It's been a very long time since I've been here. I'm rarely even checking into Tribe these days...I've got a far-too-full plate and find that I don't have much time for writing.

But, I recently wrote up something that, if you have the time, I would like feedback for, if you can, that is. Anything that you have to offer will be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

Tell Ring Lardner that he can sue me if he wants, but the Emperor is still as naked as he was the moment he was born.

The ‘odor’ of ones pedigree determined everything for me when I was an idealistic and motivated honor student through my undergraduate years. I was, indeed, an honor student, but at a public university. The ‘public’ part of the university that I graduated from bestowed a distinctly ‘bargain basement’ note to my pedigree’s odor and thus I was marked upon graduation: Page but never Bibliographer, Copy Editor but never Managing Editor, Bridesmaid but never Bride. This is a particularly difficult thing in life to accept when one is a bit smarter than ones peers and more than just a little motivated to achieve success as I was then. I bore my “place”, as it were, with the tacit understanding that my days as a Bridesmaid were temporary and did my best to camouflage the chip on my shoulder.

Upon graduating, the job market proved to be anything but sympathetic. For every editing room position that I was denied, there were five offers as a “receptionist,” a skirt, a piece of window dressing that never advanced beyond the lobby unless it was by way of the bedroom and even in that case, the advancement went no farther than the mail room. I couldn’t resign myself to my Hyacinth Robinson position in the publishing world. So, I put my search for work in the publishing industry on hold and took a position as a Reading Room Archivist at the library of the public university’s library from which I received my degree. It was a safe, quiet environment for me to lick the wounds heaped upon my battered ego, to regroup, and to plan another strategy for rising above the ridiculously low and unfair expectations assigned to me by the odor of my pedigree.

At about the time that I was beginning to feel restless, restrained by a corset that I’d outgrown before I’d even donned it as an Archivist, feeling a need to go out and try to crash through the cultural wall that blocked my entrance into the publishing world, 18 months into my position as the Reading Room Archivist, I happened to spot a flyer displayed in the library near the circulation desk;

Rutherford Smalley, Ring Lardner/Algonquin Round Table Specialist and
Managing Editor of Heliotrope Fiction Magazine, will be heading up a round
table critique next Thursday in the Parker Goss Room of the library from 8am
through 4 pm. Bring your best fiction for his insight and opinion. Pre-registration
is required.

There was a phone number with a prefix for the library for information and registration and another phone number for Rutherford Smalley at his office at Heliotrope Fiction Magazine. I ripped the flyer off of the wall and carefully folded it up small enough to fit into my pocket.

I want to write. I want to capture the number one spot on the New York Times best seller list for 12 consecutive months. And, I want to wallow in all the power and glory that this achievement brings. I want all this, but I don’t expect it. When I graduated, I hoped to get my foot in the door with a publishing house in some editing capacity, a capacity which would, at some point in the future, allow me to grow into something vaguely literary, a commentator or reviewer, perhaps. Once I’d established myself as a commentator, I’d hoped to be able to bargain my way into getting some of the fiction that I’d written published. It’s not what I hoped for, merely what I’d expected. As I just mentioned, I’d hoped for a type of success that was much more immediate. It’s sad that I hadn’t even achieved what I’d expected, much less for what I’d hoped. Seeing the flyer nudged my ambition up into the driver seat of the judgment making centers of my neo-cortex. I, while pretending to be a reporter for a wholly fictional underground newspaper titled with anything that came to my mind, decided, in a moment fueled by the most naked of competitive urges, to call Rutherford Smalley at Heliotrope for an interview. Through the course of this ‘interview,’ I was going to find out what tickled his vanity enough to get noticed. Then, I was going to take this knowledge to my voluminous stack of unpublished fiction, sort through the stack to find the most promising piece, beef it up to ensure that it hits home with Mr. Smalley, and then, with a day off from my job, show up next Thursday with a piece of tailor-made fiction that would be sure to catch Rutherford’s eye.

“There’s been no good satire published, perhaps even written, since 1933.” Rutherford spoke with authority and a British accent.

“None?” I asked, keeping my questions to a single word. I’d hoped to lead him into as much exposition as possible and I’d gotten the feeling thus far in the conversation that he’d talk up a blue streak as long as I didn’t interrupt him. He was a man who seemed to enjoy the sound of his own voice and the thrill of voicing his own opinions.

“None.” That British accent. “The Algonquin Round Table period was the most fruitful and productive period in the history of American satire. Every bit written published after that was and is rubbish.”

“Rubbish?”

“I remember discussing with Ring - ” Lardner? “ – not long before he passed, the dearth that seemed to be emerging then of refreshing, biting humor in American Literature. The situation has only gotten worse since then. These days, I don’t even finish reading the pathetic and humorless manuscripts that get passed on to me.” This last sentence made me wonder why, exactly, he was agreeing to moderate the round table. Was he doing this with the desire to find someone who would shatter the modern norm of dismal satire or was he doing this so that he could brow-beat some poor as-yet unpublished writer in order to massage his own ego?

“Ring?” Ring Lardner? Rutherford Smalley had spoken to Ring Lardner before he died? I wondered just how old Rutherford Smalley could be. And, what was it with that British accent?

I finished up the phone interview with a fist full of unanswered questions regarding Rutherford Smalley, his acquaintance with the late Ring Lardner, his British accent, his age, questions which I worked to set right researching with tools available to me because of my job in the reading room archives, abstracts, bibliographies, connections with other and larger libraries. According to my research, Ring Lardner died in 1933. That meant that Rutherford Smalley had to be in the United States before 1933. From 1933 to the present was a good 75 years, plenty of time to lose a British accent if one had a British accent to begin with. But again, according to my research, Rutherford Smalley was from small town Illinois and graduated from an exclusive Ivy League University in 1970. Rutherford Smalley, in a polite circle, would be known as faux. In my world, populated with bargain basement pedigrees, he’d simply be known as full of crap.

I sat down with my stack of promising (or so I hoped) fiction, looking for anything Lardner-esque when the most wicked idea popped into my Bridesmaid’s brain: I could copy something by Ring Lardner and submit it for critique next Thursday as my own work to see if Rutherford Smalley was wise to the plagiarism. If, like his British accent and his first hand intimacy with Ring Lardner, his knowledge of Lardner’s writing was false, I’d go to my grave with the satisfaction of knowing that my bargain basement pedigree, the degree from the public university that is, had more meat to it than his mere façade of intellectual excellence from this exclusive Ivy League University. If I never found a job in the publishing industry, the nature and knowledge of Mr. Smalley’s conceit could sustain me well into the sweet hereafter.

As I already mentioned, job as Reading Room Archivist had perks – access to abstracts to not only everything in our library, but also to everything in the libraries with which we had loan agreements. In another University’s 20th Century American Literature archives, there was a single copy of a collection of short stories written by Ring Lardner. As luck would have it, I was able to have instant access to the book on the internet. I stayed late that evening at work looking for the perfect story in this collection to plagiarize and I found it: A little gem of a tale titled “Stop me – if you’ve heard this one.” The piece was perfect for what I had in mind. It tells the story of two young playwrights, Jerry Blades and Luke Garner, and their first meeting with a charming ‘globe trotter and banquet fixture,’ Henry Wild Osburne. Through the course of this meeting, Garner had occasion to describe to Osburne a mystery, of sorts, that Garner encountered on a recent trip. The details of this mystery were many and exact; a train ride to Chicago, the presence of a young woman who was dark, about 25, well dressed and in possession of a J. S. Fletcher detective novel, a quixotic dinner at a table with 3 complete strangers that involved the aforementioned young woman and one of the men at the dinner table, and long after dinner when everyone had retired to their individual cabins, the young woman making a request of Garner to go look for the man from dinner in the Club car and to deliver to him a hand written note that she’d prepared. Two years after this initial meeting between Osburne, Garner and Blades, Blades and Garner were at a banquet and, somewhere off in the crowd, they overheard Osburne telling a rapt crowd about an adventure that he’d experienced – it was identical with exception to a few minor and insignificant details, to the story Garner had told him two years earlier and Osburne was telling the story as though it were his.

I flipped open my laptop, opened up a new MSWord file which I titled “Stop me – if you’ve heard this one.” And started, “On a certain day in the year 1927, Jerry blades and Luke Garner, young playwrights, entered the Lambs’ Club at the luncheon hour and were beckoned to a corner table by an actor friend, Charley Speed.” Forty five minutes later, I’d polished off the file ending with my name, the date and a word count. As much as I was looking forward to tripping the pompous and phony Rutherford Smalley up, I hadn’t considered the possibility that he’d recognize the plagiarism until the morning of the round table standing outside of the Parker Goss room at 7:45 am. This new revelation caused me a brief spate of anxiety and I fought with the urge to leave before Smalley arrived. But I didn’t leave. My curiosity concerning the outcome of my ruse outweighed my fear by a long shot. I stood and waited with 10 copies of my manuscript – one for Rutherford Smalley, one for myself and eight for the eight other participants of the round table.

As luck would have it, my manuscript was chosen to be first for reading and critique that morning. Feeling every bit the cat who ate the canary, I passed out copies to Smalley and the other eight members, then sat down feeling a psychic canary feather tickling the tip of my nose as I did so. Before the end of the morning, I was to see that providence would provide me with an opportunity to thumb my nose at the possibility that Smalley would recognize the plagiarism.

It didn’t take long, perhaps about a half of an hour, for the eight members of the group to start to uncomfortably fidget and rustle. I noticed two of them glaring at me as though I’d committed some social blunder such as burping or farting. A third young woman laid the manuscript, unfinished, face down on the table in front of her and stared intently at me in silent disbelief. A snicker from a young man at the opposite end of the table told me that just about everyone at the table knew what I’d done. Except Rutherford Smalley. Every pair of eyes in the room, except Smalley’s pair, were on me. Smalley’s were eagerly devouring my trap. I grinned broader at the 16 accusing eyes, then turned my gaze to the 98-year-old-who-appeared-to-be-only-56, the one with the Springfield-Illinois-British-accent who was racing through ‘Stop me – if you’ve heard this one” so quickly one could almost imagine smoke rising up from the surface of the pages in front of him.

Just as the industrially designed clock over the door ticked 9:30 am, Rutherford Smalley slammed the last page of my manuscript down on the table in front of him, got up onto his feet, rubbed an affectedly weary hand over his forehead, and asked me in his British accent, “What is this?”

In that instant, the amount of time contained within four clicks of the unforgiving hand of that industrially designed clock, I made a decision. If Smalley recognized this plagiarism, I would come completely clean, owning up to my doubting that he’d ever known Lardner let alone his being able to recognize Lardner’s work. If Smalley didn’t recognize the plagiarism, I’d go to my grave a supremely happy individual.

“What’s what?” I had no choice but to revoice the question since there was nothing decisive in Smalley’s initial query. I wasn’t sure whether he knew what this was or not.

A smile slowly began to bloom through his thin, bloodless lips. “You’re the cheeky one,” he muttered ‘cheeky’, a typically British word for ‘sarcastic’ in his something-like-British accent. “Not quite Lardner, but close. Certainly close enough to show a world of promise! I think you know what that means.” He chuckled and reached down to pick up my manuscript. The remaining members of the round table were dumb struck. “It literally screams ‘Ring’! What you need is the right editor. I’m sure I can find a publisher.”

“No! No! No!” Mr. Snicker-at-the-end-of-the-table shouted. He stood up. “I can’t believe that this is happening! This is so wrong!” He stared at me but only briefly. He swiveled his glowering gaze over to Rutherford Smalley. “You can’t be serious! Don’t you know what this is?”

“Young man,” Smalley spoke to him without looking at him, his eyes still riveted to me. “I know exactly what this is. It’s some of the best contemporary satire that I’ve seen in a good many years.” On a certain day in the year 1927…contemporary?

“You simply cannot be serious!” Mr. Snicker-at-the-end-of-the-table screamed at the ceiling. “This has to be some sort of seriously wrong joke! I can’t believe this – where’s the hidden camera? Where?” He rotated his head around, mocking the movements of someone looking for something hidden in the pattern of the library’s state-of-the-art gray and beige geometric patterned wall paper. “Where? This just can’t be! Certainly you, you,” he hissed, “Rutherford Smalley, world renowned Ring Lardner authority, can see what this is!”

“Again, my good man,” Smalley, this time, turned his head slightly to look askance at Mr. Snicker-at-the-end-of-the-table. “I know exactly what I have here. I’m taking it from your, oh, ‘tone’ that you don’t agree. But, I must remind you, of the two of us, I’m the one with the PhD from an exclusive Ivy League University in 20th Century American Literature. Of the two of us, my dear Sir, I am the one with a Peabody Award. Of the two of us, I am the only one with a Pulitzer.”

Mr. Snicker-at-the-end-of-the-table threw up his arms in exasperation, slumped down into his chair, reached down for his back pack and then stood up. “You’re a feckless boob!” He yelled at Smalley as he stomped out of the Parker Goss Room.

“I thought it was very good.” Ms.-staring-intently-at-me spoke up tentatively. Smalley nodded approvingly at her. “Very much like,” she cleared her throat, “very much like Ring Lardner.” She lowered her gaze down to the manuscript in front of her on the table and kept her gaze there. There was a very low chorus of assent that followed her statement. “Very, very much so.” Here, she raised her right hand to cover her mouth in what appeared to me to be an effort to suppress a giggle.

“You’ll need a publisher.”

“I don’t plan to publish it.” I really didn’t. I didn’t relish the idea of being sued by the current owner of Ring Lardner’s “Stop me – if you’ve heard this one.”

“Trust me, you do.”

“Trust me, I don’t.” I could hear a muffled snicker from one of the paper rustlers.

“You really do. Don’t be a fool.” This comment brought that muffled snicker, as a loud guffaw, out into the open from the same paper rustler. It landed in the air between the ten of us as a massive seizure, a Tourette’s type of explosion, an unholy gut bomb. Smalley glared menacingly in the direction of the guffawer inducing a formidable silence.

“I really don’t.” I wondered if Smalley would ever recognize himself in Osburne: A phony little man in love with the sound of his own embarrassingly loud voice, a hollow show piece whose only specialty was pedantry, unwittingly gets exposed.

Perhaps, if I’d used an outlandish nom de plum such as “Bozo the Clown,” “Xena the Warrior Princess of Fire” maybe, or even the obvious “Ring Lardner,” Rutherford might’ve been able to conjure up some semblance of a clue. Or, perhaps not.