Only in Europe

I’ve been doing some on-line research for work. Nothing  special about that, I do it all the time. But this time is different. I’ve been researching at the site of a prominent monthly magazine in preparation for an in-house training with one of their journalists.

Here’s the background: We’ve noticed the need in our corporate publishing team to jazz up the interviews we do with customers, executives, and industry experts. We want sexy stories. But I feel we’ve gotten lazy and tend to read off the same list of questions (”What was the benefit to your business?”) and then print up the results after some slight editing. An interview might sound easy, but it is one of the hardest stories to write well. You need a rapport and trust with the interview partner – which is hard to do if the interview is conducted by phone, as they often are - because you want to draw interesting bits of detail and anecdotes from your guest. When you write up the interview, you want to begin with a startling question, not something that makes it look as if you haven’t done your homework (”Tell us about your business”). Although we scrub the answers and mix up the order of the questions and answers for best results, we felt that our interviews could be improved. And that was a sign to my boss to do something about it. He decided to hire a professional to train the team in interview techniques and in writing up interviews.

The  journalist who was recommended will join us for a full day’s training in October. He writes for a magazine, my boss assured the team, that is famous for its interviews.

That magazine is Playboy.

Playboy has got to be one of the few magazines that I don’t buy. And if I did, I bet the interviews wouldn’t get my full attention. Someone on Facebook recently referred to magazines as the “lemon sorbet of literature,”  but I think they were referring to the light and pretty home, fashion, and celebrity magazines that a lot of us are suckers for.

And that explains why I’ve been doing my online research at playboy.com. I read their 1980 interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono.  I read the 1976 interview with Elton John. My further research revealed that 98% of their interviews are conducted with male celebrities, that the women they interview are TV starlets and talk show hosts, and that the photos of these ladies might well be placed in the centerfold. But what are my chances of getting an interview with someone who wants to talk about shows, shades, and shoes? My SAP playmates talk about software, services, and sales.

I have to admit Playboy’s hacks are good. Here’s an example of what I mean about beginning an interview with a startling question:

PLAYBOY: Judging by the title of your latest book—Are You There, Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea—we know your liquor of choice. Why is vodka a superior form of alcohol?
CHELSEA HANDLER:Vodka is great because it doesn’t have an odor. If you drink rum or tequila, your breath will have a very distinct alcohol smell. I was looking for something a little more subtle because I don’t like to smell like a prostitute in the morning. Not that I’m worried about offending anybody. I’m usually alone when I wake up. You can’t fit two people into a bathtub. Yeah, that’s right, I’m a class act all the way. Klassy with a capital k.

PLAYBOY: You sound like our kind of girl.
CHELSEA HANDLER: I drink often and I drink frequently…

I hope that our trainer is creative because I don’t believe that we have ever mentioned alcohol or sex or nudity in our corporate publishing channels. And our interviewees are always fully clothed in the photos. But maybe I am being unfair. Maybe the interview techniques are the same. And who knows? Maybe this could be my chance to move into the world of entertainment journalism.

The Antique Road Show in Eastern Ontario

The last time I was in Canada, one of my sisters and I deposited our husbands and children somewhere and went on a shopping tour of Eastern Ontario. We love nothing better than taking off for an afternoon without a map or a planned route, to let our whim take us where it will. On this day, we stopped by the Tay River in the town of Perth for lunch and a coffee, and continued along, stopping at a number of antique shops on the country roads. The most memorable of these was Rideau Valley Antiques. Luckily I had a camera with me to capture the chaotic collections in their yard. The shop is housed in a turn of the century country farmstead. We found the rooms crammed with junk that had been sorted: dinnerware, teapots, soup tureens, and other porcelain in the former living room, sports equipment in the hall, tins in the kitchen, bottle openers hanging from the ceiling.

I went back a second time to take photos and to buy baseball gloves for my boys. The photos are some of my favorites:

In need of a slightly worn garden hose?

...or a rocking horse?

...or perhaps a rusty wagon from the considerable collection at Rideau Ferry Antiques?

They don’t have a website, but I found the shop listed at Antiques in Canada. If you are travelling in the area, be sure to shop by – at least for a chat with the owners, a couple of brothers if I remember correctly.

A Toast to Alice Munro

Martin Levin in the Toronto Globe and Mail writes that “if drinking were not verboten in the office”  he would drink to Alice Munro, the mother superior of the short story and one of Canada’s literary treasures. First of all, no writer in the world deserves more than Alice Munro the recognition that the Man Booker International prize has now awarded her for her body of work. She is the Canadian Chekhov, a master of the short story, and if you have never read any of her stories, go now and do so. She writes of humble, small town people and has the most uncanny insight into human behavior. She is a delight to read. I have loved her books since I read Who Do You Think You Are 30 years ago. After stumbling upon Shakespeare and Co. , the legendary Paris bookstore, last week where I learned that Ms. Munro had been awarded this distinction, I bought a copy of her lastest book for the friends who were with me. Anglophiles though they are, they had never heard of her. I hoped with my purchase not only to correct that oversight but to convert them to lifetime fans of Alice Munro.

But what I thought was most startling about Mr. Levin’s comment was that drinking is not allowed on the job. This is probably true of most offices in North America. Maybe I’ve been away from home for too long, but I work in a place where the office refrigerator is stocked with bubbly and where popping a bottle is de rigeur to celebrate birthdays, anniversaries, or team achievements. The management team even awards a Champagne of the Month to an employee for outstanding efforts. Our cupboards are stocked with notebooks, pens, post-its — and booze. Until cost-cutting measures were introduced last year, beer and soft pretzels were served after every all-hands meeting. 

I’m not at the office today, but I will drink to Alice Munro.

Oh Canada!

So here’s a weird thing. I’m on Facebook and a number of classmates from high school have contacted me after searching for our high school. It seems as if all of them live in Western Canada and live lives that feature water, snow, horses or cattle, and nature. Always nature. Don runs an inn on Vancouver Island and gives lessons in white water kayaking (here is his website - stay in the yurt!); another teaches yoga in Vancouver; yet another has a ranch in Alberta. They lead lives that humble me, that I cannot imagine living myself because I would fail miserably, and because the hugeness of the nature would swallow me.

But the best is Charlie, who runs a ranch in Alberta. He says, “I run a business hauling water to oil rigs as well I run an animal health service for a 20,000 hd feedlot as well as training and buying & selling horses.” Okay, that’s a lot of information, so I had him translate for me. That’s 20,000 head of cattle he is talking about. On 160 acres of land. He goes on to say that it is his wife who hauls most of the water to the oil rigs: “We have a 2 ton dodge truck with a tank on it we only haul the potable water to the trailers that the rig workers live in while they are on the rig site.” I have a lot of respect for Charlie’s operation but could never imagine doing his job, or living  as remotely as he does.

One day not too long ago after a particularly long and hard week at work, when I came home on Friday evening with a head like cement, I called my sister. She and her family live in the town where most of these folks grew up. Her husband answered the phone. He was sitting in the upstairs sunroom in a rocking chair watching the ducks on the pond and enjoying the view of his rather expansive property. It was 2:00 o’clock in the afternoon. He wasn’t sure what he would do for the rest of the day. (”You must at least be drinking a cup of tea!” I croaked). We had a long and lovely chat, which ended with him quoting Voltaire’s Candide: “Everyone has to tend their own garden.” And it seemed to me that if there is one thing these friends I have mentioned here in common, it is that they tend their gardens.

Germany’s Next Top Job

I had the right skill set to land my first job in Germany: I knew how to sew. In two languages. The job was advertised in the weekly national paper Die Zeit. The publishing company Verlag Aenne Burda in Offenburg was looking for a translator. I bought a new black skirt and sweater for the interview, studied my sewing terminology (”yoke” and “darts”) with the help of my PONS German-English dictionary, and took a train to Offenburg for my interview. I worked in a team of young women, one or two each from countries all over Europe: Italy, France, Sweden, and Holland. We were the “Auslandsredaktion” and were housed in an old building, separate from the company headquarters. We didn’t have any contact with the editors of the magazine, which, when I think about it, was crazy. We were an all-female team with a male supervisor who spoke no foreign languages and had no apparent editorial, fashion, or home-sewing skills. I’m just saying, he might have been a good manager despite these shortcomings. It was 1991. The team translated all the editorial copy for company’s portfolio of magazines including the monthly Burda Moden and quarterly and now defunct Burda International. When I worked there Burda Moden featured a homemaker’s mixture of home-sewing, fashion, food, and domestic pleasantries.  The centerpiece of the magazine always has been the built-in sewing patterns. Everything from Bavarian dirndls to First Communion dresses to golf skirts.  Just last month, the magazine was relaunched with a fresh new look and feel, and a new editor-in-chief. I even started buying it again! Check out their website.

It was the perfect job for me at that time.  I wanted to work for a known name. Wanted to enter the workforce quickly. After all, it was only a year after I had settled in Heidelberg and my German was not very good at the time.

Later I would commute from Heidelberg to Offenburg, a train trip of some 90 minutes one way. As soon as my Probezeit was up, I asked what other opportunities there were in the company for someone like myself. Unfortunately there were none, I was told. Fortunately, I was soon pregnant with my first child.

When I tried to get a job at SAP two years later – they too were advertising for native speaking translators – I couldn’t convince them that the skills I had acquired would serve me well as a technical translator. That was my first missed attempt at getting hired at SAP. Another would follow before they finally took me.

Home Economics

I was listening to SWR2 on a Sunday morning recently and was delighted to discover that their subject was one that the media often ignores but which i adore: sewing. It is one outcome of the economic crisis: consumers are tired of same old same old Kleenex clothes that are disposed of after a couple of washings.  In the U.K. sales of sewing machine are up. In Germany homesewing courses are booked solid and at the ethnic markets in Berlin people are snapping up fabrics for 50 cents a meter.

My mother would smile. No, laugh. Even when she travels, she is never without needle and thread. She spent the month of March in Victoria, British Columbia and before she left she told me that she had packed a large board to use as a work surface for her quilting projects (”I just lay it on the luggage rack.”)  My mother was always economical. She made diapers for her many babies from the cotton sacks in which 50 pound bags of flour were delivered. We wore “Pure Canadian Wheat”  on our bottoms. She also made most of our outer clothing as well. Some of the best items that I remember were the birdcage bathing suit that she made for me and the “paper” dresses that she made for my younger sister and me. Not Kleenex dresses, these were made from a brightly printed papery cotton. We didn’t go to pre-school or kindergarten or daycare – we were homeschooled in making dolls clothes.  

Mom sewed on a heavy, but rather dainty black Singer sewing machine that she got when she married in 1945. My sisters and I all learned to sew by hand, and then on this machine. I had it with me at university in Montréal, by which time Mom had bought a new one for herself. I sewed long, narrow, six panel skirts from a Vogue pattern, one in black velvet with pin prick dots, godets flaring at the hem. Or another in fine Italian wool with kick pleats. My favorite fabric store was a tiny boutique called Au Long Metrage in Outremont. But sometimes my girlfriend Robin, another sewing fanatic, and I would enter the bargain basement of Fabricland in search of two-for-one offers on patterns.

My sister and I spent entire summers competing for the use of the Singer, she whipping up Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls, or stuffed toys. She once even cut up a vintage beaver skin coat to make a jacket. We made pinafore tops, wrap skirts, and apron dresses. It was the 70’s. The nearest fabric store was in the next village, 11 miles away. Sometimes we biked the distance just to buy fabric for new skirts or dresses with our babysitting money.

When my sisters and I graduated from university, we each received not a car or a trip to Europe, but a sewing machine. Actually, not quite. I got a loan to travel to China where a teaching job awaited me. I bought my first sewing machine there, a treadle machine. That was all that Beijing’s finest markets had in the late 1980’s. I laid out and cut my Chinese silks on the long tables in the reading room of the university library after hours. And when we came to Germany, I got the machine I have now – a Pfaff brand. It was important to me then that my new machine have a buttonhole function. Until then, I had been making them by hand.

When it came time to learn German, I found easy ways – by reading sewing instructions. But that is a topic for the next post!