Author: wdfyfe

Before WD called himself a writer, he worked at a number of different jobs from stacking lumber to interior design. He studied English at UBC and creative writing at ASU where one of his teachers, Rita Dove, taught him the importance of the tale. He has written for radio, magazines and newspapers, but never television. He’s published both fiction and nonfiction in Great Britain and the US. He reads French passably and speaks enough Spanish to get from A to B and find the toilet. He has interviewed John Cleese, Peter Ustinov, Margaret Drabble, Kenneth Branagh and enough other famous people to make him a hopeless name dropper. His not-so-secret passions are history and trivia, and he has never lost a game of Trivial Pursuit — although he did come 4th one drunken Quiz Night at the Uxbridge in Notting Hill. He lives on the Pacific Ocean, although, not close enough to see, so he spends his days looking at a computer screen. It’s a wonderful life and he has only one regret: he can’t type faster.

International Women’s Day — 2013

snooki3I wasn’t the least bit shocked to discover that Nicole Polizzi has lost 42 pounds; actually I hadn’t given it much thought.  I was a bit surprised, though, to find that it’s headline news.  Granted, she wasn’t “above the fold” as they say (that was reserved for Hugo and Stompin’ Tom) but she was still there, dressed in a bikini bottom smile to generate magazine sales and promote the 2nd season of her television show.  I’m not opposed to people using their bodies to make a living; after all, professional athletes do it every day.  Nor am I against self promotion, although I am wary of some of the stuff people get up to, to put their names in the public eye.  (Witness Dennis Rodman’s recent adventure.)  Weight loss, however, is nothing serious; Oprah Winfrey was using it as a marketing ploy (tool?) back when Ms. Polizzi was still in diapers.  (That’s a disturbing image, BTW)  No, Nicole can put herself out there all she wants.  Even her ensuing interview didn’t bother me that much.  I’m not sure my life is any fuller knowing that she’s not quite as horny as she used to be, but I suppose, in an abstract way, I’m glad she still makes time for sex when she can.  What I did wonder, however, was what would history’s serious women think about the antics of contemporary females like Ms Polizzi who have taken to whoring their privacy for so little gain and such limited fame.  What, for example, would Lillian Hellman have to say, or Tina Modotti or the tongue that launched a thousand quips, Dorothy Parker?

For those of you who don’t live on this planet, Nicole Polizzi is Snooki the sex gerbil from Jersey Shore, and Lillian, Tina and Dorothy are some of the great-grandmothers from the 1920s and 30s who cut a path for her to get there.

The last thing the world needs right now is a lesson in feminism.  However, I think that we should stop for a moment, take three deep ones and get some perspective.  Snooki and her cohorts are smart business people.  They know what sells, and they’ve packaged themselves as the product.  This is not a sin.  Their transgression is not what they do; it’s the way they do it.

Way back in the day, the women who first strolled through the Men Only door in the media arts were considered anomalies, at best.  They were there for the female perspective.   Men did the heavy intellectual lifting, and the girls softened the edges, normally on a separate page.  This all changed in the 1930s.  Unwilling to be segregated, women like Dorothy Parker and Lillian Hellman took centre stage, as accepted (if not equal) parts of the New York literary scene.  They did their share of crap (both wrote for Hollywood) but they also confronted some serious social and political issues.  Hellman’s The Children’s Hour (1934) dealt with lesbianism before most of America knew it even existed.  Meanwhile, the outspoken Parker was eventually blacklisted for her sharp and uncompromising political views.  At the same time, women like Martha Gellhorn and Msnookiargaret Bourke-White were making their bones as legitimate foreign correspondents.  Gelllhorn covered the Spanish Civil War for Collier’s and Bourke-White went to the Soviet Union for Fortune Magazine.  (She was the first Western journalist allowed in, by the way.)  Other photojournalists, like Dorothea Lange were picturing the Great Depression with a feminine eye, and Tina Modotti was putting a female face on the Mexican Revolution.

The one recurring theme throughout this entire period was that women were just as smart as their male counterparts, just as serious — but they were still women.  They didn’t just echo men.  Amelia Earhart might fly with the boys (and frequently did) but it was the typewriters and cameras of the age that gave the world a uniquely female intellectual voice.  People stopped, looked and listened.

Today, a lot of people are going to stop and look at Snooki in her faux leopard bathing costume.  They’re going to watch her TV program and listen to what she says.  At twenty-five, her claims to fame are being frequently drunk, getting punched in the face and losing 42 pounds after the birth of her first child.  As a businesswoman she’s obviously smart and clever enough to turn these minimal assets (?) into a million dollar industry.  However, I wonder what the girls* from the 30s would make of what their female voice has become.

Happy International Women’s Day

*Make no mistake: Hellman, Parker, Gellhorn and the rest were just girls at the time.  They drank and partied to excess.  They smoked Virginia tobacco and Mexican marijuana.  They listened to cool jazz and Cab Calloway’s hot jive.  They had sex with who they wanted to; when they wanted to.  They married, divorced and frequently took lovers.  They danced in the streets.  They were young and acted like it.

9 Out Of 10 Dentists…

english3When the Voice-over man on the television advertisement says, “Nine out of ten dentists recommend Brand X,” do you ever wonder what the other guy recommends?  Do you stop for a minute and think maybe that extra guy isn’t just some dumb bugger who should never have made it out of dental school?  Maybe he’s an insightful maverick, years ahead of his time.  Maybe, because of his unconventional views, he’s been losing high-end patients and is now contemplating a move to Africa where dentistry is still practised for the love of the smile.  It’s possible, you know.  In fact, in a hundred years, the Nobel Academy might just award that 10th guy the Prize for Medicine (posthumously) when scientific advances prove he was right, all along.  Maybe they’ll even name streets and schools after him for his courage in remaining true to his oral health principles in the face of universal scorn.  That can happen, also.  Or maybe it won’t go that way.  Maybe he’ll die, poor and alone, in a South African slum-hut village, consumed by Umqombothi* and despair, his unique knowledge unaccepted and lost to humanity for all time.

Or it might just be a gender thing.  That 10th dentist could be a woman, who, as a natural caregiver went into dentistry out of a genuine love for people and their hygiene.  Maybe in dental school she found she had to be that much better than her male colleagues, so now, as a professional, she’s done more research on the subject.  Perhaps she found some significant flaws in the formula for Brand X but was under enormous pressure not to publish her findings.  However, when she was asked to make a recommendation, she felt compelled to tell the truth.  Possibly this is putting a lot of stress on her home life, where her husband, an oral surgeon she met in university, is unsupportive, and she’s having an affair with the podiatrist across the hall.  It could all end in a nasty divorce, and it might take her years to get her life back together when she finally kicks the podiatrist out and returns to her small hometown to assume her father’s family practice.  It’s very possible.

Of course, it could all be a corporate conspiracy.  The original nine dentists could have been specially selected for their moral english1turpitude.  They could have been taken on an all-expenses-paid weekend to the San Marcos Golf Resort in Chandler, Arizona.  Once there, they might have been schmoozed with fast cars, expensive liquor and beautiful women.  They could have played golf all day and partied all night.  Then, on Sunday, they could have been told that the next junket was deep-sea fishing off the coast of Puerto Vallarta available only to those dentists who recommended Brand X.  It would have been an easy choice for weak men.  Perhaps, though, in a complete surprise, dentist # 4 may have fallen in love with one of the hookers.  He might say he’s going to blow the whistle on the whole tawdry scam.  Threatened with exposure, the corporate lackeys might have kidnapped the couple, taken them out into the desert and left them for dead.  However, after days of enduring heat and thirst, the lovers could have reached the border.  They could have smuggled themselves across and are now hiding out in an unnamed Mexican village, where they’ve set up a clandestine, cash-only dental practice.  Meanwhile, in corporate America, the suits at Brand X might have found another dentist and think they’re safe from exposure.  Unfortunately for them, dentist #4 might have just discovered a young girl who, even though she’s been brushing regularly with Brand X, has developed a cavity….

Do you ever think of these things when the toothpaste commercials come on TV?  You don’t?  You should.  It’s fun.

*South African beer

Hey, Boomers: Shut Up!

pie1Back in the Stoned Age, when I was growing up, there was an unwritten rulebook, which, like The Pirate’s Code, acted as a kinda running guide for the transition from primitive adolescent to responsible adult.  It covered pretty much everything — except sex (which was trial and error) and how to make a salad.  We didn’t so much live by the rules as reference them in times of crisis.  For example, when those pesky grandparents showed up with birthday money you moved the illegal agriculture off the “dining room” table and took down the more aggressive examples of bachelor art.  Here in the 21st century, that old way of life is more-or-less passé and we’ve discarded the rulebook.  After all, it’s usually grandma who’s hiding the drugs these days, and they’re dancing about boobs on the six o’clock news.   However, even though I say good riddance to most of the hypocrisy we practiced back then, it seems a shame that we threw the baby out with the bath water and no longer tolerate some of the niceties of civilized behaviour.

One of the cornerstones of life, as we used to live it, was that old people were stupid.  Every generation knew this.  Somewhere around menopause (male and female) the human IQ drops about twenty points and then continues to slowly decline on a straight shot to the grave.  People don’t actually die of old age; they simply become too stupid to live.  This is one of the tried and truisms, handed down from parent to child since Achmed the Unwashed decided to set up shop in the Euphrates valley – circa 40,000 years ago.

Of course, this utter stupidity never prevents the average old person from running off at the mouth.  They consider it a combination of their right to make noise and duty to be heard.  When I was a kid, most of the blather was irrelevant instructions on how to survive a world war – which hasn’t come in handy, yet.  (FYI, I don’t think my generation ever did convince the parents that the only thing walking away from World War III would be a cockroach.)

However, I digress.  The unwritten rule was that you listened to these old gasbags jawing away.  You shut your mouth, made all the right noises in all the right places (polite was another of the unwritten rules) and, then, after they’d cleared off, you did as you damn well pleased.  The sage advice from the grey hairs was not for you; it was for them.  It was a catalogued recollection of all the opportunities they missed, the risks they shouldn’t have taken and the places they screwed up.  Everybody knew this and acted accordingly.  Unfortunately, those days are gone, and our world is the lesser for it.

Since we threw out the old unwritten rulebook, the same people who scoffed at their parents are now demanding we take theirpie ancient wisdom seriously.  They want to keep running the show.  The problem is they’re retrending the ideas, solutions and institutions they’ve been yipping about since back when Bruce Willis still had hair.  The world has changed since then, and just FYI, that crap never worked in the first place.  And, here’s the kicker: people are listening to these fossils.  This is ridiculous.

I’m as clever as the next fellow — and smarter than most — but I have no clue what’s going on in 2013 and no right to make decisions about it.  I grew up in a time when baseball players swung for the fences, casual sex was important enough to keep private and the truth was protection against prosecution.  The world I see out my kitchen window is alien to me.  Hell, I have no idea what the 83 other buttons on the TV remote are there for – and neither does anyone else on the business end of 50.  We’re not supposed to.  We’re not supposed to be setting the agenda; we’re supposed to be complaining about it!

This is the first generation where the old folks are unwilling to go gentle into that good night.  They’re clinging to power like drunks hanging onto a lamppost.  Unable to go forward, unwilling to go back, they have no idea why they’re there in the first place.  The only thing they do know for certain is if they ever let go, they’re going to be lost in the gutter.

Me, I liked the olden days.  You knew where you stood.   And just like my parents and their parents and theirs — back a thousand generations – sometimes, I’m consumed with nostalgia and want to return to a more civilized time.  A time when young people were seen and not heard and old people were heard but never listened to.