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Uncle Orson Reviews Everything
October 29, 2006
First appeared in print in The Rhinoceros Times, Greensboro, NC.
Magical Shoes, Cookies, Trees, Slang, Lemmon, Miller, Trojans
So a friend calls up my wife and says, "I wanted to try that shoe store your
husband reviewed, but it's out of business."
Unbelievable.
My wife stopped by on her way home from grocery shopping at Harris-Teeter.
Where The Village Shoe had been was an empty store. Even the shelves were
gone.
There are friends who think that the whole thing was a Twilight Zone
experience: The store was in business only long enough to sell my wife and me
three magical pairs of shoes. We've tried clicking the heels together in various
combinations, rubbing the shoes while making a wish, and sleeping with the
shoes under our pillows (comfy), but so far, nothing.
Apparently it was just a store that closed.
I'm always saddened when a business dies.
I have no idea what the story is here -- maybe it's like Baja Fresh, where the
Greensboro store was doing good business but the chain as a whole decided to
pull out of North Carolina.
Sometimes a sudden closing is because of a personal tragedy -- like when one
of my favorite restaurants closed because its owner-chef was dying of cancer.
(It would have been incredibly selfish of me to interfere with his last days and
beg him for the recipe to my favorite dish. I'm ashamed I even thought of it.
So disrespectful. But when authors die, what I miss is their unwritten books;
there's nothing wrong with that, is there? My relationship with the chef was
entirely because of his art. When I think of him, I miss him terribly ... but it's
because I know I'll never have that glorious parmentier again.)
As for those who immediately assumed that the store closed because I reviewed
it -- I thought of that, too. But not the way you think. After we bought our
shoes, I found myself with an oversized column for two weeks in a row, and
twice I bumped my review of The Village Shoe to a later week.
What if I had run the review two weeks earlier? Might the store then have been
flooded with customers in time to make a difference in its fate?
But how could I guess the store was on the brink of closing only a few weeks
after it opened?
Usually when a business opens and then dies within a very short time, it's
because of undercapitalization.
Somebody thought that he could save up enough money to pay the first
month's lease, buy inventory and display shelves and a cash register, and then
open up a retail business and make money from the first day.
I've seen so many mom-and-pop retirement businesses die like that.
Maybe that has nothing to do with the Village Shoe. But to any of you who are
thinking of opening up a retail store please, please, keep this in mind: You are
not ready to open a store until you have enough money in the bank to operate
for a full year without any sales at all.
That's right. Enough money to pay all salaries, your lease, your utilities, your
advertising, everything, without depending on any income from actual sales.
Because whatever sales you make for the first year, all that money needs to be
plowed back into inventory -- replacing the stock you sold.
It usually takes a long time, even in a successful store, to get to the point
where you are selling enough to cover your operating expenses. And far, far
longer to reach the point where you are beginning to amortize your startup
costs.
Most retail stores make all their profit during the Christmas season. The rest
of the year they run at a loss -- sometimes a steep loss. The Village Shoe
didn't survive long enough to reach the Christmas season.
Small-scale retail is not for the faint of heart ... or empty of pocket.
*
But let's get back to the important thing. Shoes.
The Shops at Friendly Center has opened -- the new retail extravaganza just
west of the Grande Theater complex. Naturally, because it's my duty as your
roving reviewer, I spent a pleasant afternoon -- ok, a freezing windy hour just
before picking up our daughter from school -- perambulating the new shopping
center and checking out the stores.
It wasn't an ice creamy day and we didn't have a lot of time. But Ben &
Jerry's is a known quality. One only has to say the name and even arch-conservatives who loathe Ben & Jerry's politics are there, slurping down ice
cream and consoling themselves that even though a portion of their profits goes
to supporting loathsome causes, at least Ben & Jerry's corporate headquarters
is in Vermont, a safe distance away.
We began our walk by parking in the lot near the new Harris-Teeter hyperstore,
which won't be open for a couple of weeks yet, and then walking around the
complex in the direction of the parking lot south of the Grande. There we made
our first disappointing discovery.
Even though the whole point of a complex of shops like this is pedestrianism,
the sidewalk does not extend all the way around the big southeast building of
the new center. Just as you turn the corner to go down the east side, you find
a brick wall surrounding somebody's dumpsters extending right to the curb.
So pedestrians -- in other words, actual shoppers -- either have to walk all the
way around the building to the west, or cross the street where there is no
crosswalk, or step into the street where cars will presumably be zipping along.
This will be even more hazardous for people pushing strollers -- and for people
burdened with large numbers of shopping bags.
The stupidity of this is mind-numbing. Have the developers no lawyers, to
warn them against folly? This is an obvious, foreseeable hazard. It's a lawsuit
waiting to happen. Was their architect so incompetent he could not have
arranged the building so that there was room for a sidewalk?
My guess is that the architect did just fine -- it was somebody involved in
making the road that miscalculated. The road was supposed to be narrower or
farther east. But by the time the problem was discovered, it would have been
so expensive to fix it that somebody said, "Leave it."
So when a shopper is hit by a car at that spot, costing the developer far, far
more in compensatory and punitive damages than it would ever have cost to
move the road farther away from the building, that somebody who said "Leave
it" will lose his job.
No, that's what would happen in a just universe. In the real world, that person
will have immunized himself completely. Somebody else will bear the brunt of
the costs. Sic semper idiotus.
But folly aside, what about shoes?
The news is good. Soho Shoes will fill some of the void left by the closing of
The Village Shoe. On the men's side of the shop, the styles are so outrageous
that men my age would be arrested for wearing them. But they're fun to look
at. They remind me of the extravagances of the 1970s -- you know, when
young men were wearing high-heel shoes.
On the women's side -- well, women are allowed to wear extravagant and
outrageous shoes, particularly when they can be described as "darling."
The women's shoes at Soho are so darling I started forcing them on my wife.
"Try this on," I said.
"I don't like it," she said.
"I don't care, I want to see it on a foot. I'm not sure it's actually real."
My wife, more closely tied to the real world, found two pair that she liked. And
she patiently agreed to try on the darlingest of the shoes I found. Guess what?
The two she liked didn't quite fit (remember, she has feet of a rare and difficult
shape).
But the darlingissimous pair that I chose fit perfectly. And she loved them
once she had them on. Those are the ones we bought -- on a shopping
expedition that was not supposed to lead to purchases. You can't believe how
many husband-points I got for that one.
Soho Shoes is not a practical store. Their idea of a "cheap shoe" is ninety-nine
bucks. But it's a wonderful store. I'm happy just knowing such shoes exist.
We already knew Coldwater Creek and J.Jill had wonderful clothes for
grownups (i.e., women who have outgrown the wispiness of youth). Sadly,
Coldwater Creek seems to have caught polyesteritis -- everything we liked was
lined with polyester, to which we are both allergic. But eventually they'll
rediscover acrylic, nylon, cotton, and other wearable fabrics and we can buy
stuff there. Because everything looked great.
Our happiest discovery was the intriguingly named upscale party store
Swoozie's. Stationery for invitations and thank-you notes; servingware both
permanent and disposable; decorations; surprising odds and ends -- it's fun
just to walk around. Though we didn't just walk around. We bought stuff.
Not anything we needed, mind you. Swoozie's specializes in "stuff you don't
need."
Our favorite purchase was the one we needed least. Swoozie's sells mason jars
of dime-sized crispy chocolate chip cookies called "Nam's Bits." The
ingredients are healthyish -- the only corn syrup was a trace amount in the
vanilla flavoring -- and the molasses flavor is so good that you don't actually
need any chocolate chips to make these into great cookies.
The label says there are ten servings in a jar.
I had eaten eight of them before we got home. My wife was able to get one
serving -- a handful or so. Only thirteen little cookies remained, which we
generously shared with a few privileged people, who pronounced the cookies
delicious and then, realizing that I had eaten probably seventy or eight of these
cookies during one ten-minute car ride, they fled from my presence in awe.
I'm pretty sure it was awe.
Please go buy them out before my iron self-control rusts completely away and I
return to the scene of the crime, waving my credit card and screaming,
"Cookies! Now!"
*
Sometimes just knowing that The Jerry Springer Show exists is enough to make
me despair about the future of the human race. Or at least American culture.
And then Springer shows up as one of the celebrity participants on Dancing
with the Stars, and guess what? He can't dance all that well, but he comes
across as a sweet, generous-hearted guy. The audience loved him when he
learned to waltz so he could dance at his daughter's wedding. People shed
tears when he hugged his daughter as he left the show.
Yet you can't escape the knowledge that he chooses to put on a television show
consisting of the dregs of humanity complaining about the vile deeds of their
spouses or girlfriends or parents or children, each more repulsive than the
others.
So ... which is the real Jerry Springer?
Probably both. He probably thinks his tv show provides a public service. Sort
of a "There but for the grace of God goes my mother" kind of thing.
*
Botanist Colin Tudge has written a thick book called The Tree: A Natural
History of What Trees Are, How They Live, and Why They Matter. But he
isn't writing as one scientist talking to others -- it's actually a really long ode.
A paean. A love song.
After explaining why trees are powerful, compelling, miraculous creatures,
Tudge sets out to introduce us to every single one of them by name.
OK, not each tree, and not even every species -- but certainly every family and
an awful lot of the genera.
It's fascinating to find out which trees are closely related, genetically, to others.
In the old days, not knowing about DNA, plants had been classified by their
superficial resemblances to each other. Now that we can do genetic
comparisons, however, we find that outward forms have been separately
evolved more than once, so that trees that have very similar traits might belong
to families that separated a hundred million years ago, while others that bear
almost no resemblance to each other might be close kin.
Just the thought that legumes -- peanuts and beans -- are closely related to
many towering trees is disturbing.
Tudge can't go into detail about many of the trees, with the result that we get
the feeling that as he names them, it's just about killing him that he can't just
lead us up to one and introduce us and show us all the cool stuff. So thick as
this book is, Tudge is racing through the trees, stopping only to tell us about
the ones that are already famous and beloved, or the ones with something to
teach us.
Not everybody is going to love this book. But I did. I kept reading bits out loud
to my wife late at night, though I did stop short of waking her up to tell her
some of the really strange and wonderful trees.
And trees are only the beginning. Yes, Tudge loves them -- but he couldn't
stop himself from devoting several pages to telling all about the grasses, which
are in one of the few branches of the plant kingdom that have no trees at all.
*
Luc Reid's Talk the Talk: The Slang of 65 American Subcultures is meant
as a guidebook for us novelists so we can create plausible characters who
participate in them.
For instance, did you know the word "puds"? Well, actually, I did, as archaic
British slang with a vulgar meaning, but to hikers and backpackers, it means
"pointless ups and downs" -- "climbs and drops in the trail, as seen by a
person who has gotten tired of them" (p. 173).
What about "power prang"? Among model-builders and radio-controlled model
enthusiasts, it means "a malfunction in which a rocket turns downward while
still firing its engine." A synonym is "death dive." And if the rocket in a power
prang penetrates the ground at all, it's called a "core sample."
You can find out what it means for a caver to "trog up" or why you don't bother
exploring a "grot hole," or why "cryptorchids" are disqualified from appearing in
a cat show, or the difference between a "boss," an "avatar," and an "easter egg"
among electronic gamers. You may or may not want to go "canuding" (though
it's a definite no in "Groom Lake"), while it's ok to let your kids watch "ski porn"
and you'd be proud to have a trucker refer to you as a "fog lifter."
I'll leave it up to you to figure out which subcultures use terms like "dequeen,"
"dual boinger," and "megatick."
*
The late great actor Jack Lemmon's son Chris has written a charming memoir
of his father, A Twist of Lemmon. He was a fascinating man, and it's plain
that Chris loved him dearly -- as did his many friends.
But the book still left me feeling vaguely sad, because what emerges -- quite
accidentally, I think -- is the portrait of a deeply self-centered man with crude
language and a desperate need to have attention focused on him at all times.
That he still managed to make himself beloved of many speaks well of his
ability to control these personality deficits; but I suspect that had he not been
rich and famous, other people might have been less forgiving.
And yet ... when you compare him to celebrities with real personality defects --
the tantrum-throwers, the savage infighters, the little-guy-steppers-on -- Jack
Lemmon was a saint. In the world he lived in, where egos are massaged
constantly and the most vile behavior is overlooked, the miracle is that he
remained as generous and open-hearted as he clearly was.
*
Larry Miller has long been one of my favorite comedians, both for his stand-up
and his screen acting. In Pretty Woman, he played the store clerk who sucks
up to Richard Gere -- and he keeps showing up as vaguely snotty minor
characters in movie after movie.
But many people don't realize that he's also a columnist, an upholder of
traditional values from the point of view of someone who used to not have
them.
Now he has a book, Spoiled Rotten America: Outrages of Everyday Life.
This is an antidote for those who think that all comedians today are so
mindlessly opposed to family values that they would have made Stalin shift in
his seat.
Miller, you see, chose to have a life -- to marry and stay married, to have kids
and be closely involved in raising them, to believe in God and say so publicly,
to learn from his mistakes and let us learn too.
But he's still funny. No, he's funnier than ever, because his humor (like Bill
Cosby's and Jerry Seinfeld's) is nondestructive. He doesn't score laughs by
tearing people down. He doesn't assume his audience has contempt for
straight arrows.
In the book, Miller does riffs on why water-saving toilets don't save water, why
you shouldn't commit adultery even if you don't believe God will punish you,
why celebrities can't ever buy Playboy, how his wife tries to get him to wear
stylish clothes, how to teach your children to know what's really funny and
what's really good in entertainment ... and a thousand wonderful insights along
the way.
I loved this book. I think you will too.
(Admittedly, some people might be offended by some of the language and
situations described in this book. Let's put it this way -- if my column never
offends you, then this book probably won't either. But if you think some of my
columns have been disgusting, then you'll have the same reaction to Larry
Miller's primum opus.)
*
Let's face it. You're never going to read The Iliad again. If, that is, you have
ever read it. What's the point? You don't believe in all those gods, and you've
already seen the movie Troy, which is way more coherent and action-packed
than Homer's version.
And if you do read it, thinking you'll get the story of the Trojan Horse, you're
going to be disappointed. The Trojan Horse story isn't in The Iliad. It's in
another work about the Trojan War.
I bet you didn't know there were any other works about the Trojan War.
(OK, maybe you still don't care that there were other works. But now you know
it, whether you care or not.)
This is all leading up to telling you about Barry Strauss's wonderful book The
Trojan War. Strauss combines all the literary sources about the events of the
war, and then compares them with the archaeological record, which has been
growing clearer by leaps and bounds in recent decades.
The story he unfolds has a scholarly flavor sometimes, as he tells about
conflicting sources or what might have really happened where the literary
accounts are implausible. But he also allows himself some delightful -- and
clearly labeled -- speculation and flights of fancy.
The result is an interesting narrative that does a good job of transporting us
back to a culture that has long since disappeared, letting us experience events
that have left their imprint on the imaginations and memories of millions of
people in the generations since.
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