So last night before I went to the opening of Pippin here in San Francisco at the Golden Gate Theater I was having dinner alone and looking over the new issue of FourTwoNine. It is hard to convey the kind of work I put into these issues. Although I am grateful for the young people I have on my small staff I do end up doing a lot of the work. And - dont get me wrong - I love it. But I do have to wear lots of hats. (I hum Sondheims Finishing the Hat for many reasons when putting together and finishing the magazine.) Except for the Back 9 section of the book, I come up with every story idea, edit every story, write many of them using either my own name of pseudonyms, assign the others, and then end up being the lone last proofreader for the whole book as I was this time the very last day in an all-day and into-the-night marathon of proofing every line in the book. For a slightly dyslexic person like me it is the most daunting aspect of the whole process. But I suck it up and do it. The autonomy of creating a whole magazine is the trade-off for all the work that goes into it. Once the issue if done it is truly a reflection of my tastes and interests and editorial voice as well as my writers one. As I sat at in my booth at the restaurant last night, I steeled myself for the typos I was probably going to find. My heart fell and then began to race in a kind of panic attack when I read the first sentence in the cover story on Alan Cumming - the first sentence in the first story in the well - and found a mistake. The sentence: Alan Cumming not only is multitalented but he has also has become rather brilliant at multitasking. I obviously have not. I wanted to smile at the splendid irony of the universe trying to send me a message about my own multitasking as it revealed a typo last night in a sentence about multitasking itself. But I couldnt. I wanted to cry. In fact, I had to blink back the tears. I put my head down on the restaurant table and tried to calm myself. Instead of focusing on the overarching achievement of putting out the whole magazine and how beautiful it is, I focused on one extra three-letter word - has - and how it had broken my heart. The waitress walked up with my food while my head was still down on the table. Are you all right? she asked. I lifted my head and she placed the plate on the table. Honestly, no, I told her. I want to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge. The look on her face proved how sincere I must have sounded in such a sentiment in that very moment. Well, not really, I said. Im just being hyperbolical. Her face couldnt quite register such a term - was it a condition, she seemed to be wondering, like hypertension or hyperglycemia? In a way, yes, it is I guess. She walked away but kept looking over toward me as I ate to make sure I was all right. I was afraid she was going to call some suicide hotline. Now that I think about it maybe someone should start a hyperbolical hotline for dramatic folks like me. As I finished my meal, I calmed myself by remembering the time I was working at Interview magazine back in the 1980s and I had found the very first typo in a story I had edited. That time too I had put my head down - not on a restaurant table but on my desk - to calm the panic that I was feeling at not having caught it before the magazine went to print. Andy Warhol walked by to ask me if I were okay. I told him about the typo. He grinned. Oh, mistakes are always a part of working. I make them all the time, he said. You know what you have to do? Keep working and keep making them. If youre not making mistakes, youre not working. I love mistakes. But not as much as working.
Posted on: Thu, 25 Sep 2014 13:38:21 +0000
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