Where's the beef? Make that where's the beef coming from.

I'm not a huge consumer of beef. Once in a while, I'll have a steak - and one of those whiles is coming up tomorrow, as I head out to a steak house to celebrate a friend's birthday. And I really do like a burger now and again.

Last year, I tried an Impossible (non-meat) Buger, and it was okay. A bit too well done to my liking, but if you put enough toppings on it, it's fine. So's a nothing-burger. Decades ago, my husband and I were snowed in and didn't feel like braving the elements. We had hamburger rolls around for some reason. And condiments. Just no hamburger. So we concocted what we called Fake Burgers: hamburg roll with mustard, kethcup, pickles, lettuce, cheese and tomato. It actually tasted an awful lot like a McD Quarter Pounder.

I could probably convert to the Impossible Burger to meet my burger needs, and feel very virtuous about not contributing to the cow gas methane that's killing the environment. Or so I thought.

Turns out that even if you switch to plant-based meat, you're not likely to be saving a cow. 

For one thing, no one will miss my burger consumption:

Despite cattle ranchers’ deep fear and antipathy for plant-based meat, per capita consumption of beef has been increasing since 2015. U.S. beef sales reached an all-time high in 2019, with a similar outlook for 2020, according to the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association. And the debut of high-profile, plant-based burgers doesn’t appear to be a zero-sum game: Burger King’s parent company reported a 5 percent sales increase in its third quarter last year after the launch of the Impossible Whopper, the strongest growth since 2015. But sales of its beef burgers increased as well. (Source: Washington Post)

But it's not just that my "sacrifice" is outweighed by more people eating beef. There's also this: a lot of the beef that goes in to hamburger production comes "from Holstein or Jersey cows, which frequently are decommissioned dairy cows past their prime." And from male calves that used to go for veal, before we stopped cosuming veal. 

Well moo to that.

With the exception of a once-a-decade backslide, I've already bid adieu to veal. Looks like if I want to save the world from methane, I need to give up dairy. No cheese on my toasted cheese sandwich. No milk in my tea. No fro-yo snack in the evening.

Of course I can live without. But why is everything so damned hard these days?

Rocket Man, burning out his fuse up here alone

Flight is apparently in the air around Pink Slip. Just last week, it was the winged victory of Fred Reffet, who, wearing a "jet-powered wingsuit" took flight in Dubai. This week's contribution to Space Force comes courtesy of the recently-late "Mad" Mike Hughes, a daredevil who crashed last week in his homemade rocket, trying to prove that the earth is flat.

The plan: Float dozens of miles high in a balloon, then fly a rocket to the Karman line, the 62-mile-high barrier that separates the atmosphere and the cold vacuum of space, filming the entire way. “For three hours, the world stops,” Hughes said during a live stream, imagining the reaction. (Source: Washington Post)

The reality:

...his crudely built contraption propelled him on a column of steam, spiraled through the air and cratered into the sagebrush outside Barstow, Calif. He was 64.

...“Everyone was just stunned and didn’t know what to do,” [reporter Justin Chapman] told The Washington Post on Sunday. “They were silent for a long time.” 

Hughes’s support team went to inspect the crash site about a half mile away, Chapman said, and returned with the harrowing news: Hughes was dead, the rocket had pancaked, and the other three parachutes never deployed.  

On the daredevil continuum, I'm way on the end of the spectrum. 

The only horses I've ever been on are rocking horses and merry-go-round steeds. 

I've made a couple of trips to one of theose racetracks where you drive around in little cars. I got lapped repeatedly. 

One time, my husband and I were got on one of those summer toboggan runs at a ski resort in Vermont. He took off, and I followed behind, keeping one foot firmly on the slow-down pedal. That is, until sleds started backing up behind me, yelling at me to speed things up. So I had to ease up on the brake. 

I'm sure if I ever got on a Segway I'd end up with a broken hip and/or a broken skull. So I don't get on a Segway.

On a rented moped in Bermuda, I started to head the wrong way (i.e., the right way, the way we do it in America) into a 

rotary. On my way to correcting, I crashed into a stone wall.

I wasn't a particularly chicken-shit kid. I climbed trees. Crossed a steep (at least to a 10 year old) ravine on a downed tree trunk. Got in an out-sized baby buggy with a bunch of other kids and had someone send us down a hill. When there was an appliance carton to be had, I was one of the kids taking my turn to have it rolled down the steep front-yard banks and go crashing over the cement retaining wall onto the sidewalk. One of my favorite things as a kid was crawling under parked trucks, hoping the truck driver wasn't anywhere near. On sled or flying saucer, I liked going fast and loved it when my father iced the track that shot through the woods next to our house. I liked exploring creepy old garages, barns, houses. On our poorly footed backyard swing sets, I liked orchestrating things so that three kids were pumping all at once so we could get the legs of the swing set airborne.

But the older I've gotten, the less interested I've become in anything that's physically daunting. I'll never sky dive. I'll never dive off a diving board. I'd consider ziplining. Maybe. 

I'm just not an adventurer of the body. I'm more an adventurer of the mind. I like to read. I like to think. I like to do Extra Hard Sudoku. 

So, nothing like Mike Hughes, who, prior to becoming a rocket man, had done a 103-foot jump in a stretch limo. In preparing to jump the Snake River (a leap that Evil Knievel had failed at), he crashed a rocket. He piloted an earlier version of one of this garage-made rockets nearly two-thousand feet above the Mojave Desert, achieving a speed of 250 m.p.h. 

But his ultimate project was to get up high enough to prove that the earth was flat. (Something I believe he could have disproved on a commercial flight.) Instead, he demonstrated that that if you burn up your fuse up there alone, you may come crashing back down to earth. Sometimes death defying doesn't defy death.

For this last project, Hughes had a deal with the Science Channel to document it. Why something called the Science Channel would want to be associated with a flat-earther seems like a pretty good question. But while Hughes might have been mad, he was still open-minded.

“I expect to see a flat disk up there,...[but] I don’t have an agenda. If it’s a round Earth or a ball, I’m going to come down and say, ‘Hey, guys, I’m bad. It’s a ball, okay?’ ” 

And if you're wondering  how flat-earthers account for the oceans not sloshing over the sides, "many believers envision a flat disk ringed by sea ice, which naturally holds the oceans in." So there.

But Mike Hughes was more than just a flat-earther. He really just liked pushing the edge of his own personal envelope. 

“It’s to convince people they can do things extraordinary with their lives,” he said. “Maybe it pushes people to do things they wouldn’t normally do with their lives that will maybe inspire someone else." 

Guess I'm just not the easily inspirable type.  

Anyway, it's easy to write "Mad" Mike Hughes off as a nutter, and consider his death a candidate for a Darwin Award. But, hey, he died doing what he loved, and there's something to be said for that. Maybe I'll die reading. Or doing an Extra Hard Soduku puzzle...

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How long have I been shower-singing "Rocket Man"? It's not on my regular playlist, but it does come up occasionally when my brain starts to shuffle. So I've been singing it for years. It's also a wonderful sing-along tune when it comes on the radio. Let alone at an Elton John concert. (My one and only was last fall.) Anyway, when I went to write the title of this post, for some reason I googled the lyrics. It's "burning up his fuse up here alone," and not "burning up his fuel up there alone," which is what I've been singing all these years. Who knew? You really do learn something new every day.

The Zamboni driver? Too good to be true, but true and good nonetheless

When I first saw the headline about the Zamboni driver who was tapped to play emergency NHL goalie, my first reaction was this is so preposterous, it's just too good to be true. The Zamboni guy?

This would be as if the kid selling Sports Bars in the bleachers at Fenway was called in to pitch some extra innings ball. As if someone mopping the floor at The Garden was whistled in to shoot a few free throws at a Celtics game. 

This stuff just doesn't happen.

As it turns out, my first reaction was right. It was too good to be true to think that the Zamboni driver could just jump off the Zamboni and jump into the game. Which doesn't mean the story isn't true and good.

Yes, David Ayres is a Zamboni drivers. But he's also been the practice goalie for the Toronto Maple Leafs and their AHL affiliate for eight years. So he's used to having pro hockey players sending slap shots his way. Still, he'd never been in a pro game. And there he was, after the Carolina Hurricanes lost both of their goalies, in pads, in the net, making saves.

Wow!

Turns out that pro teams have an emergency oncall goalie on hand who can jump if he's needed by either the home team (who he works for) or for the visiting team. In this case, the home town team was fine. It was the Hurricanes whose two goalies went down

Ayres was sitting in the stands with his wife when he got the call, errrr, text.

Next thing the 42-year-old Zamboni driver knew, he was walking down the tunnel and into the spotlight.

And not long after, he had an improbable first NHL win. He is the oldest goalie in NHL history to win his regular-season debut.

Ayres allowed goals on the first two shots he faced before settling down and stopping the next eight in a suffocating defensive performance by his new teammates as Carolina picked up a stunning 6-3 victory over the Maple Leafs on Saturday night. (Source: Boston Globe)

Ayres is from Ontario, works for the Maple Leafs (Leaves?), and is a Leafs (Leaves?) fan. So I'm sure he would rather have had his pro debut with the Leafs (Leaves?). But I'm equally sure he was just thrilled to get in a real pro game.

The fans were apparently great, cheering him one even though he was playing for the other guys. And the Hurricanes also went all in. After Ayres' got his airtime in the post-game interviews, his ad hoc teammates showered him with Gatorade. And within minutes, the Hurricans were selling Ayres' jerseys. (Hope they put a couple aside for him.)

Ayres didn't get to be the practice goalie without being a pretty damned good hockey player. And I'm guessing he's had plenty of dreams about making it to The Show. But he never quite got to that level. (A kidney transplant in his twenties didn't help.) And now, here he was. Showtime!

I'm delighted for the guy.

It's the understudy's understudy, standing in the wings, who gets to go in for Nathan Lane on Broadway after the real understudy comes down with the flu. It's as if Joyce Carol Oates failed to deliver the short story that was due to The New Yorker, and the magazine reached out to an amateur workshop writer to send a piece in. (That would be me, of course.)

A few days ago, the hockey world celebrated the 40th anniversary The Miracle on Ice, when the kids from the US Olympic Hockey Team beat the big, bad Russkies and went on to win the Gold Medal. I watched that game, and it was absolutely thrilling. Too bad the team members marred their reunion by appearing at a Trump rally in Keep American Great caps.

So I'll be celebrating David Ayres victory as a tiny little miracle on ice. Congratulations! A true story, and a good one.

Smile, you're on post-death camera?

I grew up in the tradition of open caskets at wakes. It was just the way things were done. In fact, it was considered odd - even off-putting - when someone decided on a closed casket. It was only "excused" when the body was totally ravaged by cancer or had had his face shot off in Vietnam. Other than that, it was somehow considered selfish to go with a closed casket, as if you were depriving wake-goers of a good look see. What was the family trying to hide? 

Not that I ever actually said anything, but at a still relatively tender age, I did know what to say if I wanted to comment on the condition of the stiff deceased. "He looks good." "They did a great job with her."

And yet, the stiff deceased seldom does look particularly good.

At my father's wake - back when wakes were two day, two shifts each day (2-4 p.m., and 7-9 p.m.) affairs - a number of people commented on how good he looked, and what a great job Frank (who ran the funeral parlor) had done with him - this supposedly because, as a friend of my father, Frank wanted to make him look good. 

But the magic didn't work. Maybe because of what they did to my father's mouth - which I guess must have collapsed in on itself - my father rather resembled Galen in Planet of the Apes.

Even after nearly 50 years, I can perfectly recall how my father looked when he was laid out. Even without any photograph to use as an aide memoire. 

I was, vaguely, aware that some people did take post mortem snapshots of their loved ones. It just wasn't part of our tradition.

But it was a thing for some people.

Fast forward a dozen years from the death of my father to the death of my Uncle Jack. Jack was a state representative, and at his wake, a couple of his constituents came up to my Aunt Mary and my mother and asked if they minded if they took a couple of pictures of Jack in his casket. They wanted to be able to show it to a couple of friends who weren't able to make the wake. (I believe my mother said that the constituents were Irish. That's neither here nor there, I suppose, but it does sound ultra-Irish.)

Me? I have no interest in pictures of a dead body. But it's really no stranger than having an open casket at a wake, which I know freaks out people who didn't grow up looking at dead bodies lying down fully clothed, clutching rosary beads, in satin-lined caskets. (Big question: do you put on the person's glasses or not?)

So, while I started to react with an ick-factor shudder when my sister Kath sent me an article on an increase in the popularity after-death photography, by the time I read through the story, I was beyond "oh, why not" and into healthy-respect territory.

Photographing the dead, it seems, is taking off among those who opt for home funerals - another thing I have a healthy-respect for. 

I didn't have a home funeral when my husband died, and I didn't have a wake for Jim, either. He was cremated, with most of his ashes buried but some scattered - and some, after six years, still to be scattered. A month after Jim died, I had a memorial service that was highly personal and pretty DIY. In between, I sat a sort of shiva, with friends and family members popping by to help me grieve. It worked.

But I wouldn't have wanted to have a picture of Jim taken immediately after his death - eyes open, mouth agape. 

I realize that post-mortem pictures aren't taken in the immediate aftermath of death, but once there's been a chance to tune the body up a bit. 

Anyway, when Robert Alexander died, his family brought him back to a family farm in Oklahoma for a home funeral. And the family decided that a lot of them wanted a picture taken with Robert. And that they wanted a picture that included Robert, his six surviving siblings, and their mother. 

Unlike many memorial photos, however, the Alexander siblings just passed them back and forth among themselves. No social media postings. 

Amy Cunningham is a Brooklyn funeral director who helps out with home funerals.

“The photograph seals the emotion,” Ms. Cunningham said. “And with cellular phones ever-present, we’re going to be recording all kinds of things we never did previously. Death is just one of them. Though when you’re Facebook posting and the images are wedged between the latest Trump atrocity and cats who look like Hitler it can be jarring.” (Source: NY Times)

Not that I know anyone who's actually posted a picture of a dead body, but I'm not wild about this social media use. Maybe if someone had a dedicated account set up for such display. But the image of a dead body just showing up in your timeline, or Twitter or Insta feed, or, I guess for the youngs, on Tick Tock? Not my cup of tea. What are you supposed to do with this news? How should you react? As the article asks:

Do you choose the weeping smiley face or just hit “like”?

Precisely. 

What I do like about the concept (if not the execution) of death photography, is that it's an acknowledgement of death - not a denial. 

Not sure that I need to join the "death-positive" movement, but I'm all for accepting that dying is part of life. A big part of it. And, other than birth, pretty much the only thing that everyone in the world has in common. 

One good thing about growing up in my tradition was that there was no denial of death. While there may have a been a bit too much revelling in it on the part of the nuns -  glorification of gruesome martydoms and child-deaths, constant reminders that none of us deserved to live - there was no escaping that we were all born to die. 

Children went to wakes and funerals, and not just of close family members. If a neighbor died, the parent or even grandparent of a classmate, by late grammar school you were expected to go to the wake and/or funeral. 

In seventh grade, I was quite pissed off at my parents for refusing to let me go to the wake of an eighth grade girl who'd been hit by a car and killed. I wasn't a close friend of Dorliss, but my sister and I were part of a larger group that occasionally played or hung around together. She had a couple of older brothers - a major attraction - and her mother had a hairdressing salon in their basement - a minor attraction - so we occasionally hung out at Dorliss' house.

Anyway, my parents thought it would be too traumatic to see Dorliss' body at an open casket wake. Kath was old enough to go, but I would have to settle for the funeral. 

Everyone was, of couse, upset by the death of Dorliss. But I guess I was a somewhat callous seventh grader becaues I remember being more upset that I was the only one I knew who didn't go to the wake and see Dorliss - who was very pretty - laid out in an angel gown.

There was no option, but I absolutely would have looked at a picture of this if one had been available. 

But, yeah, I was a child wake and funeral goer. Everyone was. 

I was always amazed in adult life to find that there were plenty of folks who made it to adulthood without ever having been to a wake or funeral. How to reach adulthood without ever having known anyone who died???

Anyway, tomorrow's Ash Wednesday. You may see a few folks wandering around town with dirt smudges on their foreheads. Just the annual Catholic reminder that you're going back to dust. 

And while I don't think anyone needs to be dwelling on death, it is pretty damned inevitable. 

And that's something we all have to come to grips with, whether we want to remember it with a snapshot of not. 

M.Y.O.B.

There was a recent business advice column in the Washington Post in which an aggrieved worker wrote in to complain about a co-worker who spends an inordinate amount of time Facebooking, texting, and shopping. They had reported the underworked colleague to their manager, who pretty much told them to M.Y.O.B. Advice with which the advice columnist occurred. As did most of the folks who wrote in to comment on the original article.

I'm with the M.Y.O.B. brigade.

Yes, it is completely disheartening to have do-nothing, slacker, gold-bricking fellow workers. Especially when you're busting your ass.

But somewhere along the line, you just have to assume that their do-nothing, slacker, gold-bricking ways will catch up with them and they'll be gone. Managers generally have a pretty good sense of who's productive and who's not. Or they should have. I know that it doesn't always work out this way, but no one needs you ratting out a co-worker to their supervisor. Annoying as it is, sometimes you just need to suck it up. (And managers who are too dunderheaded to recognize and do anything about useless employees will at some point or another be found out. And be gone. At least one can hope...)

As for "reporting" poor employees, I know that, as a manager, the last thing I wanted was someone darkening my door to finger point at someone else in my group. (Oh, shut up, shut up, shut up.)

And it may be that your seemingly do-little colleagues are doing more than you see. Especially in these days of "always on."

The person you think is spending three hours shopping may have spent three hours answering emails the evening before. Maybe they got up in the middle of the night and went on a work spree, as has been known to happen, and are now chillaxin.

Okay, these are occasional situations. But the truth is you really don't know what's going. So bitch to your friends, gripe to yourself, but don't take it on yourself to tattle-tale.

It also may be that the person you perceive as slacking is highly productive - a lot more productive than you are - and that they get through their assignments at warp speeed, and can thus afford to while away a few hours looking at bathmats on Wayfair or shoes on Zappo's.

Case in point is a colleague of mine from the pre-Internet days.

In her office she had a small black & white TV, on which she watched soaps and talk shows. While she was watching, she was also knitting - the most elaborate and gorgeous sweaters imaginable.

Sometimes, I would overhear people grousing about her. How bad for morale it was to walk by her office and see her watching TV and knitting.

As I was always happy to explain to the grousers, this woman was the most productive coder we had. While she was watching Oprah and Days of Our Lives, while she was knitting and purling, she was thinking through coding problems in her head. (And she was the one always given the thorniest problems to solve, the biggest bowls full of spaghetti code to untangle.) When she sat down to code, she was fast and meticulous.

I think if someone had said anything to her manager - rather than just pissing and moaning around the halls - he would have laughed in her face. He'd have been happy to have an entire team composed of folks like her.

My bottom line is that there always have been and always will be shirkers. Yes, it's aggravating and annoying. But if they don't report to you, you really can't do much about it other than cross your fingers and hope they do themselves in. The best advice here is definitely Mind Your Own Business.

When the Zume hits your eye, like a big pizza pie...

Just in case you're under the mistaken notion that all Silicon Valley crazy money gets invested in apps, Softbank dropped a bundle - admittedly a smallish bunder of $375M - on Zume, a pizza company. 

Oh, Zume wasn't any old pizza money. It combined the beauty and wonder of the food truck with the beauty and wonder of robotics. That and the beauty and wonder of pizza dough and toppings.

Here's the Zume vision:

Their trucks were going to be equipped with pizza ovens that would bake the pizza on the way to making a delivery. No more luke-warm pizza served out of an insulated bag. And the pizza wouldn't be made by a guy standing behind a little window in the kitchen - the guy who you watch tossing the pizza dough in the air, only you can't see his head, only the pizza dough flying up and down. Zume pizza would be put together by a robot. 

There's only one pizza maker I remember whose head you could see while he dough-tossed. This was at Regina's Pizzeria in the 1970's - back before Regina's was a chain, back when Regina's was just the little place on Thatcher and North Margin that you had to wait for hours to get into but which was worth it once you got in. Their pizzas were oily but delish. And I think the only drink at that time was Coke in glass bottles. What else do you need to go with oily pizza?

And speaking of oily, at Regina's, they had this good-enough looking young guy who wore his hair in an ultra slick, Brylcreemed up pompadour that was a throw back to the doo-wop 1950's. He fancied himself a ladies' man, and would wink at and flirt with all the "girls" (as we then thought of ourselves) who came into Regina's. He was a total hoot, but he could absolutely toss a pizza.

I doubt that the Zume robot could do that!

Not that we'll be finding out. 

In January, Zume downsized, cutting 360 jobs and trimming itself to 300 employees. Employees who'll be focused on Zume's new business:

...packaging and efficiency gains for other food delivery companies. In a note to employees, [CEO Alex] Garden said that improving the global food system required increased focus and that the pizzas had served as “inspiration” for higher-growth businesses. (Source: Bloomberg)

So that's where the $375M from Soft-in-the-head-Bank went. For inspiration.

Most of it, perhaps, but some of it went to buy and refurbish a double-decker London bus that  they were planning for using for their Day-Z launch date - one of  the 10,000 buses (not all double-decker imports) that the company envisioned it would need once the robot-made-baked-on-route concept took off.

Which it did not.

As it turned out, humans still had to be involved in production. It took humans "to load the racks of assembled, unbaked pizzas into the trucks." (Pre-assembled, huh? I just knew that those robots weren't going to be pizza-dough-tossers.)

Then there were a couple of problems. Customers complained that the dough was undercooked. That the sauce and toppings were skimpy. And

...the cheese tended to run everywhere as the trucks turned or hit bumps in the road. Instead, the oven trucks began parking in central locations, with runner cars or mopeds transporting the cooked pies.

Domino delivers!

Garden was able to suck in SoftBank as much on his strength as a pitchman as on the soundness of his idea. He wanted to be "the Tesla of fresh food...the Amazon of fresh food." (Where have we seen this show before? WeWork, anyone?) Alas:

A visionary founder with a fire hose of money can’t solve every problem. Often, that combo creates new ones. “I’ve never seen data to suggest that being charismatic and confident and overly brash is linked to a successful business,” says Kellie McElhaney, founding director of the Center for Equity, Gender, and Leadership at the University of California at Berkeley’s business school. 

So now Zume is remaking itself. Packaging is part of the new and improved Zume. But the company's experiencing a few hiccups along the new way, too. Zume purchased a packaging company "to jump-start its ability to sell compostable containers to other business." Unfortunately, this packaging company's boxes contained chemicals that the EPA has said can be harmful to humans. Because of this, they couldn't be sold in all states. Oopsie.

Anyway, thanks to that SoftBank investment - which Zume, fortunately, didn't completely squander - the pink-slipped employees supposedly got decent severance packages. That said, on lay-off day, employees who were canned in the morning asked if "they could stay through the usual catered lunch." HR told them no. Wonder whether robot-prepared pizza was served.

Is it a bird? Is it a plane?

One of the odd-ball historic sites in Worcester was a place not far from where I grew up called The Hermitage. It was way up in some pretty creepy woods, and we'd take an annual walk there in the fall (usually on Thanksgiving) and it's near where we went blueberrying in the summer. 

The story was that, in the early 1800's, an eccentric local fellow- a recluse named William Parsons - had carved his will in stone (leaving everything to God), climbed the hill, and attempted to fly to heaven using wings made of wax and feathers. It goes without saying that it was not exactly mission accomplished. We all competed to be the first kid to find the boulder with the will carved in it. (Post on the subject is here.)

But folks have long wanted to fly (c.f., Leonardo daVinci), and a few misses here and there haven't stopped the truly determined from trying. 

Only now they're succeeding. 

At least they are if you're Vince Reffet from Jetman Dubai.

Last Friday, Reffet, using a "jet-powered wingsuit" took off from the ground and reached an altitude of more than one mile. Previous wingsuit flights have been launched from platforms like a helicopter. This was a first ground-up success. 

Folks are referring to Reffet as a real-life Iron Man. Since I have no idea who Iron Man is, I'll harken back to an earlier time and say that he's more like Superman. As in "faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound..." 

Don't know if Reffet made it to "faster than a speeding bullet," but:

While traveling at an average speed of nearly 150 mph, Reffett was able to reach 1,000 meters of altitude in 30 seconds. Reffett was even able to

perform a roll and loop with the wingsuit. His flight lasted approximately three minutes, and he opened his parachute at 1,500 meters before landing safely to the ground. (Source: CNN)

I am no one's candidate for wingsuit flight. I can't stand heights and, while I'm always happy to be on an airplane, I don't think I'd be comfortable doing the airborne equivalent of skinny dipping. It doesn't make me anywhere near as apprehensive as thinking of aerialist Philippe Petit and his historic wire-walk between the Twin Towers back in 1974. Just writing about that triggers a total hair-standing-on-end freeze in me. And I can see myself in a wingsuit before I can envision myself jumping out of an airplane. Still, up close and personal flight is not on my bucket list at all.

But it's plenty cool that someone out there is adventurous enough to want to (in the words of a young RCAF pilot who was killed in a crash early on during World War II) "slip the surly bonds of earth." Talk about earning your wings.

Reffet was equipped with a carbon fibre wing powered by four mini jet engines. Controlled by the human body, the equipment enables the Jetman to reach speeds of 400kmh, as well as hovering, changing direction and performing loops. (Source: Jetman.com)

My husband would have loved this. Jim always talked about how super it would be if you could fly, and it was a frequent subject of his dreams. (Yes, someone else's dreams are usually not all that interesting, and I only vaguely paid attention to his, but what I wouldn't give to have him tell me his latest...)

I've never dreamed of personal flying, but one of my favorite books as a kid was "The Magic Sandbox," in which a couple of kids took off in their sandbox and explored their neighborhood. But that magic sandbox was more or less an aircraft. If not terra firma, at least something underneath your feet that was a bit on the firma side.

At the end of his three-minute flight, Reffet performed a roll and a loop at 1,800m altitude, before opening his parachute at 1,500m and landing back at Skydive Dubai.

Unlike Superman, Reffet may not be able to "change the course of mighty rivers," or "bend steel in his bare hands."  But this is a pretty impressive feat. And it sure beats William Parsons, up there in the Worcester woods, trying to wing his way to heaven.

Plant stylist? Oh, why not.

My mother was a plant lady. We always had plants in the house, and part of the routine Saturday chore list (which included dusting, mopping, vacuuming, waste-basket-emptying, and bathroom scrubbing) for me and my sister Kath was watering the plants. Sansevieria. Coleus. Cactus. Pothos. Christmas Cactus. Geraniums. Spider plants. Ficus.

But it was only after she made her way into empty-nester that my mother really went to town. 

Half the back wall in the family room was taken up by a bay window. It got a lot of sun, so it became Plant Central. I don't know how many plants there were there, but Lizzie eventually had staging built in front of the window to hold more of her plants. She also got some sort of long plant hose attached to the kitchen sink so she didn't have to keep going back and forth with the watering can. In her later years, she spent a month each winter visiting a friend in Florida, and she had to hire someone to come in and water her plants.

I didn't inherit my mother's interest in plants, or her green thumb. I'm not a black thumb exactly -  and as I write this I'm getting the urge to do a bit of plant shopping - but I'm just not much into plants. I have plants off and on - mostly off (if you don't count pointsettias, which I usually hang onto after Christmas and give up on in July; for some reason, this year, I gave mine the boot right after the new year). 

At present, I have one plant. A geranium that's kind of stalky and which currently has no flowers, no buds. I'm on the fence between aggressively pinching it back to see if I can get another flower or two out of it, or just tossing it out. I'll probably do a bit of pinching and hang on to it for a while longer - flowered or flowerless - because I love that geranium smell. 

But I wouldn't mind having a few more plants around. So maybe I should consider hiring a plant stylist.

Plant stylist? Yes, plant stylist. And I hadn't heard of it, either, until my sister Kath sent me a link to an article in the NY Times on the subject.

Brooklyn-based Lisa Muñoz is a plant stylist/designer/caretaker who runs Leaf and June. Starting at $2,000, she'll swing by your home and strategically and aesthetically place plants in it. I looked at her website, and it's all very beautiful. But $2K? Seems like a lot to pay someone to perch a plant in a terracotta pot on your windowsill. But this is New York we're talking about.  

Not that NYC is alone here. I googled "plant stylist Boston" and it turns out there's a plant stylist just a couple of blocks from where I live. Her "gallery" is in the basement of the Restoration Hardware store, which is all in keeping with her look and feel. She doesn't advertise her prices, but I'm guessing a lot but not $2K for starters.

In some ways, plant styling is nothing new.

Nurseries and flower shops have long provided professional plant care for offices and homes. Most billionaires of Park Avenue, one assumes, don’t water their ficus trees. Ms. Muñoz offers such maintenance services to her clients, too.

But her real role is in performing the job that a fashion stylist or art consultant might — to make aesthetic choices and sound investments on someone’s behalf. Just … about plants.

There's more to plants than just the plants. Plant stylists are not just about the pothos. They're about the pots.

For one Brooklyn homeowner, Ms. Muñoz put a schefflera tree in the kids’ room, with rich, green foliage that droops like an umbrella. She paired it with a showstopper pot — a $1,500 ceramic planter from Bzippy & Co.

That "drooping like an umbrella" sounds cool, but who puts a $1,500 planter in a kids' room? 

Anyway, plant stylist is a more interesting gig than a lot of the non-do-it-yourselfer gigs that have sprung up from the gig economy. I remember reading about someone who contacted Task Rabbit after he stepped in dog crap and "needed" someone to go out and buy him a new pair of Tom's so he could continue on his way. And plant stylist pays better than Task Rabbit-ing. (C.f., $2,000 minimum.)

Me? I have definitely convinced myself that, when the weather gets a bit nicer, I'm going to go out and get me a plant. I'm thinking a nice variegated coleus for starters.  Or maybe something in the sansevieria family. And pot shopping will be fun, even though I won't be forking over $1,500 for a planter. 

Style on!

Oh those poor Wayfair-ing ex-employees

Having spent my career in an industry - high tech - notorious for lay-offs, I decided years ago that there really is no good way to conduct one. And plenty of bad ones.

I had a friend whose small tech company called everyone into a large meeting room. At the door, when they checked in, each employee was handed a colored card. Blue cards got to keep their jobs; the folks holding the pink cards were told they were being laid off. So long, it's been good to know you.

One of my cousins was laid off at a group meeting, when his boss announced that he and another colleauge no longer had their jobs. Thanks for letting us know!

During a major RIF at Wang, when thousands of folks were losing their jobs, employees were told to stay at their desks on a Friday. A team of executioneers HR people then went around and individually tapped those about to be let go on the shoulder, brought them into a private room, and handed them their package. (One techie in my group who lost his job was a Russian immigrant. He said when they came to his cubicle to tap his shoulder, it felt like the KGB was coming for him) While it was good to see that each person was treated as an individual entitled to privacy during a tough time (most rank and file Wang employees worked in cubicles), the company ran out of Friday. 

So late in the afternoon, they announced that they hadn't completed the layoffs yet, and everyone had to come back on Monday, sit in their office, and wait to see if they had a job. My group was given the all clear for some reason, so we all us survivors went home knowing we had jobs. Everyone else spent an agonizing weekend. (This was my 40th birthday - a real cheery one! When the grim HR reapers were on my floor, there were people standing on the desks, yelling out the names of those who were being laid off. "The've just taken Alice." "They're coming for Jay." A spectacle beyond belief.)

One of the most despicable human beings I've ever known laid off an employee while that employee was in the NICU with his newborn son, waiting to see whether the baby was going to live. Couldn't have waited a day or two to give my colleague the news. Shortly after this incident, I was in a meeting with Mr. Despicable, and he told us that he had really enjoyed laying off this person. (It goes without saying that the fellow that was fired was a) a good employee; b) a great guy.)

Years ago, I read that some company - was in Radio Shack? - laid folks off via text message.

Last Thursday, it was Wayfair's turn to figure out the "right" way to lay off 350 people who were working in their downtown Boston headquarters.

There had been rumors. (There are always rumors.) Last November, Wayfair had implemented a "headcount review process," which is always ominous. They'd started rating employees on a stricter curve, which is always ominous. (Grading on the curve: now there's a post for another day...)

And then:

At 2 a.m. Thursday morning, employees got a Slack message that said some internal systems were being locked so that engineers would not able to deploy code or make significant data changes. Also on Tuesday, an IT team in the Berlin office was laid off, according to an employee who was among those who lost their jobs. The former employee, who asked to remain anonymous, said more layoffs were to come in Boston.

Around 10 a.m. in the Copley Place mall, scores of employees began to descend the escalator from Wayfair’s offices. Many were visibly upset and declined to comment about the layoffs.

One employee, who was not laid off and declined to give their name, said hundreds of employees were called to a general meeting this morning, and all of them were laid off. The employee said those who were not called to the meeting still had to talk with their direct supervisors, and were told they needed to be more efficient.  (Source: Boston Globe)

Ah, the mass layoff. My first thought was, this is appalling. And then I reconsidered. Is it any more appalling than sitting around on a Friday, frozen to your office chair, all day, waiting to know if you have a job - only to be told to come back in on Monday to find out? Yes, being laid off is upsetting - there are tears, there's anger, there's fear - and a lot of people prefer to vent their emotions in a private setting. But in many ways, it's preferable to hear all at once, rather than agonize over if and when "it" is going to happen. And misery does love company.

Anyway, Wayfair has been - in terms of hiring - a real high flyer, growing aggressively, and renting top-of-the-line office space in downtown Boston. They've grown their revenues, too, but they've yet to make a profit. And Amazon has apparently set their sites on them. If I were Wayfair, I wouldn't bet my supply chain against anything that Amazon can do. So the handwriting's been on the wall.

Still, I hate to see a local company in distress. And I know it sucks to lose your job.

I was laid off 3 times. Once, I volunteered for separation, so my only agony was waiting to find out whether my offer to part company would be accepted. (I had been one of 50 midmanagers who a few months earlier had been selected to spend a week at Babson College trying to figure out how to turn the company around, and the company president didn't want anyone on his golden 50 list to leave.) 

Another time, I was collateral damage in a battle between the Tall Guys and the Short Guys. My boss was one of the leaders of the Tall Guys faction, and when they lost to the Short Guys, those of us most closely identified with "our" Tall Guy knew that all of our days were numbered. (They were.)

The other time, I was fired after getting into an argument with the company president on how we were going to position our looming layoff to the surviving employees. He won, I lost. Oh, well.

So when I was a layoff-ee, it wasn't done the traditional way.

But I've survived many a layoff, and I know how rotten it is in the days/weeks/months leading up to it. Talk about fear factor. When I worked at Wang, one fellow was so stressed out in the runup to a major reduction that he had a heart attack in his cubicle - which was near mine - and died. 

But I've never actually experienced how terrible it is to get tapped on the shoulder, to sit on the other side of the table and be handed the package. I do know that, as one who's done the tapping and been there for the handing, that the layoff-er side of the table is pretty awful.

And, let's face it, for most of us, our colleagues form an important part of our social circle. Even if it's temporary, it's your fellow employees who you see every day, chat with at the coffee machine, grab lunch with, etc. It's not just the loss of a paycheck, by any means.

Good luck to the newbie-ly laid off from Wayfair. May you find new work quickly, and land in a better place. 

As for the survivors, you heard your supervisor. You've just got to become more efficient. And, if experience counts for anything, I'm guessing that there will be more Wayfairing layoffs in the future. 

Holiday/Not Holiday

Well, in keeping with tradition, Pink Slip is celebrating the holiday by doing what we do best: kicking back and doing not much of anything.

In truth, with the incumbent president, it's hard these days to do an overall celebration of our leaders - especially given the ongoing and increasingly more rapid debasement of the office that Trump is demonstrating. As I wrote last year: Presidents Day? Just Not This President. 

But there are some presidents I've rather liked and admired, my top three being Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Barack Obama. Even though I recognize that all of the men who've held the office have their flaws, there are other presidents I've held in high regard as well. Just not this travesty of an edition.

Nonetheless, it is a holiday. And holidays are a good thing, especially in the middle of winter - even a winter as benign as this one has been. 

So, even though I don't work, I'm happy to have a holiday. And happy for everyone else who's celebrating today. (Just not this president.)

But February 17th means something else to me. Something not holiday. Not in the least.

Today is the sixth anniversary of the death of my husband, Jim Diggins. Even though it's been six years, there are still times when I wake up in the middle of the night and feel his presence. There are still times when I walk in the door and expect him to be sitting there. To this day, if I come across something in his handwriting - especially something written in Jim's signature red ink - I get a lump in my throat. Even before Jim's death, I already knew that when you lose someone you love, you never really stop missing them. It's just that with Jim's death, I know this more deeply than I had in the past.

As I wrote in last year's post: 

Seems like just yesterday. Seems like a million years ago. 

Sigh.

Ditto.

What the world needs now, is...

Since it's Valentine's Day - and for all the single ladies (all the single ladies), Galentine's Day - you might be thinking that what the world needs now, is love sweet love. But, nah, if you go by what KFC and Crocs are thinking, what the world needs now is Kentucky Fried Chicken Crocs.

I'm sure that KFC was inspired to act by Popeye's recent success with selling out apparel based on its UG-LY burgundy and orange employee uniform. But why Crocs, of all things? While someone might want a white suit and string tie like the Colonel's - or even a peppy red-and-white striped something based on the KFC awning - I can't imagine there's much call for a pair of these Crocs - especially as they'll be going for $59.99 (which is about twice what you'd pay for plain vanilla Crocs).

For the more daring, there's a 4.5 inch high platform version that has the Colonel himself on the sole.

Both pairs of shoes also come with two Jibbitz charms, which you can stick into the holes of your Crocs for decoration. But instead of smiley faces and rainbows, these charms, of course, are shaped like fried chicken drumsticks—and they even smell like fried chicken, too. If you don’t feel like walking around with mini faux-fried chicken on your feet, rest assured, they’re removable. (Source: Food & Wine)

You know, even if I were interested in a pair of KFC-themed Crocs, I don't think I'd want to be walkng around with a drumstick charm that smells like chicken. The squirrels in the Boston Public Garden are already pretty aggressive. Since so many people have been feeding them - there's even a woman who regularly wheels around a carton full of peanuts, calling the squirrles by name (Mr. Bunbun. Benicio...) - they've gotten as bold as brass. The size of a small racoon, these suckers come right up to you, and get a bit pissy if you don't have something to offer them. I can imagine what they'd be like if they got a whiff fried chicken emanating from your tootsies. Why, Mr. Bunbun might latch right onto your foot...

I'm sure that this is a good way for KFC to get some attention.  If Mr. Peanut can kill off Mr. Peanut, if Popeye's can sell (out) their uniforms, why not.

I'm sure there are Kentucky Fried aficianados who'd want a pair. I'm not one of them, but there is, as we see demonstrated time and again, no accounting for taste. 

I'm sure that there are folks who collect Crocs. I'm not one of them, but there is, as we see demonstrated time and again, no accounting for taste. 

And I'm also sure that most of these will end up in landfill, where they'll take a thousand years to decompose. 

Meanwhile, since it is Valentine's Day, I do want to give a shout out to love.  Because the world could use a bit more sweet love and a bit less once and future trash like KFC Crocs.

What the world needs now is love, sweet loveIt's the only thing that there's just too little ofWhat the world needs now is love, sweet love,No not just for some but for everyone.…

(Don't know if that embedded video of Jackie DeShannon singing Burt Bacharach/Hal David's great song from the mid-sixties, here's the link.)

Happy Valentine's Day! 

Think I'll celebrate by heading to Georgetown Cupcakes  for a cupcake with a sugar heart on it. (Happy Valentin'es Day to me.)

And hurray for swag bags

Sure, I'm interested in hearing about who wins what at the Academy Awards. Not interested enough to watch the show, mind you. But interested enough to read about it. 

And I'm also and always interested in finding out what's in the swag bags that are given to those nominated for one of the major awards: Best Actor/Actress, Best Supporting Actor/Actress, Best Director. 

Not that any of these folks actually need anything that's in their swag bag, but, hey, who doesn't like to get presents - even if they turn around and give them away to charity and/or staff members. And for the companies that provide swags for the bags, it's great publicity.

Needless to say, the swag bags contain a lot more than any goodie bag you ever got at a wedding. More better than M&M's with the bride's and groom's initials on them. More better than a mug with the wedding date on it. More better than the good night cookie, the monogrammed shot glass, the packet of Kleenex in the wedding color scheme. More better even than a net bag full of Jordan almonds. 

The swaggiest swag in this year's bag is a trip for two to Antarctica worth $78K. The trip is on an ultra-luxe yacht called the Scenic Eclipse. This is not your average run-of-the-mill ultra-luxe yacht. It contains 8 restaurants, a spa, a submarine and two helicopters. All the better to do an icecap jaunt and mingle with the penguins. I'd say the celebs better jump on this one quick. Get it while it's hot. Or still cold, as it were. 

Antarctica is heating up - the highest temperature (65 degrees F) ever recorded there was recorded just the other day - and, thanks to global warming, the penguin colonies there are disappearing. 

Looks like the scenery - flora and fauna, ice and snow - are becoming eclipsed. Permanently. So the Scenic Eclipse is pretty well named. And I'm guessing that excursions in which rich folks are helicoptered in to rub noses with penguins aren't exactly helping maintain the Antarctic environment.

If penguins aren't a gift baggee's thing, there's a trip for 8 to a Spanish lighthouse, and a five night stay at the Waikiki Beachcomber by Outrigger. This place bills itself as a "lifestyle" hotel, whatever that means. And it's "curated by local artists and tastemakers," a place where you can find "instagrammable aloha vibes.") (The marketing person who first began using the word "curated" should be barred for life from writing any more copy. Ditto for anyone using "instagrammable aloha vibes," but that might be a one-off. Curated is everywhere.) 

All these trips! Bon voyage to the winners and the runners up.

If they happen to find themselves in Cabo, Mexico, on their own dime, winners and losers alike can snag a free dinner for two at Flora's Field Kitchen, which serves "handmade, fresh food." (So do I, on occasion. Although I can't vouch for a red pepper I've chopped up as "handmade." At least they aren't using the word artisanal.)

I suspect that someone who's gotten an Academy Award nomination no longer needs a life coach. But if they do, Jessica McGregor Johnson is gifting them with a private phone call. And a copy of her book: "The Right T-Shirt, Write Your Own Rules and Live the Life You Want." In addition to writing "The Right T-Shirt," Johnson was a Certified Passion Test Facilitator. (Passion, hmmm. Talk another of those words that should be banned. But maybe I'm just feeling pissy because my passion has never been tested by a certified facilitator.)

Then there are a couple of necklaces from do-gooder organizations. The lapis lazuli necklace uses gems from Afghanistan and proceeds from sales help American and Afghani military widows. The lariat necklace benefits disabled vets. But the handcrafted earrings appear to benefit the moi charity. 

PETA is apparently now making sunglasses. Is there such a thing as vegan eyewear? There is in the swag bag. Plus they threw in subscription to a vegan meal service. I could be a vegetarian, but wouldn't want to go through life without eggs and dairy. Still, if someone gave me a free vegan meal service, I'd give it a whirl. And after Joaquin Phoenix's veganish acceptance speech for Best Actor...

Skincare is a big swag bag deal, and this year's bag edition includes a 24 karat gold bath bomb, which is made of "organic hyaluronic acid, purple Brazilian clay, and vegan coconut milk." Bombs away! Make that vegan bombs away!

There's a spa day, and up to $25K worth of cosmetic treatments, including Botox and injectables/fillers. But you have to go to NYC to collect on it.  I guess you'd also have to go to NYC for your full-body performance evaluation package, as the doc who offers it is based in New York. So you could cut your costs and get your full-body eval and your Botox on one trip.

There's a bunch of other stuff, including a $20K per annun membership in a matchmaking service, Drawing Down the Moon. Forget about it, Best Supporting Actor Brad Pitt. Just call Jennifer Aniston up and give the matchmaking to someone who needs it.

On the low end, there's a couple of packages of Pepperidge Farm Milano's. Guaranteed that this is the one product that everyone will use!

Overall, the value of the swag bag is $215K. Which sounds like a lot, but last year's was worth $232K. 

Despite that decrease, it sure does pay to get one of the biggy Academy Award nominations.


Sources for swag-fo: Cheatsheet and Newsweek. 

Hurray for Hollywood!

For some reason or another, I've never been that interested in watching the Academy Awards. Even when I was a regular (weekly, even) moviegoer, the Oscars always kind of left me cold. Nonetheless, I'm always interested in seeing who gets nominated, and who wins. Especially this year, when I've actually seen a few of the nominated movies and a couple of the nominated performances.

I was rooting for either Little Women or Parasite to win Best Picture, so I was happy to wake up to the news that Parasite took home the honors. I don't know quite to make of that film, but I thought it was highly original and brilliant, and I much enjoyed it. I've seen it described as a thriller, but I'm going with dark comedy. That turned exceedingly dark towards the end. So bravo to Parasite. (Interestingly, I have a good friend who is Korean-American - born in Korea but immigrated as a small child. She has NO interest in seeing Parasite. Which reminds me that an Italian-American friend of mine, who grew up in a Philadelphia neighborhood where a lot of wise guys lived, wouldn't watch The Sopranos.)

Although I was happy with Parasite being named Best Picture, I was a bit disappointed that Little Women only walked away with the girly-ish Best Costume award. Sigh.

The other films nominated for best that I actually saw were 1917 (enjoyed might be the wrong word; maybe admired) and Marriage Story (which I watched on TV, happy that I didn't pay big bucks to see it in the theater; it was okay, but not great).

Of the remaining nominees, at some point I intend to watch The Irishman, Ford v. Ferrari, and Once Upons a Time in Hollywood. My personal jury's out on whether to see JoJo Rabbit. I'm usually interested in anything to do with World War II/the Holocaust, but JoJo sounds a bit too close to Life Is Beautiful, a movie that I felt trivialized and romanticized the Holocaust, and which I heartily disliked. But my jury is honestly still out on JoJo, so I might watch it when it shows up on Netflix.

I cannot imagine the circumstances under which I would ever in a million years watch Joker - I make it a habit to just say no to anything with a clown in it -  so I'll have to take the august Academy's word that Joaquin Phoenix was great in it. I thought Jonathan Pryce was super in The Two Popes, but I really am not a fan of Adam Driver, who was nominated for Marriage Story. Perhaps he is an acquired taste, but it's one I have no intention of acquiring.

Not a big Renee Zellwegger, but I will watch Judy at some point. I was rooting for Saoirse Ronan, who I think is her generation's answer to Meryl Streep (a good thing!). But looks like "they" just wanted to snub Little Women. I will watch Harriet and, if I'm bored enough some night, do Bombshell.

I also have Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (Tom Hanks was nominated for Best Supporting Actor) and Richard Jewell (Kathy Bates was nominated for Best Supporting Actress). These are two actors I'd watch in anything, even a soup commercial.

Anthony Hopkins was good as Pope Benedict in The Two Popes, but since I really don't like Pope Benedict, I was just as happy he didn't win. Florence Pugh in Little Women made me actually like and understand Amy, something that hasn't happened in the 60+ years since I first met this characters. But Florence is still young. Plenty of time.

As for the Supporting winners, although I was meh on Marriage Story, I really do like Laura Dern. As for Brad Pitt, I'll let you know once I get around to Once Upon a Time...

I love that American Factory, a documentary produced by Michelle and Barack Obama, won for Best Documentary. It was a terrific film, and it really got to the heart of what it's life in a declining industry city, where the good blue-collar jobs are increasingly being automated out of existence. Depressing. Sad. Cautionary. (This problem ain't going away.)

And although I didn't see it, what a great story that Matthew Cherry and Karen Rupert Toliver won for their animated short, Hair Love. Cherry is a former NFL player who boldly predicted a couple of years ago that he was going to win an Oscar. Good for him (and her). With so many African-American kids getting hassled over their hair styles, this is a really timely topic. 

Anyway, hurray for Hollywood. Glad to have a few more movies on my watch list. Must see TV!

What's with that NY Life ad???

NY Life is an insurance company. They're a big one. They may well be a good one. For one company I worked for, they were a BIG client, and the people who worked there were very nice. They also had an extremely cool HQ building in Manhattan, and I was delighted that I got to go there a couple of times. The building was designed by Cass Gilbert, who also gave us the Woolworth Building. What's not to love?

Did I say love? Maybe I meant more like like.

After all, love is how you feel about your family (storge), your friends (philia), your lover (eros), and humankind (agápē, which is all entwined with love of God). Got that? 

What's this got to do with NY Life, you may well be asking yourself.

Good question.

If you didn't watch the Super Bowl, you may have missed it, but NY Life is running an ad about their agápē-ness.

Silly me. Here I was thinking that were about selling insurance, but, nope: it's been 175 YEARS OF HELPING PEOPLE ACT ON THEIR LOVE, and that love that they help people act on is the:

...one love that stands out above the rest. Selfless love. It’s called agápē (ah-gah-peh) — love as an action. Agápē is what inspires us to put others' needs before our own. It's about doing what's right, being our best selves, and building better futures.

Well, sure, you probably don't buy life insurance if you aren't concerned about what happens to your spouse and kids if you die in your earning prime. But there are plenty of people who love selflessly - love their families, friends, lovers and others, but who can't afford insurance premiums. And plenty of crappy peple who can.

So, with respect to this ad, I have to ask the Tina Turner question: what's love got to do with it, do with it? 

I am having technicolor, 3D flashbacks to being at an all-girl Catholic high school in the 1960's.

We were all about agápē. We hung felt posters in our homerooms - doves, flowers, crosses, agápē spelled out in a weird felt font of our own making.

We went to the Saturday Midnight Folk Mass at Holy Cross, where we sang Paul Quinlan folk songs and listened to some Jesuit talk about agápē. Or we hung out at Limbo, the Holy Cross coffee house, and talked agápē.

We swooned about God's love, probably because none of us had boyfriends (or girlfriends, for that matter) to swoon over.

We read C.S. Lewis.

Our yearbook was called "Everyman," because back then, no one worried about inclusive language, and everyman, mankind, etc. were considered universal, inclusive terms. (Our school song - words written by my classmate and still friend Kathleen to the tune of The Boys from Wexford -  because JFK's ancestors were from County Wexford, and before he was assassinated our freshman year, we swooned over JFK - included lines like:

In union is the strength of man, in union is our goal.To light the light of brotherhood, in each and every human soul.

The sisterhood was on the verge of getting powerful, but it never occurred to us that "sisterhood" might have been more appropriate for an all-girls school.

We actually wanted to call our yearbook "Fat Lady." Because, while we may have read (or tried to read) C.S. Lewis, we gobbled up J.D. Salinger. Who told us (in the person of Seymour Glass, channeled by Buddy Glass - or was it Zooey - that we were supposed to do it - pay attention, be kind, shine our shoes - for the Fat Lady. And we wanted our yearbook dedication to quote from Salinger's Franny & Zooey.

"...There isn't anyone who isn't Seymour's Fat Lady. Don't you know that? Don't you know that goddam secret yet? And don't you know - listen to me, now - don't you know who that Fat Lady really is? Ah, buddy. Ah, buddy. It's Christ Himself. Christ Himself, buddy."

It almost goes without saying that the nuns didn't allow us to name the  yearbook "Fat Lady." Alumnae, they told us. Our parents. Wouldn't get it. Nor did they let us include that dedication. ("Goddam"? In the Notre Dame Academy yearbook? Hell, no.)

So we watered it down:

Do it for Everyman. Search for Christ in him. Possess the insight to realize the immortal soul of humanity. Contact your brothers with undersanding, whic is to stand under, which is to look up to, which is a wonderful way to understand. Be one with yourself, one with your brothers, one with your God. Do it for Everyman.

"Don't you know it, Buddy, don't you know that secret yet? Everyman is Christ."

And, yes, we did put quotes around what wasn't a quote from J.D. Salinger but a paraphrase. No goddam, no Fat Lady for the girls of Notre Dame Academy, even though one of the lines in our school song (since replaced, I note sadly) was "We girls of Notre Dame Academy, behind the truth do stand." Well, yes and no.

No need to mention - but I will anyway - that I was on the yearbook staff. The yearbook was edited by my classmate (and still friend) Kathleen. My closest high school (and beyond) friend, Marie, was an assistant editor. 

I did pull it out my yearbook out in 2017, when I went to our 50th reunion. (More than sadly, Marie had died in 2014.) But I really hadn't thought of the Fat Lady thing in ages.

We spent those high school years, all in an agápē swirl. (Even though half of us had one particular Peanuts cartoon thumb-tacked to the cork bullletin board in our bedrooms. The immortal words of Linus Van Pelt: I love mankind. It's people I can't stand.)

Bottom line: I find the NY Life ad plenty dopey. Even dopier, for some reason, than the Subaru ads that tell us that love is what makes a Subaru a Subaru. Proably because Subaru uses a lot of cutie-pie golden retrievers in their ads. And NY Life just uses plain old humans. (I love mankind. It's people I can't stand.)

I don't think I'd find the add so offputting if it weren't for the agápē throw in. Maybe if they just stuck with plain old love. 

Anyway, I come away from that NY Life ad shaking my head, agape at agápē. Agápē? Seriously?