Picayune Plus: I know, I know. But go vote anyway.

& the dirtiest passage from "Coffee, Tea or Me?"

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6-26-22

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Rebranded!

When I posted my first bonus issue for paid subscribers only back in December, three months after I started the Picayune Sentinel, I wasn’t sure how often I’d be posting so I gave it the title “Picayune Extra,” as in something special from time to time. But now that I’m firmly settled into an every Tuesday rhythm I’ve decided to go with the name “Picayune Plus.”

Even though it has echoes of the ill-fated “CNN Plus,” I like the alliteration. I’m sending today’s issue out to all subscribers in hopes of snagging a few more supporters for my work. What you’ll find below is typical of a Tuesday bonus issue. Join the fun at the lowest rate Substack allows!

Thursday’s regular edition will discuss primary election results and the other big stories of the week.

Vote today, if only to let our politicians know that you’re paying attention

It’s Primary Election Day in Illinois and I’m tempted to stay home. Gov. J.B. Pritzker and my congressman, U.S. Rep. Mike Quigley, face no serious opposition in the Democratic primaries, and I’m basically indifferent about the other big races (though I am enthusiastic about voting for incumbent Democratic state Rep. Lindsey LaPointe).

But I’m headed to the polls. The main reason I’m voting is to send up one tiny little flare that tells our elected officials — even those who aren’t on the ballot — that I’m paying attention, that I can and will hold them accountable. I can and will be there in November and again next Spring for the municipal elections and again in 2024.

Pathetic turnouts — and we’re likely to see another one today — send a message to those in power that you’re not that engaged, you don’t care that much. But at what is obviously a pivotal time in our history, the message you want to send, no matter what your party affiliation or political philosophy, is that you are engaged and you do care.

Illustration from “Coffee, Tea or Me?” by Bill Wenzel

You’ll need a strong stimulant to stay awake while reading ‘Coffee, Tea or Me?’

My college housemate Pete checked in last week with a quick text: “Did you know that ‘Coffee, Tea or me?’ Was a scam written by an airline executive?”

I did not!

I suppose I should have taken note 20 years ago when former American Airlines PR official Donald Bain admitted in his autobiography that he’d invented narrators Trudy Baker and Rachel Jones, two young flight attendants, and nearly all the stories in the 1967 best-seller. It was sold as the “uninhibited memoirs” of two “audaciously outspoken young ladies” revealing “outrageous information on the aerial and amorous adventures of the swinging young stews.”

I remember it as salacious and titillating. My fourth-grade friends and I somehow got our hands on a copy and furtively passed it around. “Coffee, Tea or Me?” was a gateway to more risque material down the line — the titles “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask),” 1969, and “The Happy Hooker, My Own Story,” 1971, come to mind — and I soon forgot about it.

But Pete’s note led me to find this origin story by former New York Times columnist Joe Sharkey:

An editor at a publishing house introduced (Donald Bain) to two Eastern Airlines stewardesses who thought they together might be able to write a book about their escapades. The editor thought Don might want to be the ghostwriter for the two women. But when Don sat down with them, they didn't have much to offer besides a few anecdotes.

"I realized they didn't have enough to sustain a book, and I was going to have to use an awful lot of my own imagination," he told me then. Nevertheless, he was inspired by the idea. So he created a "memoir" out of whole cloth.

The book shot onto the best-seller list, and the two stewardesses were delighted to go on the road to publicize it as the authors -- even though their real names were not on the cover. Bedazzled by fame, "one of them legally changed her real name to the one I had given her in the book," Bain told me.

I then downloaded the book in order to see just how dirty were the dirty parts of the first dirty book in my memory.

Another illusion shattered! “Coffee, Tea or Me?” turns out to have been tamer and less explicit than today’s network TV dramas. Here, for example,is by far the most graphic passage in the entire book, one in which Trudy is seduced by a famous actor (no last name given):

The book is indescribably tedious, with adventures that go nowhere and silly little tales made even sillier now by the knowledge that they were invented. The ugly homophobia, though historically accurate, makes reading “Coffee, Tea or Me?'“ a downright unpleasant experience.

Artist Bill Wenzel’s cartoons of bosomy stewardesses — as they then were known — at the start of each chapter (see example above) provided the illusion of prurience that lingered in my imagination until, well, until last week.

News you can use

Monday I called the Tribune subscriber service line — 312-546-7900 — on behalf of my father, who is a still faithful digital subscriber at home in Ann Arbor, Mich. I wanted to know how much he’s been paying every month.

Subscribers can’t just go online and find out that information. The Tribune hides it. So they have to call and work their way through a phone tree to get a live person at the call center.

The woman I reached told me he’s paying $27.72 a month. I demanded a better rate. She offered $15.96 a month. I pointed out to her that his son — that would be me — pays less than $6 a month for digital access and home Sunday delivery. She quickly dropped the offer to $7.96 a month.

I support local journalism, but taking advantage of loyal but inattentive subscribers is just bullshit. As is, by the way, the $8 upcharge for monthly “premium issues” if you get Sunday home delivery. As I wrote earlier, I can’t tell you what these “premium issues” are exactly. I reached out to management for an explanation and got no answer. The Tribune Publishing subscription services site tells me only this:

All Print subscriptions and Print Delivery + Unlimited Digital Access subscriptions include premium issues each calendar year. Your account will be charged an additional fee in the billing period when the premium issue publishes. This will result in shortening the length of your billing period. You can opt out of premium issues by contacting customer service as provided in Section 9 (Contact Us) below. For premium issue dates refer to the Order Page (no link).

What they don’t tell you online is that your opt out period lasts only six months. If you don’t remember to call back and opt out again, the $8 monthly charge begins again. I will gladly entertain the opinions of those who feel that my barnyard epithet is too strong to describe such business practices.

Without irony, the Tribune on Sunday published a column by syndicated personal finance columnist Elliot Raphaelson headlined, “Manage subscription costs.”

A pet peeve of mine is that when a subscription ends, you automatically are renewed at a rate that, frequently, is much higher than the rate a new subscriber would be charged. In that situation, you should contact the publisher and ask for the new-customer rate. In this situation, I have always been able to renew at the rate advertised for new subscribers.

So while I urge digital and print subscribers to continue supporting the valuable journalism at the Tribune, I urge them not to be patsies and instead to call 312-546-7900 to, at the very least, find out what they’re paying and if they’re buying “premium issues” they may not want.

Notes and comments from readers —lightly edited —- along with my responses

Some of these messages are in reference to items in last Thursday’s Picayune Sentinel.

Peter Z. — Let’s give tickets to speeders going 6 to 10 mph over the limit in school zones only. Issue tickets for more than 10 mph over everywhere else.

Response to Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s decision to fight fiercely and bitterly for the lower limit has been mixed. There are certainly places in the city — side streets, for instance — where 6 mph over the limit looks and feels unsafe. But there are also certainly places and times in the city where the speed limit is unnecessarily low and the camera tickets feel like speed-trap cash grabs. The mayor and advocates for the lower limit don’t seem to appreciate the difference.

The state bans speed cameras on DuSable Lake Shore Drive — a state road — presumably because they would be dreadfully unpopular. And that tells you something about the public’s tolerance for technological enforcement of traffic violations.

Similarly, it would be fairly easy to generate speeding tickets on expressways and tollways with camera arrays similar to those at open-road toll plazas. Yet I’ve never heard that idea seriously proposed.

See: Chicago’s speed cameras yield more tickets and controversy – but drivers aren’t slowing down from Chicago Public Media.

Laurence S. — Please forgive me if I don't jump for joy at the thought of a President Ron DeSantis.

The left is split on whether it’s good news that a recent poll showed Florida’s arch-conservative governor edging ahead of former President Donald Trump in a preference survey of Republican voters in New Hampshire.

Some progressives say that DeSantis is a potentially more malign candidate than Trump because he’s smarter in nearly every way and thus less likely to stumble and stew while promoting a right-wing agenda. Trumpism without the ineptness of Trump has the potential to be devastatingly effective.

But I’m with those who say Trump is frighteningly unfit to be president — his narcissism, ignorance and utter lack of civic and personal morality continue to pose a singular threat to representative democracy. And, somehow, he has the charisma to make otherwise decent, well-meaning people follow him into the abyss of indecency.

On Twitter I frequently use the hashtag #Cult45 in reference to his followers because they appear both hypnotized and deranged in their devotion. And because Trump now believes, with pretty good reason, that the laws of political gravity don’t apply to him, I anticipate him smashing more and more norms if, God forbid, he’s reelected.

Dianne M. — I hope no one saved my old love letters from my co-dependent, before-therapy days! I lived it once and have no interest in reliving it. Have none of you grown beyond who you were?

Tom T. — You wrote that the past "can be quite rich, entertaining and useful to revisit." For people who agree with that I have no criticism and am probably a bit envious. But for others, it may be best to leave the stones of the past unturned as the memories may not be so great. The couple of times I've tried something along the lines of returning old letters it did not go well.

Either way, it seems prudent to have control of your own ancient missives so that when you're nominated for the Supreme Court, say, an opportunistic old acquaintance doesn’t sell them to the New York Post.

D. Dale W. — I want op-eds that address local issues, not just hot-button national ones, and for these you need local writers, not nationally syndicated ones.

I agree. Saturday marked one year since locally oriented columnists Mary Schmich, Dahleen Glanton, John Kass and I took buyouts and left the Tribune. Heidi Stevens took the buyout and now writes once a week through a syndicate. Rex Huppke, whose focus tended to be more national, stayed on, but he has since departed for USA Today. I’m very glad the Tribune hired local political ace Laura Washington to write a weekly freelance column, but, as a reader, I’m disappointed that the paper has yet to promote or hire local staff columnists.

As an aside, a former colleague took me to task for lumping “the graphics department” in with those in a newspaper’s chain of command responsible for reader confusion about the difference between opinion and straight news content. Apology tendered. I simply meant to make the point that many different elements go into generating a clear presentation in print and online, and it’s an interdepartmental challenge to minimize misunderstandings.

Patricia S. — Regarding last Thursday’s lead item about Uvalde, God and the problem of evil, I used to believe there was something or someone out there in charge. But that changed in 2013 after a series of tragedies in my family including the death of my 18-month-old niece and how my mother died.

My mother went to church regularly, was compassionate, kind, generous, and believed that the message of Christianity was loving other people. And she died a miserable death. Months of suffering, indignities and humiliation in the treatment for her illness. And I just couldn't believe anymore that there was a God of any kind who would allow her or anyone to suffer like that. And if there was a God who allowed suffering like that, I hated him/her. So I decided to stop believing. Otherwise I'd be gripped with bitterness and anger. I preferred to just be grief-stricken. When I look around at the miseries that so many people endure all over the world, it reinforces my conclusion that if this is the will of a God, that God is a monster.

Josh G. — Everything G-d does is for good. We humans don’t have the intellect to understand all acts of G-d.

I’m fine with Josh G.’s ostensible humility. But that humility is often gilded among the faithful by comprehensive and specific claims about what God wants, who God favors, what happens after death and so on. In a 2001 speech, I said this:

I call myself an "indifferent agnostic"--and I say that whether God exists is not just unknowable but irrelevant. It doesn't matter.

Look, if there is a living God who created and cares about this world, I think the best one can say about him and his moral sense is that it is utterly impenetrable. Take a walk around a children's hospital. Look at the videos of starvation in the Sudan. Read the stories about the just-passed 100th anniversary of the hurricane that devastated Galveston, Texas. Six thousand — some say 10,000 people — dead. Or visit the Holocaust museum.

The moral code of an almighty power that allegedly created and presides over such horror is, to put it charitably, ambiguous.

This amplified a point I made in a 1998 Tribune column, “Passover Seder often glosses over the doomed innocents” and the follow-up column “Debate offers testament to the power of the Passover story.”

Ya gotta see these tweets!

I often run across tweets that rely on visual humor and so can’t be included in the Tweet of the Week contest (the template for the poll does not allow the use of images). So on Tuesdays I present a few good ones I’ve come across recently:

John Lyon @JohnLyonTweets

Do not make the DMV lady angry while getting a new license plate. Her revenge will be swift, and it will be merciless.

NurseBrianRN @rn_murse

yes, i’m outside playing, mom!!

Pierce Tulley @pwtulley

This entire meeting could have been pee on a fire-hydrant!

There’s still time to vote in the conventional Tweet of the Week poll!

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