Category Archives: Such is Life

Age 50 has always been considered a significant milestone, spawning endless parties, toasts, silly hats and, dare I say it, trite doggerel.  However, I have come to regard age 50 as merely another year, significant only because of our 10 digits and the resulting base 10 method of counting.  Far more significant is age 54, the age when most advertisers regard you as nothing but worthless chaff as they hone in on the more desirable 18 to 54 age range.  Here is where they concentrate their advertising dollars, thus driving entertainment options.  I find myself slipping out of the desirable demographic.  Increasingly TV shows are a total puzzlement and the ads indecipherable.  (In a related development, the TV clicker has acquired the complexity of an airplane dashboard and somehow our marginal TV viewing keeps getting interrupted with shows about Hulk Hogan that have inexplicably been recorded.) Continue reading →

I stand here a stalwart but beleaguered member of the sandwich generation, a person who has marginal computer skills and even more tenuous tech support.  Activities of daily living (ADL) is a commonly used medical concept that describes a person’s ability to function at the most basic level, focusing on bathing, dressing and preparing food.  While ADL is a useful concept to determine who needs to be sent to a skilled nursing facility, I think that ADL could be easily enhanced to apply to the hapless computer-dependent worker trying to make a go of it in a home office.  Test activities would include rescuing documents that have absolutely evaporated for no particular reason or deciphering the impenetrable jargon in pop-up messages that ask you to agree or disagree.  Finally, one of the expanded ADLs would include a measure of patience.  I would fail on all of them. Continue reading →

Over the past seven years I watched helplessly as my mother’s bright and witty mind slowly unraveled.  And then over a brief 5 day period this July, her physical self quickly unraveled and suddenly she was gone.  Suddenly, I transitioned from a helpless bystander to “a woman of action,” (one of my mother’s favorite phrases).  Along with my siblings and cousins I became engrossed in planning a kick-ass celebratory memorial service for this lovely and generous woman.  The date had to be set, the services of the minister and church secured, selection of music, travel and housing plans for out of towners, hosting meals and organizing flowers.  Given the menu of tasks, it is probably not too surprising that I frequently misspoke and referred to the funeral as “the wedding.”  Nick pointed out that the major difference between the two was that with a wedding you typically have several months to plan.  Of course the other difference was my visit to the funeral home.  My mother was very skilled in finding humor, irony and irreverence in almost any situation and thus I am sure that she would have approved and enjoyed the following description. Continue reading →

What a gift to grow up next to next door neighbors like the Reeds, who had 5 children who pretty much matched up with our family.   There was so much traffic between the two households that Mrs. Reed put stones along the path through the bushes so that we wouldn’t track mud everywhere.  Johnny Reed was the youngest and matched up with my two younger brothers Tony and Tim.  He was such a part of the family that we marked his height every year inside the playroom door along with everyone else’s.  The Reeds always had plenty of ice cream in their freezer, because Mr. Reed had something to do with Kraft foods.  He would frequently get gift baskets from them at holiday time, but they often seemed to be bizarre test flavors.  Our freezer was stocked with a much more predictable supply of ice cream and popsicles, and occasionally Johnny would come over, say hi, open the freezer, get what he wanted, wave good bye and go home. Continue reading →

My father began to contemplate retirement in the early 1980s, and thought computers might be a suitable focus for his newly acquired free time.  When Nick spotted a computer seminar, we thought that this would be the perfect introduction.  As the speaker tried to explain the difference between RAM and ROM, I could see that he was rapidly losing his older audience – eyes were glazing over.  Then one older gentleman raised his hand and asked a simple question about spread sheets, “Who types in all the information into the computer?”  The speaker was visibly nonplussed by this question, shrugged his shoulders and said, “Why you do of course.”  I could see all of my father’s age group absolutely shut down, and the speaker totally lost his audience.  My father’s working life came equipped with a secretary, and I don’t think he knew how to type.  The only vague sense that he had of computers was that they were supposed to make his life easier.  This clearly was not going to happen if he not only had to learn how to type, but also know what to type in if he wanted to use the computer to prepare a spreadsheet. 

From that point on, my father just new technology go.  Occasionally, he would ask, “What is this cyberspace?”  Nick emerged from some family event exulting that he had finally explained cyberspace to my father, but multiple other family members chimed in that they had provided the same explanation.  Basically, Dad really wasn’t that interested and just used cyberspace as a conversation device.  He had decided that it wasn’t worth it to keep up with technology and that he was old enough to manage without it.  After he retired, he developed two hobbies that probably had not changed since Ooga MaGook invented the wheel.  He would spend hours in his wood shop with sandpaper, a screwdriver, hammer, rags and other simple tools.  At his hobby farm, he could be found in the barn in his fancy cable knit sweater shoveling manure or lifting hay bales onto a cart.   This strategy worked for about 20 years, but as technology evolved at a dizzying pace, he suddenly found himself totally out of touch with technologies that had now been woven into every day life – microwaves, cell phones and the internet.

One day I spent a great deal of time trying to explain to Dad the difference between a microwave and an oven.  Of course, adding to the challenge was the fact that my father was a traditional husband who had never cooked anything, and probably didn’t want to learn.  I painstakingly explained that while you could put tinfoil in the oven, you could not put it in a microwave, and while you could put Saran wrap in the microwave you could not put it into the oven.  The next day I arrived and was horrified to see that he was heating up a Styrofoam cup in the oven.  Although I considered the difference between a microwave and oven pathetically obvious, I also realized that this type of distinction might be difficult to keep straight if I was starting from square one, as my father was.  Another time he was at our house and spotted a bicycle cable that was tightly coiled and had a fancy looking lock holding the coil in place.  “Is that a new kind of computer?” he asked.  I initially thought I might be in the same realm as the psychiatrist who had written the book, “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.” Then I realized that my father had no concept of what a computer might look like and had probably only heard how computers were getting smaller and turning into “lap tops.”

We have a basic strategy for whenever my father comes for dinner involving the good scotch, shrimp with cocktail sauce, no vegetables, and after dinner some sort of internet demonstration.  He has been particularly interested in Google earth, where we were able to show him an aerial view of his own back yard, his child hood home and the boarding school he absolutely detested.  Iron ore ships on the Great Lakes or antique cars are another abiding interest.  But even as he was looking at the amazing technology of the internet, his basic question had not changed in 25 years. “Who types in all of this stuff?” he asked.

I tell this story not to poke fun at a lovely older man, but to wonder if I am unwittingly making similar decisions that will come back to haunt me.  Without at least a toe hold on a virtually vertical learning curve, in several years I could be as befuddled as my father.  Maybe I have already made this fateful error.  I have never really needed a cell phone, as most of my work is done from home with minimal travel demands.  Additionally, I felt that I was making a noble (if wrongheaded statement) about the folly of instant access.  One time on a business trip I was supposed to be picked up at the airport by a car service.  When there was no sign of a ride, I realized the folly of eschewing a cell phone.  It was late at night and there were few stores open, so I had to wander around looking for change for the pay phone.  Ten minutes later I was again wandering around looking for a pay phone.  When I finally called the car service number, the phone rang in the pocket of the slovenly person sitting next to the phone eating a greasy hamburger.  My ride had been sitting right next to me.

Now I get extremely anxious if we are driving in a car and Nick hands me his cell phone to make a call.  While the first generation of cell phones resembled real phones, twenty years later and umpteen successive generations of blending cell phones with computers and hifis, this cell phone bears no relationship to what I would consider a phone, in fact it looks like a miniaturized airline cockpit.  Nick would get exasperated as he once again tried to guide me through the steps, which involved double clicking, scrolling and negotiating a miniscule key board.  In one instance, I hesitated and held one key down too long and the “phone” interpreted this as a signal to call the last number received and I ended up calling myself.  

 Clickers now dominant our lives.  As a child I was amazed that my parents grew up without TV.  Now my children are amazed that I grew up watching TV without a clicker.  A profusion of household appliances now come with clickers, including a floor fan where one of the clicker selections is “breeze,” which translates to a random selection of fan speeds to simulate the real outdoors.  We stayed in a ski condo once where the table in the living room had 6 clickers artfully arranged in a fan shape.  I knew there was no way that I could decipher this array and actually was looking forward to a weekend of cards and board games.  However, the teenager in our midst got both the DVD and TV up and running in no time.  I have tenuous control over our own TV clicker, but often call on Nick for more problematic issues.  One time the dog rolled over on the clicker and the TV went black; the situation was only resolved by a phone call to India.  As part of Nick’s job, he often visits his clients in their home.  One of his value added services is to coordinate clickers, if needed.

So what do I keep, and what do I let go?  I will think about it this afternoon as I seek refuge in digging weeds with a shovel.  

The missing words in the following poem are anagrams (i.e. share the same letters like spot, stop and post) and the asterisks indicate the number of letters.  Oneo f the missing words will rhyme with the previous or following lines.  Your job is to solve the missing words based on the above rules or the context of the poem.  Scroll down for more answers.

 Technology advances every day as the earth ——-

 With new innovations that the human mind creates.

 Ancient Egyptians were probably puzzled by the ——- stone,

Now, millennia later, I am just as flummoxed by a cellular phone.

 If keeping up with technologies is something you dread,

 Watch out, soon your ——- will need a clicker to pop up your bread.

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Answers;  rotates, Rosetta, toaster

One day I was sitting in the kitchen as my mother arrived from the grocery store and starting unloading groceries, as she had probably done almost once every day for at least 30 years.  But she hummed and there was a joyous zip to her step.  She suddenly turned to me and said in a triumphant tone, “You won’t believe it.  I saw Sally in the grocery store.  I have not seen her in about 10 years, and she has LET HERSELF GO!”  I had only heard of Sallie by reputation as an elegant member of Lake Forest’s social elite, but my mother offered me no further details on this peculiar nugget of information, probably because she did not want to display the cattiness she was secretly enjoying.

Quite likely glamorous Sally was the life of a party, surrounded by a phalanx of sycophantic men only too eager to laugh at her jokes, pour her a drink, or swing her around the dance floor.  Lake Forest was populated by a swell set, who might hire the band Cream to play at their daughter’s debut, rocking out on a dance floor placed at the bottom of an empty swimming pool.  While this might have been Sally’s milieu, it was not something that my parents were part of, I think by mutual agreement.  I never thought of my mother as a beautiful woman.  Several times she confided in me that when she was younger, some people thought that she looked like Ingrid Bergman.  However she always said this with a roll of her eyes and a shake of her head, implying that everyone was crazy to think that she could ever aspire to the cool elegance of this international movie star.  While I could see the vague resemblance to Ingrid Bergman in pictures of her in her twenties, at this point she was deep into the throes of mothering 6 children, and clearly had no time for elegance. 

My mother never had any interest in style, almost to the point of excess.  She could spend the entire day in a one piece bathing suit that looked more like a children’s romper.  She loved playing tennis in her bathing suit, and on the occasions that she was required to wear white, she seemed to delight in producing some rumpled old outfit, and completed the look by wearing black socks. 

She abhorred shopping and had only a couple of outfits for the few formal parties that my parents did attend.  One of her classic outfits was her pink “peek-a-boo” dress.  This dress featured a really rather sedate rectangular cut out centered above her modest cleavage, but she loved pasting things into the cut out.  I remember one evening she sailed off to a party with S&H green stamps decorating her chest.  Collecting green stamps did not carry any social cachet in Lake Forest, and in fact was something that you would only do very discretely, but my mother chose to blatantly wear them on her chest.  Another evening she pasted dark black dog hair in the cut out.  I truly don’t think that this was premeditated and was not designed to send any particular message, she just wanted to cause a stir.  I envision her looking into the mirror, thinking, “How should I enhance this dress tonight,” and glancing around the room, she spotted the lazy dog, grabbed some scissors and thought, “That’s just the ticket.”  My father was so horrified at this performance that he banned the peek-a-boo dress to the back of the closet, never to be seen again.

Clearly from a starting point of Ingrid Bergman, my mother had “let herself go” in terms of elegance, but she did it such a conscious and refreshing style.  Perhaps she knew that she could not compete with the upper echelon, but more likely she simply had no interest and considered this a losing long term strategy anyway.  Certainly, my mother craved being the life of the party, but her strategy centered around playful humor and clever wit.  In addition to her sartorial tweaks at elegant society, she was always ready to entertain with a poem or skit to commemorate birthdays and weddings.   She amassed all these efforts into a bulging blue binder.  Leafing through it I can see the passage of time, with poems written for the same person on his 40^th, 50^th and 60^th birthday.  I can envision party after party where she arrived with a guitar that she discreetly hid in the coat closet, waiting for the right time for her performance.  Leaping up after dinner, she would begin her serenade, which frequently included a chorus that all the celebrants could raucously participate in. 

Sally might have burned brightly, but as my mother so triumphantly realized, Sally’s tenure in the spot light inevitably succumbed to age and disrepair, while my mother could still command the stage and bring the house down well into her 70s.  I remember one time when I was about ten I asked my mother what the word “sexy” meant.  She replied, “It is a woman who is really fun and makes men laugh.”  Even as a 10 year old, I thought that this definition was missing some key ingredient, but it was not one that mattered to my mother.

 The missisng words in the following poem ar anagrams (i.e. share the same letters like spot, stop and post) and the number of asterisks indicate the number of letters.  One of the missing words will rhyme with the previous or following lines.  Your job is to solve the missing words based on the above rules and the context of the poem.  Scroll down for answers.

If you want to live ******* as a society queen,

And epitomize glamour and monopolize the party scene,

You can’t let yourself go, and will need to count each calorie,

And you must amass a wardrobe that looks like a stylish fashion *******.

 If you rely only on looks, you must treat aging like an ******* that must be treated,

 But the ravages of age are a force that is not easily defeated.

 Better have a plan B, because eventually wrinkles will line your face,

 And you might be ******* forgotten as younger women clamor to take your place.

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*Answers:  regally, gallery, allergy, largely

As I passed by a pool filled with kids on a muggy day, I realized that they were playing the game Marco Polo.  I had played this game as a kid, but thought it was perhaps a faddish or very local thing, but here it was again a generation later.  Marco Polo is an aquatic version of blind man’s bluff.  One poor sucker is the “it” person who is supposed to swim around in the deep end with his eyes closed.  When he yells out Marco! the rest of the swimmers are supposed to yell out Polo! to give him some sort of chance.  I don’t know why we were calling out Marco! Polo! and not, say, John Wayne! Gacy,! and I certainly did not know who Marco was.  In fact, when I did eventually learn that he was an explorer, his identity was so wrapped up in water, I just assumed that Marco Polo was a sailor.   It wasn’t until many years later that I discovered that he spent 24 years walking across Asia.  

The sounds of the kids voices made me smile, because I positively knew that every kid playing that game was cheating.  There was no way that anyone could tell if you opened your eyes a crack under water, and you would be the biggest sucker in the world if you didn’t peek just a little bit.  When I played, I remember looking through the eyelashes of my eyes, opened just enough to see the shadowy forms of arms and legs treading water.  Quite frankly, there was no way you could possibly catch anyone unless you cheated, and the real talent of the game was not to be too obvious about peeking.  If you caught someone too quickly, you would be roundly accused of cheating, but if you flailed around just long enough, everyone accepted the pretense. 

As I thought about Marco Polo, it occurred to me that this might be the first time that many kids learned that you can cheat and get away with it.  I am not talking about the big guilt-laden moral compass here – the one that keeps you from being sent to the principal’s office, or keeps you from shop lifting more than once, or the one that keeps neighboring moms welcoming you into their kitchen with milk and cookies.  I wouldn’t even call this a compass, but more of a personal list of rules that we are willing to break.  My husband Nick did not grow up near a swimming pool, so his introduction into rule-breaking was more abrupt.  He has a very distinct memory, at age 7, of driving with his mother in a Ford sedan.  At the corner of Lake and Greenbay, right next to the Kentucky Fried Chicken, she made an illegal right hand turn.  Nick had been carefully trained to follow all rules, and this wanton disregard for authority threw his well-ordered world into chaos.    

“Mom, you just made an illegal turn,” he gasped.

“Oh, honey, some rules are made to be broken,” she said.

“But how do you know the difference?”

“Honey, don’t worry about it, I just do.”   

Our own personal list of breakable rules probably fall across a spectrum ranging from rules that can be broken with no consequence, to rules that seem petty and finally to things that are downright illegal.  The no consequence rules include things like cheating at solitaire.  As I kid, I remember overhearing my younger brother Tim saying under his breath, “On Mondays, it is okay to move a ten into a space.”  Minutes later he looked up beaming and said, “I won!”  I sometimes cheat at solitaire by peeking under a stack of cards to determine which king to move into a space, but I would never do something as egregious as moving a ten into a space.  But I respected Tim’s creative rules. 

Moving along the spectrum you have of course the example of Marco Polo, but I also remember a period of time in High School when Ouija Boards were in vogue.  You sat around a game board consisting of letters and you all put your hands gently on a triangular device with a little peep hole in the apex called a “planchette,” which slid along the Ouija board.  You would attempt to call forth some sort of spiritual element and then ask questions, and the planchette would spell out the answers.  Forget the spirits, I found that it was easy enough to imperceptibly push the Ouija board around, and soon I was wisely advising friends on love lives, future professions and other particularly thorny issues.   

Yes, I cheated on a Ouija board, but let’s be honest, this is the only way it could ever work, i.e. you need a group of gullible believers and at least one skeptic to push the planchette around.  In fact, the directions of a Ouija board advise that you should never use the board alone (duh!) and that the Ouija board is not good at picking lottery numbers.  Much like Marco Polo, Ouija skill involves maintaining a pretense by intentionally garbling some answers.  There were some occasions when the planchette was difficult to secretly move around – I felt some reistance.  Believers would say that this was due to the real presence of spirits, I think that is more likely that there was another person like me, trying to impose their will on Ouija.   

Moving further along the slippery slope you have the example of my mother who routinely fudged on age restrictions at both ends of the spectrum  – in order to get the child’s lift ticket for her grandchildren on the ski slope, and for her to qualify for the senior discount.  There are plenty examples of petty rules involving cars.  When you rent a car, you cheerfully sign a document that attests that you will not drive on dirt roads, and that you will be the only driver.  Forget it.  Now we move into illegalities.  Like Nick’s mom, annoying traffic lights are rules meant to be broken.  Even if arrested you could always claim ignorance – i.e. “I didn’t see the ‘no left turn sign’.”  And of course there is a certain comfort in numbers.  When you are stuck in a traffic jam, that open shoulder begins to look very inviting, and as soon as someone starts scooting up the side, plenty of drivers will follow.  In fact, you can probably divide drivers into those who are willing to be the first to use the shoulder, those who are willing to follow, and those who stubbornly refuse to take advantage of the newly opened “lane.”  Personally, I am willing to be that first shoulder pioneer.  I justify this move as a public service and am fulfilled when I see other cars quickly fall in behind me, appreciative of my leadership.  Nick is a more reluctant follower since he claims that he actually saw someone get arrested in the midst of a traffic jam.   

At the end of the spectrum, there are things that are deliberately and definitely illegal – like shoplifting.  My father might have been the only child never to have cheated at Marco Polo, but in his 80s we caught him shoplifting.  It was really an innocent mistake, but there he was eating an illegal Snickers bar.  The scene was a gas station attached to an Arby’s restaurant where we had stopped during a long road trip.  He had picked up the Snickers in the gas station, presumably thinking that he would pay for it as part of his Arby’s lunch. 

I said, “Did you pay for that Dad?” 

His face turned ashen.  We told him he could go back to the gas station, explain his innocent mistake and pay for the Snickers but he flat out refused.  My father was more concerned that the cashier – a pimply farm girl – would think that he was a shoplifter.  Basically, in his mind it was better to be a shoplifter than to have someone think that you might be a shoplifter.  It was consistent with his reluctance to enter a police station, which he was periodically required to do to retrieve wayward dogs.  He didn’t like to go in broad daylight, because people might see him and then assume that he had done something illegal.      

The next day Nick called my father and in his best disguised authoritarian voice said, “Mr. Brown, we have video taped evidence of you shoplifting a Snickers bar in Abrams, Wisconsin.  What are we going to do about this situation?”  My father’s panicked spluttering was so distraught that Nick immediately revealed the ruse.  I don’t think that the poor man was ever the same.  After all, he had to revise his list of rules that he was willing to break,  a list that had served him well for over 80 years. 

The missing letters in the following poem are anagrams (i.e. share the same letters like spot, stop, post) and the number of asterisks indicates the number of letters.  One of the missing words will rhyme with the previous or following lines.  Your job is to solve for the missing words based on the above rules and the context of the poem.  Scroll down for answers.

I think that we all have a mental ***** of rules that can be broken,

Cheating at Marco Polo or solitaire are examples of which I have spoken.

Only the most obedient soul or complete chucklehead

Has not run a ***** yellow light or even one that is red.

And driving on the shoulder should not bother you in the *****

Particularly if there is a traffic jam and the highway is lightly policed.

But to ***** something, like shoplifting as a kid,

Should only happen once, since guilt will make your regret what you did.

So one of our favorite *****  involves my father and his mistake

He stole a Snickers and never recovered from angst and heartache.

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Answers:  slate, stale, least, steal, tales

Along with the crossword puzzle, the Wedding and Celebrations section justifies the hefty price of the Sunday NY Times.  Back in the 1960s, I used to peruse this section in the remote possibility of recognizing a name.  Beyond that, there was always plenty of snickering at the east coast WASP elite that was featured, with ridiculous inverted names and crazy nicknames with Roman numeral appendages.  With a shriek of delight you might find that Goddard (God) Bruce IV had married Bleeker Cate.  The wedding announcement of yore would then go into excruciating detail on God and Bleek’s attendants, the wedding dress, what they ate, and then with a great flourish a recitation of their impeccable blood lines.

Now, some 40 years later I have returned to the wedding announcements, and things have changed.  Gone is the East Coast preppy St. Grottlesex aristocracy, replaced with something more akin to a nationwide meritocracy based on the NY Times’ closely guarded decisions regarding who’s in and who’s out.  Ancestry is sometimes included, but in this era it smacks of gratuitous name-dropping.  Once recent announcement featured a nice looking young man named Teddy Roosevelt V – well okay maybe we will give him a break since he can’t help but name drop, but how about the bride who claims she is a direct descendent of Peter Stuyvestant, the last governor of the colony of New York who died in 1672?  Seems to me that 337 years is way too long to dine out on his name, which is now more recognizable as one of NY most historic slums.  Then there is Sage Lehman who feels compelled to say that she is the great-great granddaughter of Meyer Lehman, the founder of Lehman Brothers.  This name might have lost its cachet with the tattered collapse of this venerable institution.  Tatiana Papanicolaou just has to let us to know that she is related to the developer of the Pap smear. 

I would imagine the wedding beat is a lowly editorial post (but I’d do it for free).  Does the fresh scrubbed journalist appreciate the power of picking and choosing among the competing nuptial applicants?  Did Tatiana (perhaps Tati Pap to her homeys) get selected for the Times based on her kinship to a Pap smear?  Personally, I think that her lineage would only be relevant if she had the great good fortune to marry Vitto Chlamydiolo instead of the rather staid Thorne Perkin.  But the bigger question is who wants their wedding announcement published in the first place?  Is it the status conscious mother-in-law whose family has an unbroken record of making the grade since the Great War (the Civil War, that is)?  Or maybe couples legitimately seeking the cachet of a Times wedding announcement due to accomplishments, or triumph over adversity?  Or is it simply the result of a wee-hours bar room bet?

The wedding section always profiles one couple in depth including several color pictures.  This must be a real coup, although I can’t figure out what sort of status it might confer.  Often, a wooing storyline involves a saga of multiple lost opportunities with sparks flying at random meetings over the years, but either the couple is geographically challenged or hooked up with someone else.  Another typical storyline is a “meet cute” anecdote, illustrating the wonderful coincidences that can turn life on an absolute dime.  I was excited to read about a couple who randomly met squished together on a rush hour subway; she was instantly besotted to see him reading the book “History of Philosophy, Volume IX.”  Romance blossomed and voila! here are Dixie and Jeffrey in full color in the NY Times.  The profile improbably included a close up picture of the bride’s back, featuring some sort of complicated straps that only partially covered up her tattoos, one of which memorialized a “Buster.”  Whoa, momma – the old gray lady of journalism must be shuddering at the thought of a bondaged bride brazenly displaying her tats.

The rest of the wedding announcements are all carefully scripted per instructions of the NY Times, who insist that, “Those posing for pictures should be neatly dressed, and should have their eyebrows at the same level.”  And it appears that everyone follows these instructions to a tee – in some pictures the couple’s heads are so aligned that it appears that they are affixed with a jumbo staple gun.   The black and white picture is then followed by about three inches of text, all of which could be considered mind-numbingly boring to the casual reader. However, I have found that with a little imagination, you can turn this into a marvelous sociology exercise; the trick is to imagine that the sparse text is the initial concept of a Hollywood script and your job is to supply the back story. 

In the first paragraph you learn who married the couple, which would seem to be of minimal interest, except that occasionally you get interfaith marriages where you can sense a hint of a contentious tug-of-war over the ritual, “ the service was performed by Rabbi Berman, who incorporated Lakota traditions…”  Meredith and Gareth apparently nixed the religious part of the ritual and were married by Barry, “a Humanist celebrant.”  Maybe I could qualify for that role – according to the website you just need to be a dues paying member for one year (http://www.humanist-society.org/celebrants/inquiry.html).  But if you are looking for something quick and dirty I would recommend becoming a universal life minister (http://www.ulc.net) which requires no cost and no faith.  Next the announcement will let you know what colleges were attended (still mostly Ivy league) and even whether or not the blessed couple graduated magna or summa cum laude.  And the fact checkers must really be on their toes; once I spotted a correction in which a summa got downgraded to a magna.  Probably some jilted suitor called that one in.   And then you can ponder the potential marital stress if the wife graduated magna and the husband was only cum. 

Occupations make up the majority of the text, including both the couples’ jobs along with that of both sets of parents, and potentially step parents.  This is where your back story can get really interesting, because the NY Times will also cattily let you know if someone is unemployed.  A typical entry might read, “Until three months ago, Bleek Cate worked as a kindergarten teacher …”  Now when the wife is unemployed I see three possible story lines.  Perhaps Bleek has resigned her job to resolve some sort of geographic incompatibility, or perhaps she has simply lost her job, or most cynically, you can imagine that her job was only a stop-gap until she reached her goal of marriage.  Now she is ecstatic to wave good-bye to a regular paycheck and settle down to a life of undiluted wedded bliss.   But we all know that this is a potentially disastrous scenario – even the wedding section provides a glimpse of the financial sector woes.  Another entry might read, “Until recently Goddard Bruce was a vice president and financial analyst at Lehman Brothers.”  Who would want to subject themselves to this type of humiliation?  But then I realized that the wedding pages of the NY Times are just as good a place to network as any.  In two short lines and at no charge, you can inform the entire NY Times readership of your qualifications and immediate availability.  Some entries show how the financial collapse has ripped through entire families.  Melissa Frey is the stepdaughter of Caleb Koeppel who until last year was a partner in the Koeppel Companies, a real estate investment company (was he ousted by his relatives?), and granddaughter of Alan Greenburg who was chairman of Bear Sterns.  Ouch!   

Typically the wedding couple will have high profile jobs, but Elizabeth Rounds and Joel Pinkser are puzzlers.  Elizabeth is a marketing coordinator for a construction company assembling introductory packets for prospective clients. I’m sorry, honey, but this sounds like a glorified secretary.  Joel, 30, will begin working as a tour guide with CitySights at the end of the month.  As nice as they might be, you have to ask what qualified them for a coveted slot in the wedding announcements.  Perhaps it was Joel’s mother who was a well known writer of soap operas.  Ranging from Pap smears to soap operas, the Times editorial decisions keep me guessing.  I could definitely see a Law and Order episode involving a botched bribe to get into the wedding section. 

Lawyers and doctors seem to be overrepresented in the announcements, both among the married couples and their parents.  A common scenario is the wife who works as the office manager for her husband who is a doctor or dentist.  While this probably represents some cozy partnership extending beyond the home, your screenplay could just as easily suggest that the wife needs to keep a tight rein on her husband midst all the steadily younger and perkier nurses.  In general, the jobs of most the mothers tend to be stereotypically woman’s work – in education or the arts, or the mother might have some sort of kick-ass volunteer job, like a ballet board member, or a hobby that poses as a job.  Teddy Roosevelt’s V mother, for example, “is a free lance writer on the subject of endangered primates and eco-tourism.”  My interpretation is that the enduring Roosevelt wherewithal has permitted her to be world traveler, but this may come to an abrupt end – because now we all know that her husband Teddy IV is (or potentially will not be) an investment banker at Lehman Brothers. 

Some of the more touching announcements are professional couples with very humble origins, judging by the jobs of the parents.  Take the marriage of Linda Law and Jim Mui.  Linda’s father is an internist, her mother the practice manager.  In contrast, Jim’s mother is a seamstress at Lookout Sportswear while his father owns Cherry’s Chinese food.  Plenty of story lines here in this clash of culture and class – potentially a dysfunctional bridal dinner and other family events.  

The choice of one’s life partner is always an interesting story, but marriage of same sex couples still adds a frisson to the back story.  Phillip and Douglas met in 1967 and were finally married in 2008.  One can only imagine the trajectory of this relationship through the climate changes of the past 42 years, to the total glory of public recognition of their partnership through marriage and inclusion in the NY Times.  John and David live in Los Angeles, but John grew up as the son of a minister in rural North Dakota.  I just want to put my arms around them both in celebration of their triumph over a presumably tortured childhood.  But the best is perhaps Damon and Charles who participated in a double wedding.  Their marriage was immediately followed by marriage of Damon’s father to his gay partner of 16 years.  Bravo! In the movie parlance, that story line is optionable.

The missing words in the following poem are anagrams (i.e. share the same letters, like post, stop, and spot).  The number of asterisks indicates the number of letters.  One of the missing words will rhyme with either the preceding or following lines.  Your job is to solve hte missing words based on the above rules and the context of the poem.

The ******* NY Times has been the arbiter of class and culture throughout the ages,

 Selecting wedding announcements to be published in its Sunday pages.

The austere responsibility is left to the discretion of shadowy *******

Who must select the winners midst the clamoring nuptial competitors.

As * ****** through the listings, I saw no pattern that was clear,

Who knows, the tipping point might be kinship to Pap smears.

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Answers:  storied, editors, I sorted