Tag Archives: personal experience

Me and My…Doppelganger?

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Susan Kelly

Susan KellyA week or so ago, I got a nice email from a woman who told me how much she enjoyed a recent podcast I’d done, and added that she had bought my Boston Strangler book in its Kindle edition, and was enjoying it. Of course I wrote back right away to thank her.

The thing is, I hadn’t done a podcast, although I am scheduled to do one at some future date with the interviewer whose name she mentioned as having done this particular one. I thought this was rather odd—my memory is still sufficiently acute to recall any podcast I’d made recently—but then, after thinking about it a bit, I decided that perhaps some audio I’d done for another broadcast at some point had been licensed by the producer of this particular podcast and interpolated with questions from the interviewer. That would be an odd way to go about doing an interview, but not, I suppose illegal. And what do I care if it results in a book sale? And as long I don’t sound like an idiot, which apparently I didn’t.

Are you with me so far? I have a feeling this is going to be hard to explain.

Okay. So. Just as I was sending off my reply to the first email, a second one, from the same woman, appeared in my inbox. This one was a little different from the first. Still very nice and polite, but different. She told me how much she enjoyed meeting me, and then apologized for the condition of her house when I was a guest in it.

I have never met this woman (she gave her name). I have never been in her house. I have never even been in the small city in which she lives. And of course I don’t know the two relatives to whom she mentioned having introduced me.

Cue the theme from The Twilight Zone. I mean, really. Where’s Rod Serling when you need him to explain things?

Narrator: This is Susan Kelly. A little-known writer living in a small town. Her life follows a routine as clearly marked as a highway. But today, she’ll take an unexpected exit off that well-known road, into…The Twilight Zone.

Doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo…

I wrote back to the woman, saying: “I’m terribly sorry to be so forgetful, but could you refresh my memory about where and when we met?”

She wrote back, asking, “Have I made a mistake?”

Huh?

Actually, I can understand why people—who’ve never seen nor met me—might confuse me with another Susan Kelly who’s a writer. There are about six of them, which is why I don’t bother with my Facebook account, since no one can find it anyway. If I’d known this back in the day, when I first started writing, I’d have changed my pen name to something like Cynthia Ricker Hayes, or Margaret Eleanor Abbott, which would have had the advantage of honoring some of my ancestors (a tougher crew of stand-up broads than you can imagine; I’m honored to inherit their DNA) while distinguishing myself from the other seven hundred gazillion Susan Kellys on the planet.

So I don’t know. If there’s someone prancing around pretending to be me, I can give you a test that will confirm, absolutely, that you have the real Susan. Ask her if she wants a vodka martini, on the rocks, olives, before dinner.

If she says “yes,” it’s me.

Trump: Stumped

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Susan Kelly

Susan KellyI don’t usually write about politics, but the whole Trump phenomenon totally confounds me.

He’s said to appeal to “the base,” a group that regards all the other Republican candidates as progressive liberals. Seriously. Take a look at some of the online forums where “the base” gathers. I’m not going to list them. They’re easy to find. They’re composed of people who claim they refused to vote for Mitt Romney in 2012 because Romney’s a socialist.

Well, okay. Mitt’s a soft-shell Commie. I can dig it. But Trump, on the other hand, is supposed to be a real conservative. I’m not digging it.

Let’s look at his record.

Trump supports—100%, he says—Kelo, the Supreme Court decision that allowed a corporation to take over private property. This isn’t eminent domain; it’s theft. And it’s anathema to most conservatives. And to a lot of liberals, for that matter.

He has donated more money to Democratic politicians and their causes than he has to Republican politicians. And the Democrats better not forget it, either. If they do, he’ll remind them, plus issue marching orders. “Hillary Clinton, I said, ‘Be at my wedding,’ and she came to my wedding,” Trump stated on August 7, 2015. “She had no choice, because I gave to a foundation.”

Back in the day, he loved Hillary. He said so. Now he despises her.

In 2008, he thought Barack Obama was great. “I was his biggest cheerleader,” Trump claims. (Well, of course he was. According to Trump—who has recently acquired the lamentable habit of referring to himself in the third person—Trump and anything Trump-related is the biggest of whatever it may be.) In 2011, he offered to donate one million dollars to charity if someone would produce Obama’s real birth certificate. He said he sent a fleet of private eyes (the legendary Matt Jacob not amongst them, alas) to dig up the truth. In July of this year, Anderson Cooper raised the birth certificate issue. “I really don’t want to get into it,” Trump replied. Gee, I wonder why not?

He’s been all over the place on guns, abortion, and universal health care. His supporters say he’s “evolved.” They don’t cut the same slack for any other candidate who’s failed to toe the line without any deviation whatsoever, which is why, I assume, they decided that former candidate for the Republican nomination Scott Walker is a flaming liberal. Same for Marco Rubio. And Rick Perry. And Carly Fiorina. And John Kasich. The jury’s out on Ben Carson, because he once said something to the effect that he’d prefer not to see Uzis in the hands of homicidal lunatics.

At one point, Trump himself supported a ban on automatic weapons—but that was before he evolved, I guess.

So what’s Trump’s appeal to the people to whom he appeals?

Is it his braggadocio? “I’m really, really smart,” he’s said on numerous occasions, although probably not as often as he’s said “I’m really, really rich.” He’s told us that he’s “slept with the top women in the world,” though “the top women in the world,” whoever they are, seem to have unanimously declined to verify the claim. He’s informed us that his current wife Melania looks incredibly hot in a “very small thong.” (Amusing factoid: If Trump becomes president, his wife will be the second foreign-born first lady and the first to pose nude for a men’s magazine.)

The next time he tells us about whatever he has that’s the biggest, I hope it’s not what I’m afraid it will be.

Is it his general oafishness? He’s referred to various women—notably Rosie O’Donnell and Arianna Huffington–as slobs, dogs, and pigs. When Megyn Kelly of Fox asked him if he thought this practice might damage him with women voters, he responded by Tweeting that Kelly was a bimbo. Which would appear to prove Kelly’s point, but, hey…

Is it that he claims not to care what the press says about him? As he told Esquire magazine in 1991, “You know, it doesn’t really matter what [the media] write as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass.”

Or does it just come down to the fact that he said he’d build a 1575-mile-long wall along the southern border and make Mexico pay for it? If you believe that, you’ll believe anything.

Even about whatever’s biggest.

Random Hypotheticals about Books

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Susan Kelly

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve thought that the silliest hypothetical question ever posed was, or is: If you were only permitted to take one book with you to a desert island, what would that book be?

Seriously, dude? One book?

What happens when you finish reading it? Or re-reading it? What do you do then? Write your own sequel?

I would have to beg the question, and respond by saying that I’d want to take with me every good book I’d never read. Which would, of course, require a freighter to transport, or at least a cargo plane.

Let me pause here so we can all remember one of the all-time great Twilight Zone episodes, in which Burgess Meredith, an avid reader, survives some unspecified mega-disaster that apparently wipes out the rest of humanity but leaves the local library intact. Meredith is ecstatic at the thought of spending the rest of his life in solitude,immersed in his beloved books.

And then he breaks his glasses.

Trust me, there is no writer on the planet who doesn’t rank this as one of her or his Top Ten Fave TZ episodes.

Another concept I’ve never quite grasped is that of “summer reading.” Why would you want to read a book in the summer that you wouldn’t want to read in the winter? Or the fall? Or the spring? Are novels seasonal?

Is this like only wearing white shoes between Memorial Day and Labor Day?

The same holds true of so-called “airplane reading.” Are there books you can only read on a Delta flight from Boston to Atlanta? A British Airways flight from New York to London? And, conversely, are there books you can read only at home, or at least on the ground?

“Hey, Alice, remind me to stick the newest Tom Clancy in my carry-on bag. Airport security will confiscate my copy of ‘The Critique of Pure Reason.'”

It just occurred to me that there may be people who read only on airplanes. In the summer.

Hypothetically speaking.

Great Inventions of Our Time

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Susan Kelly

Susan KellyActually, this column is going to be—mostly–about great unheralded, or at least underappreciated, inventions of our time. Do I need to talk about antibiotics, which have saved countless millions of lives? (Unfortunately, about 10% of the population of the planet is allergic to them.) Or Novocain and its successors, which have made trips to the dentist, if not a joyride, far less unpleasant? Or the Salk vaccine? The internal combustion engine? (Yes, it pollutes, but seriously—in the event that it’s necessary, do you want to be conveyed to the hospital via horse-drawn buggy?) Civil rights? Universal education? Computers? Telephones? Refrigeration, which has also saved countless millions of lives? Air conditioning? Vodka martinis? Mel Brooks’s movies?

No. I don’t need to talk about those things.

What I want to write about are those little things that make life so much easier, that we take for granted (our grandparents wouldn’t) and never acknowledge. The following list is not in any order of importance.

  1. Suitcases with wheels. Whatever genius invented rolling baggage deserves the Nobel Prize for so doing. I’m not sure which Nobel Prize. In my case, the Peace Prize, since it prevents me (and zillions of other people) from having meltdowns in airports as a result of having to carry all that stuff.
  2. Salad spinners. How did we prepare salads before these were invented? Well, we did, but it was considerably more work than necessary. I’m old enough to recall the time when you had to use a roll of paper towels to dry the lettuce you just washed. Or soggy-up a bunch of clean dish towels doing the same thing.
  3. Stamps that you don’t have to lick before you stick them on an envelope.
  4. Carpet-sweepers. These have been around a long time, but I really like them better than vacuum cleaners. They don’t jack up my electric bill and I don’t have to buy bags and change them.
  5. Rolled oat cereals. (These are commonly known as Ch—rios, but I don’t want to get into potential trademark violation. I wasn’t allowed by my editor to use the word Sty—f-am in a novel to denote a disposable coffee cup, so I’m careful about these things.) No, not for the fact that rolled oat cereals are apparently a heart-healthy breakfast food, but because they endlessly entertain babies. As soon as the kid’s able to maintain an upright position, buckle your infant into a high chair, sprinkle the pristine-clean high chair tray with you-know-whats, and the child will be absorbed for hours trying to pick up the things and insert them in his or her mouth while you occupy yourself with other matters. (Of course you don’t leave the kid unattended. I suppose I need to say that, just as blow-driers now come with instructions NOT to use them while one is taking a shower.) Babies seem to be able to pick up only one Ch—rio at a time, which is why I say they provide hours of entertainment for her or him. Full disclosure: I don’t actually like to eat this cereal, and never did.
  6. Plastic ice cube trays that you twist to release the contents. When I was a kid, ice cube trays were metal, with levers that you yanked back in order to relieve the cubes from their confinement. But you had to be Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime to do this successfully.

Here are some modern inventions I could do without:

  1. Reality television
  2. Ice tea or lemonade that purports to be kiwi-strawberry-flavored. This is not a beverage. It is what you pour into the anti-freeze compartment of your car.
  3. Boy bands
  4. Microwave pizza. This is not food. It is mattress stuffing compressed into a circular shape and topped with ketchup and a sprinkle of cheese product.
  5. Any carbon-based alleged life form calling itself Kim Kardashian

Neither of my lists is by any means comprehensive. In fact, as soon as I send this column to Zach, I’ll probably think of a dozen other unheralded but vital inventions that I love. And even more inventions that I hate. That being the case, I invite you to list your own loved and hated inventions. It’s still summer: This is the silly season, as they say in the news biz. So go for it.

I’ll be back later in September with some, ahem, more serious commentary. Promise.

But in the interim, tell us what you love. And hate.

House Hunters, Part Deux

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Susan Kelly

Susan Kelly When I wrote about the show House Hunters a month or so ago, I didn’t mention that I myself was, at that point, a house hunter. Or, rather a condo-hunter. Anyway, after about six months’ of searching, I found one, made an offer on it, had the offer accepted, and sealed the deal on July 22. I am now a woman of property, having not been one since 1999. It feels good. Not because I want to be a real estate magnate, but so I can have my own place that I can make my own. That it’s a condo means that I don’t have to shovel my own snow.

So…let me tell you about my condo and what it doesn’t have in terms of those things the show House Hunters deems essential in terms of civilized living:

  • A “spa tub” in the “master suite.”
  • Double sinks in the bathroom of the “master suite.”
  • Anything resembling a “master suite.”
  • Granite counter tops in the kitchen.
  • A “desirable open floor plan.”

I must confess that the condo does have a walk-in closet, but not in the non-existent “master suite.” It’s situated in an alcove off a hall that leads to the entrance to the kitchen on the east and the living room on the south. And that forms yet another alcove.

The condo is in fact lousy with alcoves, which is one reason I decided to buy it, literally twenty seconds after I walked into it. It also has eleven-foot ceilings, hardwood floors, working light fixtures from 1910 (they’re up to code), and big windows. The building dates from 1900, and was constructed originally to house the executive offices of a woolen mill. It was converted to apartments sometime in the 1930s (I think), and then into condos sometime in the 1980s. Every antique feature that could be preserved or restored has been. The building foyer looks like that of the Palais Garnier, and was probably modeled after it. (Look up Palais Garnier on Google images. The resemblance is astonishing. Really. I am not exaggerating.) There’s a mail chute on each floor that actually works, and each apartment/unit door has a functioning transom. When was the last time you saw a functioning transom? Don’t tell me. It was Humphrey Bogart’s office in The Maltese Falcon. And the Casablanca fan hanging from the living room ceiling is straight out of….Casablanca. It’s all so noir I could just scream. Put that together with the Palais Garnier foyer and…we’ll always have Paris.

What could be better?

I’ll tell you what’s better. The kitchen is small. Really small. It’s perfectly equipped, with much better cabinet space than I’ve had in larger kitchens. But it’s only big enough for me. This is the opposite of the House Hunters ideal, of course, which mandates that you can’t possibly prepare a meal in a kitchen that’s not big enough to hold all your family and friends milling around and hanging over your shoulder while you’re trying to broil their lamb chops and bake their potatoes. Or toss the salad. In this galley, the salad might get tossed on you.

So…guests be warned. There is no room for you in my new kitchen. You’ll just have to sit in the living room drinking your vodka martinis, gin martinis, Scotch on the rocks, bourbon and soda, wine, whatever floats your boat, and chomping on hors d’oeuvres while I gracefully excuse myself, waft to the oven, and put the finishing touches on dinner. You can’t follow me there.

I’m thrilled.