The Last Mermaid Show
Behind the scenes of a live mermaid show in Weeki Wachee Springs State Park in Orlando, Fla.:
“I sat down next to Crystal Videgar on a bench in front of a mirror that ran along one wall. She wore a black fishnet stocking pulled down over her face, which she used to create a scale pattern as she dabbed metallic green and purple eye shadow around her temples. The conversation had turned to whether everyone should meet up at Hooters or Applebee’s after work, but Videgar worked on her makeup with quiet focus. When she pulled off the stocking, I could see in between the fish scales that her skin was lightly freckled from life in the Florida sun. ‘We love that we get to dress up all day long,’ she said. ‘It’s like reliving your childhood.’
“Videgar and her co-workers earn $10 to $13 per hour. They punch timecards when they arrive at Weeki Wachee an hour before the first show and again when they leave after the last show of the day, usually by 5 p.m. In between performances, they train new recruits, scrub algae off the theater windows, do laundry and clean their locker room, bathroom and showers. They take breaks on a rooftop sun porch, where a surprising number of them smoke; their joke is that inhaling is good practice for holding your breath underwater.”
The Letter
S.I. Newhouse’s contentious appointment of Robert Gottlieb as the editor of The New Yorker in 1987, and what Gottlieb did to bring the magazine into a new era:
“Orlean was an early Gottlieb-era hire. ‘She came in off the street,’ said McGrath, her Talk of the Town editor (though, she noted, Gottlieb was often her second reader). ‘She came into my office and, in the space of a twenty-minute conversation, she had about a hundred ideas for stories, and about eighty of them were good.’
“Orlean laughed about this. ‘By the standards of The New Yorker I was being brought in off the street. I had a book contract; I was writing for Rolling Stone and The Boston Globe, so that’s hilarious. That’s so classic of The New Yorker to feel that if you weren’t at The New Yorker you were essentially homeless and living hand-to-mouth on crap.’
“‘When I got there the mood was not very nice,’ she said. Orlean was unusual among New Yorker writers, most of whom, she said, had spent their careers at the magazine and hadn’t written for other publications. ‘It’s a little bit like, I wasn’t a virgin, and more typically people came to The New Yorker as virgins. They came into their adulthood there.’ The place was cliquey, she said, but that has since dissipated, in no small part because Gottlieb brought in so many writers who ‘weren’t born in the manger.’ At this point, ‘that aristocratic, inbred feel—that if you weren’t there from birth you didn’t deserve to be there—has really dissolved.'”
The Road to West Egg
On the origins of The Great Gatsby and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s desire to “be one of the greatest writers who have ever lived”:
“In October 1922, Fitzgerald moved his family (Zelda plus their two-year-old daughter, Scottie) to Great Neck, Long Island and over the next 18 months ‘my novel’ acquired a Midwestern background, a poor boy-rich girl theme, a narrative structure and a title which was definite one day and discarded the next. Most of what he got down on paper was tossed out until things began to come together as winter ended in early 1924. Fitzgerald’s faith in his novel grew as he laboured to make it ‘the very best I’m capable of … or even as I feel sometimes, something better than I’m capable of’. Perkins received and considered many title variants as the book made its way towards publication but Fitzgerald’s first was the one that stuck, the one he liked, the one he thought had a certain bigness to it. Perkins never exactly pushed for The Great Gatsby; he just said he thought it ‘suggestive and effective’.”
The Rules of Grieving: They Are Still Boys
Grief counselors at Archbishop Moeller High School, an all-boys school, work with teens who have lost loved ones:
“Phillip begins to speak even more in this session. He says his father died of heart failure which was a result of quadriplegia. The death was not expected, he says, but it was not a surprise. He tells the class that when he held his father’s hand that night, it reminded him of his mother’s hand. He says he can still feel how cold her hand was.
“‘I remember touching her hand and trying to wake her up. It was the coldest thing I could ever feel,’ Phillip said. ‘When I touched my dad’s hand it was still warm, but it reminded me of it so much.’
“After the group, he said he is glad to be a member. ‘It’s enjoyable. You can actually talk and you realize there is a brotherhood. There are people you can go talk to.'”
Viewing and Reading List: The Wisdom of Mr. Rogers
Last week, the below YouTube video resurfaced on Twitter to remind me about everything I loved, and still love, about Mr. Rogers. It’s a clip from the 1997 Daytime Emmys, where Fred McFeely Rogers accepted a Lifetime Achievement Award:
The Rock ‘n’ Roll Casualty Who Became a War Hero
Jason Everman was kicked out of both Nirvana and Soundgarden, before the bands went on to sell millions of albums. He then decided to do something completely different:
“So in 1993, while living in a group house in San Francisco with the guys in Mindfunk, Everman slipped out to meet with recruiters; the Army offered a fast track to becoming a Ranger and perhaps eventually to the Special Forces. He told me he always had an interest in it. His stepfather was in the Navy; both grandfathers were ex-military. Most of the people he grew up with scoffed at that world, which was part of the appeal to him. Novoselic remembered something Everman said way back in the Olympia days. ‘He was just pondering. He asked me, “Do you ever think about what it’d be like to be in the military and go through that experience?” And I was just like . . . no.'”
College Longreads Pick: ‘The Other Redskins,’ by Kelyn Soong, University of Maryland
Last February, a Washington Redskins executives said on a team talk show that 70 different high schools across the country share the NFL franchise’s controversial name. University of Maryland journalism graduate student Kelyn Soong did a little fact checking.
Medical Research: Cell Division
Fifty years ago, a microbiologist named Leonard Hayflick developed a strain of cells named WI-38 from the lungs of an aborted fetus. The strain of cells have been used to produce life-savings vaccines worldwide, but have also had a history riddled with controversy:
“The cells have played ‘a very critical role in studying cellular senescence,’ adds Rugang Zhang, who works in this field at the Wistar Institute. That’s because they so reliably stop replicating after about 50 divisions and because scientists have, over time, built up a wealth of knowledge about the reasons why. In the 1990s, for instance, WI-38 was used to discover the most widely used marker of cellular senescence10. More recently, Zhang’s team used the cells to discover a pathway by which the complex of DNA and proteins known as chromatin controls cell proliferation11.
“But the controversies surrounding the cells have rumbled on. Back in July 1973, Hayflick received a call at home from a senior medical officer at NASA. Skylab 3 had taken off several hours earlier from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, bound for the Space Station. The NASA physician was contending with anti-abortion demonstrators who were protesting about the presence aboard of WI-38 cells, which were going to be used to detect the effects of zero-gravity on cell growth and structure. Once Hayflick explained that the abortion from which the cells were derived had occurred legally in Sweden, the physician said that he would defuse the situation — but concerns among anti-abortionists about WI-38 have lasted to this day.”
In the Line of Wildfire
The writer embeds with the Hotshots, an elite group of wilderness firefighters, for a season:
“At 11 P.M., the crew hooks over the top of the spot and starts building line down the eastern flank and back toward the creek. Rojas is mowing through the brush when a flare-up sends a wash of embers overhead. Behind him, Cowell yells, ‘RTO! RTO!’ It stands for reverse tool order, which basically means get the hell out. The crews power through the brush to the top of the spot, where they pause to catch their breath.
“Burning mountains surround them, and Cowell has to make a decision. They either gamble and try to put out the spot fire by building a firebreak directly on its eastern edge, or they back off and take the line up to the ridge top. Option two is safer, but it gives the fire a chance to gain momentum. Cowell sends Rice downhill to scout. The foreman climbs a tree, sees emergency lights flashing 500 feet below, and hears another hotshot crew’s saws screaming in the night. The fire looks manageable. “We can do this,” Rice radios to Cowell.”
Chasing the Dragon
[NSFW] A look back at Bruce Lee’s early career and the making of Enter the Dragon. (One of Lee’s costars, Jim Kelly, died Saturday at age 67):
“Enter the Dragon struck a responsive chord across the globe. Made for a minuscule $850,000, it would gross $90 million worldwide in 1973 and go on to earn an estimated $350 million over the next 40 years, including profits from a recently released two-disc Blu-ray edition. Producer Fred Weintraub likes to joke that the movie was so profitable the studio even had to pay him. Screenwriter Michael Allin recalls, ‘Warner’s lawyer sent me a letter saying, “The picture will be well into profit”—and here’s the phrase I love—”by anybody’s formula.” The picture made so much money they could not sweep it under the rug. The rug had too big a bulge.'”
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