LET'S TALK

LET'S TALK: Columnist hits 30 year career milestone, still goin'

What a difference 30 years makes.

Especially when the main difference is that you're trying not to get depressed when you realize that 30 years ago, you were old enough to be not only an adult of working and drinking age, but pushing 30.

That would be my case. It has been three decades to the month that I started writing Let's Talk.

For those who don't know the story, I took it over from a former editor who left the company. It was a dream come true for a chick who'd written a high school newspaper column and had begun to dream about writing a "real" one.

The former editor had taken Let's Talk in a feminist direction. I took it in, well, a bunch of directions, rightly, wrongly or in-betweenly, with big glimpses into the life of the Talkmistress. Among the subjects: Dating. First marriage. Divorce. Returning to the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, which I'd ghosted for 14 years, to get that journalism degree. Dating again, and continuing to be pretty bad at it. Dealing with naive life expectations versus reality and getting rid of a Cinderella mindset. Temporary bouts of homeownership, married and single. My attempts to be that woman my mother raised me to be, and the oft-comically disastrous results.

Then there were the celebrity obituaries, which I abandoned for the most part as deaths of the famous and infamous seem to come more and more frequently and as I'd always manage to hack somebody off, somehow. There was the head-scratching over the whole Kardashian phenomenon. There was the crank-out of commentaries on the stuff that pops up in the "strange news" category. There were the riffs on politics and elections. There was the reminiscing on old-folks sayings I'd grown up with, from "You don't have sense enough to pour you-know-what out of a boot!" to "He's got enough money to burn a wet mule."

Last but not least, there have been, and are, commentaries on the ins and outs of aging ... gracefully and disgracefully. Such as a rewrite of the "Please, God! I'm Only 17!" essay that appeared from time to time in the Dear Abby column, renamed "Please, God! I'm only 35!" Such as buying a late-model car roughly a decade after buying the previous car and barely figuring out how to operate the contraption. Becoming farsighted in addition to being nearsighted, and navigating reading glasses, bifocals and monovision. Then there were my 2002 contributions to that email forward titled "Hymns for the Over-50 Crowd, which (OK, indulge me a bit) bear repeating here:

"Jesus, Keep Me Near Blue Cross"

"Pass Me Not, O Elevator"

"Oh, for a Thousand Tongues ... to Tell Me How Young I Look"

"Nearer, My God, to AARP"

"Lead on, O King Eternal ... I Can't Find My Glasses"

"Lord I Want to Be Mo' Younger (In-a My Heart)"

"Standin' in the Need of Hair"

"I Couldn't Hear Nobody Pray ... My Hearing Aid Needed a Battery"

"Go Down, Moses ... To the Sto' and Get Me Some Geritol"

Let's Talk has has not landed me a ton of industry kudos ... Well, I have precisely two, and one of those was from the turn of the millennium. Fame and syndication didn't come as it did with Dave Barry or the late Erma Bombeck or Lewis Grizzard. (Granted, I only made one attempt to go syndicated, sometime in the '90s. I won't say that attempt bombed. Let's just say it was gonged, as in The Gong Show.)

I've also had my share of brickbats from nonfans -- or, ahem, fans who got angry because I left Veterans Day out of a mention of November holidays that time -- but it seems that any time those come, they're almost immediately preceded by a note or a word from a loyal reader who lets me know that "your column really touched me/encouraged me/brightened my day/made me laugh out loud." Such nuggets also seem to come whenever I've been at my most weary and discouraged, wishing I'd been born left-brained.

It's those readers who let me know that I don't need to please everybody, that I don't need no stinkin' syndication and that they are award and reward enough.

So the plan is to continue to sound off on various and sundry things from Gilligan to GaGa, from Hoverounds to hair loss.

Thaaaanks for the email:

[email protected]

Style on 09/22/2019

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