Sunday Night

Two trends in the news invite comment:

1. The almost naked volleyball women playing in the Olympics. I don't remember Olympic women playing in bikinis when I was younger. But my skittishness made me feel like a prude. Then I read in today's Boston Globe "Brainiac" column that advertisers decide what to broadcast based on probable audience numbers. And guess who gets the best numbers, women in the Winter Olympics in parkas and ski wear, or women in bikini-like volleyball uniforms? Right, it's the bikinis that get broadcast before many other events.

2. The "Weird Dude of Boston" story. I know the story of Clark Rockefeller, (aka a million other names) is not hard news. But it is fascinating from a human interest perspective. I wonder why I am so hooked into this one probably nutty guy?

a) Journalism angle - The Globe actually shipped someone over to Bergen, Germany to bug the old mother and the brother and the neighbors as to what little Christian was like. I know it had to be done, but that's a lot of money to spend.

b) Who wouldn't want to just disappear and start over some days? I once read a novel about a housewife who did this, but she just ended up collecting another family. I would like to take off about now, since the final paper is due Tuesday. "Paper? What paper?"

c) The wife. How is it that with so much income and book learning, she was such a poor judge of character? They were together for years. He had a sweet smile, though, and he was probably useful as a childcare giver. I've picked some doozies, but nothing near to this woman's mistake.

And so ends the class blog for me. I am lighting a mental candle to its future as an ongoing project. In the meantime, I can't help giving one last note of ol' fart advice to the young future journalists in the class. If you end up working in a university library for 25 years (ahem), it won't be the end of the world. You will find a way to have fun and be of use, if you've made it this far. For a summary of my career path, see the letter I wrote to the Boston University alumni magazine:

Back to the Future

“Boston Rocks,” along with the “Retro” piece (Summer 2007) about the Sanctuary at Marsh Chapel, sold me on reading Bostonia again. I am one of the Silber-era dropout alumni, but now a fresh breeze is blowing, given the new president, the new dean of CAS, and new general manager of WBUR, all fine people. I remember James Montgomery playing me some blues records (a suitcase full of them — did he pack any clothes?) in Myles, where all the musicians and painters lived amidst a fog of Jack Daniels, B.O., Galoises, oil paint, and more. I remember sitting in at Sanctuary as a freshman and fanning out in Brookline to discuss racism with the neighborhood when Martin Luther King, Jr., was shot. I remember meeting Father Jim (now Boston writer James Carroll), eating at the Hedge School, and organizing rallies with Howard Zinn. I even taught a course on Women’s Images in the Media one summer at the “Communiversity” (a free give-a-course, take-a-course radical school), noting that Lassie was the only positive show I could find, and even she was a boy dog.

Something irreversible happened to me at BU. I realized that I did not want to be a concert harpsichord player; I wanted to serve the people and ever since I have lived a rich, unpredictable life. Eventually, I got a master’s in feminist studies in folklore and helped form a local feminist band called the New Harmony Sisterhood Band. So BU did its job, whether it intended to or not. I am a citizen of my world, and although I have turned out to be a generalist, not a specialist, and a liberal arts library worker, not an academic, I realized there that history was in the streets as well as in the books.

Marcia Deihl (DGE’69, CAS’71)Cambridge, Massachusetts

See: http://www.bu/edu/alumni/bostonia/2007/fall/letters/index.html

Stay in touch. Let's comment on each others' ongoing blogs. I know, people always say that, but it will be good for us and I have to know how everyone's "Lois Lane" life turned out.

MD