PlazaJen: Passion Knit

Ohhhhh, good golly. Just typing her name makes me duck a little. For a two-year period of time, I could set my father off like a powderkeg by just the mere mention of her name. Tina Brown. Former editor of Vanity Fair, and at the explosive times I am referencing, editor of the New Yorker magazine. Holy Fuckin' Toledo. You would have thought the AntiChrist himself had ridden up from the Bowels of Hell, in a black carriage drawn by devil dragons and deposited my father's subscription in his mailbox.

"FUCKINGTINABROWN*THATROUNDHEELED BITCH" would explode through my phone, which, if you know my father, "round-heeled bitch" is one of his favorite gender-degrading remarks. I had to have him explain it to me when I was a youngster, learning the Art of Cussing at his knee.("Because her heels are round, Jennifer, she's always falling over backwards into bed with men. A whore." Gotcha! Thanks, Pop!) He also taught me to deliver lines like, "You scum sucking pig" or, "You big gob of snot" with such evil seeping through my voice, he finally forbade me from saying it anymore. Why did he teach me this? I have no idea. But it sure would have given me a leg up as a merchant marine, had I chosen that field instead of advertising.

In any event, GoddamnTina Brown, every time Dad's inner eye flared up over her, I'm sure she felt it, walking down the street in NYC, hailing a cab, a flush of heat blazing up through her upraised arm, a slight buckling of a knee. She probably thought nothing of it, not realizing half a country away, a middle-aged hippie was seething and roiling with rage at her incompetence & directing a white-hot fury in her very specific direction. (This is the same man who had no restraint in his equal, if not greater, white-hot rage for that one and only big gob of snot Newt Gingrich. Maybe Arlen Specter. I love my dad.) And, perhaps, I tell this nugget of a story to illustrate the origins of my OWN wound-uppedness, when I get so pissed, small flecks of spit form in the corners of my mouth and I blink rapidly to cool my brain.

Well, finally, GoddamnTina Brown went away, on to ruin other shit, and the shambles she left in her wake was still the New Yorker, the pinnacle of literary goodness and essay excellence. I had a sales rep in from the magazine a couple months ago, and he had just started his rep job for the pub. I gave him a half-wry smile as I looked at his business card, his name printed in that distinctive-font the masthead is typed in every week. "That's something to be proud of, that right there," as I pointed at it. "That's the cache you represent."

Sure beats being a scum-sucking pig. Or a round-heeled bitch.