kafka like Kafka, and more to the point, Kafkaesque stories have a grimmer point to make than it seems this story’s ambition to make, apart from unspooling some of Allen’s pet remarks about love, death, and the like. (If one were to reduce what is peculiarly Kafka to an almost logical proposition, it is, “You are handled as if you have no rights whatever, or as if you don’t deserve to have rights.”)  

More shallowly, this film seems in good part, in its peripatetic story, not just a chance to get in some nice, horror-ready visuals (which are its highlight), but to have a ton of actors briefly turn up in bit parts. In fact, this film seems like an early example of Allen’s films (1994-2000) under producer Jean Doumanian, where the point seemed to be, more often than not, to fit in as many famous-name actors as possible, almost as if to cover up a weak story.

Also, this film contains many Allen lines or concepts—arrayed almost like confetti in this script—that sum his philosophy about various aspects of life (which we know is mostly quite pessimistic). These lines we will recognize very well after having viewed (as I have, anyway) most of his decades of films for the past year. If we didn’t love him when he’s at his best, in viewing Shadows we might burst out in guffaws at how many of these lines, posturing here, fall like deadwood in this film.

To put it differently: These sorts of lines, while we can have fun picking them out as if in a game, here sound like inscriptions for Chinese fortune cookies that were written by someone in a bad mood.


Two plotlines stretch a story beyond mere portentous groping through dark streets

Shadows and Fog, in an Allen tradition, braids two plotlines (which are here rather loose and circumstantial), including two (roughly speaking) “constellations” of people: Kleinman and his more button-down, European-burgher world; and the motley microcosm of a traveling circus, in which the most focus is on a sword swallower named Irmy, played by Allen’s 1982-92 standby, Mia Farrow. Kleinman and Irmy will eventually wander the streets together.

The circus subplot. Irmy is initially paired with a steady significant other named Paul (John Malkovich, looking young), who performs in the circus as a clown (most recently, he had trouble getting laughs from the crowd). Irmy and Paul have a (not entirely fatal) relationship problem, and part of their problem is the unresolved question of when to have children. Paul opines at one point something Allenesque (which he presents in mildly debating style, not necessarily as a defiant position) to the effect that a family is death to the artist.

(Allen’s production team’s work at creating a murky atmosphere here is very good. For one thing, the sound editing is tasteful enough that, in the first circus sequence, you can hear peepers making noise in the background [peepers are young frogs that live in wetlands or swamps, and usually make their noise in the spring]. Meanwhile, you tend not to ask yourself: where, exactly, is this circus, which seems so close to a town that seems rather like Prague?)

After Paul’s affair with another circus performer is discovered by Irmy, for a time Irmy wanders through the film alone similarly to Allen’s Kleinman. Irmy has her own little odyssey, including a dalliance, at a brothel where she is taken in for shelter; her horizon-widening dalliance is with an arrogant college student, Jack (John Cusack [URL 1; from now on, numerous links to stars’ names will be in a numbered end-note format]). Jack seems to have the moral-boundary-testing, Dostoyevskian inclinations of Allen’s lead character Chris for his later Match Point (2005).

The sex-themed plot eddies. Later in Shadows, with rather forced Allenesque irony, Paul and Jack, both in desultory wandering mode, run into each other at a bar; and Jack reveals to Paul (without Paul’s indicating he knows who Jack is talking about) that he, Jack, had had sex with Irmy that was unusually fulfilling to her. (IMO, the brothel and Jack components of the film are among the most expendable; Allen has written on sex and its complications many times before [and also after], and actually in arguably boring ways that are better than seen here.)

As it happens, there are two specifically brothel-set scenes (they are the only place we see, for example, Jodie Foster [URL 2], on whom more below); and even the first, introductory one of these scenes—with an expected-fun situation of women talking confidentially in earthy, hearty ways—wears thin on subsequent viewings, rather fast.

Irmy and Kleinman’s temporary partnership. As I hinted, the two of Irmy and Kleinman, in their peregrinations in the dark night streets, become allied and walk together for a time (you would be right to imagine that Allen and Farrow work up a decent enough chemistry here, as was inevitable in 1991 after their now-decade-long partnership in films; as it happens, this was the next-to-last film Farrow performed in with Allen). Still later, Irmy parts amicably with Kleinman and reconciles with Malkovich’s Paul; her and Paul’s rapprochement is inspired and sealed by an orphaned infant they find on the street that Irmy impels herself and Paul to adopt, informally, their own.

Kleinman finds a new career home. As it happens, Allen’s Kleinman, whom we think might be done in by the serial strangler (who, as indications online of this film will readily say, stands for anthropomorphosized Death), is ultimately able to evade/foil him in the fanciful environment of the circus. He has aid from a magician, Armstad (?; it also sounds like Olmsted, and the Wikipedia article spells it Armstead), played by Kenneth Mars [URL 3] (died 2011), who here is using something of the same Germanic-plus-cerebral-infarct accent as that of the wildly comical inspector (with the half-dysfunctional artificial arm) in Young Frankenstein (1974). If that sounds as if Shadows has collapsed into complete camp, Mars’ shtick actually works fairly well here, and it’s pleasant to see Mars doing his old-time thing again.

(At one point, Mars in his lilting Germanic voice says to Kleinman, “Sooner or later we must put on the grey hat of compromise!”—one of Allen’s better figures of speech, and Allen adapts it, to better effect, in the subsequent Husbands and Wives [1992].)

After being somewhat under Mars/Armstad’s wing, and realizing his life is completely in the tank, Kleinman decides to join the circus to practice magic, which he has admitted is a little sideline/hobby of his.


The assorted-candy actor appearances mean a roster helps describe the film

So, amid this plotline and the various visually tempting scenes we enter, among personages we have, not necessarily in the order in which they appear:

* Madonna [URL 4]—yes, the veteran music star—plays the circus performer with whom Malkovich/Paul, early on, has a temporary dalliance. (Madonna is OK here. If you remember, as was loudly enough said when she made her movie debut in Desperately Seeking Susan [1985], she is not an actor; she reads lines, doesn’t act them; but still, that works well enough here.)

* Donald Pleasance [URL 5] (died 1995), a sturdy British veteran of horror (and other) films—as the voice of wary Commonwealth rationality among dark, threatening doings—has a couple short but memorable scenes as some kind of man of science; he is referred to in the film as a “doctor,” but I thought at first he was a coroner. He is eventually killed by the strangler, in a sort of Frankenstein moment.

* Lily Tomlin [URL 6], Kathy Bates [URL 7] (looking younger than today’s seasoned Earth mother), Jodie Foster (!!; this was the same year she appeared in Jonathan Demme’s renowned The Silence of the Lambs [1991]), and Anne Lange [URL 8] are on hand as prostitutes in a bordello of sorts. Tomlin first encounters Irmy on the street, and Tomlin kindly brings her to the bordello. A bit later, Allen rigs up a situation where the camera is roving around the table while the various “working girls” are chatting about a range of things (Foster opines at one point that the love that lasts the longest is unrequited love, an Allen type of line that is less dreary in one or more of his other films where it appears). This roving-camera deal is similar to the famous restaurant scene in Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), where the three sisters, about two-thirds of the way through the film, are talking, and Barbara Hershey’s character pauses with affected conscience…. But this roving-camera thing in Shadows is both clumsily done technically and not apt to do much to improve a tiredly-written scene.

In the bordello, Irmy is somewhat like a naif “lined up for an awakening,” rather like Janice in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, as brought to the doorstep of a possible new, mind-changing area of the world and life. Eventually a set of men come into the bordello, almost as if its MO, for maximum efficiency, is to have the couplings operate all at once, like some kind of orgy (but with couples in separate rooms, one would assume). Among the arriving johns is (no pun intended) John Cusack, as Jack, who takes a fancy to Irmy, and he eventually persuades her to bed with him for $700 (he has to work his way up to the price; she is understandably shy about doing prostitution). This money then becomes something of a Hitchcockian Macguffin for Allen to wind into some later plot details.

(Another Macguffin is a cordial-drink glass Allen swipes from a police station, which can be mistakenly used as “evidence” that he, and not the serial killer, killed Donald Pleasance’s doctor….)

* Jack—along with some of the prostitutes—actually gets the chance to deliver some of the more banal lines in this film, as I hinted earlier. In the scene I mentioned where Paul and Jack cross paths in a bar, one of Cusack’s lines is about the way he and Irmy had a wonderful time, and that evidently Jack serviced Irmy in a way that her “clown” of a boyfriend apparently hadn’t been, which of course leads to the comic point where Paul recognizes which female Jack is talking about. Then when Jack observes that after their fling, he had no more urge for her, and this showed that their (more exactly, his) passion was an example of lust more than love. (This reading is not the exact words, but Cusack’s formulation is an Allen throwaway—I think its earliest instance, or a derivation, is in A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy [1982], and the cumulation of Allen’s characters’ throughout several films dropping this general line means, for me, it grows in being tiring each time I hear it.)

In this same scene, before the recognition of who did what with Irmy, Paul remarks that women are “All we’ll ever know of heaven,” which is something of a paraphrase of a line from, I think, Albert Camus, which Allen also alludes to more explicitly in, I think, Anything Else (2003), and/or some other of his films. Without missing a beat in Shadows, Cusack/Jack takes the banality here a little further with, “And all we need know of hell.” (We in the audience shift awkwardly in our seat, maybe.)

Cusack/Jack further seems to parodize Allen when, presumably as a “thoughtful student,” he remarks, apropos of his earlier comment “There’s no point to anything,” “Somehow my blood always said ‘Live, live.’ And I always listened to my blood.” Allen himself makes roughly the same point, in a real-life interview, in Lax p. 124 (in February 2006) regarding Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) and/or Match Point. While this may be a decent enough philosophic point offered in the right context with the right tone, here it sounds like a rather fatuous college student dribbling pessimism that is not borne out by his experience, who could be advised, “With all due respect, I think maybe you could use a stop at the student mental-health center.”


Other character actors add to the stew

* Josef Sommer [URL 9], who plays the heavy (the corrupt police director) in Witness (1985), is on hand here as a priest who is only too willing to take some of the $700 that Irmy has elected to give away to charity.

So many other actors turn up, often half in the shadows, that you would barely notice them.

* Fred Gwynne [URL 10] (died 1993), a couple years from his tasty turn as the judge in My Cousin Vinny (1993), is one of the burghers on the street (or in a doorway) confronting Kleinman.

* David Ogden Stiers [URL 11] is briefly on hand in an early scene, but at least he’s given the benefit of a full, sharp focus on his distinctive face. And he delivers his limited lines with enough portentousness to complement Allen’s film—which film maybe, during production, Ogden Stiers felt (as might have Allen) was a bit of a burlesque as well as a good-faith homage.

* Wallace Shawn [URL 12] (why not? He was free one day during production) makes an equally fleeting, and similarly situated, appearance. Here, his lines are so few—and unmemorable—that he adds to what seems his truly fun reputation among Allen’s films: we might not remember what spelled-out specifics there were to his character or his part of the given plot, but we remember his being in a given Allen film (Manhattan, The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, Melinda and Melinda) by virtue of his crumpled Cabbage Patch Kid face and collegial speaking tone. “Oh, yeah, Wallace Shawn was in that film. I don’t know what he did, but he was there, and livened his scene up!”

* Philip Bosco [URL 13], who had been in Allen’s estimable Another Woman (1988), is here as Mr. Paulsen, who is Kleinman’s boss, whom Kleinman finds acts like a peeping tom on the street.

* Julie Kavner [URL 14], a help to Allen in several films (including Hannah and Her Sisters [1986] and Radio Days [1987]) appears in a brief sequence, in her home, as Alma, a woman Allen has spurned (here’s another dusty Allen joke: the day Kleinman and Alma were to get married, Kleinman took an interest in—had an affair with, in a closet—Alma’s sister at the last minute, while Alma was waiting at the altar). Kavner delivers the juice in giving Kleinman a good tongue-lashing as she chases him out of her home, not giving him the quarter he seeks. This works well enough for the film as farce, but it seems like the kind of scene Allen and Kavner could do in their sleep. (It also seems like an old, second-rate radio skit.)

##

A lot of this stuff—for the average viewer, not an Allenophile—is like some entertainment you had at the Nevele hotel way back when, when Lainie Kazan was the headliner in the supper-club venue; and you know you saw her, and you had fun, but you really can’t remember much of what was in the show afterward. And you didn’t even have that much to drink, either.

Which brings up….


How serious need Allen have been here? Problems of varying the artistic seriousness vis-à-vis the real-world correlates

Near the film’s end, Mars’ hamming around with his accent really seems to put into perspective what this film should be taken as, just a spell of goofing around, rather than anything too serious; and I think most of the actors knew Shadows was no serious dish of super-heavy themes. And yet this fact is such that it actually puts into relief something else about the film that is, perhaps, inadvisable: specifically, as exampled in a sequence where something possibly “heavier than usual is going on,” a sort of thing that reflects an artistic problem that can dog Allen through a wider array of his works.

In the example, Kleinman happens upon a scene where a family, by name Mintz, is being rounded up rather ominously; someone explains they are being handled as “undesirables.” Kleinman responds anxiously, in the family’s defense, by saying that the father does “quality circumcisions—I’ve seen his work!”

One suspects that the situation of “undesirables” is something of an allusion to Nazi-style rounding up of Jews (and/or, to stretch a historical reference, pogroms against Jews in Russia), though the situation here, as to specifics, is quite watered down by comparison. Now, of course, there are historical circumstances of 1991 that qualify what criticism can be made here: Orion Pictures may, in general, have wanted Allen to stay away from too-heavy subjects; and the times were (un-gravely) such that, as the film was being made, the Soviet Union hadn’t even dissolved yet (while the charged-but-short Persian Gulf war had happened early in the year), never mind that what would happen in the Balkans was a few years off (in the mid-1990s). And never mind that what would happen on September 11, 2001 was a decade off; or today, the festering mess in the Ukraine or in the Middle East….

Allen has not been one to shy from acknowledging, even lamenting, the colder, harder realities of twentieth-century politics and history in his films. For instance, in Annie Hall (1977) his character Alvy takes Annie to showings of the film The Sorrow and the Pity (which is not specifically about the Holocaust); and in Manhattan (1979), Allen’s character Isaac grittily enthuses about wanting to go after some neo-Nazis demonstrating locally, with bricks and bats, which he notes are more effective than written satire about the same in The New York Times.

(Sidebar: Speaking of The New York Times, did you see that obituary of a law professor named Monroe Freedman, in the March 4, 2015, issue [p. A19]? One thing that intrigued me about Freedman’s provocative approach to the area of practicing-lawyer ethics, in which he apparently did pioneering work, is that he held that a lawyer should be so dedicated to the defense of a criminal defendant that Freedman would even condone the lawyer’s allowing the defendant’s lying on the stand: “Though lawyers should advise clients not to commit perjury, Professor Freedman wrote, if it became clear that the client was going to [lie] anyway—or already had—the lawyer’s overriding obligation was to remain silent.” Really? Once again, it seems, in the U.S., criminal defendants can have more rights in the U.S. than other citizens [including law-abiding], such as those swept up as defendants in a frivolous civil lawsuit, in which perjury was committed [I speak from personal experience on this latter]. I was reminded, by this idea of Freedman’s, of an epigraph in Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror: A Reassessment [Oxford Univ. Press, 1990], on p. 71: “ ‘In what did his fascism show itself?’ ‘His fascism showed itself when he said that in a situation like the present we must resort to the use of every possible means.’ ” [typographical format slightly changed; credited by Conquest as an exchange between Andrey Vyshinsky, prosecuting attorney in the Stalinist show trials, and Grigori Zinoviev, one of the defendants, at the August 1936 trial])

Of course, post–World War II American literature, and other verbal art, has gone in all sorts of directions, with varying levels of edifying effects, on issues like the Holocaust, and the social instability in Europe than preceded it. Joseph Heller has been commonly enough characterized as influenced by Kafka in Catch-22, in his depiction (in some ways, fancifully to make a moral point, about 55 years ago) of a U.S. Army that not only can do egregiously clumsy or bad-faith jobs in the handling of bombing tasks (cf. the Vietnam War), but is rife with status lust and petty office politics that echoed, per Heller’s authorial intentions, the white-collar culture of the 1950s U.S. (That is, his novel suggested, creatively of course, that petty white-collar office politics of the 1950s type was already rampant within the wartime Army in the mid-1940s.) Late in the novel, things get more Kafkaesque as frivolous-seeming investigations (and worse) are done of the exquisitely sincere chaplain and others, deliberately commenting on McCarthyist abuses going on in the early 1950s.

By the time I was in college in the early 1980s, it was easy enough to appreciate Kafka as a seminal writer whose work, in its peculiarity, somehow cognized the worst perversions of political life in the twentieth century. Nevertheless, a certain type of comedy that might derive from Kafka, even while skewing to the lighter side, was well understood to not merely make unjustified light of Kafka in his darker implications. In fact, it was honoring of Kafka if one could grumble in a more banal situation such as to say, “That workplace is like some Kafkaesque nightmare. Or like the North Korean government.” Listeners need not quibble with what you knew of Kafka; they might only question whether you were exaggerating a bit in comparing the workplace to such dark literary conceptualization. (Or, on the other hand, they might say you didn’t go far enough.)

For Allen, the problem hasn’t been that people wouldn’t have known what Kafka was about (this may have been truer of 1991 than today, where young people might think “Kafka” was the name of some fantasy creature, with purple hands and yellow horns), or what the idea of rounding up of “undesirables” might usually connote (as in a history class). It’s that Allen’s joke might not work because it’s either (1) being too lukewarm a joke or (2) not going far enough to depict the darker possibilities of what he’s talking about, in this case the understated “rounding up of undesirables.”

In sum, is this vignette of Allen’s (about the Mintzes) some kind of Mitteleuropa nightmare (not un-germane to a Kafkaesque story) that should be looked at as more serious than Allen seems to be making it? Or, if it’s not meant to be so serious, what does Allen mean by bringing up such a thing here, at all? Is Shadows and Fog merely about a serial strangler (who artistically stands for Death), or also about social instability and, possibly, ominous war clouds? How much is it merely a “religious” story about death, versus (also) a political story?

In short, Allen in fashioning a generally light comedy with Shadows may have made this film trivial, or rather starkly flawed, by having it import cultural baggage without doing more to open it up and be more healthily solemn about what’s in it. The film on its surface seems to deal with dark societal developments in a Mitteleuropa swathed in forboding, when actually the story is closer to a tough, foggy night in the West Village.

##

A similar problem elsewhere may bring the point home: Allen inserts a storyline or trope in one film that he is being quite socially responsible about, but then he is being more facetious or off-hand in using the same sort of trope in another film, sometimes one that closely succeeds it. This can be seen in the point his John Cusack character passionately makes to Chazz Palminteri’s Cheech in Bullets over Broadway (1994) about the moral depravity of the latter’s killing someone. Bullets overall is largely a satire or farce. But Allen very sensitively and responsibly handled—in a sober drama—the theme of calculated, premeditated murder in Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989). A few years later, presumably in his assiduous struggle to come up with a viable story for Bullets (especially in the wake of his 1992-93 family problems), he seemed to take the same theme and be a little “too light” with it. (Maybe it isn’t quite so light, for this.)

This way that Allen can, in the larger corpus of his work, go “all over the place,” in tone/seriousness and effectiveness, with his wide variety of stories, I will try to discuss more fully when I summarize him, appreciatively, as a writer.

##

Monday, March 2, 2015

Getting the Knack/Only in NJ: Despite the Siberian conditions, a good winter for “senior coffee”

This follows up the third installment in this mini-series. [Edit 3/3/15.]

Sometimes others’ jumped-to assumptions about you are your friend. Which doesn’t happen very often (certainly in the general area where I live).

Since my February 12 update of that earlier entry, I have gotten a senior discount at a few local fast-food places about half-a-dozen times. Without expressly claiming I’m a senior. It is usually at a McDonald’s in Franklin Borough, Sussex County, N.J., or a Dunkin Donuts I like to go to in Orange County, N.Y. And usually it is young people (twenty-somethings) who make the assessment I’m a senior.

But just the other day, February 27, it happened at a Dunkin Donuts where it hadn’t happened before, one in Morris County, N.J., that I frequently go to. Again, a twenty-something bestowed the favor, and she is one who has waited on me several times before, never before assessing me as a senior.

As empirical observation and easy inferences tell me, all it takes is having grey whiskers, now maybe two-and-a-half weeks’ worth, that may be as awe-provoking a sight of fuzziness as is covering anything that would emerge butt-first out of a hole in the ground, eyes blinking dazedly, after three months of hard winter.

So little else has been required. No AARP magazine under my arm. No low singing of a classic Sinatra tune or something from Guys and Dolls. No muttering the likes of “I have my good days and my bad days” or “You [young person addressed] should value your health when you have it, because when you get to be my age….” (Actually, declined health is an issue for me, but not of the severity of seniors’.) Just the sight of me clinches the deal (and the crazy, grey winter hat helps).

Who says you can’t get a break in this country?

##

Here’s another thing I need not do to get the small favor of the senior discount. You may remember the routines in Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In where Arte Johnson, as the shuffling old man with overcoat and wild white hair clamped down with a hat, approaches Ruth Buzzi as the docile, homely old woman with hair pasted down with a hair net. She’s been sitting on a park bench, and he sits next to her before uttering his spiel. He would say something that offends her (and makes us laugh) and she starts swatting him repeatedly with her purse.

Well, one routine had him shuffle up to her, sit on the park bench too close to her, and in his insinuating, muttering voice, him saying, “Do you believe in the hereafter?” At which she, compliantly, nods yes. “Then,” he says, “you know what I’m here after.”

At which, in high dudgeon, she would rise and start swatting him repeatedly with her purse.

Well, I don’t need to engage in that routine, either.