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A Newspaper Columnist Takes a Vacation
By Lionel Beehner
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Sarah Jenkins is on vacation. Her column, which usually runs on Wednesdays, will appear again next week in its regularly scheduled spot.
Yes, columnists too take vacations. Not often, but enough to notice. They sure are missed around here. Their jobs make our jobs, and our lives, better and a bit more bearable. Their weekly assignment – to write 750 words per week on anything of their choosing, provided it has some relevance to normal folks’ lives and is full of snappy one-liners, gossipy bits, and sensational viewpoints that often polarize the readers—from the face of it, might look easy, but it is not. Our columnists are required to be up to snuff on everything and muster up opinions on a wide range of topics. Each week they must produce mounds of carefully culled data and disciplined copy, weighing in on all the important issues of the day that affect you, the reader.
Why, just the other day, Ms. Jenkins was up until four in the morning, neck-deep in research, we’re told, plowing away on an upcoming column on the legal merits of interrogation techniques used by the feds in homicide cases. What can or can’t they ask? You want to know and Sarah Jenkins wants to tell you. Read Jenkins’ next column (that is, when it returns next week) and find out.
No hard feelings then, right? Your Wednesday mornings will return to normal. We promise. As you can see, her column this week has been replaced by a cuddly little cartoon: funny but not too highbrow. Ha, ha, see? Look, Kerry is riding a bigger bike than Bush. Ha, ha…er… OK, admittedly not funny, nor as enlightening as a cogently-written, pull-no-punches Sarah Jenkins column. At least you appreciate that she slaves away so that you, the lazy reader, don’t have to. Please, show some mercy for goodness sake. She’s changed her headshots three times over the past year to give her readers a variety of new looks, hairstyles and confident poses. She reads every morsel of mail that comes across her desk—and we’re talking stacks and stacks and stacks of letters, mostly piss-poorly written, from aggrieved half-literates like you. But dammit all, she’s tired! One person can take only so much responsibility and stress in her life. So she and her family took a vacation. Just for a week. Given the lousy weather, probably some place down south. I know she had talked about seeing the Virgin Islands for years. But she’s coming back.
Yes, yes, I know what you’re thinking: “But I rely on reading Ms. Jenkins’ column’s crisply worded prose, her wacky sense of humor, each week on my way to work, and I just love her metaphors, her cheeky turns of alliterative phrase, her sassiness! Her column—above which a tiny picture of her well-put-together face resting confidently on her carefully-folded hands seems to be saying, 'Let me tell you how it is'—carries me through the week and wakes me up each Wednesday morning. What will I do without it? I feel let down, ripped off. I feel like she doesn’t care. Why? WHY? WHY THE FUCK DID YOU HAVE TO GO ON VACATION, YOU FUCKING BITCH?!"
The editorial department shares your concerns, deeply, and will do everything newspaperly possible to keep you, the reader, satisfied.
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Lionel Beehner is a Research Editor at New York Press and a Contributing Writer at SEED Magazine. He can be contacted at lbeehner@yahoo.com.
©
2003 Me Three