The Fun of It: Stories from The Talk of the Town (Modern Library Paperbacks)

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The Fun of It: Stories from The Talk of the Town (Modern Library Paperbacks) Page 46

by Lillian Ross


  • Hillary is excited about putting on a talent show to raise money for local Democrats but has second thoughts when Bill is cast as Mark Antony in the “Cleopatra” sketch opposite Jennifer, her gorgeous administrative assistant!

  • There’s heck to pay when Bill takes Hillary’s new limo, provided at taxpayers’ expense, to McDonald’s—and puts a big scratch in the fender!

  • Bill has some explaining to do when he goes on a talk show—and blabs about what Hillary really did with those billing records from the Rose Law Firm!

  • In a flashback episode, Bill and Hillary reminisce about Bill’s Army days— and how he avoided having any!

  • When Bill and Hillary discover they were not legally married, Bill vanishes forever. Series finale.

  1999

  NOSTALGIA FOR THE BYGONE DAYS OF FEMINIST FAMILY FEUDING — Rebecca Mead

  WHEN the feminists of the nineteen-sixties coined the expression “Sisterhood is powerful,” they did not have in mind one typical characteristic of the relationship between female siblings—the way that sisters fight all the time. Susan Brownmiller, in her entertaining new history of the women’s-liberation movement, “In Our Time,” reminds readers that the sixties-era feminists, for all their high achievements, did their fair share of feuding.

  Three decades later, a certain nostalgia has set in, and when Brownmiller appeared at a Barnes & Noble on the Upper West Side the other day and found some of her onetime adversaries in the audience, she appeared delighted to see them. She punctuated her reading—about the daylong feminist occupation of the offices of the Ladies’ Home Journal, in 1970—and a question-and-answer session that followed with yelps of recognition. “Judith Hennessee, who wrote the biography of Betty Friedan—I picked a fight with her!” Brownmiller cried. “Alix Kates Shulman, the novelist—one of the best feminists, although we disagreed all the time!” She spotted Michela Griffo, a radical lesbian whom she’d offended back in 1970. “Michela, you want to say something divisive?” she shouted. “I never agreed with anything you said!” Griffo shouted back fondly.

  “Visionaries are difficult people,” Brownmiller said later, at a party given in her honor. “Put eight visionaries in a room, and you will get eight different visions.” Her book does, she said, give considerable play to some of the wackier elements of the feminist movement, such as Shulamith Firestone’s erratic behavior during the Ladies’ Home Journal sit-in. Firestone tried to assault the magazine’s editor, a man, yelling, “We can do it—he’s small.” Brownmiller maintained that she was entitled to chronicle these goofy moments, “because I am doing it in love and celebration of the movement. Movements are always like that. Think about Freud and Jung and Adler, always at each other’s throats. Or Stalin, arranging to have Trotsky killed.”

  All that scrapping was simply the sign of a vital movement—something that Brownmiller says she sees no hint of these days. “I feel sorry for young women today,” she said. “Some young women are committed feminists, but it is hard to be an activist and a militant in nonmilitant times.” (Younger women wishing for a movement of their own might have been made wary by the answer Brownmiller gave at the reading when she was asked about how feminism affected her ability to negotiate relations with men. “Well, I don’t know if I did negotiate those relations,” she said. “I did not know that if I wrote a book on rape”—“Against Our Will,” which was published in 1975—“my popularity would plummet. Once, I said to Robin Morgan”—a former editor of Ms.—“that I had been alone since I wrote ‘Against Our Will,’ and she said, ‘What did you expect?’ ”)

  Brownmiller’s party was attended by only two men and a crowd of women with hair in various shades of gray and gold. The host was Marlene Sanders, a former ABC and CBS News correspondent, who is identified in “In Our Time” as the movement’s only ally on television. (Sanders indicated that there were still battles to be won for women’s rights when a guest asked why she no longer appeared on television. “I’m too old,” she growled. “Though I’m the same age as Dan Rather.”) Guests included friends of Brownmiller’s from the human-rights contingent, such as Lucy Komisar, and from the feminist movement, such as Joyce Johnson and Alix Kates Shulman. “We’ve disagreed, but that’s history,” said Shulman, glowing. “One of the consolations of history is that it’s history.” There was also a delegation from Brownmiller’s regular Saturday-night poker game, and one from the women’s Ping-Pong league in which she plays every Sunday. “That’s what an old feminist does to keep active,” Brownmiller said. “I do all those things in lieu of a women’s movement.”

  1999

  2000

  THE NEW YEAR STUMBLES IN — Anthony Lane

  IT was reported last week that eighty per cent of Americans stayed home to enjoy the opening of the new millennium. This was a startling figure, although it requires further analysis: we need to know how many celebrants were clasped in the bosom of their families, and how many sealed themselves into storm cellars with a candle, a .45, and enough tortilla chips to last three months. Contrast the extrovert spirit that prevailed in Australia, say, where government statistics have revealed that the only citizens who failed to leave the house on December 31st were the McGarry family of Perth. The city of Sydney, which, despite the looming Olympics, looks pretty happy about itself, laid on an extravagant party in the harbor.

  Whether this made it the Greatest Show on Earth was a matter of inflamed debate. China—the place that invented fireworks, as well as noodles, the printing press, and peeling students off tank tracks—emblazoned the heavens above the Great Wall. Layers of light ascended the Washington Monument and, with geometric elegance, the Eiffel Tower. In a daring act of multiculturalism, the good people of Tonga rose at midnight to sing the “Hallelujah Chorus” from Handel’s “Messiah.” Then, there was New York. Estimates put the number of revellers at more than two million, of whom at least forty-six were resident New Yorkers. Nobody in his or her right mind headed for Times Square, for the simple reason that if you wanted to get out of your right mind you had to go elsewhere; Mayor Giuliani, not content with gluing shut the manholes in case anyone was reading the Koran in the sewers, had declared midtown to remain an alcohol-free zone for the entire evening. The joke is that the only visitors who would applaud such a move were the same Islamic fundamentalists he was trying to keep out. One wonders how major an event would have to be before the Mayor thought it worthy of a beer. As rogue Korean warheads plummet toward Forty-second Street, will he announce free hazelnut mocha for children under ten? One thing is certain: thanks to the Giuliani precautions, grandparents in 2080 will be able to regale the kids with tales of that amazing night when they stood shivering beneath a giant underpants billboard and sipped apple Snapple.

  For once, New York could have taken a lesson from London. There, underfoot, as revellers walked across Blackfriars Bridge at two in the morning, empty champagne bottles made a lush pastoral carpet of green and gold. At the Oxo Tower, on the South Bank, where the eighth-floor Restaurant, Bar and Brasserie threw the most geographically desirable party of the night, cocktail specialists could pass seamlessly from a Y2K—basically, a gingered-up White Lady—to a One Second To . . . , the effects of which could still be felt Eight Hours After . . . Dancing took place beneath fluorescent, Warholish portraits of Faces of the Millennium. There were, on balance, few experiences more suited to a fading, farcical century than trying to moonwalk to “Blame It on the Boogie” under a picture of Bertrand Russell.

  Russell, of course, blamed it on expansionist Western capitalism. He would not have relished the last hours of 1999. The rule governing fireworks, for instance, is quite simple. If x is the amount of money that it would be prudent to spend on your fireworks display, and if y is the number of people whom you expect to attend, then the actual expenditure should be 3x + y. There is a further rule, which states that on the occasion of a new century the equation should change to 3(x + y). Real fireworks addicts whisper darkly of y to the power of x, bu
t that is unrealistic. The London fireworks, launched from a string of sixteen barges along the Thames, were as intemperate as one could have wished. The last time the city took so apocalyptic a pounding was in 1940, when the Luftwaffe flattened the docks; now, as then, St. Paul’s Cathedral vanished in the smoke and slowly reappeared, ghost gray. What better than harmless hellfire to presage a fresh start?

  The most fitting thing about London’s millennial effort was its blend of new technological hope and comforting, old-fashioned screwups. The waiting crowds were promised a wall of fire, two hundred feet high, that would flash up the Thames at eight hundred miles an hour, presumably singeing everything in its path. The mind reeled at the idea of a million British subjects beginning the new century with no eyebrows. In the end, nothing happened; the wall failed to ignite, and the London Eye, a four-hundred-and-forty-three-foot Ferris wheel near Waterloo Bridge, failed a safety inspection. Down in Greenwich, the place where time is timed, it emerged on New Year’s Eve that, of the $1.2 billion dollars spent on the Millennium Dome, almost none had been set aside for postage stamps to stick on invitations; the great and the good were therefore, to the delight of the moderate and the naughty, made to wait in line with ID for up to four hours before entering what is, in effect, the world’s largest diaphragm.

  Once inside, the ten thousand visitors were treated to a floor show, a plastic glass of champagne, and a prayer. As the New Year broke, they launched into a mass rendition of “Auld Lang Syne.” Singers crossed their arms and linked hands with those on either side, as custom demands; unfortunately, custom doesn’t say what to do if the woman adjacent to you happens to be the Queen of England. Samuel Johnson was once asked why he had not wowed King George III with one-liners. “It was not for me to bandy civilities with my Sovereign,” he replied. Tony Blair is nothing if not a bandy man. He took the left hand of his sovereign and pumped it proudly up and down. The Queen offered the other hand to her husband but declined to cross her arms, the result being that she was forced to stand there and flap weakly like a chicken. The set of her mouth was the highlight of the evening: as billions of viewers looked on, Her Majesty assumed the steady, thunderous expression of a nun at a Robert Mapplethorpe exhibit. No doubt she was reflecting that, had she been the first Elizabeth rather than the second, she could have had the Prime Minister’s entrails broiled in front of his eyes.

  But the moment passed; a good time was had by nearly all. The world chose not to end, or even to shut down; computer wonks everywhere breathed easy once again and fingered their wads of overtime. The millennium bug has thus far failed to nip; the only substantial glitch was traced to Russia, where a software error caused a pneumonic lush to hand over nuclear codes to a war-hungry spook. The new President chose to be photographed in a patterned zip-up cardigan; if Mr. Putin’s foreign policy turns out to be as aggressive as his taste in knitwear, 2000 promises to be, at the very least, a colorful year. Maybe those fireworks were just an appetizer, after all.

  2000

  THE WELL-HEELED AND THE WONKY TOAST THE MILLENNIUM — John Cassidy

  DRESS as your favorite figure of the past millennium,” the silverembossed invitation to George and Susan Soros’s New Year’s Eve party said, and most guests did as they were bid. Shortly before seven, Galileo, Erasmus, and St. Francis of Assisi, not to mention Amelia Earhart and several Audrey Hepburns, gathered outside the Soroses’ Fifth Avenue apartment, where a fleet of minibuses was on hand to ferry them up to the speculator-cum-philanthropist’s country estate in Katonah. Passing through iron gates, the distinguished guests approached a large red brick mansion, with a slate roof and a modern extension jutting out of one side—which, on closer inspection, turned out to be a fully equipped sports atrium. Once inside, they were greeted by liveried servants in white wigs. The Soroses, famously kind hosts, had a rack of extra costumes standing by for those who had overlooked, or simply forgotten, their previous instructions. Jagdish Bhagwati, an eminent professor of economics at Columbia, chose to be the Emperor of Japan. His wife, Padma Desai, another noted economist, opted for the Empress of India.

  After being individually announced by a butler, the guests drank cocktails in a tented area around the swimming pool. “It was such a phantasmagoria,” said Gloria Deák, who fulfilled a lifetime ambition by dressing as Gloria Swanson. (Her husband, the historian Istvan Deák, came as Noël Coward.) On the walls hung ten large oil canvases, one for every century of the second millennium, and each featuring an image of the hosts. Beneath these modest portraits, George and Susan Soros greeted their guests in person: George a trim and smiling Christopher Columbus, Susan a striking Queen Isabella of Spain. The crowd numbered about two hundred and fifty, and there were many familiar faces in unfamiliar garb: Steve Brill, the publisher of the magazine Brill’s Content, had come as Winston Churchill, complete with top hat and cigar (in truth, the cigar was no stretch); Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, made an imperious Zeus (nobody dared question his grasp of the calendar); Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former national-security adviser, was a spirited Karl Marx (although he told some guests that he was Father Christmas); and the former British diplomat Sir James Murray, a sprightly octogenarian, entered in a bright-yellow jacket, delighted to be announced as Hugh Hefner.

  After a lengthy cocktail hour, the revellers took a footbridge across the pool—some stopping to stare at two gold-clad hired nymphs cavorting in the water—to the high-ceilinged atrium, where dinner was served. As Genghis Khan and Henry VIII and the rest tucked into lobster risotto, a troupe of trapeze acrobats whizzed to and fro above their heads. The acrobats were young, lithe, and dressed, or partly dressed, as signs of the zodiac. Two buff young fellows made a particularly strong impression, grinding sinuously against each other in an arresting interpretation of Gemini. “There was a beautiful young woman writhing above me as I ate,” Bhagwati later recalled. “My wife said, ‘Watch out! She’s going to fall on you.’ I said, ‘I hope she does.’ ” When the assembly could avert its eyes from the sights above, there was music, including a piece composed specially for the occasion by Lewis Flinn and performed by a small orchestra.

  At midnight, the crowd counted out the old year in fine voice, and gave the new one a resounding cheer. As the guests set off back to the city, at least some of them stared at the bronze medals they had been handed on the way out and wondered if the dawning millennium could ever match such understated splendor. Their hosts, in any case, had no such doubts. Beneath etched profiles of George and Susan Soros, the medals featured the following inscription: “Enlightened by the past. Embraced by the present. Empowered by the future.”

  2000

  TWO MENUS — Steve Martin

  2000

  THE BOOK TO HAVE WHEN THE KILLER BEES ARRIVE — David Owen

  HERE’S the situation: Your enemies have used their car to block the road ahead of you, and a bear, a python, and a mountain lion are gaining on you from behind. To your right: quicksand. To your left: a body of shark-infested water. Meanwhile, a woman is giving birth in your back seat, and the woman is unable to breathe, and you have a bullet lodged in your leg, and a package lying on the seat beside you looks as though it might contain a bomb. What do you do?

  Answering that question is much easier today than it was just a little while ago: all you have to do is open your copy of “The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook,” by Joshua Piven and David Borgenicht, and consult pages 34, 50, 44, 54, 18, 46, 99, 88, 109, and 94, respectively. The book, which was published late last year by Chronicle Books, has a bright-orange cover and is small enough to be tucked under the strap of a life jacket or a parachute pack. It contains straightforward, step-by-step, illustrated instructions for extricating yourself and others from all kinds of terrible predicaments. To fend off sharks, for example, you want to use “anything you have in your possession” to make “quick, sharp, repeated jabs” on or near the sharks’ eyes or gills—not on the tips of the sharks’ noses, as so many people e
rroneously assume. The book also explains how to jump from a building into a Dumpster, how to escape from killer bees (forget about swimming pools—the bees will wait for you to resurface), and how to win a sword fight.

  Piven and Borgenicht ought to have been longtime friends by now—they have lived in Philadelphia much of their lives and have many acquaintances in common; they both graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in the early nineties; and they are both writers—but they didn’t meet until just over a year ago, when Borgenicht, after wondering one evening how to land a pilotless airplane, went looking for a like-minded writing partner. Their book was inspired, Piven says, by “paranoia and too much television,” and also by certain formative life events. Piven was once attacked by knife-wielding thugs while riding a motorcycle in Jamaica—an incident that led him to wonder about the proper technique for leaping from a moving motorcycle to a moving car. (See page 84.) Borgenicht, whose previous works include “Mom Always Said, ‘Don’t Play Ball in the House,’ and Other Stuff We Learned from TV,” first began to worry about quicksand as a child, while watching Tarzan movies and certain episodes of “Gilligan’s Island.” (“Tarzan was usually rescued by Cheetah,” he says. “We stress self-reliance in our book—leave the chimpanzee at home.”) Still, the authors’ advice is drawn not from their own experiences but from the accumulated wisdom of experts in various disaster-related fields. The instructions for landing a plane, for example, come from two accomplished aviators, one of whom once wrote a book called “How to Crash a Plane (and Survive!).”

 

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