Danville High School, class of 1982. Born and raised in Danville. 
Currently in Jackson, MS.
(goes off singing another chorus of “It’s A Small World”)
Well let’s adjourn to a private room and I’ll SHOW you.
puts some 70s porn soundtrack music on the stere
dowm da da dowm dowm wicky wicky wicky pow
dowm da da dowm dowm wicky wicky wicky pow
(You like that, don’t you baby?)
dowm da da dowm dowm wicky wicky wicky pow
dowm da da dowm dowm wicky wicky wicky pow
(say, is it hot in here, or is it just YOU?)
dowm da da dowm dowm wicky wicky wicky pow
dowm da da dowm dowm wicky wicky wicky pow
(let me just lower the lights a bit and freshen up your champagne cocktail…)
dowm da da dowm dowm wicky wicky wicky pow
dowm da da dowm dowm wicky wicky wicky pow
Ah, okay…thank you. I had been picturing something out of FANTASIA, and it wasn’t pretty.
All this palavering and no one’s mentioned what a world of good this move would do for Eve’s HOBBYING life!
She’s always been drawn to dark, musty, claustrophobic places (she works in the magazine business), and Kentucky is the best area in the world for amateur spelunking!
{cues up “The Ballad of Floyd Collins” on the Victorola}
Eve’s version of the Floyd Collins tragedy: she goes out spelunking in the depths of the Kentucky caverns, catches her Jimmy Choo pumps on an outcrop, and runs her stocking.
Thousands weep!
Ya know, Eve, I’ve been thinking for a long time that I ought to hook you up with an old graduate school friend of mine. He’s a cable network programming VP, and you seem like kindred spirits in many ways. Despite the horrible soul-less corporate nature of much of his job, he’s managed to continue having fun and doing some things because he likes them, not because the market research says to. He was in the same English lit. grad program I was, specializing in American realism and film, but basically quit the program after completing coursework and comps. Went to work for the network doing their monthly program guide about nine months after they launched in the late 80s, and was offered a job in programming when they shut down the program guide. I could give a much better idea of what he’s like if I told you which network he works for, and particularly if I reminded you of what their programming was like a decade or so ago, but that would make him too readily idenfiable to others, which I wouldn’t want to do without his consent. He continued to teach intro to film courses at Georgia State University for several years, just because he liked doing it, until teaching three days a week and grading 300 final exams on top of 70-hour weeks got to be more than he could deal with.
I’m not suggesting that you go to work for him or anything like that; I have no reason to believe that such a thing would be possible or desirable for any of the parties involved. You just seem like people that ought to know each other. Perhaps he might know someone who knows someone who . . . .
We’re not in regular contact these days, except indirectly through his ex-girlfriend, who works near where I do and with whom I have lunch occasionally. He has this neurological problem that prevents him from dealing with the concept of marriage in any form, so when his friends get married they basically cease to exist. I hadn’t fully processed the depth of this (having few married folk among our acquaintance) until he failed to show up for my wedding after agreeing to be one of the witnesses who signed the ketubah – and you try finding a replacement who’s a Jewish male over thirteen years old not related to the bride or groom among the wedding guests on a Sunday afternoon in Asheville, NC. I was annoyed for a while, but I’ve come to understand that it really is nearly an organic problem with him, so I don’t worry over it. He’s still a great guy, just one I don’t get to hang around with anymore.
And if things progress at all with the UK press, one of my oldest friends is an editor at the University of Tennessee Press in Knoxville. He might have some useful information on the situation in Lexington.
Feh. Everyone knows that Meow Mix on Houston St. is the best area in the world for amateur spelunking!
:: d & r ::
Rack—A heterosexual man who doesn’t want to get married, AND who works in programming?
Birng 'im on!
[Manny—SHAME on you!]
Hey, Rack—Do get me in touch with your friend; he may at least know some people who might know some people . . .
I’ll ask Tuba to let you have my E-mail address. Thanks!
I’ve heard of “wailing and rending of garments”, but I never realized there was a causal relationship.
Okay, I HOPE you’re not talking about the hippo in the tutu, Ike… that would severely hurt my feelings.
Ummmmmm…ahhh…no…no…I was thinking of the manly yet graceful centaurs in the Beethoven section.
Yeah. That’s the ticket. Those manly yet graceful centaurs.
I’ll just step out now, and mail Chef a holiday fruitcake.
MANNY:
That’s Canyon Ferry Lake, you troglodyte. You want people to think you’re from (ugh) New York?
I love this place. Where else would you see throwaway mentions of Floyd Collins and people who get the reference?
Eve, I hope you find the place that you want. Lexington might be tough. I’ve only driven through there once, and so know little about the town, but I did spend a year in a small city in southern Illinois about 18 years ago. No decent daily newspaper, local broadcasting that was a joke, no good bookstore and the lack of other, similar amenities that you take for granted in a big city were hard to deal with.
Yeah, you can still subscribe to the NY Times, sign up for cable, and buy books and DVDS of old movies by mail, but it isn’t the same. (I suppose it would be somewhat easier today, with online booksellers and such, but I bet it still would hard to acclimate yourself.)
Lexington has a pretty good newspaper, the Lexington Herald-Leader. However, the Louisville Courier-Journal is better there: they have won quite a few awards for journalism. When I was in school studying journalism, we didn’t study the Lexington paper, even though it was closer. We studied the Louisville paper. You can go to http://www.kentuckyconnect.com and read the Herald-Leader.
Bookstores: There are quite a few. If Sqecial Media is still there (near UK campus), they specialize in the hard-to-find stuff. However, in Lexington Green, there is Joseph-Beth Booksellers. A HUGE, two-story bookstore right in the middle of the mall. Fantabulous. You could find almost anything there.
Local broadcasting: Well, it’s about what you’d expect.
So you’re saying that when you think of me, you think of a creature with a blandly handsome face, odd-colored skin, a rear end as big as a horse’s, and no discernible genitalia? Gee, THANKS, Ike. I feel much better.
sigh I guess it could be worse, you could have said you were thinking of that drunken bedsheet-clad wine-swilling reprobate Silenus from the same segment, or one of the bubble-blowing elephants.
Let me know when you need my mailing address, you big meanie.
(grin)
Eve, you need to move out of NY in a Southern sorta direction.
Why?
Because I am convinced you are Florence King, and she moved out of NY at about your age, for about the same reasons.
I am not sure where I picked up the idea theat you are Florence King–I think it is a combination of the “Flora McFlimsey” thing, your mix of cosmopolitan and pre-60s pop culture knowledge, your status as a sucessful-but-not overwhelmingly-so author, and your writting style, but I am absolutly convinced you are more or less Florence King, although I have never been able to reconcile your lack of Southerness.
So it is perfectly normal that you should find yourself less and less entranced with the NY life style and more and more interested in moving to the south. It is a quirk of nature that you didn’t start out here to begin with. In fact, you will eventually find yourself longing for the sort of small mountain town where “All the children have left and all the old people sit on thier porches with shotguns across their laps” (Not an exact quote, but close). It’s destiny, you can’t help it, might as well accept it.
(This is, BTW, the nicest compliment I have ever given anyone–I hope you appriciate it)
{sob}
All right…ALL RIGHT!
I was thinking of Mickey Mouse!
{insert winking smiley here}
Happy to. I’ll be waiting.
In Kentucky, the darkies are gay? I’ll never be able to look at Muhammad Ali the same way again.
But, Eve, you can’t leave all of us in New York. We love you more than the butterscotch pond or the porno bush.
There just aren’t enough gay people in my life. I should hasten to Kentucky…
Strangely enough, I’ve been to several national conferences where the KY Delegation was… well… a big buyer of KY. If you know what I mean.