When I discovered that I had been conscripted into the service of this publication, I asked the creative director what I should use as a guide to determine how to fill the column assigned to me.
“Ohthenumberofwordsintheothercolumnsisfine,” fired Paula Nicewanger, and once I replayed her voice at 33 RPM, I understood what she had said. (When I played it backward, her voice said, “Sell more ad space.”) I did a word count on the other columns that had (unbeknownst to me) been printed, and came up with a nice round number: 600. That is the number of words necessary to fill my assigned seat.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, wrote a poem: “The Charge Of The Light Brigade.” In it, he chronicled an event where, “Into the valley of Death/ Rode the six hundred.” It may be an apt metaphor for the 600 I send to war on a weekly basis. But before the hearty lasses and lads can swarm over the walls of your mind-castles, they must first wrestle with me. I round up hundreds of words, herd them into my personal arena, and set loose the twin lions, Strunk and White. The 600 who survive are deemed worthy, especially when they are not the elements of a cliché, such as “deemed worthy.” (I do not apply Faulknerian standards: one sentence in his short novel, “Old Man,” contains an astonishing 452 words.)
I fret over the survivors, for though they have survived the arena, are they really the most capable? Are there any weaknesses among them? Can they combat ennui, punch through boredom; can they inform and enlighten? Or at least, clown a little, maybe giggle down the walls?
I cheat, of course. When I say “600,” there are times that the number may be greater. I always feel guilty about that, those extra word-count calories that fatten the eye. The creative director tells me that she “makes magic” when my column arrives with a roll around the waist and an extra jiggle to the thighs (which, in feminine form, I find censored). The editor may strike some of my choices. I suspect that the parenthetical comment on the “thigh jiggle” may die on the cutting room floor, the peelings of a wounded potato, curling and drying beside my scatological references. And of course, it is important to avoid mixing metaphors, such as wrestling and lions eating warriors who might survive to ride into a valley if they have not been cut from a roll of film. (Metaphor, whom I thought was rightly a 5.)
The 37th word in this column (should it reach you as I have submitted it) is not a true “word,” but a compilation — a “mashup”, if you will — of 11 words. Another instance of shameless cheating, but done in the vein of the description my publishers have appended to me: humorist. While I feel that I am ill equipped to carry this moniker, anyone who has known me for at least 20 seconds understands that I am a fan of womanhood; the four women who publish this paper can call me anything they choose. In both my marriages, I often employed the honorific, “Yes Dear.” (Pay no attention to the screaming bride behind the curtain. My mother often admonished me to “Use your inside joke!”)
It is my hope that the 600 survivors of the thinking, writing and editing process should be the greatest of all the possibilities when they reach the reader. Even those found lacking were rigorously tested. But sometimes, the measure of the value of my submissions is this:
I crack myself up.