Let Me Be Your Front Door Woman

Thrilling! A couple months ago I hooked up with HGTV's FrontDoor.com to be their Bay Area reporter. After much hard work on the part of my editors, "my" end of the site has relaunched. I'll be doing 3 posts a week for them. Bookmark the home page:

http://www.frontdoor.com/places/san-francisco-ca-us

and take a gander at my inaugural post:

http://www.frontdoor.com/houses/thats-so-bay-thoughts-on-the-san-francisco-decorator-showcase

So far, it's been a ton of my favorite style of reporting -- getting to be a nosy-noodle-looky-loo and obsess over real estate, decor, and Pinterest-type obsession. Yay. YAY!!

ANd this weekend I'm going to Maker Faire with two editors. Hooray!

Richie Havens RIP

I'm so sad to hear of the passing of Richie Havens. I had the distinct honor of interviewing him when I was an editor at Brooklyn Bridge Magazine. He was gracious and generous with his time. Talking to him on the phone was like leaning my ear against a huge purring cat, or like having a soothing hot liquid poured into my brain. As I remember it he mailed me a few pages of handwritten notes that were very easy to organize into this article -- it was just a matter of rearranging and shaping, not rewriting. All words were his. The pleasure was mine.

Richie Havens article in Brooklyn Bridge Magazine

Richie Havens in Brooklyn Bridge, Part 2

Thanks to editor extraordinaire and keeper of ephemera Joe Fodor. 

Some Very Old (Very Entertaining) Clips

An old pal from my days at Cosmopolitan Magazine just hipped me to this archive of magazine articles at Villanova. Here, we see many of my Cosmo articles -- including the "American Pie Chart," "Men Unzipped: The Secret His Undies Reveal" (for which I interviewed, off the record, my crush at Esquire), and my expose on the Brazilian bikini wax.

But in addition, there are more recent gems I had forgotten about, such as "can you build a better PENIS?" from Redbook, 2004. I don't know why PENIS is so big, except that maybe PENIS got excited at the idea of a better PENIS.

Villanova Falvey Library

I'm going to get interesting page-views on this one, aren't I. Well, go click the ads, PENIS-lovers.

Anyway, it's nice to see there's a record of some of my more ridiculous articles, though I have no idea how to access it. I'd follow that rabbit hole down to its end, but I have to not procrastinate this morning, and that's pretty much a prime example of work avoidance by way of pretending something is tangentially related to work and therefore OK to spend the morning on.

Begone, temptation! If anyone else wants to research this, be my guest!

The Financial Lives of the Freelancers

I read a novel by Jess Walters called The Financial Lives of the Poets. In it, a hapless financial reporter finds himself laid off and unemployable and makes a stunning series of ill-thought-out mistakes in an effort to cling to his middle-class existence. The main character was a bit of a pud, but that probably only bothered me because he was my kind of pud -- his stunned disbelief at being in the position he's in and his utter lack of direction, now that he's adrift, were all too familiar to me. Laid-off, unemployable, scrabbling for freelance dimes that I swear used to be dollars -- yeah. It's hard to feel at a distance from that guy.

It was a still a good, funny, solid read though, and I appreciated this gem, in the acknowledgements at the end:

"...and all of my dismayed and displaced newspaper friends, whose talent and commitment deserve a better world."

I'll pretend he said "and magazine" and make myself part of the group. Blerg.

Also, I'm A Tiny Bit Cray-Cray

Speaking of procrastinating, this morning, Johnny Galecki (now of The Big Bang Theory) was on Sesame Street, and I was reminded that in 1992 or so, I wrote him a fan poem that I posted via my AOL account. And because I am a digital pack-rat, I still have a copy of it. So. If you love The Big Bang Theory, Roseanne, or The Opposite of Sex, enjoy.

Oh my god. It's creepier than I remembered. And it's long. Longer than I remembered.

Darlene! My God! What's wrong with you? You moron, are you blind?
A better man than David you could never hope to find!
This Jimmy guy is loser-lame. He'll lead you down the path
Of cigarettes and and Nietsche, and then you'll face Roseanne's wrath.

Johnny Galecki, Johnny Galecki, won't you be my man?
I'll be your Darlene if you'll be my David from Roseanne.

I've watched him from afar, grainy and small on my TV
He is my TV boyfriend, even though I am thir-tee.
I don't know why he charms me so, I just know he's the one
Who makes my heart go pitter-pat when across the screen he runs.

He's way smarter than Mark, and he's skinnier than Dan,
he's older than that DJ, he's my David from Roseanne

I remember his first TV movie, starring ol' Roseanne,
about a football team for women (not a single man!)
Johnny was Roseanne's son, and he was droopy and so sad.
My heart just broke for Johnny; he was missing his dead dad!

He didn't sing on Rosie O'Donnell, though I'm sure that he can:
He's multitalented, cuz he's my David from Roseanne!

Another time, he was a guy whose heart was truly good,
Though he was troubled, had bad hair, and seemed to be a hood.
His bro (Neil Patrick Harris, who's of Doogie Howser fame),
Did awful stuff, and tried to make poor Johnny take the blame.

I'd tie him up and hobble him, cuz I'm his number-one fan;
JUST KIDDING! I'm no stalker -- I just love David from Roseanne.

Another week, with Jennie Garth of 90210,
He was in a hospital, cuz he'd gone plumb loco.
They plotted their escape; alas! he didn't make it out.
But Oh! if I had been his nurse, he'd have no need to pout!

Oh! The things I'd do to him, in the back of my Chevy Van:
I'd (censored censored censored stuff) with David from Roseanne.

In one movie, with Judith Light, he had a reputation:
He played a charming murderer who died in conflagration.
Judith's screaming histrionics hit the nail right on the head.
I would shriek and holler too, if I thought Johnny G were dead!

In high school, my best friend was this girl down the street named Fran.
I only mention this to rhyme with David from Roseanne.

Now his star is rising; to the movies I must go.
His career is on the big screen now, not on a weekly show.
I'm glad for him, but sad for me: no TV boyfriend now,
unless another show comes on that features Brian Krakow...

Johnny Galecki, Johnny Galecki, won't you be my man?
I'll be your Darlene if you'll be my David from Roseanne!

Forbes and Marissa Meyer

Hey! This is good news I should have reported last week. My LearnVest piece about Marissa Meyer got reposted on Forbes and got a huge response. More than 88,000 views and I heard from people all over the place. It got Facebooked around like a kitten picture. Horribly, Forbes also neglected to put my byline on the piece, but it does come at the end, in a little blurb, so okay.

The comments were predictably depressing, but at least I was part of the conversation, and got to call her husband "hot-ass."

They did edit out the part where I said Meyer is a unicorn, and we should be more worried about the horses that actually need our attention; I liked pointing out that she's so rare as to actually seem mythical, but it was a little far-fetched.

I also said "we're all in this together," which is a direct reference to my darling, beloved, gorgeous Wendy Wasserstein in "The Heidi Chronicles." Here's the moment:

I don't blame the ladies in the locker room for how I feel. I don't blame any of us. We're all concerned, intelligent, good women. It's just that I feel stranded. And I thought the whole point was that we wouldn't feel stranded. I thought the whole point was we were all in this together. 

It didn't fit into the piece, but those who know will hear the echo. I hope.

this always happens.

okay, not always, but I am resisting a story because the way I pitched it now seems too simplistic (it's based on a press release, not enough THERE there, no meat, bad bad bad), but to put in the time to do it right will render it a loss (have not been able to scare up better info on the phone; will need to devote an afternoon to on-site reporting, sans kids, which negates the $ made).

I hate this.

Okay, back to trying to report it.

Know what I miss?

Reporters' notebooks.

I'm talking about these jammies. The ones I used, though, were not so crass as to announce themselves on the cover; they had the same basic, glossy cover as your average Spiral notebook, the kind you buy in a pack before each new semester of college. But the shape. 4x8 inches, tall and slim, gave me more go-get-'em-Scoops courage than ten press passes.

They honestly never made much sense. I am assuming they were originally created in that shape to fit into the breast pocket (some might call it a flask pocket) of a blazer, and they don't even put those pockets in womens' blazers. (Plus: who wears women's blazers?!) I'd been carrying notebooks for years before I was a reporter, in the service of being a standup comic, and for that I just carried a tiny notepad. Granted, I was writing fewer words that wouldn't have to be transcribed or fact-checked, but still: I knew, as I strode into Staples and picked up a megapack of these guys, that this wasn't a practical act. I had like 900 Steno pads stolen from temp jobs (the ones with the mint green paper and the little red line down the middle? Swoon).

(yeah, I may have a little office-supply problem. Yeah, I might.)

 Anyway. The point is, these were as much a part of my emotional preparation, going into a reporting situation (a Russian bath in Brooklyn, a boat to Ellis island packed with Jewish celebrities, the release of a G.I. Joe based on the standing Secretary of State), as pair of comfortable shoes, a cup of coffee, and a set of ready questions so I wouldn't be tongue-tied.

Yet it was surprising to me when people saw the notebook and said "Oh, here's the reporter." I can't tell you when I realized reporters had their own style of pad; I didn't think of it as a general cultural signifier. I was in a relationship with my notebook, it wasn't for the world to see. Except it was; people recognizing it gave me an additional charge, a jolt of self-confidence.

I see now there are moleskine reporters' notebooks. What. The fudge. No WAY would I carry one of those! Ah, but I don't carry the real thing anymore, either. The most important interviews, I capture on a digital recorder. When I take notes, I grab whatever half-empty notebook is handy, most often one that was given out free at a press event (read: cocktail party my friends and I took as an excuse to meet up). Or I do my interviews over the phone, so I can type my notes in garbled, but more accurate and harder to lose, format.

Maybe I've gone soft. Or I've moved on to a different kind of reporting. Or both! But the sight of these little soldiers makes me feel all gooey inside. They bring to my memory the urgency of hurrying through an unfamiliar neighborhood, peering at building numbers, trying to soak up local color while staying focused on the story at hand. Jotting down possible other stories (what's that cool blue house? There's a puppet theater -- here?!) on the way.

I'm not even tempted to buy a set - I don't want to dilute those memories.