by Fay Jacobs
And it’s been 36 years since we last spoke!! And how cool to hear from you; I don’t know if I have the Damron Womens Guide, but I’ll check to see you. And it would be great if you and your lover would come to NYC and stay here; I’ll make you a great deal. Much more to tell you, but time for dinner, and hope you’ll write again and tell me how you got here from there over the last 35 (!!!) years.
Love, (HE WHO SHALL REMAIN NAMELESS)
Dear (HE WHO SHALL REMAIN NAMELESS)
Oy! Where to start!!!!! First off, every man I ever dated (except the man I married, which is a whole other embarrassing story) turned out to be gay, so it had to be me that was the culprit, okay?
I’m glad you remember it was (Blankety-Blank) who introduced us, cause I’d lost that bit of info to the ages. I have no idea what happened to her, but you’re right, she was pretentious.
As for Drama Club (I’ve heard it called Gay Head Start, you know), you were right about Outward Bound being a perfectly awful play. However, you were being too polite about my performance, as I’m a dreadful actress and you knew it even then. That’s why I became a director. I foolishly tried to make my living that way for a while, but I have come to my senses.
Now to some appalling ancient miscommunication: Yes, we used to make out in my parents living room, where Goulet & Lawrence lived next door and Elaine Stritch dieseled to and fro. But, silly boy, it was I who prayed we’d never go farther than kissing; I was petrified and bizarrely disinterested. We sure could have saved ourselves years of angst if we’d just discussed it then.
And yes, I remember Top of the Sixes Restaurant, and Bear Mountain prom night. I actually do have the photos, 36 years later. However, I’ve totally repressed the Brooklyn make-out session in your parents bed (gawwwd!!!) and, contrary to your tragic misinterpretation, all I wanted to do when I got back from summer camp was go to more Broadway shows with you. So you had it all wrong!
What have I been up to? In college I majored in theatre and communications, watched all my friends get married, figured it was mandatory, married a freakin’ professional accordion player (stop laughing), got divorced six endless years later, met my partner Bonnie 21 years ago, and then four years ago we chucked everything to move to Rehoboth Beach. I work in tourism & PR, and write a column for our local gay publication. You can check me out at www.camprehoboth.com.
By the way, that old Corvette croaked in 1973. I now drive the official lesbian car, the Subaru Outback. We’d love to come to NYC and stay at your place sometime. What a hoot that would be. Thanks so much for writing, even with those seriously skewed memories. With all the stories you hear about people reconnecting through the internet and running off with their high school sweethearts, we can both rest assured it won’t happen here.
Cheers—Fay
June 2003
SMILE, YOU’RE ON DIGITAL CAMERA
I’m in a love-hate relationship.
Everywhere we go, there’s tension. I’m scared the relationship will fall apart. I’ve sought professional help so often I wish One Hour Photo took Blue Cross. I love/hate my digital camera.
I was a little dykette when I got my first Brownie Starflash. I’ve been through Instamatics, flash cubes, strobes, 35 millimeter, single-lens reflex, Polaroid, and point and shoot.
Taking pictures was simple. You plopped film in the Kodak, took pictures and left them at the drug store, waiting expectantly, sometimes for a week, to see if the photos “came out.”
Well, since those days, almost everyone I know has come out but that doesn’t help the evolving state of photography. Going digital seems like a good idea, but so did Phen-Fen.
Truthfully, I like taking digital photos. I shoot multiple shots until I get one with everybody’s eyes open. I also love dumping pictures which, if they accidentally got published in this column could get me sued or at least disinvited to parties. But the real negative is the fact that there are no negatives.
A hundred years from now historians won’t have a clue. Most people take digital pictures, send them to friends over the Internet, store the pictures on their hard drive and never even print them. What happens when the Dell detonates? Will a whole nation wander around in a daze like tornado survivors, having lost their wedding pictures? Yeah, yeah, we’re supposed to be backing things up. But you know how THAT goes.
I’m the kind of person who believes if you don’t have a picture of it, it didn’t happen. Today, you can hold Matthew Brady’s Civil War photos and negatives in your hand and see history. Where will our negatives be? In the bowels of some computer in a landfill at Mt.Trashmore? I’m telling you, there will be no evidence of us.
Now this truly makes me nuts because my secret obsession is photo albums. Bonnie will tell you, one time when we thought our house was on fire she practically herniated herself running down the stairs with a dozen leaden photo albums in her arms. Our fire drill is Women, Dogs and Albums first. I’m such a photo album lunatic that years after everyone else was sliding pictures into plastic album sleeves, I was still licking little black photo corners. When the company making them went under I had to detox from picture corner glue and there wasn’t even a support group for me.
So I have a long history of understanding things like aperture, back lighting and red eye reduction. So why don’t I get the pixel thing? Yeah, I know they are tiny bits of data that form a digital picture and they come in big bunches called mega-pixels. The more megas you have, the sharper the picture, the more expensive the camera.
What I don’t get is why my 5 Mega-Pixel state-of-the-art camera, which cost as much as my sofa, can’t deliver a picture as clear as those cardboard and plastic single use cameras from the drugstore.
The first time I printed an 8x10 from my new Olympus, everybody looked like Doris Day in those movies where she was filmed through a gauze-covered lens to make her look as young as Rock Hudson. Besides that, for some reason the flash ricochets, making everybody wearing glasses look like Tinkerbell landed on their frames. Animal eyes are particularly vulnerable.
I can’t get a Schnauzer shot without my boys looking like the poster children from Night of the Living Dead.
But as worried as I am about blurry photos and the lack of a permanent negative collection, I’m more bereft by the devastating psychological toll of going digital. I used to rush from vacation directly to the camera shop, and eat lunch next door while my umpteen rolls of film got processed. Vacation budgets included big bucks for the après trip picture glut. I didn’t care what it cost because the thrill of ripping open those envelopes and seeing what you’d been doing for the past week was absolutely exhilarating.
Well, there’s something far less satisfying about having already seen your pictures and then thinking about paying somebody to print stuff you’ve had hanging around in the camera for ten days. Just like that, the thrill is gone.
Hoping to reclaim the excitement I decided to try printing the pictures at home. My speedy printer managed to turn one-hour photo back into one-week photo with just the click of a button.
And the cost is staggering. Know why printers are absurdly cheap now? Because they practically give you the hardware and software, but make you pay through the nose for the wetware— ink. After just two or three 5x7s and right in the middle of cropping somebody’s thighs out of a family portrait, my computer starts flashing “cartridge almost out of ink.” And if you’ve ever stood in the aisle at Staples trying to figure out which cartridge goes with your printer then you know the fresh hell I’m talking about.
Of course glossy paper isn’t cheap either. Between paper, ink and the time it takes to print the pictures, I could go on vacation again.
So for me, the answer was to bring my camera to the nice folks at the photo shop for digital printing. But unlike regular one-hour equipment that prints from that ntiquated stuff called film, new digital machines are merely big, stupid computers with slots for your camera’s memory chip. The machine had a slot that accepted Memory Sticks, Magic Memory Cards, digi-chips,
cow chips, and pop tarts, but it didn’t take the memory chip from my hot-shot camera.
I had to ask the local photo shop to order, at best, some kind of exotic adapter for my chip, or at worst, a whole new $20,000 machine so they can print me and Bonnie standing in front of stuff. It’s humbling, to say the least.
So there you have it. I love playing with the camera. It’s excellent for e-mail pictures and snapshots. It’s fun at parties. But I hate how much it costs and what an ordeal it is to print the photos. While I love pressing the delete button after a goofer shot, I hate worrying that my hard drive will crash and take all of 2003 with it. And I detest making back-ups of my back-ups.
So as far as I’m concerned, digital is fun for now, but the second I head off for a major vacation or an important family occasion I’m stopping by the drug store for a cellophane-wrapped $7.95 disposable Kodak Fun-Saver.
It’s the least I can do for posterity.
June 2003
TOO MUCH INFORMATION
We’re becoming a civilization with attention deficit disorder and I blame CNN. And MSNBC, CBS, NBC, ABC, QVC, and every other network and local affiliate with the possible exception of Nickelodeon.
I’m talking about that infuriating and relentless news crawl that’s been on the bottom of our televisions since 9/11. Exactly how much simultaneous information do we need?
In a time of national crisis, having breaking news at eyeball level was innovative and informative. Now it’s just irritating. Turn on the set and you see a reporter, with film of beautiful downtown Baghdad in the background. It’s interesting, but you can’t process the words or the scene because the bottom of the screen is screaming about FBI warnings, debunked diets, sports finals and Eminem’s rank on the music charts. With time, temperature, and weather graphics for city after city scrolling in one corner, and the NBC Peacock or CBS Eye blinking in the other, where the heck are we supposed to look? Chiropractors all over the country are seeing people for video whiplash.
One news channel reserves the upper left hand corner for really frightening stuff like flood or tornado warnings. Confusingly, another channel uses the same corner of the screen for network logos. Turn on the set and you see a logo of crossed palm trees and, depending which channel you’re watching, it’s either film from Saudi Arabia state television or a gale warning in Pensacola.
Sometimes the juxtaposition is entertaining. A reporter blabs about the President’s tax cut and the bottom crawl acknowledges the anniversary of the day the Hindenburg Blimp blew up. I didn’t know which story hawked a bigger disaster.
The thing about these news tickers is that the fronts and backs of sentences are forever being lopped off by station breaks. You come back from a commercial and see “…found alive in the wreckage.” Who? It sounds like a living hell. It takes another twenty minutes staring at the bottom of the screen to find out it was a box of worms from a science experiment aboard the space shuttle. Yuck.
You glance away from the talking head in the middle of the screen for just a second and see the words “hoping to avoid the worst meltdown since...” And bang, we’re right back at a commercial. Worst meltdown since Chernobyl? 3 Mile Island? No, I had to sit through a whole hour of headline news, which by the way, repeats more often than that, to find out somebody was accused of having the worst meltdown in NBA history. Foul.
At one point a blurb announced a class in make-up application taught by drag queens. Now this is something I would have liked to know more about, but it’s like a phantom headline. No newspaper, magazine, Internet site or evening news ever breathes another word about it. I think interns make this stuff up and type it onto the AP wire.
And speaking of drag queens, that’s who I thought the phrase “taking off their horsehair wigs and elaborate gowns” was referencing, but no, an interminable time later I discovered that the crawl was about British jurists contemplating changing their traditional garb.
I loved the CNN piece about an Asian city under threat from the SARS virus. A shortage of disposable face masks prompted women to use brassieres instead. Go ahead, picture it. Not only was the picture worth many thousand words, but the simultaneous news crawl happened to be about zany new fashion trends. Coincidence?
Actually, it might not have been a coincidence, since some stations enhance their incredible shrinking commentator’s words with a news ticker about the same subject—giving you additional useless facts and figures about the story in progress. Other stations just crawl completely random factoids just to distract you.
It’s cruel and unusual punishment.
Often, the shorthand needed to put complex stories into news crawl form breeds confusion. “Senator Kerry accuses President Bush of waging a war based on questionable intelligence.” Okay, maybe that’s not confusing at all.
Following are some of the news items I managed to see either the beginnings or endings of, but never found out another word:
“…but over brushing of teeth is harmful.”
“100K angry bees sting truck driver in…”
“…beating her with an iron skillet.”
And my personal favorite, “…when sour neighbor busts lemonade stand.”
Quick cuts and splices may be fine for the MTV generation, but just trying to read the damn thing gives me a headache. Apparently, I’m not alone, because I found a web site petition online called “Stop the News Crawl!” I signed it, although I imagine its fate will merely be fifteen seconds of fame some day on the bottom of my screen.
The final humiliation comes closer to home. Since every Sussex County morning is fog bound, the regular cluttered mess of a screen is reduced to a third its size so the local station can run school delays. My favorite is the curious crawl, “John the Baptist two hours late.”
During the school delay marathon my 27-inch television screen is reduced to the size of the set I watched Howdy Doody on in 1955. Boy I’m glad I didn’t buy that 54” $8,000 flat screen plasma TV so I could watch a 13” screen surrounded by a flashing list of every charter school on the Eastern Shore.
Frankly, now that all news is breaking news, including, this morning, a crawl announcing the box office receipts for Dumb and Dumberer, what will happen when we actually have a national emergency? I guess they’ll just break in with, gasp, a full screen of some newsperson talking directly to viewers. The novelty will be absolutely riveting. Shock and awe.
July 2003
HITTING THE SPEED LIMIT
In the interest of full disclosure, let me say that I recently hit the speed limit birthday. Double nickels, that is, not the I-95 limit, and certainly not the three digits-plus on the Autobahn. And when you write a first person column, incorporating the amusing antics of others, you have to tell on yourself sometimes, too.
So the truth is, I’m older than I ever imagined I’d be. I bought my first home in 1975, and I can remember staring in disbelief at the mortgage paper noting loan payoff in 2004. It seemed unimaginably distant.
Since then, of course, I got rid of both that house and that spouse. However, it is now perilously close to 2004, and there’ll be a Wawa on Mars by the time I pay off my current digs.
I’m in the pharmacy now more than the liquor store, and have a slew of minor age-related ailments (okay, maybe they’re jalapeno and stress related) but I still feel a lot younger than my driver’s license admits. Am I deluded or, as some magazines suggest, is 55 the new 35? Okay, 45????
As my birthday approached, I found myself doing things unbecoming a woman my age, and I liked it. For instance, America Online now has a roster of sounds you can adopt to announce your online presence. If you instant message, your signature sound accompanies your comment.
My adopted son-the-comedian told me about this stuff and helped me select my audio John Hancock. We auditioned a symphony of instruments ending up with the most disgusting of barnyard calls. He’d type “hi” with a bleat and I’d answer with a burp. He’d boing and I’d bray.
We’d gotten to the
protracted electronic flatulence when I was laughing too hard to continue. I told him we had to stop because my stomach hurt, but I’d forgotten to change the sound and my message came with a loud fart. Is this any way for a mature woman who would have gray hair if she didn’t dye it to behave?????
One night a party of six sat at my dining room table playing Trivial Pursuit, and having more fun than I can ever remember overhearing when my parents had dinner guests. The only way we remembered our age was from the questions in my two-decade old edition of the game.
“What presidential assassin is due for parole in 1986?” (Yipes! Is he out?????)
“What’s the capitol of West Germany?” (um, where IS West Germany???”)
“What is the Soviet Union’s ruling political body called?” (Defunct?)
Ashamed as we were to admit it, we did know that the answer to “What musician’s license plate is ‘A1ANA2’ ?” was Lawrence Welk. But hey, some of us have at least heard of Britany Spears.
The most amusing antique question was “What U.S. President declared ‘the White House had no involvement whatever in this particular incident?’” Geez, what president didn’t? From Iran-Contragate to Zippergate and now Iraqgate, that card’s sadly contemporary.
I really tried to eschew my age for my June journey to the DC Pride festival. Subtitled “How Old People Go to Pride,” the day started with checklists. My friend Joan and I made sure we had sweaters for a chill, water for our medications, Elmer’s Glue-like SPF45 sunscreen, and inhalers for going to dinner in DC where they don’t have Delaware’s smoking ban.
We left Rehoboth twice, departing with glorious abandon, but turning around three miles up Route One because we couldn’t remember if we’d let the dogs back into the house or pressed the button to put the garage door down. We had, but I felt like I was channeling my grandmother.