Hey, y’all, check out the guest piece I did for the Shop Tart. The Tart asked me to write a “party politics” piece for her readers, meaning a primer that would help them avoid embarrassment at parties when the subject of politics came up.
It sounded like a fun idea, so I jumped at the chance. Here’s a sample from what I produced:
So you’re at this party, and you’re only there because your BFF insisted. You love her to death, but the room is filled with her husband’s intolerable friends who think they rule the world. And while you think the things they think are
important are insipid beyond words, the last thing you want to do is appear to know less about that stuff than they do. It would embarrass your friend, and it wouldn’t make you feel too great, either. Besides, you’re quite sure you’ll smack their silly faces if they show you that smug, condescending look just one more time…
With the Columbia city election coming up Tuesday – you overheard someone mention it just this week – you just know everybody at the party’s going to be insufferable about it. They’ll be predicting outcomes, and talking about what the outcomes will really mean, which of course won’t be what all the ordinary people think they mean, and swapping intimate details that only they know about each of the candidates and droning on about the pertinent issues in the most obnoxious manner …
And there you’ll be, getting your wine glass refreshed just once more and looking about desperately for someone who wants to talk about the implications of the last episodes of “Lost,” or sports or weather or pretty much any damned thing other than this city election – I mean, who follows city politics? Really? With the state of the world as it is, who has the time? And how to do it even if you want to? The paper’s not thick enough to wrap fish anymore, and local TV’s idea of covering politics is to ask some uninformed twit on the street what HE thinks, so they’re less than useless.
But then you see one of the hubby’s partners moving your way, with a “Do you believe that Joe Azar?” smirk on his face, and you’re trapped.
No, you’re not. Take a breath. Here’s your handy-dandy primer, which will give you the general picture plus all the little smart-sounding asides you’ll need to survive “party politics”…
So you’ve got the idea. Go check out the rest of it, which provides a tongue-in-cheek guide to all you need to know about the city election Tuesday — background, issues and candidates.
But as Kathryn Fenner noted, visit the rest room first. It’s 2,119 words long — about twice the length of one of my columns at The State.
But as the wags on the copy desk out in Wichita used to say (always ironically), it reads like 800…
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I meant that one might laugh too hard, and well,….
Very funny stuff, and useful, too!
Oh.
Well, I’ve taken a lot of grief over the years for being verbose — my 1,000-word columns were way over the standard length — that I always assume that’s what people mean…