And Now Ladies And Gentlemen
© James C. Hess
Do with the following what you will, for whatever it may be worth: When I was in college I considered, for a brief time, becoming a journalism major, but sanity, logic, and reason reasserted themselves, and I majored in English instead.
Being an English major opens the door to a great many possibilities: One can eventually teach while writing The Great American Novel or Screenplay; one can fashionably starve while suffering for their would-be Art; one can be realistic and become a writer from the outset and eventually take up teaching to pay the bills; one can chuck it all upon graduation and become something else: The seller of painful footwear for the average but perverse woman, for example.
I decided, once I declared my major--English--that I would not pursue a career in teaching, because to do so would only assure my failure as a writer. But I also decided that should I lack the proper talent, skill, and ability to be a writer I needed a career to fall back on. That career, interestingly enough, manifested itself in the form of an editor: While I was still an undergraduate I found work editing the unpublished writings of would-be writers, many of whom were, in fact, journalism majors.
Because I demonstrated a knack for this work I quickly found my services in demand, and often found myself swamped with manuscripts in desperate need of a sound editing. On any given day several manuscripts, in various stages of deconstruction, could be found staged around my home office. One day a visitor to my office, finding my office hot and uncomfortable, opened the only window in the room, causing a gust to enter, resulting in the work I was dealing with being mixed.
It could go without saying: Much time was lost trying to sort all these manuscripts and reordering them accordingly. Eventually several of them were considered lost causes and simply tossed (much to the relief of their respective creators, I suspect). As they waited in the recycling bin I could not help but notice how several seemed to actually work together, by way of a superficial reading. When I suggested to their creators that a collective effort be attempted I was quickly silenced: Writers, generally speaking, may be socialists, but they do not work well together, and this suggestion was beyond idiotic.
More than a few years have passed since that particular incident but the idea resulting remains tempting and I am pleased someone has apparently acted on it, producing a film entitled "And Now Ladies And Gentlemen".
