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| From | Stewart Mason <flamingo@theworld.com> |
| Subject | Re: Cobain + 10 |
| Date | Tue, 06 Apr 2004 03:07:15 -0400 |
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At 11:13 PM 4/5/2004 -0700, bryan wrote:
>So, I get home, and sure enough, it's on the 5pm or 6pm
>news (forget which), and I'm featured prominently in the
>interview, looking like a long-haired dork, saying something
>stupid about depression and whatever. Under my name
>it said "Nirvana fan." I thought, well at least that's that --
>it's over. But no....the story was, of course, picked up by
>the national ABC news, with Peter Jennings, and once
>again, my mug is right there on the national news saying
>whatever it is that I said to that local L.A. reporter...
You think that's bad? Last summer, my buddy Jonathan calls me and asks if
I want to go people-watching at the opening of the new Krispy Kreme in
Medford. (Sidebar: this was the first KK in Massachusetts, better known as
the home of Dunkin Donuts, which has an outlet on damn near every other
block, and although Krispy Kreme are masters at creating media frenzies
around their new store openings anyway, they were REALLY pulling out all
the stops for this, and there had been stories in the papers and on TV for
a solid frickin' month beforehand.) So I say sure, because mass hysteria
always interests me, and I meet up with him and our friend Lisa there at
the Krispy Kreme at about 10:30 a.m. We're watching the madhouse -- there
are mounted police directing traffic, there was about a five-acre field
next door that had been transformed into a massive overflow parking lot for
those who unlike me hadn't been smart and taken the T, and, I shit you not,
a local junior high gymnastics team was there performing tumbling routines
in the parking lot and singing Krispy Kreme jingles to the tune of "The
Safety Dance" -- and then we join the line and buy ourselves a mixed dozen
each and some coffees. There happened to be an open table as we were
leaving the line, so we stopped there to have our coffees before we went
home, and within about 45 seconds, a camera crew approached us and asked if
we could be interviewed. I demurred, since it's actually Jonathan who's
the massive KK head amongst the three of us (I swear, I think he only
married a woman from Virginia so that they could go to Richmond over the
holidays and he could load up on Krispy Kremes), but Lisa has to go and say
something like "Well, you're the one who's a professional food writer,
you'll have the most articulate things to say." So I say something about
how I think it's really clever that rather than do traditional advertising,
Krispy Kreme just manipulates the local media into covering their openings
like they're an actual news event -- yeah, that part didn't air -- and then
I say something about how I think Krispy Kreme has Dunkin Donuts beat
because DD's doughnuts have sucked for years and people only ever go there
for the coffee anymore -- that part didn't air either -- and then that I
thought in the long run, Krispy Kreme was going to be a novelty in New
England, because they focus almost entirely on southern-style yeast
doughnuts, which are very light and sweet and insubstantial, when the local
taste is *very* strongly biased for barely sweet, unglazed cake doughnuts.
That's the part that aired, and frankly, I thought it was a fairly cogent,
reasoned statement.
But as I'm saying this to the camera, I suddenly realize...I had come out
on a whim just because Jonathan had called on a morning when I didn't have
any pressing deadlines, and I had left the house pretty much as soon as I
hung up the phone. I hadn't had my morning shower, so my hair was dirty,
AND I was well overdue for a haircut. I was wearing a Hawaiian shirt and
holey jeans and a baseball cap bearing the logo of Albuquerque's
minor-league team, the Isotopes. Plus, I had like a four-day growth of
beard because I just can't be arsed to shave half the time. Basically, I'm
sitting there looking like Michael Moore's less-outraged kid brother. AND,
Jonathan and Lisa are on the other side of the table, and they're out of
frame. So, on this little table directly in front of me, I have my cup of
coffee and not one, not two, not three, but FOUR ONE-DOZEN BOXES OF
DOUGHNUTS stacked up in front of me. (Jonathan, who has two teenage kids,
had wisely bought an extra dozen original glazed to go along with his mixed
dozen to make sure he at least got a couple before they were gone.) So
basically, I look like this crazed sugar junkie who's trying to slip into a
diabetic coma before sundown. And on the local news that night, as a final
insult, the caption doesn't say anything like "Stewart Mason, food writer."
(See, it's his JOB that he's there...oh, and those doughnuts aren't all
for him, either!) It says "Stewart Mason, doughnut aficionado." I think
they were still mad about the crack about how they're doing Krispy Kreme's
job for them.
Given a choice, I would totally have rather been identified as a Nirvana fan.
As to that, I had been holed up in the library working on a paper for most
of the day, and I only heard about Kurt's suicide when I had Headline News
on in my apartment later that night. Although I was and remain a rather
halfhearted Nirvana fan at best, I was surprisingly upset by the news. I
remember I called my best friend's house and ended up talking with her
boyfriend (whom I at the time didn't much like), and we actually bonded
slightly over that, because he was a bigger Nirvana fan than I was by some
distance and he was pretty broken up. I also remember that I didn't call
my girlfriend, because she was both quite a bit older than me and pretty
much exclusively a jazz fan and I had correctly surmised that her response
-- which she delivered when I saw her the next day -- would be along the
lines of "Wasn't he that little white boy who was always complaining?"
S
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