Writing Boots

Writers routinely advise one another to “kill your babies”—sacrificing favorite lines that don’t quite work. Well, you can kill ’em, or you can just blog them separately. This was the original lead for the piece I published yesterday, at ProRhetoric.com. You can tell why I liked it, and why it had to go.

It’s Sunday afternoon, after last night’s Gridiron Dinner, in Washington, D.C. I’m back home in Chicago, wondering like a snail in a bathing suit pocket after a spin cycle: What the hell was that all about?

On a phone call Thursday morning, I tried to impress a former White House speechwriter by mentioning casually that I would be attending the insider-famous Gridiron Dinner Saturday night—invited by a Washington Speechwriter Friend of our mutual acquaintance. 

Was she going? No, she wasn’t. “I wish I were,” she said, graciously.

My mission suavely accomplished, I then heard myself blurt out, “I’ve never worn a tuxedo before!” (“How can that be?” she muttered in genuine wonder.)

My subtle sense of insecurity must have also been detected by the woman barber in my Chicago neighborhood Thursday afternoon, to whom I went for a beard trim. To explain this extravagance, I told her I wanted to look tidy for a fancy dinner I would be attending over the weekend. I mentioned that our governor, J.B. Pritzker, would be speaking. And that I would be wearing a tuxedo (with tails!).

A scheduled 15-minute appointment ran to 30, as she prepped me meticulously for the big event. 

At one point, she asked, “Are you going to have a few notecards in your pockets?”

“What for?” I asked.

“Maybe with just a few things on them, to say to people.”

“Good idea,” I told her.

And then I reassured her that I’d have a notebook, instead. To write things down, that I heard from other people.

“Oh, that’s a good idea,” she said.

Read the rest, at …