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I love our daily 1 p.m. news meeting to discuss what we're going to put in the next day's paper. We meet at the end of a long day for those who start at 4 a.m. Between battle fatigue and looney stories on our news budgets, we get so far off track sometimes that I'm amazed we get out a newspaper. Sometimes the news
gets out of handOur meeting Wednesday ended when one editor demanded to know, "How the !&@# did we get from Elian Gonzalez to David Bowie?"
As the others shrugged and left, I tried to retrace how I'd lost control of the meeting. It went something like this:
We started by discussing how to cover young Elian's return to Cuba. We got his departure from Washington in that day's paper, but his plane left too late to get him landing in Havana. We had hoped to finally rid ourselves of the whole bloody story in one day.
From there it turned into an object lesson on the gender gap.
A woman editor said it would have been nice to replace the huge A-1 picture of a guy with a parachute jumping off of a giant rock formation in Switzerland with a photo of Elian arriving home. I liked the rock picture.
"Why?" she asked. "It's a boring shot of some idiot doing something stupid. A woman would never do anything so dumb."
"Most men wouldn't do something so dumb either," I said. "But every man thinks he SHOULD be strapping on a parachute and jumping off of big rocks. We find pictures like these vicariously fascinating."
She segued into a discussion of why so few women are contestants on "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" Surprisingly, she didn't claim discrimination.
"Women don't go on the show because they don't want to be embarrassed on national TV," she said. "It's humiliating if you miss the $200 question. Men have no shame."
The "men are fools" theme continued as we moved into a discussion of Tricia Yearwood's concert at Richardson Field. I was accused of being more interested in her blond locks than her melodies, which was slanderous.
"It's just as well," said a woman editor, noting that Yearwood is romantically involved with another country music star. "You wouldn't have a chance."
That got me onto one of my favorite themes: that women are incapable of linear thought because they clutter their brains with encyclopedic information about the romances of every celebrity on the planet.
I wrote once about Julia Roberts being married to the guy from "Law and Order." The nice lady who edits this column sent me an indignant note: "Julia Roberts isn't married to Benjamin Bratt. They're only shacking up."
The men observed in unison that Julia Roberts used to be married to Lyle Lovett, which brought cries from the women that men, too, are obsessed by celebrity romances. "It's the exception that proves the rule," I said. "It's only when someone who looks like Lyle Lovett marries someone who looks like Julia Roberts that men take notice. It gives us hope."
That got us into every beauty and the beast pairing we could name, which ended with David Bowie and Iman and a spat over which was the beauty and which was the beast.
So that's how we got from Elian to David Bowie. Thank goodness our Assistant Managing Editor Frank Bridgewater returned fresh from vacation the next day and put out a respectable newspaper despite the attention deficit of his colleagues.
David Shapiro is managing editor of the Star-Bulletin.
He can be reached by e-mail at editor@starbulletin.com.
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