In 1993, struggling to find something to write about, I decided that since I was so interested in women I’d write about them and their daily work in jobs that interested me. The resulting profiles are in the posts that follow. I showed them to several people in publishing, thinking I might have the start of a book that would appeal to parents looking for something vocational to inspire their daughters. The publishing people said, “Gee, interesting. I wonder who’d publish it.”
I thank the women who permitted me to interview them: a victim's advocate, a foreign correspondent, a high school English teacher, a performing arts administrator, and a movie translator. I gave each woman a copy of her profile. One said she and her colleagues didn't recognize themselves. Another said she didn't have the color (orange) clothes I described. I hope that if any reads her profile now, she is glad to have an image, however imperfect, from her past.
Had the book been published, I planned to put as epigraph what the dead Mrs. Gibbs says to the dead Emily, who wants to revisit her life, in the third act of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town: "Choose the least important day in your life. It will be important enough."
Showing posts with label women professionals. Show all posts
Showing posts with label women professionals. Show all posts
Victims' Advocate
The staff in the Austin Police Department's Victims Services joke a lot when there are no crime victims around. Mary Lieberman, a victims' advocate, asks her visitor if he wants a cup of coffee, and one of her co-workers, Jerry Usher, who arrived before Mary, says, "Hey, I've been asking for coffee for half an hour."
"Well, you can get your own," Mary says. "Bill's writing a book. On interesting work women do. Sorry, Jerry."
Mary, 41, a short, wiry, dark-haired woman, says there won't be much going on today. She'll be at her desk in her cubicle office doing follow-up calls to some of the families she's tracking.
The first family's son, 19, was just killed during a card game. Mary gets the father on the phone. She asks how they are doing. The father's answer takes several minutes.
"People say the most awful things," Mary tells him. "They don't mean to. They are so horrified by the pain you and Kathy are going through that they don't want to be near it. They sympathize, but they're scared."
The husband talks about Kathy, his wife.
"Yeah," Mary says. "That happens. That's normal. Whatever people do when something like this happens is pretty normal, because this itself isn't normal. One reason I'm calling is that you're going through legitimate grief also. You say that Kathy's taking it out on you -- and that's O.K. But I wonder who's going to take care of you?"
As she talks, Mary makes notes.
"Losing a life over a game of cards -- just senseless," she agrees.
The father talks, again at length.
"Sounds like he had a lot of charm," Mary says. "And the cockiness of youth. Sounds like he was . . . very bull-headed."
She leans to the left and bends her legs beside her on her chair.
"The knife was legal," she says. "Less than six inches in the blade. . . . It really was an outrage; you're so right."
The killer got out on bail without spending a night in jail. He is now in Dallas.
"The anger you and Kathy feel can be put to good use. You know about the support groups, For the Love of Christie and Parents of Murdered Children. They're both very good. There's also P-A-V-C, People Against Violent Crime, and they can help you and us in the fight for justice. Can I give you their number? . . . 458-2501."
The father talks.
"Justice isn't vengeance: justice is justice," Mary says. "Even if you do get satisfaction from the justice system, you're going to have to fight for it. PAVC can help."
The father talks. Mary draws intersecting boxes on a piece of scrap paper.
"When that happens, we just flood the parole board with letters. This didn't mean much until Colleen Reed's murder, but it counts heavy now."
Colleen Reed was a young woman abducted from an Austin carwash on December 29, 1991. For two months her fate wasn't known, and Central Texas TV stations played re-enactments of her abduction, and hundreds of posters with a happy picture of her sought news of her whereabouts. In March 1992, a drifter named Alva Hank Worley came forward and said that he had helped abduct Colleen Reed and been with her shortly before she was killed. Her killer, he said, was Kenneth McDuff, a paroled death row inmate convicted of killing three teenagers in 1969. Reed's body has never been found but is assumed to be buried, as was the body of a woman McDuff killed in January 1992, in a ditch alongside some rural Texas road.
"You and Kathy and Bobby's brother are going to have to make Bobby real to the judge and jury," Mary says. "I'm ready to help you and the prosecutors any way I can."
The father talks.
"That's such a guy thing," Mary says. "I don't care if you're 6'4" and weigh 250 pounds. I want you to cut out thinking you can handle this by yourself. I want you to call me. I've got lots of Kleenex and big shoulders."
The conversation over, Mary turns to her visitor. "His wife is so angry he can't dump his feelings on her, so he dumps them on me. Which is great -- just what we're here for."
Mary got into her peculiar line of work, she now realizes, because she was raped 15 years ago. "The officers who comforted me, well, I hope they've been promoted right to the top. Because they made me feel like a person again, you know, not a thing that had been trashed.
"I couldn't have done this job then. I was too hurt and scared. Later, when I was doing office work -- I'd been an English major in college and loved it without being bright enough to do anything with it -- my boss said I could do something better. And I thought of working with people and went back and got my social work degree."
Mary calls her next client. "Ginny, now that the trial's over and this slob's in jail where he's going to stay, I was wondering how you felt."
Ginny, whom Mary calls "a Supermom," was raising a family and working as a bank teller. She opened the bank at seven each morning. One day a man wearing a Richard Nixon rubber mask jumped her, put a gun to her head, and ordered her to give him the money, without setting off the alarms and without putting "the rat" in the bag. (The rat is a microchip that emits a sound audible to police radios.)
The man was so brutal and so well informed that Ginny was sure he was going to kill her. So she put the rat in the bag. He bound her with duct tape, including her mouth and nose.
An hour after the robbery, the man's house was surrounded with police cars and he was under arrest. An hour later, Ginny and the money were in Victims Services when her supervisor arrived and, without a word to Ginny, began counting the money.
Ginny was so traumatized by the robbery that she has found it difficult to leave her house. She is getting psychological counseling paid for by the State of Texas, which, under a recent law, supports crime victims in this way.
"You're doing so much better now than in the first days and weeks," Mary says. "Are you thinking about going back to work? Not necessarily at the bank -- anywhere?"
Mary nods at what Ginny says. "I couldn't believe it," Mary says. "I would have thought he'd have more . . . maturity than just to sit there counting the money. But it's very good that it was more than $60,000, because that can bring in the federal government, as it did in this case. As I told you, state jail time is one-third to one-half of the sentence; federal time is 90 percent.
"Now, for the sentencing, we get to submit a Victim Impact Statement. This is very important in cases like yours where there's violence -- implicitly, lethal violence. When someone does to you what this son-of-a-bitch did, your mind goes bananas. It's like really dying because you think you're going to die. You wonder stuff not only like who's going to bring up your children but who's going to tell them."
Ginny talks for several minutes.
"That's exactly the sort of stuff we want," Mary tells her. "You write it out just that way. Or, if it's easier, come by the station and I'll bang it out while you talk it."
Ginny talks.
"Well," Mary says, "we sure never stop thinking about you over here. You know that."
After getting her social work degree, Mary ran a shelter for battered women in Killeen, Texas, serving four rural counties. "It was quite a laugh having a short Jewish woman from Detroit mixing it up with these big country Texans. I was there for three years, and liked it. Then one day a director came to me and said, 'We're going to miss you, but we've found your next job.' Which was this job here, with the Austin police. And right away I knew this was what I wanted to do. People say, 'How can you do that -- ugh! It's so depressing.' Not to me."
Before her next call, Mary glances over her notes. Then she says, "You learn stuff about people that you're just sure no one else knows."
"Hello, Paula, it's Mary. How are things?" she says. "You sound great."
Paula talks, and Mary exchanges pleasantries. Then: "Last time I saw you up here at the station you were getting ready to turn your husband in."
Paula talks.
"So are you concerned about the mortgage or anything? You love that house."
Paula talks.
"Don't give that car to anybody," Mary says. "Don't loan it. It's so hard to prove auto theft if you give permission to someone to use it. But at $60 per month, even if you can't pay the balloon, it's a great deal, because you can't rent a car for $60 a month."
Paula says something.
"You're paying on it and you can't drive it?" Mary says. "Forget it!"
Paula talks for several minutes, Mary inserting un-huhs and hmms to keep her talking.
"So you're saying he's done this in the past?" Mary says. "He exposed himself and fondled her in the past -- before this assault? Oh, lady!"
Paula talks.
"Shock and denial," Mary says. "That's perfectly normal. Bless her heart. When kids see something like that, or even us as adults, we go into shock. That doesn't mean you're naive, Paula. When you're married to someone . . ."
Paula interrupts.
"You're a very good mother," Mary says. "You've bonded with Kimmy and heard what she said. That's the most important thing you can do. How is Kim? . . . She is? . . . Oh, yah, spring vacation.
"Hi, Kimmy, it's Mary. Are you pleased to be on vacation? . . . Yah, it's O.K. here, but I don't get a vacation. What're you doing? . . . The Greatest Story Ever Told -- wow.
"You sure have been through a lot lately. How are you doing in school? . . . Just one Incomplete? Kimmy, I'm so proud of you! Are you the smartest girl in your class? Be honest."
Kim says a few words.
"I thought so," Mary says. "Well, things have changed a lot. How do you feel about that?"
Kim talks.
"You bet it's tough at 13. It's tough anytime, but especially at 13. You're a wonderful daughter. Your mom tells me it began a long time ago with him exposing himself."
Kim says a few words.
"You're a very brave girl. You know we know it, and you know how proud we are of you. You're doing just the right thing."
They exchange goodbyes, and the mother comes back on.
"What a kid!" Mary says. "If I'd have known I could have one like that, I'd have had one."
When Paula and Mary finish their conversation, Mary tells her visitor the father in the case is actually a stepfather, which in some ways makes it harder on the mother.
There is a stir and babble in the next cubicle, and Mary stands on her chair to look over the partition wall. Three tired young children are roaming around in a small space that has a sofa, chairs, toys, and stuffed animals.
The children belong to a young woman who appears, holding a crying baby, at the entrance to Mary's office. The woman is a SIDS -- Sudden Infant Death Syndrome -- volunteer come to announce Bozo the Clown's Red Nose Day USA, Friday April 2, 1993, which will call attention to SIDS.
The woman brings with her posters and flyers and red plastic noses ($2.00) and pins that say "I didn't have the courage to wear a red nose" ($2.50). Two of the four children are hers; the other two she babysits 12 hours a day.
"SIDS kills more infants between two and nine months than anything else," she says. "Seven thousand a year in America: one every 75 minutes." Three years ago, she lost a baby to SIDS.
She and Mary discuss current thinking on what may cause SIDS. "They don't know," the woman says, "but there's some statistical evidence that it happens after the infant has had a slight cold. It happens more often to boys."
The woman's children are restless, and she wants a cigarette. "I know this place has become all non-smoking," she says.
"Well, not quite," Mary says. "In Homicide, if you confess, maybe they'll let you have a cigarette." She laughs. "Anyway, that's what they'll tell you."
When the SIDS woman has gone, Mary turns to her visitor and says, "Yah . . . I'd forgotten. That's the toughest part of the job -- dealing with parents whose infants have died. You're totally powerless. I hate it.
"The first day I was on the job, it was the first thing I had to do. A woman was drunk and her child, sleeping with her, got tangled in the sheets and smothered. I thought, 'Why am I here?' I wanted to quit.’”
Mary's next call is to a woman who is being harassed by her estranged husband. "So he's out of jail," she says. "He hasn't gone after your boyfriend, has he? . . . . And you're still waiting to see if your tires are slashed, yeah."
The woman talks.
"Good girl," Mary says. "You're just one of the best. Lots of times people will say 'I want to be friends. We were married -- why can't we be friends?' But, you see, you can't be. He's not behaving rationally. Maybe he will someday, but not now. You can't make him behave rationally. You can't protect his feelings. You have to protect yourself.
"So if he calls you again, would you please call me and I'll shepherd a complaint through the system?"
The call over, Mary says to her visitor, "Assault. . . . There are a lot, a lot, a lot of false assault charges -- I don't care what they say. But there's also a tremendous amount of violence against women. And I'm here to help women recognize danger and avoid it before a conflict moves to a higher level of torment."
Mary's final call before lunch is to the family of one of four teenage girls murdered on December 3, 1991 in an Austin "I Can't Believe It's Yogurt" store. "Austin had 37 murders last year -- mainly family arguments and drug deals gone wrong and bar fights," Mary says. "But what people remember is Colleen Reed and the yogurt shop murders."
"Hi, Lisa! This is Mary." Mary's tone is upbeat and obviously sincere. She has been the Austin police department's contact with this family since the crime happened.
The women chat about the spring weather and their good moods. After several minutes, Mary says, "Say, I wanted you to know that we'll all be there for the dedicating of the memorial on March 28."
A man has put up a monument to the murdered girls outside the yogurt shop, now abandoned.
Lisa says something.
"You didn't even know him beforehand?" Mary says. "Well, that's something! People come in here all the time -- people you don't know -- and they ask how you are.
"Shawn still like school? . . . Does he still have the same girlfriend? . . . Well, tell him hi for me. And say I'm learning to say rodeoin', dropping the 'g' so I don't sound Jewish." She laughs.
"Well, you can get your own," Mary says. "Bill's writing a book. On interesting work women do. Sorry, Jerry."
Mary, 41, a short, wiry, dark-haired woman, says there won't be much going on today. She'll be at her desk in her cubicle office doing follow-up calls to some of the families she's tracking.
The first family's son, 19, was just killed during a card game. Mary gets the father on the phone. She asks how they are doing. The father's answer takes several minutes.
"People say the most awful things," Mary tells him. "They don't mean to. They are so horrified by the pain you and Kathy are going through that they don't want to be near it. They sympathize, but they're scared."
The husband talks about Kathy, his wife.
"Yeah," Mary says. "That happens. That's normal. Whatever people do when something like this happens is pretty normal, because this itself isn't normal. One reason I'm calling is that you're going through legitimate grief also. You say that Kathy's taking it out on you -- and that's O.K. But I wonder who's going to take care of you?"
As she talks, Mary makes notes.
"Losing a life over a game of cards -- just senseless," she agrees.
The father talks, again at length.
"Sounds like he had a lot of charm," Mary says. "And the cockiness of youth. Sounds like he was . . . very bull-headed."
She leans to the left and bends her legs beside her on her chair.
"The knife was legal," she says. "Less than six inches in the blade. . . . It really was an outrage; you're so right."
The killer got out on bail without spending a night in jail. He is now in Dallas.
"The anger you and Kathy feel can be put to good use. You know about the support groups, For the Love of Christie and Parents of Murdered Children. They're both very good. There's also P-A-V-C, People Against Violent Crime, and they can help you and us in the fight for justice. Can I give you their number? . . . 458-2501."
The father talks.
"Justice isn't vengeance: justice is justice," Mary says. "Even if you do get satisfaction from the justice system, you're going to have to fight for it. PAVC can help."
The father talks. Mary draws intersecting boxes on a piece of scrap paper.
"When that happens, we just flood the parole board with letters. This didn't mean much until Colleen Reed's murder, but it counts heavy now."
Colleen Reed was a young woman abducted from an Austin carwash on December 29, 1991. For two months her fate wasn't known, and Central Texas TV stations played re-enactments of her abduction, and hundreds of posters with a happy picture of her sought news of her whereabouts. In March 1992, a drifter named Alva Hank Worley came forward and said that he had helped abduct Colleen Reed and been with her shortly before she was killed. Her killer, he said, was Kenneth McDuff, a paroled death row inmate convicted of killing three teenagers in 1969. Reed's body has never been found but is assumed to be buried, as was the body of a woman McDuff killed in January 1992, in a ditch alongside some rural Texas road.
"You and Kathy and Bobby's brother are going to have to make Bobby real to the judge and jury," Mary says. "I'm ready to help you and the prosecutors any way I can."
The father talks.
"That's such a guy thing," Mary says. "I don't care if you're 6'4" and weigh 250 pounds. I want you to cut out thinking you can handle this by yourself. I want you to call me. I've got lots of Kleenex and big shoulders."
The conversation over, Mary turns to her visitor. "His wife is so angry he can't dump his feelings on her, so he dumps them on me. Which is great -- just what we're here for."
Mary got into her peculiar line of work, she now realizes, because she was raped 15 years ago. "The officers who comforted me, well, I hope they've been promoted right to the top. Because they made me feel like a person again, you know, not a thing that had been trashed.
"I couldn't have done this job then. I was too hurt and scared. Later, when I was doing office work -- I'd been an English major in college and loved it without being bright enough to do anything with it -- my boss said I could do something better. And I thought of working with people and went back and got my social work degree."
Mary calls her next client. "Ginny, now that the trial's over and this slob's in jail where he's going to stay, I was wondering how you felt."
Ginny, whom Mary calls "a Supermom," was raising a family and working as a bank teller. She opened the bank at seven each morning. One day a man wearing a Richard Nixon rubber mask jumped her, put a gun to her head, and ordered her to give him the money, without setting off the alarms and without putting "the rat" in the bag. (The rat is a microchip that emits a sound audible to police radios.)
The man was so brutal and so well informed that Ginny was sure he was going to kill her. So she put the rat in the bag. He bound her with duct tape, including her mouth and nose.
An hour after the robbery, the man's house was surrounded with police cars and he was under arrest. An hour later, Ginny and the money were in Victims Services when her supervisor arrived and, without a word to Ginny, began counting the money.
Ginny was so traumatized by the robbery that she has found it difficult to leave her house. She is getting psychological counseling paid for by the State of Texas, which, under a recent law, supports crime victims in this way.
"You're doing so much better now than in the first days and weeks," Mary says. "Are you thinking about going back to work? Not necessarily at the bank -- anywhere?"
Mary nods at what Ginny says. "I couldn't believe it," Mary says. "I would have thought he'd have more . . . maturity than just to sit there counting the money. But it's very good that it was more than $60,000, because that can bring in the federal government, as it did in this case. As I told you, state jail time is one-third to one-half of the sentence; federal time is 90 percent.
"Now, for the sentencing, we get to submit a Victim Impact Statement. This is very important in cases like yours where there's violence -- implicitly, lethal violence. When someone does to you what this son-of-a-bitch did, your mind goes bananas. It's like really dying because you think you're going to die. You wonder stuff not only like who's going to bring up your children but who's going to tell them."
Ginny talks for several minutes.
"That's exactly the sort of stuff we want," Mary tells her. "You write it out just that way. Or, if it's easier, come by the station and I'll bang it out while you talk it."
Ginny talks.
"Well," Mary says, "we sure never stop thinking about you over here. You know that."
After getting her social work degree, Mary ran a shelter for battered women in Killeen, Texas, serving four rural counties. "It was quite a laugh having a short Jewish woman from Detroit mixing it up with these big country Texans. I was there for three years, and liked it. Then one day a director came to me and said, 'We're going to miss you, but we've found your next job.' Which was this job here, with the Austin police. And right away I knew this was what I wanted to do. People say, 'How can you do that -- ugh! It's so depressing.' Not to me."
Before her next call, Mary glances over her notes. Then she says, "You learn stuff about people that you're just sure no one else knows."
"Hello, Paula, it's Mary. How are things?" she says. "You sound great."
Paula talks, and Mary exchanges pleasantries. Then: "Last time I saw you up here at the station you were getting ready to turn your husband in."
Paula talks.
"So are you concerned about the mortgage or anything? You love that house."
Paula talks.
"Don't give that car to anybody," Mary says. "Don't loan it. It's so hard to prove auto theft if you give permission to someone to use it. But at $60 per month, even if you can't pay the balloon, it's a great deal, because you can't rent a car for $60 a month."
Paula says something.
"You're paying on it and you can't drive it?" Mary says. "Forget it!"
Paula talks for several minutes, Mary inserting un-huhs and hmms to keep her talking.
"So you're saying he's done this in the past?" Mary says. "He exposed himself and fondled her in the past -- before this assault? Oh, lady!"
Paula talks.
"Shock and denial," Mary says. "That's perfectly normal. Bless her heart. When kids see something like that, or even us as adults, we go into shock. That doesn't mean you're naive, Paula. When you're married to someone . . ."
Paula interrupts.
"You're a very good mother," Mary says. "You've bonded with Kimmy and heard what she said. That's the most important thing you can do. How is Kim? . . . She is? . . . Oh, yah, spring vacation.
"Hi, Kimmy, it's Mary. Are you pleased to be on vacation? . . . Yah, it's O.K. here, but I don't get a vacation. What're you doing? . . . The Greatest Story Ever Told -- wow.
"You sure have been through a lot lately. How are you doing in school? . . . Just one Incomplete? Kimmy, I'm so proud of you! Are you the smartest girl in your class? Be honest."
Kim says a few words.
"I thought so," Mary says. "Well, things have changed a lot. How do you feel about that?"
Kim talks.
"You bet it's tough at 13. It's tough anytime, but especially at 13. You're a wonderful daughter. Your mom tells me it began a long time ago with him exposing himself."
Kim says a few words.
"You're a very brave girl. You know we know it, and you know how proud we are of you. You're doing just the right thing."
They exchange goodbyes, and the mother comes back on.
"What a kid!" Mary says. "If I'd have known I could have one like that, I'd have had one."
When Paula and Mary finish their conversation, Mary tells her visitor the father in the case is actually a stepfather, which in some ways makes it harder on the mother.
There is a stir and babble in the next cubicle, and Mary stands on her chair to look over the partition wall. Three tired young children are roaming around in a small space that has a sofa, chairs, toys, and stuffed animals.
The children belong to a young woman who appears, holding a crying baby, at the entrance to Mary's office. The woman is a SIDS -- Sudden Infant Death Syndrome -- volunteer come to announce Bozo the Clown's Red Nose Day USA, Friday April 2, 1993, which will call attention to SIDS.
The woman brings with her posters and flyers and red plastic noses ($2.00) and pins that say "I didn't have the courage to wear a red nose" ($2.50). Two of the four children are hers; the other two she babysits 12 hours a day.
"SIDS kills more infants between two and nine months than anything else," she says. "Seven thousand a year in America: one every 75 minutes." Three years ago, she lost a baby to SIDS.
She and Mary discuss current thinking on what may cause SIDS. "They don't know," the woman says, "but there's some statistical evidence that it happens after the infant has had a slight cold. It happens more often to boys."
The woman's children are restless, and she wants a cigarette. "I know this place has become all non-smoking," she says.
"Well, not quite," Mary says. "In Homicide, if you confess, maybe they'll let you have a cigarette." She laughs. "Anyway, that's what they'll tell you."
When the SIDS woman has gone, Mary turns to her visitor and says, "Yah . . . I'd forgotten. That's the toughest part of the job -- dealing with parents whose infants have died. You're totally powerless. I hate it.
"The first day I was on the job, it was the first thing I had to do. A woman was drunk and her child, sleeping with her, got tangled in the sheets and smothered. I thought, 'Why am I here?' I wanted to quit.’”
Mary's next call is to a woman who is being harassed by her estranged husband. "So he's out of jail," she says. "He hasn't gone after your boyfriend, has he? . . . . And you're still waiting to see if your tires are slashed, yeah."
The woman talks.
"Good girl," Mary says. "You're just one of the best. Lots of times people will say 'I want to be friends. We were married -- why can't we be friends?' But, you see, you can't be. He's not behaving rationally. Maybe he will someday, but not now. You can't make him behave rationally. You can't protect his feelings. You have to protect yourself.
"So if he calls you again, would you please call me and I'll shepherd a complaint through the system?"
The call over, Mary says to her visitor, "Assault. . . . There are a lot, a lot, a lot of false assault charges -- I don't care what they say. But there's also a tremendous amount of violence against women. And I'm here to help women recognize danger and avoid it before a conflict moves to a higher level of torment."
Mary's final call before lunch is to the family of one of four teenage girls murdered on December 3, 1991 in an Austin "I Can't Believe It's Yogurt" store. "Austin had 37 murders last year -- mainly family arguments and drug deals gone wrong and bar fights," Mary says. "But what people remember is Colleen Reed and the yogurt shop murders."
"Hi, Lisa! This is Mary." Mary's tone is upbeat and obviously sincere. She has been the Austin police department's contact with this family since the crime happened.
The women chat about the spring weather and their good moods. After several minutes, Mary says, "Say, I wanted you to know that we'll all be there for the dedicating of the memorial on March 28."
A man has put up a monument to the murdered girls outside the yogurt shop, now abandoned.
Lisa says something.
"You didn't even know him beforehand?" Mary says. "Well, that's something! People come in here all the time -- people you don't know -- and they ask how you are.
"Shawn still like school? . . . Does he still have the same girlfriend? . . . Well, tell him hi for me. And say I'm learning to say rodeoin', dropping the 'g' so I don't sound Jewish." She laughs.
Foreign Correspondent
At 11 a.m. on Thursday July 15, 1993, Lisa Beyer, Time magazine's Jerusalem correspondent, starts her weekly staff meeting.
"It was great not meeting last week. I know -- you don't have to thank me," she says with a chuckle. "We've got mucho things to discuss today."
Lisa, 29, is wearing pale orange shirt and pants. A cheery, wisecracking person, she is somewhat subdued in the meeting. The four full-time members of her staff have worked in the Jerusalem bureau far longer than she, and they are a good deal older. She listens hard to what they say.
"As some of you know, we got an O.K. on the Plia Albeck story," Lisa says. "I cabled on Tuesday and it will run in 'Talk of the Streets.'"
Plia Albeck has just been removed from her post as head of the civil claims department in the Israeli Ministry of Justice. For years she had provoked controversy by her insensitive handling of Palestinian suits against the Israeli government. An example: in 1992, a court awarded $333,000 to a Palestinian who lost both hands when an Israeli officer ordered him to remove a Palestinian flag from a live power line; Albeck protested that the award was excessive because the man, a street vendor, could "sell falafel with artificial arms."
Time's "Talk of the Streets" is a series of paragraph-long reports in its international edition.
Lisa says the Time editors in New York need three things. "A picture of Albeck, which I assume we have."
"We will have," says Anni Rubinger. Her husband, David, nods. David Rubinger, Time's staff photographer, is one of Israeli's most celebrated photographers. Anni is the bureau's photo-archivist and -researcher. The Rubingers are in their sixties and came to Israel from Austria.
David photographed Plia Albeck some years ago against the day when she might be important enough to make Time. A smiling image of her will be culled from the files to run, with nice incongruity, alongside the paragraph about her losing her job.
"Great," Lisa says. "They want to know why the Palestinian woman was killed by the Israeli army -- you know, when Plia argued that her husband shouldn't get any money because now he didn't have to support her."
There are groans at the table.
"Do you remember, Jamail?"
The incident happened in 1991.
Jamail Hamad is the bureau's Arabic-language reporter. A Palestinian in his 50s and a well-known writer, Jamail replies after a moment's reflection. "It was an accident. I don't remember how it happened."
"Can you find out?"
"Yes. I can try."
"Finally, they want some pithy quotes about Plia getting sacked. Some happy, some outraged. I'll get those, but if any of you have heard good things, tell me.
"Now, we need to come up with stories we can propose."
Silence at the table.
"Well, the army's moving north," says Jean Marx, Lisa's administrative assistant. "Leaves have been cancelled." Jean, who is in her 50s, surveys the Hebrew press. She came from England.
The table is silent. The army suddenly moving additional troops into southern Lebanon has happened countless times before. Many people hoped it wouldn't happen under the new, liberal Israeli government.
"Yah," says Lisa. "Something's happening up there."
"Shelling," several people say.
"The army's not going to tell us anything yet," Lisa says. "I think I may have to go there. Anyhow, that's for next week."
"There's Demjanjuk," someone says.
"All we can do is an update," Lisa says. "That's next week too -- when the Supreme Court verdict comes out."
"It's done," one of the staff says.
"Why do you say that?" Lisa asks.
"Someone in Justice told me."
"It's written?"
"At the printer's."
Lisa thinks for a moment. "I ought to be able to get a confirmation on that."
John Demjanjuk is the retired Cleveland autoworker whom an Israeli court condemned to death in 1988 for being the notorious "Ivan the Terrible" of the Treblinka death camp in Poland. Subsequent evidence has suggested that, while Demjanjuk was a guard at another Nazi camp, he wasn't at Treblinka.
"Everybody think he's going to be acquitted?" Lisa asks.
Everybody does. Israel can't afford to kill a man who might be innocent; that would smack too much of the Holocaust.
"Ivan-the-Not-So-Terrible," Lisa says, repeating a phrase from the papers. "I heard on French radio that the 40th anniversary of the UZI is coming up. That's in a month or so. We'll propose a story."
There is talk about the whereabouts of the submachine gun's inventor.
"I think the best thing we can propose is the 'Fractured Fatah' story again," Lisa says. "They didn't run it four weeks ago, but with Abdel-Shafi's blow-up at Arafat it's bigger than ever. It's really a new story.
Dr. Haidar Abdel-Shafi, a Palestinian negotiating with the Israelis, has just demanded that Yasser Arafat, the head of the Palestine Liberation Organization, cede his autocratic power to a collective leadership.
"I know what they're going to say in New York," Lisa says. "'Aw, this is defrosted fish! Everybody's read it.'
"Yeah, right --" she answers her own accusation, "everybody in the office! Four weeks ago we would have been the first to publish, but we still can be, maybe. Anyhow, it's the best we've got."
There is consensus on this, and Lisa says she'll send a cable suggesting the story and the new angle on it that afternoon.
"Hey, if I do go north," she says, as the meeting is breaking up, "where's that bulletproof vest I heard about?"
There's some laughter. Jean Marx says it's up in the storeroom.
"Good," Lisa says. "Would you bring it out, Jean? We want the chief to be taken care of."
Lisa and the staff chuckle.
Fifteen minutes later, beneath a trellis of bougainvillea in a nearby café, Lisa digs pita bread into a mound of hummus and tells her guest she always wanted to be a reporter. "I'm a very confrontational person. I love being able to pick up a phone and ask questions and have people feel some compulsion to answer.
"I'm a Louisiana Cajun -- proudly. I went to Texas just because they had a better Journalism department. And then I found, more important, The Daily Texan."
The Daily Texan is the University of Texas at Austin's student newspaper. Lisa worked for the Texan as reporter, copy editor, managing editor, and, finally, editor-in-chief.
"I didn't know what I wanted. I guess I dreamed about a conventional newspaper career culminating with The New York Times. If you'd held a gun to my head, I'd probably have said, 'The Austin American-Statesman, The Dallas Times-Herald, The Cleveland Plain-Dealer, and then The New York Times.'
"Red Gibson, famous teacher, neat guy, said -- it's the only thing I remember from the class -- 'If you want to get to The New York Times, be editor-in-chief of The Daily Texan.' So that gave me the goal.
"I had a great time as editor, hobnobbing with the campus administrators and the politicians who wanted our endorsement. I didn't know what would happen when I graduated.
"One night I was walking across campus and I met a teacher I'd had in American Studies. He asked me what I was going on to and, when I said I didn't know, said, 'What kind of grades do you have?'
"Well, no one in Journalism cares about grades, not if they're serious about journalism. A lot of the Daily Texan staff doesn't graduate when they're supposed to -- you know, like athletes -- because they've been doing something More Important.
"But they didn't have my mother. I told my teacher, 'I have a perfect 4.0' and mashed my teeth together in a big smile.
"'My God,' he said, 'we've got to get you a Rhodes!'
"I don't think I said, 'What's a Rhodes?', but I may have. It had never crossed my mind. Anyhow, to make a long story short, I was a finalist but didn't get a Rhodes. And I was a finalist for a Luce Fellowship, from the Henry Luce Foundation, which sends young people with no background in Asia to work there for a year.
"I called up my American Studies teacher and said, 'Should I go for the interview?' I thought I'd probably bomb out again in the interview. He said, 'Why not? If you don't get it, you've had a trip to San Francisco and a learning experience."
"'But what if I don't get it?'
"'Then you won't have to go to Asia!'"
Lisa laughs. "I'll never forget that line. I got the Fellowship, so I had to go. I worked for Asia Week in Hong Kong. It was really tough being away from the States and my friends for the first time, and in Hong Kong, the meanest city of them all. After Hong Kong, New York is a piece of cake.
"It took time -- maybe half a year -- but I adapted. I always loved the work. So when the editor asked me to stay on, I said, 'Where do you need a correspondent?' The answer was Singapore.
"Singapore was another world. New. Clean -- because if you dropped a candy wrapper you got a $100 fine. Waterskiing the whole year round. Remember 'I have seen the future and it works'? Well, I have seen the future and the reason it works is tyranny.
"I was in Singapore for three years having fun and falling more and more out of favor with remarkable Prime Minister Lee Kwan Yew. Until I wrote about the detention without trial of a group of Catholic church workers. Lee banned the sale of Asia Week in his happy island republic.
"Asia Week screamed for a while and then sold me out. The magazine would return; I would go.
"They offered me a job in Hong Kong, but I preferred to come back to the U.S. I went through the torture of thinking I wouldn't have a job -- I'd never not had a job.
"But I landed on my feet at Time and in New York. Beat out a Rhodes Scholar, which was sweet. I wrote for the International Edition for a year, then foreign affairs for the domestic magazine. I learned a lot from the people who edited me, particularly a genius named George Church. How to be colloquial but not too colloquial. How to make news a story. How never to create a question in the reader's mind you don't answer right away. How to condense, condense, condense, and then tighten.
"I wasn't getting noticed. The American audience doesn't care about foreign affairs. The glamor assignments in the magazine are everywhere else. I had to wear pantyhose, and I felt my pantyhose wasn't sexy enough.
"Then a big break: Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. I became a star because of my first sentence in the story: 'In hindsight, it made perfect sense that . . .' In fact, an early version of the sentence had been in a correspondent's story.
"People asked, 'Should a woman be writing the war for us?' But I was a star: a star can do anything. Forget about pantyhose."
After lunch, Lisa and her guest stroll over to the Israeli foreign ministry where she chats with friends about the status of the Demjanjuk verdict. She is told that it has been sent out to a private printer.
Back in her office, she phones a printer on the outskirts of Jerusalem. She greets the person on the other end of the line in Hebrew, and then says, in English, "I'm Lisa Beyer, correspondent with Time magazine. Do you have a spokesman, someone who does press relations?"
She learns that there are Israeli troops outside the building making sure only authorized people enter.
"This is a journalist's dream," she says to her guest. "Important news and a great place to live. Everybody's got an opinion that they put forward very strongly. I found South East Asia hard to take because you can't argue about anything. Everything's hidden to save face. I have a tough time chitchatting, and the Asians think that's what women are for -- keep the conversation going.
The guest asks whether it's an advantage or disadvantage being a woman reporter in the Middle East.
"I don't know," Lisa says. "It's both. The Israeli military are reluctant to have me as a correspondent. Don't want a woman killed on their watch. On the other hand, the officers love to flirt, and interviewing is a kind of flirtation.
"There's tremendous formality in all my relations with the Arabs. Sometimes, like when I interview the fundamentalists, Hamas or other, I have be heavily dressed, with my hair covered, no bright colors.
"It turns me into a wild beast. I can't hear. It's degrading and absurd. I type interviews into my laptop as they're taking place, and the men think I'm the secretary for Jamail or whoever is translating. I'm a non-person. It's awkward, but you can't let it hurt your professionalism. You can't let it affect your reporting.
"
People are always asking me, 'How do you like it here?' What they mean is, 'Which side are you on?' I say, 'I love my job -- and the weather.' I hope that reading my stuff they don't have any idea what my politics are."
Lisa spends the rest of the afternoon (1) phoning to get quotes for the Plia Albeck story ("Small items can be as time-consuming as big ones," she says) and writing them up ("Says a right-winger: 'They're only picking on her because she's not a leftist.' A left-winger responds: 'She's a racist, an abomination. She should have been dismissed long ago'"); (2) writing an update on the Demjanjuk case, which begins with a color sentence about the suburban printer protected by army troops; (3) writing a proposal that something be done for the UZI's anniversary; and (4) writing a proposal for a 500-word story combining Abdel-Shafi's criticism of Arafat with an article she wrote four weeks earlier on conflicts among the Palestinian leadership.
By five p.m., all this is sent via electronic mail to Time's offices in New York, where it is 10 a.m.
At midnight Jerusalem time, Lisa is asleep in her apartment when a Time International editor phones to say they want the Abdel-Shafi story. Lisa has to file it by 5 p.m. the next day, Friday, so that Time will can edit, check the edited version with her, title, format, picture and caption the story by the Saturday press deadline.
While Lisa talks on the phone, the man she calls her "semi-spouse," the writer Ze'ev Chafets, who woke her, returns to a couch in the living room and lies down. He is watching American TV via satellite. Lisa gives him a kiss and returns to bed. Ze'ev is in the throes of the first draft of a novel. During the night he occasionally pads to his study to write more pages. Then he returns to the couch, where he watches The MacNeil/Lehrer Show and part of Larry King Live before falling asleep with the TV on.
The next morning, Lisa has set up a tennis match for her guest, herself, and Richard and Natasha Beston (Richard is the Jerusalem correspondent for The Times of London). One of the Bestons is sick, so Lisa and her guest play singles.
On the drive to the court, the guest protests that Lisa has a big story to write by 5 and probably can't afford to play tennis.
"I write better under pressure," she says. "I'm already writing it in my head."
"Do you have the first sentence?"
"Yep, I think I so: 'It had been clear for some time that Dr. Haidar Abdel-Shafi was cranky.' That gives me something to unwrap. The difference between a newspaper dispatch and a Time article is that we present the news as part of a process, an unfolding, a story."
Lisa plays a strong game of tennis -- she worked her teenage years in a pro shop -- but she doesn't get much involved in the match. She stops early, drives home, showers, grabs a bite to eat, and is in the office before noon.
"In a way, it's good not to give them a story too soon," she says. "Because then they don't have time to get tired of it or to change it a lot.
"No calls," she tells Jean.
Lisa closes her office door and doesn't reappear for more than an hour. She then drinks two cups of water from the water cooler, an abstracted look on her face. After that, she comes out every half hour or so.
"Others smoke and drink bourbon," she says. "I fret. I have to walk around. I drink water. Which makes me go to the bathroom. Which makes me wash my hands. Which makes my hands chapped. Which gives me something else to fret about."
One time when she appears, she says flatly, "I have to get each sentence right. Arrrg."
Her dispatch is on the wire at 5:25 p.m. Lisa has written so hard that when she gets home at 6 she takes a nap.
Lisa and Ze'ev spend weekends at his house in Tel Aviv, less than an hour away. After her nap, Lisa drives there. On route, she says, "The story used to be that Time had such a thick layer of editors because they never knew how many would be drunk. It's tough, tough work. I always try to put in an extra paragraph so the editors feel they improved the story by cutting."
After dinner, at 10:45 p.m., much later than she'd like it to be, Lisa calls Jamail to find if he's learned how the Israeli army killed the Palestinian woman in 1991. Jamail, it turns out, has just returned from a two-hour drive to a Palestinian village, tracking down the facts. Unfortunately they are too complicated for the Albeck paragraph, and Lisa decides simply to say that the army killed the woman "mistakenly."
An hour later, the fax machine at Ze'ev's receives Time's first edit of the Abdel-Shafi story.
At 12:49 a.m., Lisa sends back her comments, prefacing them, "Nice chopping. A few niggles." She makes nine points about the edited story, offers suggestions on things that can be cut if space requires, and closes: "that's all from me. thanks and I'll be in touch with the saturday staff on updates tomorrow. albest."
"It was great not meeting last week. I know -- you don't have to thank me," she says with a chuckle. "We've got mucho things to discuss today."
Lisa, 29, is wearing pale orange shirt and pants. A cheery, wisecracking person, she is somewhat subdued in the meeting. The four full-time members of her staff have worked in the Jerusalem bureau far longer than she, and they are a good deal older. She listens hard to what they say.
"As some of you know, we got an O.K. on the Plia Albeck story," Lisa says. "I cabled on Tuesday and it will run in 'Talk of the Streets.'"
Plia Albeck has just been removed from her post as head of the civil claims department in the Israeli Ministry of Justice. For years she had provoked controversy by her insensitive handling of Palestinian suits against the Israeli government. An example: in 1992, a court awarded $333,000 to a Palestinian who lost both hands when an Israeli officer ordered him to remove a Palestinian flag from a live power line; Albeck protested that the award was excessive because the man, a street vendor, could "sell falafel with artificial arms."
Time's "Talk of the Streets" is a series of paragraph-long reports in its international edition.
Lisa says the Time editors in New York need three things. "A picture of Albeck, which I assume we have."
"We will have," says Anni Rubinger. Her husband, David, nods. David Rubinger, Time's staff photographer, is one of Israeli's most celebrated photographers. Anni is the bureau's photo-archivist and -researcher. The Rubingers are in their sixties and came to Israel from Austria.
David photographed Plia Albeck some years ago against the day when she might be important enough to make Time. A smiling image of her will be culled from the files to run, with nice incongruity, alongside the paragraph about her losing her job.
"Great," Lisa says. "They want to know why the Palestinian woman was killed by the Israeli army -- you know, when Plia argued that her husband shouldn't get any money because now he didn't have to support her."
There are groans at the table.
"Do you remember, Jamail?"
The incident happened in 1991.
Jamail Hamad is the bureau's Arabic-language reporter. A Palestinian in his 50s and a well-known writer, Jamail replies after a moment's reflection. "It was an accident. I don't remember how it happened."
"Can you find out?"
"Yes. I can try."
"Finally, they want some pithy quotes about Plia getting sacked. Some happy, some outraged. I'll get those, but if any of you have heard good things, tell me.
"Now, we need to come up with stories we can propose."
Silence at the table.
"Well, the army's moving north," says Jean Marx, Lisa's administrative assistant. "Leaves have been cancelled." Jean, who is in her 50s, surveys the Hebrew press. She came from England.
The table is silent. The army suddenly moving additional troops into southern Lebanon has happened countless times before. Many people hoped it wouldn't happen under the new, liberal Israeli government.
"Yah," says Lisa. "Something's happening up there."
"Shelling," several people say.
"The army's not going to tell us anything yet," Lisa says. "I think I may have to go there. Anyhow, that's for next week."
"There's Demjanjuk," someone says.
"All we can do is an update," Lisa says. "That's next week too -- when the Supreme Court verdict comes out."
"It's done," one of the staff says.
"Why do you say that?" Lisa asks.
"Someone in Justice told me."
"It's written?"
"At the printer's."
Lisa thinks for a moment. "I ought to be able to get a confirmation on that."
John Demjanjuk is the retired Cleveland autoworker whom an Israeli court condemned to death in 1988 for being the notorious "Ivan the Terrible" of the Treblinka death camp in Poland. Subsequent evidence has suggested that, while Demjanjuk was a guard at another Nazi camp, he wasn't at Treblinka.
"Everybody think he's going to be acquitted?" Lisa asks.
Everybody does. Israel can't afford to kill a man who might be innocent; that would smack too much of the Holocaust.
"Ivan-the-Not-So-Terrible," Lisa says, repeating a phrase from the papers. "I heard on French radio that the 40th anniversary of the UZI is coming up. That's in a month or so. We'll propose a story."
There is talk about the whereabouts of the submachine gun's inventor.
"I think the best thing we can propose is the 'Fractured Fatah' story again," Lisa says. "They didn't run it four weeks ago, but with Abdel-Shafi's blow-up at Arafat it's bigger than ever. It's really a new story.
Dr. Haidar Abdel-Shafi, a Palestinian negotiating with the Israelis, has just demanded that Yasser Arafat, the head of the Palestine Liberation Organization, cede his autocratic power to a collective leadership.
"I know what they're going to say in New York," Lisa says. "'Aw, this is defrosted fish! Everybody's read it.'
"Yeah, right --" she answers her own accusation, "everybody in the office! Four weeks ago we would have been the first to publish, but we still can be, maybe. Anyhow, it's the best we've got."
There is consensus on this, and Lisa says she'll send a cable suggesting the story and the new angle on it that afternoon.
"Hey, if I do go north," she says, as the meeting is breaking up, "where's that bulletproof vest I heard about?"
There's some laughter. Jean Marx says it's up in the storeroom.
"Good," Lisa says. "Would you bring it out, Jean? We want the chief to be taken care of."
Lisa and the staff chuckle.
Fifteen minutes later, beneath a trellis of bougainvillea in a nearby café, Lisa digs pita bread into a mound of hummus and tells her guest she always wanted to be a reporter. "I'm a very confrontational person. I love being able to pick up a phone and ask questions and have people feel some compulsion to answer.
"I'm a Louisiana Cajun -- proudly. I went to Texas just because they had a better Journalism department. And then I found, more important, The Daily Texan."
The Daily Texan is the University of Texas at Austin's student newspaper. Lisa worked for the Texan as reporter, copy editor, managing editor, and, finally, editor-in-chief.
"I didn't know what I wanted. I guess I dreamed about a conventional newspaper career culminating with The New York Times. If you'd held a gun to my head, I'd probably have said, 'The Austin American-Statesman, The Dallas Times-Herald, The Cleveland Plain-Dealer, and then The New York Times.'
"Red Gibson, famous teacher, neat guy, said -- it's the only thing I remember from the class -- 'If you want to get to The New York Times, be editor-in-chief of The Daily Texan.' So that gave me the goal.
"I had a great time as editor, hobnobbing with the campus administrators and the politicians who wanted our endorsement. I didn't know what would happen when I graduated.
"One night I was walking across campus and I met a teacher I'd had in American Studies. He asked me what I was going on to and, when I said I didn't know, said, 'What kind of grades do you have?'
"Well, no one in Journalism cares about grades, not if they're serious about journalism. A lot of the Daily Texan staff doesn't graduate when they're supposed to -- you know, like athletes -- because they've been doing something More Important.
"But they didn't have my mother. I told my teacher, 'I have a perfect 4.0' and mashed my teeth together in a big smile.
"'My God,' he said, 'we've got to get you a Rhodes!'
"I don't think I said, 'What's a Rhodes?', but I may have. It had never crossed my mind. Anyhow, to make a long story short, I was a finalist but didn't get a Rhodes. And I was a finalist for a Luce Fellowship, from the Henry Luce Foundation, which sends young people with no background in Asia to work there for a year.
"I called up my American Studies teacher and said, 'Should I go for the interview?' I thought I'd probably bomb out again in the interview. He said, 'Why not? If you don't get it, you've had a trip to San Francisco and a learning experience."
"'But what if I don't get it?'
"'Then you won't have to go to Asia!'"
Lisa laughs. "I'll never forget that line. I got the Fellowship, so I had to go. I worked for Asia Week in Hong Kong. It was really tough being away from the States and my friends for the first time, and in Hong Kong, the meanest city of them all. After Hong Kong, New York is a piece of cake.
"It took time -- maybe half a year -- but I adapted. I always loved the work. So when the editor asked me to stay on, I said, 'Where do you need a correspondent?' The answer was Singapore.
"Singapore was another world. New. Clean -- because if you dropped a candy wrapper you got a $100 fine. Waterskiing the whole year round. Remember 'I have seen the future and it works'? Well, I have seen the future and the reason it works is tyranny.
"I was in Singapore for three years having fun and falling more and more out of favor with remarkable Prime Minister Lee Kwan Yew. Until I wrote about the detention without trial of a group of Catholic church workers. Lee banned the sale of Asia Week in his happy island republic.
"Asia Week screamed for a while and then sold me out. The magazine would return; I would go.
"They offered me a job in Hong Kong, but I preferred to come back to the U.S. I went through the torture of thinking I wouldn't have a job -- I'd never not had a job.
"But I landed on my feet at Time and in New York. Beat out a Rhodes Scholar, which was sweet. I wrote for the International Edition for a year, then foreign affairs for the domestic magazine. I learned a lot from the people who edited me, particularly a genius named George Church. How to be colloquial but not too colloquial. How to make news a story. How never to create a question in the reader's mind you don't answer right away. How to condense, condense, condense, and then tighten.
"I wasn't getting noticed. The American audience doesn't care about foreign affairs. The glamor assignments in the magazine are everywhere else. I had to wear pantyhose, and I felt my pantyhose wasn't sexy enough.
"Then a big break: Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. I became a star because of my first sentence in the story: 'In hindsight, it made perfect sense that . . .' In fact, an early version of the sentence had been in a correspondent's story.
"People asked, 'Should a woman be writing the war for us?' But I was a star: a star can do anything. Forget about pantyhose."
After lunch, Lisa and her guest stroll over to the Israeli foreign ministry where she chats with friends about the status of the Demjanjuk verdict. She is told that it has been sent out to a private printer.
Back in her office, she phones a printer on the outskirts of Jerusalem. She greets the person on the other end of the line in Hebrew, and then says, in English, "I'm Lisa Beyer, correspondent with Time magazine. Do you have a spokesman, someone who does press relations?"
She learns that there are Israeli troops outside the building making sure only authorized people enter.
"This is a journalist's dream," she says to her guest. "Important news and a great place to live. Everybody's got an opinion that they put forward very strongly. I found South East Asia hard to take because you can't argue about anything. Everything's hidden to save face. I have a tough time chitchatting, and the Asians think that's what women are for -- keep the conversation going.
The guest asks whether it's an advantage or disadvantage being a woman reporter in the Middle East.
"I don't know," Lisa says. "It's both. The Israeli military are reluctant to have me as a correspondent. Don't want a woman killed on their watch. On the other hand, the officers love to flirt, and interviewing is a kind of flirtation.
"There's tremendous formality in all my relations with the Arabs. Sometimes, like when I interview the fundamentalists, Hamas or other, I have be heavily dressed, with my hair covered, no bright colors.
"It turns me into a wild beast. I can't hear. It's degrading and absurd. I type interviews into my laptop as they're taking place, and the men think I'm the secretary for Jamail or whoever is translating. I'm a non-person. It's awkward, but you can't let it hurt your professionalism. You can't let it affect your reporting.
"
People are always asking me, 'How do you like it here?' What they mean is, 'Which side are you on?' I say, 'I love my job -- and the weather.' I hope that reading my stuff they don't have any idea what my politics are."
Lisa spends the rest of the afternoon (1) phoning to get quotes for the Plia Albeck story ("Small items can be as time-consuming as big ones," she says) and writing them up ("Says a right-winger: 'They're only picking on her because she's not a leftist.' A left-winger responds: 'She's a racist, an abomination. She should have been dismissed long ago'"); (2) writing an update on the Demjanjuk case, which begins with a color sentence about the suburban printer protected by army troops; (3) writing a proposal that something be done for the UZI's anniversary; and (4) writing a proposal for a 500-word story combining Abdel-Shafi's criticism of Arafat with an article she wrote four weeks earlier on conflicts among the Palestinian leadership.
By five p.m., all this is sent via electronic mail to Time's offices in New York, where it is 10 a.m.
At midnight Jerusalem time, Lisa is asleep in her apartment when a Time International editor phones to say they want the Abdel-Shafi story. Lisa has to file it by 5 p.m. the next day, Friday, so that Time will can edit, check the edited version with her, title, format, picture and caption the story by the Saturday press deadline.
While Lisa talks on the phone, the man she calls her "semi-spouse," the writer Ze'ev Chafets, who woke her, returns to a couch in the living room and lies down. He is watching American TV via satellite. Lisa gives him a kiss and returns to bed. Ze'ev is in the throes of the first draft of a novel. During the night he occasionally pads to his study to write more pages. Then he returns to the couch, where he watches The MacNeil/Lehrer Show and part of Larry King Live before falling asleep with the TV on.
The next morning, Lisa has set up a tennis match for her guest, herself, and Richard and Natasha Beston (Richard is the Jerusalem correspondent for The Times of London). One of the Bestons is sick, so Lisa and her guest play singles.
On the drive to the court, the guest protests that Lisa has a big story to write by 5 and probably can't afford to play tennis.
"I write better under pressure," she says. "I'm already writing it in my head."
"Do you have the first sentence?"
"Yep, I think I so: 'It had been clear for some time that Dr. Haidar Abdel-Shafi was cranky.' That gives me something to unwrap. The difference between a newspaper dispatch and a Time article is that we present the news as part of a process, an unfolding, a story."
Lisa plays a strong game of tennis -- she worked her teenage years in a pro shop -- but she doesn't get much involved in the match. She stops early, drives home, showers, grabs a bite to eat, and is in the office before noon.
"In a way, it's good not to give them a story too soon," she says. "Because then they don't have time to get tired of it or to change it a lot.
"No calls," she tells Jean.
Lisa closes her office door and doesn't reappear for more than an hour. She then drinks two cups of water from the water cooler, an abstracted look on her face. After that, she comes out every half hour or so.
"Others smoke and drink bourbon," she says. "I fret. I have to walk around. I drink water. Which makes me go to the bathroom. Which makes me wash my hands. Which makes my hands chapped. Which gives me something else to fret about."
One time when she appears, she says flatly, "I have to get each sentence right. Arrrg."
Her dispatch is on the wire at 5:25 p.m. Lisa has written so hard that when she gets home at 6 she takes a nap.
Lisa and Ze'ev spend weekends at his house in Tel Aviv, less than an hour away. After her nap, Lisa drives there. On route, she says, "The story used to be that Time had such a thick layer of editors because they never knew how many would be drunk. It's tough, tough work. I always try to put in an extra paragraph so the editors feel they improved the story by cutting."
After dinner, at 10:45 p.m., much later than she'd like it to be, Lisa calls Jamail to find if he's learned how the Israeli army killed the Palestinian woman in 1991. Jamail, it turns out, has just returned from a two-hour drive to a Palestinian village, tracking down the facts. Unfortunately they are too complicated for the Albeck paragraph, and Lisa decides simply to say that the army killed the woman "mistakenly."
An hour later, the fax machine at Ze'ev's receives Time's first edit of the Abdel-Shafi story.
At 12:49 a.m., Lisa sends back her comments, prefacing them, "Nice chopping. A few niggles." She makes nine points about the edited story, offers suggestions on things that can be cut if space requires, and closes: "that's all from me. thanks and I'll be in touch with the saturday staff on updates tomorrow. albest."
High School English Teacher
It is Nancy Christensen's birthday. She opens a card the other teachers and student teachers put on her desk. The card shows a bunch of friendly wild animals. "One of these animals is like you," the card says. And, when opened: "The giraffe -- you don't hear him laughing, either! Happy birthday!"
Mrs. Christensen, a blond woman in her late thirties, smiles and shows the card to a visitor.
"Now to unpack," she says.
She takes a large stack of typed student papers out of the canvas bag she carries to work. "These are for the newspaper contest," she says. "I didn't put a mark on them. I gave the students feedback on their first drafts. Some of them did a lot better, but there are still verb mess-ups."
Mrs. Christensen teaches eleventh grade honors and regular English in Austin High School. This incarnation of Austin High -- there were several earlier ones -- is a rough concrete building completed in 1975, at the end of the "open classroom" vogue. Mrs. Christensen's classes meet in a huge room, with other classes on three sides separated from hers by bulletin boards, walkways, and, on the west end, hanging from the ceiling, six large American flags from different historical eras. In the class two east and one north of Mrs. Christensen's, the teacher has taped to the lectern Abraham Lincoln's maxim: "We cannot escape history. We will be remembered in spite of ourselves."
Mrs. Christensen's first period is free, so she meets with students and her student teacher, Sherry Holt, a senior at the University of Texas. Mrs. Christensen is preparing students for a statewide spelling contest, and she gives 15 "approved" words to a girl who missed the try-out:
anthrax
apropos
bodacious
chicken Kiev
despotical
equilibrium
gazpacho
gossamer
hawser
Ichabod
laudanum
marauder
nadir
oleander
spasmodic
"The words come from the UIL booklet," Mrs. Christensen says. "In the contest, they have to use current words from the newspapers as the tie-breakers.
"The last two years, my students have won District. My trick is just to choose kids who are geniuses."
Ms. Holt has been adapting sentences for a grammar test, and she asks Mrs. Christensen about one that perplexes her: "'In order to be a complete sentence, a group of words must contain a subject and a verb and must express a complete thought.'"
"It's parallel," Mrs. Christensen says. "Do you want it make it unparallel?"
Ms. Holt is concerned that they have too many correct sentences.
Mrs. Christensen frowns. She and Ms. Holt work out a revision: “In order to be a complete sentence, a group of words must contain a subject and a verb and a complete thought must be expressed by it.”
"That's awful," Mrs. Christensen says, "but it's wrong too."
A tall boy in a Doonesbury T-shirt comes to speak to Mrs. Christensen about his newspaper essay. "I think we better use the second one," she says. "The first one is better, but it's not quite on the topic. There are times when you'll be forced to write to a specific prompt. Too, what if it won? They'd publish it in the paper -- they even publish the honorable mentions. How would your father feel?"
The boy agrees to submit the second essay, though he doesn't like it so well.
Mrs. Christensen later explains that the first essay had talked about his father's racism.
She leads her visitor out of the open classroom, into the carpeted hall. There are signs in the classrooms and a large banner in the hall proclaiming "Everyone is someone at Austin High!" Still, when Mrs. Christensen notices the visitor noticing the knots of students sprawled in the carpet, she says, "Sitting in their cliques."
The hall smells of warm muffins. "Yes," Mrs. Christensen says. "More than a quarter of the students get free breakfasts here."
In the high school's office, Mrs. Christensen tears 12 large pieces of white paper from a contraption loaded with six rolls of poster paper of different colors. On the paper Mrs. Christensen will have her students, in groups of four, make lists comparing the parties in the first three chapters of the book they have begun reading, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.
At 9:55 she begins an honors American Studies class by describing the Advance Placement English test many of the students will take in the fall. "You'll be given a passage to analyze. You won't recognize the passage, but it wouldn't matter much if you did, because the assignment will say something like 'Analyze how the author's use of tone, diction, and syntax works to achieve the passage's effect.'"
She speaks about Fitzgerald's "West Egg" and "East Egg," and compares them to the actual Great Neck and Manhasset Neck. "That's the American imperative," she says, "to want to move up the ladder: from West Egg to East Egg."
She points out how the high-class Daisy and low-class Myrtle are alike in their shallow values. "Didn't take much to seduce Myrtle, did it?" she says. "Wait and see about Daisy."
Eugene, an African-American boy who read the book two years ago, announces that Daisy once had an affair with Gatsby.
The class groans.
"Eugene!" says Mrs. Christensen with amused exasperation.
She breaks the class up into groups of four to outline the similarities between Daisy's and Myrtle's and Gatsby's parties.
Mrs. Christensen and Ms. Holt circulate among the groups commenting on the students' work. Mrs. Christensen has asked Ms. Holt to prepare a class on the Black Sox Scandal and 1920s gangsterism alluded to in Gatsby. "You have to let student teachers do things their own way," Mrs. Christensen says, "and fall on their faces if they need to learn that. Sherry will do fine."
At 11:06, at the start of the next class, school announcements pour out of a loudspeaker. Rushed and muffled voices speak of upcoming "mandatory" and "emergency" meetings and "important" sports events. After this, a television hanging from the ceiling comes on, and an African-American boy gives the "Austin High headlines on Channel One." These include peer mediation for ongoing disputes and anchor tryouts for the TV service. An African-American girl and a white girl speak about Black History Month.
Following the Austin High broadcast, the day's Channel One transmission occurs. "Yesterday, the United Nations voted to set up a war crimes tribunal," says the young Hispanic woman announcer. Then there is a four-minute interview with a gray-haired man who is an expert on war crimes trials. He says that most of the precedents for trying people for war crimes come from the Nuremberg Trials after World War II.
Then there is a Reebok advertisement.
Then Channel One does a story on President Clinton's proposal that young people do national service. There is gray footage of Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corps and slightly brighter footage of former soldiers attending college on the G.I. Bill.
Then there are ads for a candy bar and Pepsi.
Channel One closes by answering its question of the day. The average college graduate earns how much more than the average high school graduate? Ninety-six percent more.
Third period, Mrs. Christensen teaches The Great Gatsby to another honors American Studies class. "There are similarities between West Egg and East Egg," she says. "You may see that Daisy and Myrtle are alike and see why Fitzgerald put the first chapters next to each other."
At lunch, several teachers speak to Mrs. Christensen's visitor about the difficulty of maintaining order in the "regular" and "remedial" classes. "Students don't care because their parents don't care," a math teacher says. "We're bringing up a generation that doesn't have good work habits and doesn't want them."
The State of Texas is going to do away with remedial classes next year and move remedial students into regular classes, the belief being that the remedial students will learn more and be better behaved if they are with regular students.
Mrs. Christensen is silent during this conversation because she teaches mainly honors classes, with highly motivated students. These classes have 40 students -- five more than usual classes -- but they have an extra teacher (Mrs. Christensen works with Rosemary Morrow, who teaches history), which means, in practice, that the class is usually split in two. "That gets it down to a size you can manage," Mrs. Christensen says.
Of Mrs. Christensen's 100 honors students, only two are African-American. "But the number of Hispanics is increasing," she says.
The push toward a multicultural curriculum is strongly felt. "The editor of the paper, one of my students, wrote an editorial about what he hadn't learned at Austin High," Mrs. Christensen says. "This was directed at me. I'm reading women's and minority literature as fast as I can. But who am I going to cut out? Hemingway? Faulkner? Fitzgerald? Steinbeck?"
Her honors classes read The Grapes of Wrath, the whole thing. "And they just love it," she says.
As Mrs. Christensen leaves the lunchroom, she mentions to another teacher an upcoming drama club performance to establish a scholarship in the name of the former drama teacher, a young man dying of AIDS. "It's very hard on the kids," she says.
A week later, Mrs. Christensen's classes have gotten to the climatic chapters of The Great Gatsby.
"Where does Gatsby meet Jordan Baker?" Mrs. Christensen says.
"In Louisville," several students say.
"Yes, she's in Daisy's car," Mrs. Christensen says.
"In --- What's she doing there?" a red-haired boy asks.
"Just sitting," Mrs. Christensen says. "You don't sit around in your car, David?"
"Hours on end," David mutters.
"Canute!" calls a boy down the row. "Tell her not in the front seat."
While drawing a moral about the lack of loyalty in Gatsby's world, Mrs. Christensen says, "Those of you who have finished the book know how many people come to Gatsby's funeral."
"You told us!" says a girl. "He dies!"
"That's in Chapter 8, Melissa," Mrs. Christensen says. "You were to read that for today."
Mrs. Christensen says that Fitzgerald, as he began Gatsby, wrote his editor that he wanted to write "something extraordinary and beautiful and simple and intricately patterned."
"What are some of the patterns in the book?" she asks.
Students mention the parties and violence. "Yes," says Mrs. Christensen, "we talked about those things, didn't we? What else?"
The students seem puzzled, so Mrs. Christensen says, "How about the colors in the book? Fitzgerald calls a lot of attention to them. Jana, name three things we know are green."
"The light on the end of Daisy's pier," Jana says.
"Yes, that Gatsby looks at so long and hard. Pretty important symbol for him. What else?"
Jana thinks for a moment. "I really like that light," she says.
A boy says the Gatsby's hydroplane is green.
"I don't remember that," Mrs. Christensen says. "Are you just making that up? Don't make it up."
Mrs. Christensen has her students write a paper on every book they read in class. She gives out the mimeographed Gatsby assignment, which will be due in a week: "Analyze one of Fitzgerald's patterns in The Great Gatsby. You will find repetitions of certain scenes, symbols, relationship between characters, settings, images, and social groupings. Explain how one of the patterns reinforces a theme of the book."
"Any questions about the assignment?" says Mrs. Christensen. There are none.
"Now, let me read you something I saw on a plaque at the U.S. Pavilion at Epcot Center. How many of you have been to Epcot?"
Three hands go up.
Mrs. Christensen reads from a page of her notebook, which is marked "Gatsby -- the 1920s" on the spine. "'There are those I know who reply that the liberation of humanity -- the freedom of man and mind -- is nothing but a dream. They are right. It is the American dream.'"
Mrs. Christensen pauses for a moment. "Let me read that again," she says. She does. "That was written by the poet Archibald MacLeish, who knew Fitzgerald and was a close friend of Hemingway.
"Now, we've spoken about the American dream and The Great Gatsby. The American dream is based on the freedom of the individual. Our country gives the individual more freedom than any other nation on earth. But great burdens come with this freedom -- or they should. Freedom shouldn't mean that we have the right to injure other people. Or buy automatic weapons anytime we like."
The news that day is full of David Koresh and his group of religious fanatics who are in an armed standoff with federal agents outside of Waco, 100 miles up the road. Two days earlier, Koresh's group killed four Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms agents.
"Fitzgerald's people are free, but what is he saying about them?" Mrs. Christensen asks. "They are careless, corrupt people. They show the danger of the American dream."
Mrs. Christensen, a blond woman in her late thirties, smiles and shows the card to a visitor.
"Now to unpack," she says.
She takes a large stack of typed student papers out of the canvas bag she carries to work. "These are for the newspaper contest," she says. "I didn't put a mark on them. I gave the students feedback on their first drafts. Some of them did a lot better, but there are still verb mess-ups."
Mrs. Christensen teaches eleventh grade honors and regular English in Austin High School. This incarnation of Austin High -- there were several earlier ones -- is a rough concrete building completed in 1975, at the end of the "open classroom" vogue. Mrs. Christensen's classes meet in a huge room, with other classes on three sides separated from hers by bulletin boards, walkways, and, on the west end, hanging from the ceiling, six large American flags from different historical eras. In the class two east and one north of Mrs. Christensen's, the teacher has taped to the lectern Abraham Lincoln's maxim: "We cannot escape history. We will be remembered in spite of ourselves."
Mrs. Christensen's first period is free, so she meets with students and her student teacher, Sherry Holt, a senior at the University of Texas. Mrs. Christensen is preparing students for a statewide spelling contest, and she gives 15 "approved" words to a girl who missed the try-out:
anthrax
apropos
bodacious
chicken Kiev
despotical
equilibrium
gazpacho
gossamer
hawser
Ichabod
laudanum
marauder
nadir
oleander
spasmodic
"The words come from the UIL booklet," Mrs. Christensen says. "In the contest, they have to use current words from the newspapers as the tie-breakers.
"The last two years, my students have won District. My trick is just to choose kids who are geniuses."
Ms. Holt has been adapting sentences for a grammar test, and she asks Mrs. Christensen about one that perplexes her: "'In order to be a complete sentence, a group of words must contain a subject and a verb and must express a complete thought.'"
"It's parallel," Mrs. Christensen says. "Do you want it make it unparallel?"
Ms. Holt is concerned that they have too many correct sentences.
Mrs. Christensen frowns. She and Ms. Holt work out a revision: “In order to be a complete sentence, a group of words must contain a subject and a verb and a complete thought must be expressed by it.”
"That's awful," Mrs. Christensen says, "but it's wrong too."
A tall boy in a Doonesbury T-shirt comes to speak to Mrs. Christensen about his newspaper essay. "I think we better use the second one," she says. "The first one is better, but it's not quite on the topic. There are times when you'll be forced to write to a specific prompt. Too, what if it won? They'd publish it in the paper -- they even publish the honorable mentions. How would your father feel?"
The boy agrees to submit the second essay, though he doesn't like it so well.
Mrs. Christensen later explains that the first essay had talked about his father's racism.
She leads her visitor out of the open classroom, into the carpeted hall. There are signs in the classrooms and a large banner in the hall proclaiming "Everyone is someone at Austin High!" Still, when Mrs. Christensen notices the visitor noticing the knots of students sprawled in the carpet, she says, "Sitting in their cliques."
The hall smells of warm muffins. "Yes," Mrs. Christensen says. "More than a quarter of the students get free breakfasts here."
In the high school's office, Mrs. Christensen tears 12 large pieces of white paper from a contraption loaded with six rolls of poster paper of different colors. On the paper Mrs. Christensen will have her students, in groups of four, make lists comparing the parties in the first three chapters of the book they have begun reading, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.
At 9:55 she begins an honors American Studies class by describing the Advance Placement English test many of the students will take in the fall. "You'll be given a passage to analyze. You won't recognize the passage, but it wouldn't matter much if you did, because the assignment will say something like 'Analyze how the author's use of tone, diction, and syntax works to achieve the passage's effect.'"
She speaks about Fitzgerald's "West Egg" and "East Egg," and compares them to the actual Great Neck and Manhasset Neck. "That's the American imperative," she says, "to want to move up the ladder: from West Egg to East Egg."
She points out how the high-class Daisy and low-class Myrtle are alike in their shallow values. "Didn't take much to seduce Myrtle, did it?" she says. "Wait and see about Daisy."
Eugene, an African-American boy who read the book two years ago, announces that Daisy once had an affair with Gatsby.
The class groans.
"Eugene!" says Mrs. Christensen with amused exasperation.
She breaks the class up into groups of four to outline the similarities between Daisy's and Myrtle's and Gatsby's parties.
Mrs. Christensen and Ms. Holt circulate among the groups commenting on the students' work. Mrs. Christensen has asked Ms. Holt to prepare a class on the Black Sox Scandal and 1920s gangsterism alluded to in Gatsby. "You have to let student teachers do things their own way," Mrs. Christensen says, "and fall on their faces if they need to learn that. Sherry will do fine."
At 11:06, at the start of the next class, school announcements pour out of a loudspeaker. Rushed and muffled voices speak of upcoming "mandatory" and "emergency" meetings and "important" sports events. After this, a television hanging from the ceiling comes on, and an African-American boy gives the "Austin High headlines on Channel One." These include peer mediation for ongoing disputes and anchor tryouts for the TV service. An African-American girl and a white girl speak about Black History Month.
Following the Austin High broadcast, the day's Channel One transmission occurs. "Yesterday, the United Nations voted to set up a war crimes tribunal," says the young Hispanic woman announcer. Then there is a four-minute interview with a gray-haired man who is an expert on war crimes trials. He says that most of the precedents for trying people for war crimes come from the Nuremberg Trials after World War II.
Then there is a Reebok advertisement.
Then Channel One does a story on President Clinton's proposal that young people do national service. There is gray footage of Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corps and slightly brighter footage of former soldiers attending college on the G.I. Bill.
Then there are ads for a candy bar and Pepsi.
Channel One closes by answering its question of the day. The average college graduate earns how much more than the average high school graduate? Ninety-six percent more.
Third period, Mrs. Christensen teaches The Great Gatsby to another honors American Studies class. "There are similarities between West Egg and East Egg," she says. "You may see that Daisy and Myrtle are alike and see why Fitzgerald put the first chapters next to each other."
At lunch, several teachers speak to Mrs. Christensen's visitor about the difficulty of maintaining order in the "regular" and "remedial" classes. "Students don't care because their parents don't care," a math teacher says. "We're bringing up a generation that doesn't have good work habits and doesn't want them."
The State of Texas is going to do away with remedial classes next year and move remedial students into regular classes, the belief being that the remedial students will learn more and be better behaved if they are with regular students.
Mrs. Christensen is silent during this conversation because she teaches mainly honors classes, with highly motivated students. These classes have 40 students -- five more than usual classes -- but they have an extra teacher (Mrs. Christensen works with Rosemary Morrow, who teaches history), which means, in practice, that the class is usually split in two. "That gets it down to a size you can manage," Mrs. Christensen says.
Of Mrs. Christensen's 100 honors students, only two are African-American. "But the number of Hispanics is increasing," she says.
The push toward a multicultural curriculum is strongly felt. "The editor of the paper, one of my students, wrote an editorial about what he hadn't learned at Austin High," Mrs. Christensen says. "This was directed at me. I'm reading women's and minority literature as fast as I can. But who am I going to cut out? Hemingway? Faulkner? Fitzgerald? Steinbeck?"
Her honors classes read The Grapes of Wrath, the whole thing. "And they just love it," she says.
As Mrs. Christensen leaves the lunchroom, she mentions to another teacher an upcoming drama club performance to establish a scholarship in the name of the former drama teacher, a young man dying of AIDS. "It's very hard on the kids," she says.
•
A week later, Mrs. Christensen's classes have gotten to the climatic chapters of The Great Gatsby.
"Where does Gatsby meet Jordan Baker?" Mrs. Christensen says.
"In Louisville," several students say.
"Yes, she's in Daisy's car," Mrs. Christensen says.
"In --- What's she doing there?" a red-haired boy asks.
"Just sitting," Mrs. Christensen says. "You don't sit around in your car, David?"
"Hours on end," David mutters.
"Canute!" calls a boy down the row. "Tell her not in the front seat."
While drawing a moral about the lack of loyalty in Gatsby's world, Mrs. Christensen says, "Those of you who have finished the book know how many people come to Gatsby's funeral."
"You told us!" says a girl. "He dies!"
"That's in Chapter 8, Melissa," Mrs. Christensen says. "You were to read that for today."
Mrs. Christensen says that Fitzgerald, as he began Gatsby, wrote his editor that he wanted to write "something extraordinary and beautiful and simple and intricately patterned."
"What are some of the patterns in the book?" she asks.
Students mention the parties and violence. "Yes," says Mrs. Christensen, "we talked about those things, didn't we? What else?"
The students seem puzzled, so Mrs. Christensen says, "How about the colors in the book? Fitzgerald calls a lot of attention to them. Jana, name three things we know are green."
"The light on the end of Daisy's pier," Jana says.
"Yes, that Gatsby looks at so long and hard. Pretty important symbol for him. What else?"
Jana thinks for a moment. "I really like that light," she says.
A boy says the Gatsby's hydroplane is green.
"I don't remember that," Mrs. Christensen says. "Are you just making that up? Don't make it up."
Mrs. Christensen has her students write a paper on every book they read in class. She gives out the mimeographed Gatsby assignment, which will be due in a week: "Analyze one of Fitzgerald's patterns in The Great Gatsby. You will find repetitions of certain scenes, symbols, relationship between characters, settings, images, and social groupings. Explain how one of the patterns reinforces a theme of the book."
"Any questions about the assignment?" says Mrs. Christensen. There are none.
"Now, let me read you something I saw on a plaque at the U.S. Pavilion at Epcot Center. How many of you have been to Epcot?"
Three hands go up.
Mrs. Christensen reads from a page of her notebook, which is marked "Gatsby -- the 1920s" on the spine. "'There are those I know who reply that the liberation of humanity -- the freedom of man and mind -- is nothing but a dream. They are right. It is the American dream.'"
Mrs. Christensen pauses for a moment. "Let me read that again," she says. She does. "That was written by the poet Archibald MacLeish, who knew Fitzgerald and was a close friend of Hemingway.
"Now, we've spoken about the American dream and The Great Gatsby. The American dream is based on the freedom of the individual. Our country gives the individual more freedom than any other nation on earth. But great burdens come with this freedom -- or they should. Freedom shouldn't mean that we have the right to injure other people. Or buy automatic weapons anytime we like."
The news that day is full of David Koresh and his group of religious fanatics who are in an armed standoff with federal agents outside of Waco, 100 miles up the road. Two days earlier, Koresh's group killed four Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms agents.
"Fitzgerald's people are free, but what is he saying about them?" Mrs. Christensen asks. "They are careless, corrupt people. They show the danger of the American dream."
Performing Arts Administrator
Roxalene -- "Call me Pebbles" -- Wadsworth is a slender, mild-looking woman in her early 40's who prefers casual clothes: blouses, pants, crepe-soled flats. She looks like a librarian or a scholar of medieval illuminations. In a large meeting, she listens with an abstracted air, legs crossed and eyes on the ceiling. When she speaks, though, her whole body comes alive, her arms gesture forcefully, and her eyes seek the eyes of everyone present.
As Director of the University of Texas' Performing Arts Center (which commonly goes by its initials, the PAC), she oversees seven theaters and recital halls, has a budget of $4 million, and programs more than 225 events a year. The crown-jewel theater for which she is responsible is Bass Concert Hall, the largest and the best-equipped stage between the coasts. When the English National Opera brought its production of War and Peace to America, only two stages could accommodate it: Bass and the Metropolitan Opera in New York.
On April 19, 1993, the comedian-pianist Victor Borge performed in Bass to a full house, 3000 people. Pebbles and her husband were in attendance, and they and the rest of the audience got even more of a show than Borge usually gives.
"If the piano is good," Borge's son told Tom Dwyer, Bass' House Manager, who told Celeste Tanner, Pebbles' Administrative Associate and alter ego, who told Pebbles, "the performance will take about an hour and a half. If the piano is great, it will go longer."
Borge loved the piano, a Bosendofer Imperial Concert Grand, and the program lasted two hours and fifteen minutes.
The next morning, Pebbles was at work for two hours of Mad time before a lunch with the chairman of the University's Radio-Television-Film department. She divides her work day into scheduled appointments, Mad times and Quiet times, she explains, "because Celeste went to a meeting on how to run an office, and she learned this trick, which has saved my life -- kept me from going home every night at eight or later."
During Mad time, Pebbles welcomes walk-in visits from anyone on her 110-person staff and all phone calls. During Quiet time, she works -- reads, writes, thinks -- by herself and accepts only certain phone calls.
This morning, no one comes to her office right away, so Pebbles starts writing letters in plum-colored ink on a yellow legal pad. "I'm going to give you a bunch of stuff to type," she tells Celeste. "I'm clearing my brain."
Celeste, a stately, well-dressed, smiling woman in her fifties, smiles even more. Then she says, "We had a call this morning from a woman who was in the tenth row on the keyboard side last night and couldn't hear the piano."
Pebbles thinks about this. "Odd," she says. "That's just where I was. I heard splendidly. Phone her back and ask what can be done to make her happy. But tell her I was also sitting there and heard fine."
A few minutes later, Matt Hessburg, the PAC's Marketing Manager, comes by to get Pebbles' input on a problem they are working on.
"Have Herb fax a copy of the contract," Pebbles says. "I don't have a copy. We have a copy, but we can't find it right away. I'll be here for a couple of hours working quietly."
Matt explains that the problem is complicated because not only is a second airline involved but comp tickets to performances and advertisements that must soon be set in next year's program.
"I better call him," Pebbles says. "No, stay here," she says to Matt.
"Herb, I'm here with Matt and I hear we have a little problem. It's a failure of communication, and I take full responsibility for it."
Herb says something.
"I know that," Pebbles says. "I know we can work it out. You and Matt need to meet and renegotiate that contract so that both parties are happy. Chevy" (Chevy Humphrey, Pebbles' Development Officer) "is in tears in the trunk of her car because she didn't go to the meeting this morning. Again, I take full responsibility."
After hanging up, Pebbles asks Matt if he's happy about negotiating with Herb. "I'd be there," she says, "but I think this is something for you to work out."
"Right," Matt says. "I'm glad to do it."
Pebbles turns back to her letters. Meanwhile, down the hall in her office, Celeste is meeting with Connie McMillan, the Box Office Manager. "I thought you'd be dying to talk with this person," she says, handing Connie a piece of paper. "She attended Victor Borge last night in the eighth to tenth row on the keyboard side and couldn't hear a thing."
Connie gives a slight groan.
"Yes," Celeste says. "We want to make sure we respond to her concern. Tell her, though, that other people were sitting nearby and heard just fine."
"We don't have anything more coming up at Bass," Connie says. "Nothing anywhere, except the Dance Repertory. She'll want tickets to Cats."
"Which, you can tell her, was unfortunately earlier this month," Celeste says.
Back in her office, Pebbles has gotten far enough into her letters to slow down for a moment and talk about her job.
"I got into this by accident," she says. "When I got out of college, I taught on an Indian reservation and then took six months out to paint. I discovered I wasn't going to be the next Picasso.
"There was a remarkable woman who headed the UCLA performing arts center, Frances Ingalis. She had been the executive secretary of Sam Goldwyn, and she was tough. People were terrified of her, but I wanted to work for her.
"The only job open was as clerk-typist. Now, I can't type very well. I couldn't learn to play piano, either. There's something wrong in my eye-hand coordination. In order to apply as clerk-typist, I had to pass the personnel office test.
"I went in with a splint on my finger and said, 'I can type 90 words a minute, but I can't take the test now because of this.'" She waggles an index finger in an imaginary splint. "They gave me list of all the other things I had to do, machines to run. I checked them all off 'yes, yes, yes, yes.' And got the job.
"I threw myself into everything going on the office, but I kept wearing the splint so I wouldn't have to type. After a while I realized I had to take the splint off. Frances gave me a dictaphone cartridge, and told me to type up what she said. Later, she came by my desk and saw me fumbling with earphones and foot pedals.
"'Miss Ingalis,' I said, 'you're going to fire me, and you should fire me. I was hired under false pretenses. I can't type 90 words per minute.'
"She stared at me. She was famous for her typing. She could type 120 words a minute.
"'Then we will have to find you another job,' she said."
Pebbles folds her hands in her lap, grinning.
"The press assistant had just resigned, and I got that job.
"I kept moving around, and I was finally assistant to Miss Ingalis, who became my mentor. When she retired, the Chancellor -- the president of the University -- appointment me Acting Director. I was 28.
"I asked him why he appointed me, and he said, 'Well, you've done everything here. And you always tell the truth, particularly about how much things are going to cost. And when someone else isn't telling the truth, you always look at the floor.'
"Well, when I got that job, I discovered who my friends were!" Pebbles laughs. "There were people waiting for me to fall on my face."
The phone rings -- it's Mad time, after all -- and Pebbles talks with an old friend. "Really! How wonderful!" she says. "When is it to be? . . . In North Carolina? That's her home? . . . May you be as happy as Christian and me. "Are your children coming?"
She says hmm and nods.
The conversation turns to finances.
"I'm very conservative by nature," Pebbles says. "Robert, let's have a Reality Check. An $85,000 cut is nothing in this time."
She discovers that Robert is coming soon to Austin. "Certainly the piano faculty will be intrigued -- interested. Could you spend time with students? . . . Do you know what you want to play?"
Pebbles scribbles down a few words. She and Robert agree to be in touch when she has scouted out local requirements.
She hangs up and shouts, presumably to Celeste down the hall, "Robert Blocker's getting married!"
She explains that Blocker, an excellent pianist, is Dean of the School of the Arts at UCLA and that the School had been having a bad time until, after a four-year search, he was brought in. "Film and theater, especially film, are what count at UCLA. And they were cut away from Arts and made a separate school in hopes that Hollywood people would give more money to a clearer target."
Pebbles came to Austin less because of the remarkable performing facilities, though they counted, than because of the plans of Jon Whitmore, the University's Dean of Fine Arts. "I had been offered other jobs, including Carnegie Hall," Pebbles says. "But they wouldn't let me do what I want. I knew what Jon was trying to do -- build a prototype school of the arts for the twenty-first century -- and I absolutely agreed with his program.
"When I took over at UCLA, all we programmed was Western elite culture. There we were in one of the great immigrant cities of the world, and we showed only a sliver of its art. I began reaching out to any ethnic group that would listen to me, saying 'How can we help you get your music and dance and drama before the whole community?'
"I knew that Jon wanted to do exactly that with the Performing Arts Center, have a facility where the old barriers were down, and was looking for someone to head it. He asked me if I'd do it, and I said, 'No, but I'll help you find someone.'
"I came to Austin and was amazed by what was here, performing arts facilities already built for next century. Facilities that could be a resource for both the College of Fine Arts and the University community and communities beyond the University."
Pebbles is talking now in her full-persuasion mode. She leans forward in her chair, her arms and hands opening up.
"You see, culturally we have failed. That's what the Los Angeles riots showed us. We aren't paying attention to each other. Peter Sellars -- you know, the director -- has said that Los Angeles is an experiment that didn't work.
"My hope is that here in Austin we can pioneer a new pattern. This year we collaborated with La Peña, the Mexican-American art organization, to bring in Tish Hinojosa and Mercedes Sosa. Wonderful! A whole new audience in Bass. I felt my husband and I were practically the only non-Spanish speakers. We gave the profits to La Peña so they can continue their work, and this next year we'll collaborate with them again.
"I'm working also with the Black Arts Alliance. We're bringing in Wynton Marsalis. We had the Ghanaian National Dance Company this year, and we'll have the Ballets Africains and Kodo Drummers in November and January.
"I sought out people in the Austin music scene, and we're going to start a collaboration, the Country Knights-Broken Spoke Series. I think it's horrible that Willie Nelson has never performed in Bass and, come September, he will. With Alvin Crow and the Geezinslaw Brothers. In November, we have Jerry Jeff Walker.
"All of this, and plenty of elite art -- Itzhak Perlman, the Royal Ballet of London, Marilyn Horne -- and musicals and family shows."
The phone rings and Pebbles is brought back to earth. Lee Smith, a vice-president for business affairs at the University, is calling to continue a conversation about the 8 percent state tax Pebbles now has to collect on all performances that aren't student productions.
"I'm so frustrated," Pebbles says, though she speaks with perfect calm and good humor. "Spike Lee speaks to thousands of paying customers and doesn't have to pay tax. A dance performance for a 100 people has to pay tax."
The vice-president explains.
"Well," says Pebbles, "maybe we'll have somebody stand up before each event and give a two-minute lecture. I'm a bit desperate, really. We figured this year it will cost us $87,000. And next year, when we try to explain to our audience . . ."
Mr. Smith responds.
"Yes, I know, Lee. I will pass this on to Matt" (the marketing manager) "and he'll be in touch to be sure what we can say and can't say in our subscription promotion."
Pebbles hangs up. She doesn't sigh about the taxman; she doesn't revert to multicultural speculation. A woman of the moment, she glances at her watch and sees that the next thing on the plate is her lunch appointment. She nips into Celeste's office, where Celeste is talking with Maria Aleman, Matt's administrative associate, about outreach to primary and secondary schools. The PAC is sponsoring Jacques d'Amboise's "Believe in Me" program to build self-esteem in children, particularly those at risk of not finishing school, through teaching them to dance; the next day, Pebbles and Maria will visit an elementary school to watch a final rehearsal of Austin's "Believe in Me 1993."
"I'm running to lunch," Pebbles says. "I have an appointment with Jerry at 2, and then Quiet time."
Celeste smiles and nods, and Pebbles is gone.
As Director of the University of Texas' Performing Arts Center (which commonly goes by its initials, the PAC), she oversees seven theaters and recital halls, has a budget of $4 million, and programs more than 225 events a year. The crown-jewel theater for which she is responsible is Bass Concert Hall, the largest and the best-equipped stage between the coasts. When the English National Opera brought its production of War and Peace to America, only two stages could accommodate it: Bass and the Metropolitan Opera in New York.
On April 19, 1993, the comedian-pianist Victor Borge performed in Bass to a full house, 3000 people. Pebbles and her husband were in attendance, and they and the rest of the audience got even more of a show than Borge usually gives.
"If the piano is good," Borge's son told Tom Dwyer, Bass' House Manager, who told Celeste Tanner, Pebbles' Administrative Associate and alter ego, who told Pebbles, "the performance will take about an hour and a half. If the piano is great, it will go longer."
Borge loved the piano, a Bosendofer Imperial Concert Grand, and the program lasted two hours and fifteen minutes.
The next morning, Pebbles was at work for two hours of Mad time before a lunch with the chairman of the University's Radio-Television-Film department. She divides her work day into scheduled appointments, Mad times and Quiet times, she explains, "because Celeste went to a meeting on how to run an office, and she learned this trick, which has saved my life -- kept me from going home every night at eight or later."
During Mad time, Pebbles welcomes walk-in visits from anyone on her 110-person staff and all phone calls. During Quiet time, she works -- reads, writes, thinks -- by herself and accepts only certain phone calls.
This morning, no one comes to her office right away, so Pebbles starts writing letters in plum-colored ink on a yellow legal pad. "I'm going to give you a bunch of stuff to type," she tells Celeste. "I'm clearing my brain."
Celeste, a stately, well-dressed, smiling woman in her fifties, smiles even more. Then she says, "We had a call this morning from a woman who was in the tenth row on the keyboard side last night and couldn't hear the piano."
Pebbles thinks about this. "Odd," she says. "That's just where I was. I heard splendidly. Phone her back and ask what can be done to make her happy. But tell her I was also sitting there and heard fine."
A few minutes later, Matt Hessburg, the PAC's Marketing Manager, comes by to get Pebbles' input on a problem they are working on.
"Have Herb fax a copy of the contract," Pebbles says. "I don't have a copy. We have a copy, but we can't find it right away. I'll be here for a couple of hours working quietly."
Matt explains that the problem is complicated because not only is a second airline involved but comp tickets to performances and advertisements that must soon be set in next year's program.
"I better call him," Pebbles says. "No, stay here," she says to Matt.
"Herb, I'm here with Matt and I hear we have a little problem. It's a failure of communication, and I take full responsibility for it."
Herb says something.
"I know that," Pebbles says. "I know we can work it out. You and Matt need to meet and renegotiate that contract so that both parties are happy. Chevy" (Chevy Humphrey, Pebbles' Development Officer) "is in tears in the trunk of her car because she didn't go to the meeting this morning. Again, I take full responsibility."
After hanging up, Pebbles asks Matt if he's happy about negotiating with Herb. "I'd be there," she says, "but I think this is something for you to work out."
"Right," Matt says. "I'm glad to do it."
Pebbles turns back to her letters. Meanwhile, down the hall in her office, Celeste is meeting with Connie McMillan, the Box Office Manager. "I thought you'd be dying to talk with this person," she says, handing Connie a piece of paper. "She attended Victor Borge last night in the eighth to tenth row on the keyboard side and couldn't hear a thing."
Connie gives a slight groan.
"Yes," Celeste says. "We want to make sure we respond to her concern. Tell her, though, that other people were sitting nearby and heard just fine."
"We don't have anything more coming up at Bass," Connie says. "Nothing anywhere, except the Dance Repertory. She'll want tickets to Cats."
"Which, you can tell her, was unfortunately earlier this month," Celeste says.
Back in her office, Pebbles has gotten far enough into her letters to slow down for a moment and talk about her job.
"I got into this by accident," she says. "When I got out of college, I taught on an Indian reservation and then took six months out to paint. I discovered I wasn't going to be the next Picasso.
"There was a remarkable woman who headed the UCLA performing arts center, Frances Ingalis. She had been the executive secretary of Sam Goldwyn, and she was tough. People were terrified of her, but I wanted to work for her.
"The only job open was as clerk-typist. Now, I can't type very well. I couldn't learn to play piano, either. There's something wrong in my eye-hand coordination. In order to apply as clerk-typist, I had to pass the personnel office test.
"I went in with a splint on my finger and said, 'I can type 90 words a minute, but I can't take the test now because of this.'" She waggles an index finger in an imaginary splint. "They gave me list of all the other things I had to do, machines to run. I checked them all off 'yes, yes, yes, yes.' And got the job.
"I threw myself into everything going on the office, but I kept wearing the splint so I wouldn't have to type. After a while I realized I had to take the splint off. Frances gave me a dictaphone cartridge, and told me to type up what she said. Later, she came by my desk and saw me fumbling with earphones and foot pedals.
"'Miss Ingalis,' I said, 'you're going to fire me, and you should fire me. I was hired under false pretenses. I can't type 90 words per minute.'
"She stared at me. She was famous for her typing. She could type 120 words a minute.
"'Then we will have to find you another job,' she said."
Pebbles folds her hands in her lap, grinning.
"The press assistant had just resigned, and I got that job.
"I kept moving around, and I was finally assistant to Miss Ingalis, who became my mentor. When she retired, the Chancellor -- the president of the University -- appointment me Acting Director. I was 28.
"I asked him why he appointed me, and he said, 'Well, you've done everything here. And you always tell the truth, particularly about how much things are going to cost. And when someone else isn't telling the truth, you always look at the floor.'
"Well, when I got that job, I discovered who my friends were!" Pebbles laughs. "There were people waiting for me to fall on my face."
The phone rings -- it's Mad time, after all -- and Pebbles talks with an old friend. "Really! How wonderful!" she says. "When is it to be? . . . In North Carolina? That's her home? . . . May you be as happy as Christian and me. "Are your children coming?"
She says hmm and nods.
The conversation turns to finances.
"I'm very conservative by nature," Pebbles says. "Robert, let's have a Reality Check. An $85,000 cut is nothing in this time."
She discovers that Robert is coming soon to Austin. "Certainly the piano faculty will be intrigued -- interested. Could you spend time with students? . . . Do you know what you want to play?"
Pebbles scribbles down a few words. She and Robert agree to be in touch when she has scouted out local requirements.
She hangs up and shouts, presumably to Celeste down the hall, "Robert Blocker's getting married!"
She explains that Blocker, an excellent pianist, is Dean of the School of the Arts at UCLA and that the School had been having a bad time until, after a four-year search, he was brought in. "Film and theater, especially film, are what count at UCLA. And they were cut away from Arts and made a separate school in hopes that Hollywood people would give more money to a clearer target."
Pebbles came to Austin less because of the remarkable performing facilities, though they counted, than because of the plans of Jon Whitmore, the University's Dean of Fine Arts. "I had been offered other jobs, including Carnegie Hall," Pebbles says. "But they wouldn't let me do what I want. I knew what Jon was trying to do -- build a prototype school of the arts for the twenty-first century -- and I absolutely agreed with his program.
"When I took over at UCLA, all we programmed was Western elite culture. There we were in one of the great immigrant cities of the world, and we showed only a sliver of its art. I began reaching out to any ethnic group that would listen to me, saying 'How can we help you get your music and dance and drama before the whole community?'
"I knew that Jon wanted to do exactly that with the Performing Arts Center, have a facility where the old barriers were down, and was looking for someone to head it. He asked me if I'd do it, and I said, 'No, but I'll help you find someone.'
"I came to Austin and was amazed by what was here, performing arts facilities already built for next century. Facilities that could be a resource for both the College of Fine Arts and the University community and communities beyond the University."
Pebbles is talking now in her full-persuasion mode. She leans forward in her chair, her arms and hands opening up.
"You see, culturally we have failed. That's what the Los Angeles riots showed us. We aren't paying attention to each other. Peter Sellars -- you know, the director -- has said that Los Angeles is an experiment that didn't work.
"My hope is that here in Austin we can pioneer a new pattern. This year we collaborated with La Peña, the Mexican-American art organization, to bring in Tish Hinojosa and Mercedes Sosa. Wonderful! A whole new audience in Bass. I felt my husband and I were practically the only non-Spanish speakers. We gave the profits to La Peña so they can continue their work, and this next year we'll collaborate with them again.
"I'm working also with the Black Arts Alliance. We're bringing in Wynton Marsalis. We had the Ghanaian National Dance Company this year, and we'll have the Ballets Africains and Kodo Drummers in November and January.
"I sought out people in the Austin music scene, and we're going to start a collaboration, the Country Knights-Broken Spoke Series. I think it's horrible that Willie Nelson has never performed in Bass and, come September, he will. With Alvin Crow and the Geezinslaw Brothers. In November, we have Jerry Jeff Walker.
"All of this, and plenty of elite art -- Itzhak Perlman, the Royal Ballet of London, Marilyn Horne -- and musicals and family shows."
The phone rings and Pebbles is brought back to earth. Lee Smith, a vice-president for business affairs at the University, is calling to continue a conversation about the 8 percent state tax Pebbles now has to collect on all performances that aren't student productions.
"I'm so frustrated," Pebbles says, though she speaks with perfect calm and good humor. "Spike Lee speaks to thousands of paying customers and doesn't have to pay tax. A dance performance for a 100 people has to pay tax."
The vice-president explains.
"Well," says Pebbles, "maybe we'll have somebody stand up before each event and give a two-minute lecture. I'm a bit desperate, really. We figured this year it will cost us $87,000. And next year, when we try to explain to our audience . . ."
Mr. Smith responds.
"Yes, I know, Lee. I will pass this on to Matt" (the marketing manager) "and he'll be in touch to be sure what we can say and can't say in our subscription promotion."
Pebbles hangs up. She doesn't sigh about the taxman; she doesn't revert to multicultural speculation. A woman of the moment, she glances at her watch and sees that the next thing on the plate is her lunch appointment. She nips into Celeste's office, where Celeste is talking with Maria Aleman, Matt's administrative associate, about outreach to primary and secondary schools. The PAC is sponsoring Jacques d'Amboise's "Believe in Me" program to build self-esteem in children, particularly those at risk of not finishing school, through teaching them to dance; the next day, Pebbles and Maria will visit an elementary school to watch a final rehearsal of Austin's "Believe in Me 1993."
"I'm running to lunch," Pebbles says. "I have an appointment with Jerry at 2, and then Quiet time."
Celeste smiles and nods, and Pebbles is gone.
Movie Translator
Ruth Shek-Yasur subtitles English-, French-, and German-language movies into Hebrew, and, less often, Hebrew-, French- and German-language movies into English. An emotional person, she spends much of the day doing work as precise as an accountant's at a computer like a tombstone.
When the words aren't coming right, she pushes back from the machine and unwinds by dancing about her fifth-floor Tel Aviv apartment, sweeping the terrace, washing dishes, watering plants, making tea, or feeding her cats and making sure neither has fallen into the toilet whose seat they use to jump onto the windowsill and then up to the roof.
"You should see them get down from the roof," she says. "They cling by their claws to the shingle and drop inwards to the sill, twisting in mid-air. It makes me perfectly dizzy.
"Well, what can I tell you? Here's a script I'm going to do."
She turns several pages of a mimeographed script with sections of dialogue bracketed in red pencil.
"It's already 'spotted,'" she says. "The dialogue in each of those marks goes into a subtitle. As well as it can!
"Not infrequently the speeches have been cut or changed in the final print we get here. Before I work on a film I have to screen it, often more than once, to check that the dialogue list corresponds to what the audience will see.
"Also, there's a special problem with Hebrew because I must know who is being addressed in every speech to get the verb form right."
Ruth is a vibrant woman of 41, with an expressive face and thick dark hair into which she frequently thrusts her hands.
"First rule: you can't use all the words they say in the film. The eye reads slower than the ear hears. There's not enough time to write out all the words spoken; you must condense. Sometimes you have to let whole sentences go -- sometimes a joke, because it would take too long to tell and distract from the main path of the story.
"Then too, there's the size of the screen to take into account. A movie subtitle has lines of no more than 38 characters, including punctuation and spaces. A TV subtitle has 27 characters, because the screen is smaller. You have to get what is said in that patch of film into that subtitle; otherwise, the audience will be behind where the movie means them to be. And you'll have trouble catching up, because you need the following spots for whatever's said there. It's a bit of a challenge. I used to find myself counting letters like a crossword puzzle. Now the computer tells me when I'm taking too many spaces.
"Rule two: you generally can't translate word for word, because it would confuse the audience. The characters are making references to things in their culture the audience doesn't know about or they are talking slang. Slang is very difficult.
"Slang's lovely. I adore it. It is always acceptable when spoken because it's spoken to people who understand it. But slang in a foreign language seldom makes sense translated literally, word for word.
"Furthermore, slang is time-bound. There's twenties' slang and thirties' slang -- who says 'Yes, we have no bananas' today? If you translate using slang that belongs to an earlier generation, you make the characters sound weird.
"You can do the same thing if you use slang that comes from a specific subculture. Here in Israel I can draw from Yiddish slang, Russian slang, Arabic slang, as well as Hebrew. Well, if I do so, am I going to mislead the audience?
"Rule three: what matters is the point of the words, not the words themselves. The spirit and tone of the conversation. The social class of the people speaking.
"The object is to serve what's happening on the screen, so the audience will always know the plot, what really counts. Basically, movies use dialogue to say things that can't be shown. It's your responsibility to get those things across to the audience if they have to know them to understand the film; if you can get more than this across -- and you can, you always can -- so much the better."
Asked which movies are most difficult to subtitle, Ruth says, "Comedies! Movies with specific jargon, like Top Gun or baseball movies. When I do a baseball movie I spend half my time on the phone to local fanatics who know the Hebrew words for sinker ball and I don't know what -- Texas Leaguer!
"Well-written movies are easier to work on, even if the language is difficult. Because the movie hangs together. I just did The Lady Eve, which was tough because everyone talks on top of one another. But it was such fun and had so much energy that you couldn't go wrong keeping to the story.
"Bergman is easy to translate. You can speak elliptically in all languages. And he's full of . . . significant . . . pauses," Ruth laughs and bats her eyes.
"Hitchcock is generally easy because there's not much talk -- he's into showing.
"What I type in my computer is copied directly onto the film print. That's why I get ulcers. I'm the first draft, the editor, and the publisher.
"I learned all my languages before I was eight. I was born in Czechoslovakia, where my parents came from. Immediately I was brought to Israel, where I spent my first four years, so I learned to speak Hebrew. My father was in the diplomatic service, and from age four to eight I spent in London; my first schooling was in English. Then from age eight to twelve, we were in Paris. Every summer from age four to eleven I spent with my brother and sister on my great-grandmother's farm in Austria -- another language: German.
"Father didn't want us speaking German for reasons you can imagine. He told our grandmother not to speak it to us, but Great-grandmother didn't speak anything else. Besides, that was what the neighboring kids spoke. We'd forget it every winter and pick it up next summer.
"A diplomatic life is very hard on children -- very dysfunctional, though we didn't have the word then. You keep being torn away from everything you know, and your parents are out every night doing their job. It's hard on the wife, too: she is left holding the house together in a foreign country while her husband does the interesting work.
"A small child realizes very fast that it may not be worth it to put herself into making new friends because she'll soon be gone.
"Languages can a problem. Often the servants spoke another language: Spanish or Portuguese. 'There are too many languages in this house!' my brother said when he was three or four. It became a catch phrase in the family. He is now a diplomat in Paris.
"I learned the languages, but I missed all the explanations of how they work. I know no grammar at all. I go by my gut. All I know is when something sounds right.
"From age 16 to 19 I was in Vienna -- German was no long verboten. I didn't know where on earth I belonged. I remember at 17 driving through Paris in a convertible, with the wind gushing through my hair, smoking, talking philosophy, and wondering, 'Who is this girl?'
"Well, at 18 all Israeli women have to begin two years of military service. According to law, I could have my service postponed until Father was posted back to Israel. In fact, I did get a six-month postponement.
"Then I did something smart. I stopped asking myself 'who am I?' because I got too many answers. Instead, I asked, 'Who do I want to be? Where do I want to make my life? What language do I want to speak?' These were probably the first adult questions I had asked.
"I went to my father and said, 'I want to get myself in synch with my society. This is my one chance. I'm going back and enter the army.'
"My father was a clever guy. He said, 'You're doing useful things here, but . . .' And he smiled and shrugged and gave me a hug.
"Even in Israel I was an outsider. I was much more adult than the other recruits. I had met all kinds of interesting and important people. Further, I was so shy that I was a great snob. But I had a goal in mind, and I was exactly right.
"Our army takes people from every background. Everyone's an outsider when they join. I was scared stiff. I was alone, following an intuition I'd had.
"And I got just what I wanted: I was treated like nothing special, like everybody else. I became like everybody else. I became what the army wanted me to be. I wound up working with journalists -- my languages again -- but as a cog in the organization. I was home.
"After the army, I went to design school for three years. I came out and designed all sorts of things -- leisure wear, lingerie, women's outer wear, children's wear, even men's wear. Always, though, I felt a tug toward words, those languages I had up in the attic." She ruffles her hair.
"My husband was translating movies, and one day he needed my help with the French. That was it!"
When the words aren't coming right, she pushes back from the machine and unwinds by dancing about her fifth-floor Tel Aviv apartment, sweeping the terrace, washing dishes, watering plants, making tea, or feeding her cats and making sure neither has fallen into the toilet whose seat they use to jump onto the windowsill and then up to the roof.
"You should see them get down from the roof," she says. "They cling by their claws to the shingle and drop inwards to the sill, twisting in mid-air. It makes me perfectly dizzy.
"Well, what can I tell you? Here's a script I'm going to do."
She turns several pages of a mimeographed script with sections of dialogue bracketed in red pencil.
"It's already 'spotted,'" she says. "The dialogue in each of those marks goes into a subtitle. As well as it can!
"Not infrequently the speeches have been cut or changed in the final print we get here. Before I work on a film I have to screen it, often more than once, to check that the dialogue list corresponds to what the audience will see.
"Also, there's a special problem with Hebrew because I must know who is being addressed in every speech to get the verb form right."
Ruth is a vibrant woman of 41, with an expressive face and thick dark hair into which she frequently thrusts her hands.
"First rule: you can't use all the words they say in the film. The eye reads slower than the ear hears. There's not enough time to write out all the words spoken; you must condense. Sometimes you have to let whole sentences go -- sometimes a joke, because it would take too long to tell and distract from the main path of the story.
"Then too, there's the size of the screen to take into account. A movie subtitle has lines of no more than 38 characters, including punctuation and spaces. A TV subtitle has 27 characters, because the screen is smaller. You have to get what is said in that patch of film into that subtitle; otherwise, the audience will be behind where the movie means them to be. And you'll have trouble catching up, because you need the following spots for whatever's said there. It's a bit of a challenge. I used to find myself counting letters like a crossword puzzle. Now the computer tells me when I'm taking too many spaces.
"Rule two: you generally can't translate word for word, because it would confuse the audience. The characters are making references to things in their culture the audience doesn't know about or they are talking slang. Slang is very difficult.
"Slang's lovely. I adore it. It is always acceptable when spoken because it's spoken to people who understand it. But slang in a foreign language seldom makes sense translated literally, word for word.
"Furthermore, slang is time-bound. There's twenties' slang and thirties' slang -- who says 'Yes, we have no bananas' today? If you translate using slang that belongs to an earlier generation, you make the characters sound weird.
"You can do the same thing if you use slang that comes from a specific subculture. Here in Israel I can draw from Yiddish slang, Russian slang, Arabic slang, as well as Hebrew. Well, if I do so, am I going to mislead the audience?
"Rule three: what matters is the point of the words, not the words themselves. The spirit and tone of the conversation. The social class of the people speaking.
"The object is to serve what's happening on the screen, so the audience will always know the plot, what really counts. Basically, movies use dialogue to say things that can't be shown. It's your responsibility to get those things across to the audience if they have to know them to understand the film; if you can get more than this across -- and you can, you always can -- so much the better."
Asked which movies are most difficult to subtitle, Ruth says, "Comedies! Movies with specific jargon, like Top Gun or baseball movies. When I do a baseball movie I spend half my time on the phone to local fanatics who know the Hebrew words for sinker ball and I don't know what -- Texas Leaguer!
"Well-written movies are easier to work on, even if the language is difficult. Because the movie hangs together. I just did The Lady Eve, which was tough because everyone talks on top of one another. But it was such fun and had so much energy that you couldn't go wrong keeping to the story.
"Bergman is easy to translate. You can speak elliptically in all languages. And he's full of . . . significant . . . pauses," Ruth laughs and bats her eyes.
"Hitchcock is generally easy because there's not much talk -- he's into showing.
"What I type in my computer is copied directly onto the film print. That's why I get ulcers. I'm the first draft, the editor, and the publisher.
"I learned all my languages before I was eight. I was born in Czechoslovakia, where my parents came from. Immediately I was brought to Israel, where I spent my first four years, so I learned to speak Hebrew. My father was in the diplomatic service, and from age four to eight I spent in London; my first schooling was in English. Then from age eight to twelve, we were in Paris. Every summer from age four to eleven I spent with my brother and sister on my great-grandmother's farm in Austria -- another language: German.
"Father didn't want us speaking German for reasons you can imagine. He told our grandmother not to speak it to us, but Great-grandmother didn't speak anything else. Besides, that was what the neighboring kids spoke. We'd forget it every winter and pick it up next summer.
"A diplomatic life is very hard on children -- very dysfunctional, though we didn't have the word then. You keep being torn away from everything you know, and your parents are out every night doing their job. It's hard on the wife, too: she is left holding the house together in a foreign country while her husband does the interesting work.
"A small child realizes very fast that it may not be worth it to put herself into making new friends because she'll soon be gone.
"Languages can a problem. Often the servants spoke another language: Spanish or Portuguese. 'There are too many languages in this house!' my brother said when he was three or four. It became a catch phrase in the family. He is now a diplomat in Paris.
"I learned the languages, but I missed all the explanations of how they work. I know no grammar at all. I go by my gut. All I know is when something sounds right.
"From age 16 to 19 I was in Vienna -- German was no long verboten. I didn't know where on earth I belonged. I remember at 17 driving through Paris in a convertible, with the wind gushing through my hair, smoking, talking philosophy, and wondering, 'Who is this girl?'
"Well, at 18 all Israeli women have to begin two years of military service. According to law, I could have my service postponed until Father was posted back to Israel. In fact, I did get a six-month postponement.
"Then I did something smart. I stopped asking myself 'who am I?' because I got too many answers. Instead, I asked, 'Who do I want to be? Where do I want to make my life? What language do I want to speak?' These were probably the first adult questions I had asked.
"I went to my father and said, 'I want to get myself in synch with my society. This is my one chance. I'm going back and enter the army.'
"My father was a clever guy. He said, 'You're doing useful things here, but . . .' And he smiled and shrugged and gave me a hug.
"Even in Israel I was an outsider. I was much more adult than the other recruits. I had met all kinds of interesting and important people. Further, I was so shy that I was a great snob. But I had a goal in mind, and I was exactly right.
"Our army takes people from every background. Everyone's an outsider when they join. I was scared stiff. I was alone, following an intuition I'd had.
"And I got just what I wanted: I was treated like nothing special, like everybody else. I became like everybody else. I became what the army wanted me to be. I wound up working with journalists -- my languages again -- but as a cog in the organization. I was home.
"After the army, I went to design school for three years. I came out and designed all sorts of things -- leisure wear, lingerie, women's outer wear, children's wear, even men's wear. Always, though, I felt a tug toward words, those languages I had up in the attic." She ruffles her hair.
"My husband was translating movies, and one day he needed my help with the French. That was it!"
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