You Call That a Cha Cha? Plus, Waiter! Black Coffee For Maddox and Shiloh Please

We are entering the season of gooey Television Goodness! That means the few brain cells I have left that I didn't destroy in my twenties (you don't wanna know, trust me) are checking out for a few weeks.

Dancing With the Stars is my absolute fave closely followed by America's Next Top Model (Tyra mail!) and Gordon Ramsay's Restaurant Wars. The girls are better than the boys this time on DWTS though I hate, hate, hate the Cheetah Girl. Jane Seymour with her mismatched eyes is extremely sexy and a year older than me, role model material. Mark Cuban isn't bad for a billionaire with a bionic hip but I'm frightened for Wayne Newton – I mean, what happens to his face when sunlight touches it?

ANTM this season is enlivened by the presence of a real live Asperger's girl. I'm looking forward to the Q&A's. ("Does it hurt when you rip off the duck tape, Miss Jaye?")

And Gordon Ramsay! Be still my beating heart.
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What's the difference between a novel and a short story?

Oh, about a hundred thousand words or so.

But also thematically – a novel is the descriptive arc of a particular event whereas a short story is about an individual in crisis, at the tipping point between emotional phase states.

So, for the Stegner submission I am messing around with storylines about a woman who becomes obsessed with her husband's X-wife's blog and a twenty year old guy, half white, half Korean, and unable to come to terms with his mixed ethnic heritage.

The characters are fully formed in my mind but I'm not yet sure what their tipping points are.
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Also I'm not quite as out of shape as I thought I was. As I was chugging along the bike path yesterday, a fellow cyclist stopped me. "How can you ride that thing? The front wheel's so bent!"

And indeed it was.

And the fact that I hadn't noticed the front wheel was bent, but had noticed that this cyclist had a strong Elizabeth, New Jersey accent, a gap between his front teeth and melancholy eyes says something very important about me although I'm not exactly sure what.
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Remember? I'm making all this shit up!

So. After Sty left People Online, I began reporting to two bosses, Charlotte Tyrell, the managing editor, and Hala, who was officially a VP of New Media on the Time Inc payroll. I suppose she was the equivalent of the publisher.

Hala conscripted me to any number of projects but once I was there gave me my own head. More or less.

Charlotte, who edited my copy, did not.

This meant I got to spend several hours on the phone every day with Charlotte discussing comma placement and the use of the passive voice.

Charlotte had come over from the magazine with Maria where they'd often bylined together. People Magazine has this truly bizarre system whereby reportage and writing are two entirely separate functions so I figured one of them had done all the interviewing while the other got all the glory. In any S&M relationship viewed from outside, it's impossible to determine who's the top and who's the bottom. But I had my suspicions here.

Whichever, Charlotte had been left a raging mass of professional insecurities and seething resentment. Maria often had this effect on other women. She got along very well with other women so long as those other women understood their mission was to protect and serve. And, of course, because Maria was just so beautiful and witty and charming, you wanted to do just that! Or at least I did.

But it had taken its toll on Charlotte.

Invariably my phone conversations with Charlotte grew more personal. Now instead of agonizing over whether the descriptive phrase tucked between the object and the subject changes the form of the verb, we discussed her irritation with Hala, her dislike of new hire Lianne Farbstein, her resentment with Brandon Smith (not his real name), a bright and personable young writer. (A sentence like that one would have been good for at least twenty minutes of Charlotte sighing, clicking her retractable ballpoint tip against the mouthpiece of her phone: "Patrizia, I just don't know about those commas. After proper names, maybe semi-colons? Do you have a copy of the AP Manual of Style handy?")

From there it was just a short hop to her feckless husband, their troubled marriage, the wretchedly behaved children that union had produced. The children never slept! They ran around all day screaming like savages and the only thing that would shut up the youngest was when she popped out her boob –

"Uh, Charlotte," I interrupted. "Vergil's like – what? Four years old now? Isn't that a little old to be breastfeeding?"

"Vergil's five," Charlotte snapped. "And there's nothing wrong with breastfeeding, it's a beautiful natural thing, we both get a lot out of it –"

I didn't really want to pursue what Charlotte got out of it, especially after she confided in me that she and Norm – the feckless husband – hadn't had sex in over seven years, that the way she'd managed to conceive Vergil was by marching over to the sperm bank and making a withdrawal –

"You didn't ask Norm?" I shrieked.

"Of course not," said Charlotte. "He would have said no. He didn't want another kid."

Even the experts at Ladies Home Journal couldn't have saved this marriage. When the family came to visit me later that summer, Charlotte and the boys came alone.

They really were horrible little monsters.

One morning Charlotte and I and our respective sons went out for breakfast.

"Would you like coffee to start with?" smiled our waitress.

"Yes,please," said Charlotte. "I'll have three cups."

"Charlotte, you don't have to order three cups. The service is good here, they bring you refills," I said.

"Oh, it's not all for me. It's for the boys too."

"Charlotte. You let them drink coffee?"

"It's an old Scandinavian custom."

"Charlotte. You're not Scandinavian. You're Irish. Norm is Irish."

"Well, I don't let them have milk or sugar in it," she said.

This was when I finally became hip to the fact that Charlotte was suffering from a bizarre form of Munchausen's By Proxy.

But, alas! that insight would never be put to practical use because shortly after the California visit, Charlotte Tyrell was ousted from her job as managing editor. At this point I can no longer remember why. I'd been through enough palace coups though to understand that reasons were irrelevant. It was the whole operation. It just wasn't working.

Part of the operation was working, though. The interactive part. My part. My hits and page views kept going up, up, up.

Brandon Smith was next up to be yoked next to Hala behind the reigns of power.

The fifth managing editor in less than a year.