"Mischief in the Mansion"
"Admit it. No matter how interested you are in serious news, every so often you glance at a gossip column, scanning its staccato list of items and bold- faced names to see if there is anything of interest . . . Yet, is American society becoming too obsessed with gossip, too absorbed with the private lives of public people? . . . For Naushad Mehta, interviewing columnist Liz Smith and her brethren for this week's cover stories was an amusing change of pace . . . Though Mehta kept asking about the troublesome issues raised by our national infatuation with the trivial, her subjects kept changing the topic to . . . you guessed it. Says Mehta: "They usually prefaced their gossip with the words 'Don't quote me on this, but' ... "
"Mary Cronin probed the public relations trade . . . 'Flacks guiding clients up the social ladder,' she says, 'protect them as if they were atomic secrets' . . . In Washington, Michael Riley rang up Diana McLellan, the doyen of D.C. gossips . . . 'She breathlessly picked up the receiver and talked without stopping. And she was doing her nails, causing her to lose her train of thought several times' . . . In Los Angeles, Jeanne McDowell concluded that gossip levels there approach the toxic because so many people have car phones . . . Stuck in traffic? Call a friend and talk about Cher."
"As the motto embroidered on a pillow in Alice Roosevelt Longworth's sitting room said, 'If you can't say anything good about someone, sit right here by me' . . ."
Talk about Cher? What era is this? It's 1990 and gossip (Gossip: Pssst...Did You Hear About?) was the cover subject of a Time Magazine cover .
In the past weeks, politicians have found themselves the subjects of new books: Game Change (about the 2008 campaign participants), The Politician (about former senator John Edwards), and, now, Staying True, Jenny Sanford's story about her life with her husband and governor of South Carolina, Mark Sanford. Ironically, the Sanford sons had penned a book about the governor's mansion, Mischief in the Mansion, which term could be applied to a number of these situations, we think.
It's going to be a long weekend ahead, especially that Super Bowl Sunday taking up the oxygen, so pull up a chair, put down that Twitter, erase that impulsive Facebook addition, and after a trip to the bookstores, library or a Kindle version, read classic (and mostly true) tales of betrayal, lust, infidelity, hurt, and strength.
Hmmmm ... perhaps the above could be said of the Super Bowl warrior event and their Field of Dreams (based on W.P. Kinsella's magic realist novel, Shoeless Joe).