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Christmas Goosed

3 Jan

January 3, 2012

By the time you read this it will be well into January and you’ll be tired of Christmas stories but I hope you forgive just one more.

A few days before Christmas the Company I Am employed by, which must remain confidential for reasons I cannot reveal, threw a Christmas lunch for all of its employees. Of course, this being the era of political correctness, it wasn’t called a Christmas lunch.

As much as I hate PC, and as much as I think it is often taken to a ridiculous degree, in small doses it isn’t such a horrible thing. Seeing as how Christmas fell smack in the middle of Hanukkah this year, it would not have bothered me if this were called a Holiday Lunch. It would acknowledge both holidays. The problem is, PC is usually used not to include anyone, but to exclude everyone. Case in point: Here in NYC, Mayor Michael “I am your mother” Bloomberg decided that in order to avoid offending some people, the Staten Island ferry terminal cannot display a Christmas tree or any holiday decorations, despite it hosting some wonderful displays the past few years. So the upshot is, while in the past a very few cranks might have been offended by the sight of a Christmas tree, thanks to PC, now everyone is offended by the lack of holiday cheer. Rather than acknowledge all holidays, it acknowledged no holidays. So I guess political correctness really did work- everyone was equally pissed off.

This is not a fake, he actually did this at some press event. What a tool.

In that spirit, my company did not call it a Holiday lunch, they called it a Kickoff lunch. Kickoff to what? It was never explained. Logically, it could only be a kickoff to Christmas, although the invitation I was emailed showed a picture of a woman (in silhouette) doing what appeared to be the limbo, but it was hard to tell in silhouette.

At this point you might be wondering if there was to be any fun at the Kickoff lunch.

There was not.

That was clear from the invitation, in which we were told that the lunch would not be held in the building’s giant cafeteria but on whatever floor of the building in which you worked. While I have friends who work on the 5th floor, since I work on 13 there would be no mingling. Furthermore, each floor was divided into sections, with each section being assigned a time and place to pick up their lunch. It was a very regimented lunch.

You might also note that I wrote “pick up” lunch, not “eat” lunch. This is because the food was set up in a small meeting room and we were expected to get it and leave, eating the food at our desks. For the record, I took my food down to the cafeteria where I hoped to meet a good friend with whom I always have lunch. The problem was, she was designated to eat 45 minutes earlier than I was and I missed her, meaning I ate my Christmas- sorry, Kickoff lunch, alone. Bah. Humbug.

This day’s lunch was the worst lunch I ever had since I started at The Company, and that includes the very first lunch in which I ate outside in the park and almost got pooped on by a bird.

But the food? Surely the food was good? After all, The Company has a giant, catering-style cafeteria, and the resources to bring in food from anywhere. The food must have been fantastic, right? It was a great lunch, wasn’t it?

We had our choice of pre-wrapped sandwiches which would not have looked out-of-place at a 7-11 or one of the fancier gas stations. There was roast beef with an odd sauce whose name I cannot quite recall but was French-sounding and tasted like vinegar, a turkey sandwich with tomato-pesto sauce, and a roasted vegetable sandwich. I took the roast beef. As bad as those choices sound, I later found out that my friend was thrilled to see the veggie sandwich because she has a strict diet and cannot eat the other two sandwiches.

We had a choice of chips, or so they said. When I got there I saw there was only one kind of chip available. I guess the choice was chips or no chips. I took the chips. There was a choice of fruit. On the table were about two dozen bananas and a single apple. I passed. There was a cookie (no choice) which I spit out when I later ate it. It wasn’t even a cookie, it was a very thin cake covered in the sweetest icing you can imagine. If you took pure sugar and spread it in a half-inch layer over a piece of pound cake you would not even come close to this thing. It was sweet enough to kill a diabetic from thirty paces.

We were also given a bottle of water.

Getting the lunch was a torture in itself. In addition to being given a specific eating period we were also given a ticket. One ticket, one lunch. I guess they were worried about not having enough food if people started taking seconds. You’ve just read about the menu. Would you want seconds?

At our specified time my section was ordered- yes, that is the correct word- to get our lunch. I dropped my ticket in a bag sitting in the lap of a woman whose job it was to make sure I had a ticket. I tried to have some witty banter with her- “you must be the most important woman on this floor”- and was rewarded with a stony stare. I went inside. 

Our emailed invitation also included instructions on what we were to choose, but they went a little nuts in the actual room. For example, red arrows were laid out on the table leading from the sandwiches to the chips, which were less than two feet away, to the fruit, less than two feet away, to the cookies, right next to the fruit, to the bottles of water, unmissable near the exit door. And next to each section, printed directions/warnings to take just one of each category.

In retrospect, I’m very glad this was not a Christmas Lunch after all because there was zero Christmas spirit in me that day.

I guess the takeaway is big company + political correctness = no fun for anyone.

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A New York Minute (9)

2 Jan

January 2, 2011

Welcome to your New York Minute.

They say that you can find anyone anywhere at anytime in New York. And that may be true, because this week I’m broadcasting from the intersection of Rex Harrison and Allen Ginsburg. Well, so to speak.

Rex Harrison may be best known as Doctor Doolittle in the 1967 film- you guessed it- Doctor Doolittle.

Can we get a little Rex Harrison? That’s the stuff.

He was a wonderful actor. Noel Coward said he was “the best light comedy actor in the world—except for me.” Um, Noel Coward was talking about himself, not yours truly.

Rex Harrison died in 1986, leaving behind six wives (five of them exes, of course) two sons, and three step-sons. One of his sons, born to actress Lilli Palmer, was a bright lad named Carey.

Carey Harrison is the celebrated author of 35 stage plays and 16 novels. He has written for radio and television. Masterpiece Theater has dedicated 17 hours to his work. Among many other things, he is a book reviewer and a columnist. He has won numerous awards and is currently writing an opera.

And he was my English professor in Brooklyn College.

Now I have to be honest. When I was his student I knew nothing about any of that. I knew his father was a famous actor but that was as far as it went. Professor Harrison was, and presumably still is, a very nice man and a scholarly gentleman. I enjoyed his class, which was planned around the novel The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford. I recall coming up with an insight about some of the minor character’s names, which I realized were the names of lesser Knights of the Round Table. Despite probably having heard the same insight hundreds of times from hundreds of students, he made me feel as though I had really accomplished something, which I much later in my own career realized was a hallmark of a good teacher.

The class was small, about a dozen of us gathered around a large conference table in his office, which he used instead of a classroom. It was intimate. One thing I admired about him was his passion not for writing, but for curiosity. At one point in the novel a character drinks, I believe, a sloe gin fizz, though it might have been a mint julep. Any of you Ford Madox Ford nuts in the audience, write in and tell me which it was. Professor Harrison stopped us to ask us about the drink. None of us had ever had one. We knew it was an alcoholic beverage, and some of us knew what was in it, but that wasn’t good enough for him. He chastised us- in a kind way- for not knowing more. What did it taste like? How was it made? I suspect it was that level of passion and attention to detail that makes him such a successful man.

I took the class in the winter and he invited all of us to a holiday party at his home and one of my regrets is that I didn’t go. I was never much of a joiner, especially then, and the prospect of spending the night in the company of what were virtually strangers and my English teacher did not seem very inviting. But as I said, I had no idea who my professor was. Looking back, all the questions I could have asked, all the stories I could have heard, the potential valuable professional contact- Professor Harrison, if you listen to Flash Cast, and I’m sure you do, please, invite me back! And if any of his current students are listening, yo, hook me up, dudes!

But I did say I was broadcasting from the intersection of Harrison and Ginsburg.

Allen Ginsburg, as I hope most of you know, was one of the leading Beat Poets of the 1950’s. If you know nothing else of him, get out of the house and look up his poem “Howl.”

He was a poet, a hippie, and a postmodernist. He was a Buddhist, a protestor, and a professor. Yes, he too taught English at Brooklyn College.

I did not get to meet Professor Ginsburg, though I understand no one called him Professor. I took Professor Harrison’s class not long after Allen Ginsburg died. Professor Harrison brought us into the small and dingy English Department office they shared. It was nothing special. It was functional, painted with neutral, faded grey paint and stocked with slightly beat up and worn furniture like you’d find in a cheap walk-in clinic. From the surroundings you’d never guess two such distinguished men worked there, yet they did. Professor Harrison reverently pointed to Allen Ginsburg’s chair, which he never allowed anyone to sit in, and showed us Ginsburg’s plants, which Professor Harrison continued to water. And if you Ginsburg fans are wondering, the plants were ordinary ferns, not marijuana.

I can’t say that I appreciated any of that tale at the time, but now several years later and reading it back as I write, that’s a pretty good story. And where else could it happen but Brooklyn New York?

 

An audio version of this legend recently appeared in the amazing FlashPulp website. Check them out for awesomeness and goodies!

 

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