Elvis Has Left the Building

My long-time colleague Steve Marcus retired this past week. Here’s what I said about him at his reception, before he left the building...

Steve modestly wanted a small reception for close friends, but we soon realized the conference room we had scheduled was too small.

Like the police chief in the movie “Jaws” (released 40 years ago), we quickly realized, “We’re going to need a bigger boat.”

Why? Because Steve has influenced so many people over the years… He’s been a mentor and trusted colleague to all of us here. This is truly worth celebrating. As EB White once noted: “It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer."

Nearly 30 years ago, when I had just started at a corporation called NYNEX, we got word that our largest subsidiary, New York Telephone, had just made a major hire -- an award-winning reporter from the New York Post and one of the members of the Inner Circle, a great journalistic institution whose roster is made up of legendary New York City political and community-interest reporters.

Of course, I only knew Steve by reputation back then – which could be summed up by everyone’s reaction at the time: “Thank God, now we know everything will be OK… we’ve got Steve Marcus working for us.”

And since then, I’ve been honored to work at Steve’s side:

· At New York Telephone, he was our chief on-camera spokesman, because on TV and radio his directness and his concern for customers was so self-evident.

· NYNEX became Bell Atlantic, and Steve was the company’s international spokesperson for a time.

· When Bell Atlantic became Verizon, Steve was the company’s voice during our first labor negotiations and later, as most of you know him, he became the company’s chief editor and voice of sanity.

Over all this time, I’ve never heard a single negative thing said about Steve. This is almost impossible in today’s world – but it speaks to his work ethic and talent and the respect he shows everyone around him.

Steve, we’re going to miss you. You’ve earned our respect. I think the general reaction here today is, “Oh God, will everything be OK without Steve Marcus working for us?”

One final note… Steve would have officially worked for Verizon 30 years next month. But I think it’s especially fitting that he’s leaving before then.

There’s an old journalistic tradition of putting the number 30 at the end of every story that’s filed.

I think it’s symbolic that there’s not a 30 on Steve’s career at Verizon, because, Steve, all your friends here know that this is far from the end of your story.

Cheers to Steve Marcus…

Love Wins

Today's news was dominated by the Supreme Court’s decision authorizing gay marriage nationwide.

Brands were going crazy with rainbow-themed tweets (using the hashtag “LoveWins”), and corporate social media and marketing departments all over America were in a frenzy. A thoughtful post by Scott Meslow of “The Week” pretty much summed up my own thoughts, but better:

“Your own skepticism about these kinds of social media posts may vary. On the one hand, public support and advocacy isn't meaningless; when a cultural movement achieves enough open support, it can eventually lead to real, recognizable results. But there's also something a little unseemly about the self-congratulatory eagerness as these brands have jumped to associate themselves with an extremely popular social movement — and, of course, managed to shoehorn in pictures of their products while doing it. Corporations, remember: The next time something big and important and deeply meaningful to a bunch of people happens, you don't need to rush out a Photoshopped copy of your logo and slap on a hashtag. You can just, you know, say nothing.”

I had taken the day off and went to dinner tonight in Nyack, NY. From the porch of The River Club, my wife and I had a scenic view of the construction of the new Tappan Zee Bridge. Afterward, we walked around town, and even La Fontana Family Restaurant was proudly displaying a gay pride flag outside its doors.

On Facebook, all my social media friends have been praising the Supreme Court ruling. It’s amazing to me how quickly society-at-large has changed perspective on this issue. This change has surely been fueled by the power of technology, and social media, to expose all of us to a world bigger than ourselves. A high school friend posted, “Love first. Everything else later. In fact, everything else is meaningless without love.”

It turns out she was actually referring to another post from Fr. James Martin, editor of the Jesuit magazine America. I reprint it here, since it also pretty much sums up my own thoughts, but better:

No issue brings out so much hatred from so many Catholics as homosexuality. Even after over 25 years as a Jesuit, the level of hatred around homosexuality is nearly unbelievable to me, especially when I think of all of the wonderful LGBT friends I have.

The Catholic church must do a much better job of teaching what the Catechism says: that we should treat our LGBT brothers and sisters with "respect, sensitivity and compassion."

But God wants more. God wants us to love. And not a twisted, crabbed, narrow tolerance, which often comes in the guise of condemnations, instructions and admonitions that try to masquerade as love, but actual love.

Love means: getting to know LGBT men and women, spending time with them, listening to them, being challenged by them, hoping the best for them, and wanting them to be a part of your lives, every bit as much as straight friends are part of your lives.

Love first. Everything else later. In fact, everything else is meaningless without love.

Oh, For the Love of Instagram...

Of all the social media sites, my favorite -- by far -- has been Instagram. It's simple, it's immediate, it tends to be nurturing. The best part is that in order to play, you have to create something. Although it emphasizes visuals, I've come across captions that are clever and insightful -- and the mere fact of sizing up a scene and trying to think of a way to capture it has made me a better writer. I think.

Well, at least a better observer... and that's half the battle.

Sometimes -- from the unlikeliest of sources -- even art emerges from among the bright red hearts, playful emojis and hashtags, and the extraordinary variety of ordinary life.

Machiavellian PR: Deleted Tweets

If you really want a tweet to be noticed, should you delete it?

That seems to be the PR lesson from two recent news stories: Twitter's shutdown of a site that saved politicians' deleted tweets, and one CEO's Twitter musings in the midst of M&A speculation.

Since-deleted but widely-reported tweets may be as old as Twitter itself -- which is to say that images of Anthony Weiner have been burned into my memory since 2011. But as time passes, I wonder if there are Machiavellian PR practitioners (as opposed to the garden-variety Orwellian PR practitioners) who intentionally post and then delete tweets for the sheer impact.

You can tip the media by saying you're shocked, shocked, that something like this could be posted -- in much the same way that you can ensure coverage by having someone slip the media what would otherwise be a press release (remember those?) and calling it a "leaked document."

Since we've long (since March 2015) been living in the Periscope Age, we've already seen the rise of behind-the-scenes, often "unauthorized" videos too. None I've yet seen has been blatantly manipulative, but already my email inbox has been inundated with PR experts pitching me on tried-and-true methods of integrating Periscope into media plans.

Imagine being an editor or journalist (remember those?) in today's world. You already know that everyone you talk to has an agenda... but now everyone has a shiny new app or technology tool to try to fool you too.

In that sort of environment, how can PR people break through the clutter?

Here's one approach:

Treat reporters and editors like real people. Help them do their jobs. Invest the time and effort to become a trusted source.

You can still be honest, and be human, and be an unapologetic advocate for your company or your cause.

Not everything in the world is fake. Take, for example, the Arthur Ashe Courage Award that ESPN gave to Caitlyn Jenner just the other day.

Wait... what??*

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*- And it turns out this was true all along.

Three Images: One Night in New Jersey

I live in suburban New York. Which is another way to say, “I live in New Jersey.”

It does have its charms, though — many of which I post about at bvar.tumblr.com — and last night is a case in point.

Last night, I walked to my hometown’s annual carnival. It’s usually held in the field behind the police station, and I had fond memories of taking my daughters there when they were little girls.

Along the way, I saw New Jersey’s version of the popular Manhattanhenge phenomenon: Pink lawn flamingos placed by the local Boy Scout troop were in alignment with the setting sun…

Posted to a telephone pole nearby was the advertisement for the carnival. It was charming and cheerily yellow — like my memory of my girls — but the reality was a little less bright…

With the carnival moved to the Elks Club parking lot, I didn’t spend much time there. Without a child at my side, I didn’t feel as if I belonged. So I strolled to the nearby Little League field, and saw this…

One of the sponsors is Chico’s Bail Bonds. I know, it’s a“Bad News Bears” reference. But I love the image, especially with the American flag in the background and the slogan, “Let Freedom Ring.”

This is New Jersey, unfiltered.

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What Fresh Hell Is This?

Advice to My 22-Year-Old Self I Won’t Dare Post on LinkedIn

With everyone offering advice to their younger selves on LinkedIn this graduation season (#IfIWere22), I find myself -- in the middle of my years -- being tormented by Dante Alighieri.

With Dad at my college graduation

He has been following me these past few weeks, as if daring me to find some meaning to it all.

I’ll take that dare, Dante. You may have journeyed to Hell and back with Virgil, but I’ve recently journeyed to New York and Minnesota and Washington DC with my cell phone. While I haven’t pretended to find eternal truths, I’ve experienced some interesting moments.

By way of background: My 22-year-old self had already given up his boyhood dream of becoming an astronomer and moving to San Francisco. In fact, after all these years, I’ve never even visited San Francisco. But I have a wonderful family; my life has been filled with productive work; and, once, I wrote a book, riddled with so many Dante references that even its last word was “stars.”

So I offer here my own mini-trilogy of life lessons.

Lesson One: Magic Exists

Just last month, late on Holy Thursday evening, I took my 22-year-old daughter to a reading of excerpts from Dante’s “Inferno” at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. As one of the perhaps dozen actual readers of my book, my daughter had always promised that someday we would go to this annual reading together.

The Cathedral of St. John the Divine on Maundy Thursday

I was excited. Days earlier, I brushed up by listening to an audio of John Cleese reading Robert Pinsky’s translation of excerpted cantos from the “Inferno.” None of it resonated with me, however, and at one point near the end Cleese broke into the voice of a Monty Python character. For a moment, from the depths of Hell, I thought I heard that there was a penguin on the telly.

Undaunted, I drove my daughter into the city and marveled at the grand, cavernous cathedral. We excitedly took seats on uncomfortable wooden folding chairs right in the front row, and we waited for award-winning modern-day poets to interpret one of our favorite works of literature.

More than three hours later, we were massively disappointed. There was a lot of earnestness in the readings, but no heart. Three readers recited cantos in the original Italian, but there was no rhythm or expressiveness in their language -- no discernible tercets, no rhymes. As soon as the last reader said the word “stelle,” my daughter and I were out the door and headed to a dive bar off West 110th Street.

I was by far the oldest person there, and one of the few without a tattoo. My daughter and I sat under a framed photo of a sheep, and I ordered a very cold beer from very Irish bartender.

“What the hell was that?” I said to my daughter. “I got nothing out of that, and ‘The Inferno’ used to be my favorite. Is it me? A mid-life crisis?”

“That’s OK, Dad,” she said. “My friends and I are all going through a quarter-life crisis, so I can relate. Things change.”

Then she patted my hand tenderly, and the previous three hours disappeared… like magic. It was midnight on Good Friday, and I was never happier to be anywhere else, with anyone else, in my life.


Lesson Two: All Children Are Above Average

Fast forward a few weeks:

I’m in a living room in Almost Heaven, Minnesota, visiting my college friend’s elderly parents. We’re sipping coffee while the father reminisces about his military experience during the last days of World War II. Over his shoulder, there’s a framed lithograph of Dante Alighieri in profile, watching me.

Minnesota: almost Heaven

“What’s with the Dante portrait?” I ask after we leave, expecting an involved and quirky story.

“Oh, nothing,” my friend replied. “Mom just likes the print.”

I thought: That’s my point of view, exactly. After all these years, I’ve come to realize that I really don’t enjoy reading the “Divine Comedy”; I just like the thought of being someone who enjoys reading the “Divine Comedy.” I like to pretend I’m special, but I’m really just like everyone else.

There’s a redeeming paradox to this, however, and it had hit me right between my eyes when my first child was born.

Because, and although I do appreciate Garrison Keillor’s wit, that’s precisely a moment in life when you realize that everyone is special.


Lesson Three: The Sidelines Are Not Where You Want to Live Your Life

Now fast forward to last week:

I’m in Washington DC, and walking toward the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum on the National Mall. I have the morning to myself, and I want to rekindle my boyhood wonder about space and astronomy. However, I feel invisible -- an insubstantial shade, unconnected to the present-tense people ignoring me or walking right through me, heads bowed, watching their cell phones.

Ironically, there's no space here

At the entrance to the museum, a guard directs me through one door, but once inside another man angrily says that this is not an entrance. We all must pass through metal detectors, and the government security agents slow their disinterested movements as the lines increase in length behind me. The man who yelled at me is now trying to bring a knife into the museum in a plastic shopping bag, and as the agents rustle him aside I slip past unnoticed.

It’s crowded inside. There’s no open space in the Space Museum. Unsupervised children run all around. Everywhere I walk I am seemingly in the line of sight of someone taking a photo. It’s loud, and people crowd three-deep around the exhibits. Nothing about this place seems remotely enchanting. So I leave, disappointed, and rest on a park bench a half block away.

“Hey, get off my bed!” comes an angry shout in my direction.

An imposing, disheveled man is waving his finger at me.

“You’re sitting on my bed! I’m warning you: Get off!”

I do as he says. But before I turn to leave, I make eye contact with the homeless man, and we acknowledge each other’s existence. This surprises him. “I just needed to rest,” I say, “I meant no disrespect.”

This unsettles him. He looks at me cautiously and says, “I meant no disrespect either. I just get mad sometimes.” Then he offers me his hand and says, “I’m sorry.”

I shake it and say, “Good luck,” causing his eyes to turn vacant.

“I don’t believe in luck,” he spits in reply.


So I turn back toward the Mall -- currently under renovation, resembling a pit -- and walk headlong into the nearest museum. It happens to be the National Museum of African Art, and the featured exhibit is “The Divine Comedy: Heaven, Purgatory and Hell Revisited by Contemporary African Artists.”

My diamante

I laugh when I see the inscription above the entrance, and channel Sheldon Cooper channeling Dorothy Parker. “What fresh Hell is this?” I ask no one, because there’s not another soul in sight.

It’s a wonderful exhibit, dramatically staged on three levels, with 40 works from some of the best known and emerging artists from Africa… all addressing the themes of Dante’s epic poem.

I wish I could show it to you here, but as soon as I raise my cell phone, a security guard runs up to me saying, “No photos! No photos!” I wonder why. With no one else around, the three security guards -- Dante’s minions -- keep following me as I wander through the gallery.

So I look but don’t touch. I don’t take photos. I don’t complain. The art itself is spell-binding.

As I leave I spot a table littered with diamond-shaped cards, inviting guests to compose a “diamante” -- an unrhymed, seven-line poem -- about the exhibit. It’s a contest for visiting school children, but I fill one out myself, using words such as “stalking,” “threatening” and “paranoia,” and comparing the circling guards to dogs.

Needless to say, I don’t think I’ll win the contest.


I’m pretty sure, though, that my diamante put a stake through Dante’s fat heart and drove him from my own bed, because I woke the next morning with everything back in focus. That’s right, Durante, I’m no longer scared of you.

Tim Cook takes an iPhone photo at the 2015 GWU commencement

It was my daughter’s graduation day, in another grand setting: a wide and gentle bluff beneath the Washington Monument, where George Washington University had set up a temporary stage, carnival tents and thousands of folding chairs (#GWCommencement).

I had wanted to leave extra early, to make sure we had seats, but there was a group of us and I didn’t insist -- so we wound up standing in a gentle rain throughout the ceremony.

The commencement speaker, Apple CEO Tim Cook, looked down at me from a large-screen video monitor, as if in parody of Apple’s famous 1984 Super Bowl television commercial, and said: “The sidelines are not where you want to live your life.”

And yet there I was, literally standing on the sidelines at my daughter’s graduation.

Right then and there, I typed a to-do item into my phone. The due-date is a few years away, addressed to my future 62-year-old self.

It reads simply, “Plan trip to San Francisco.”


And the Point of All This Is...

The point, 22-year-old Bob, is that I can’t give you answers when all the questions keep changing. Even Dante didn’t know what he didn’t know. So show a little faith and, as Mr. Cleese and his colleagues often reminded us, always look on the bright side of life.

Life is messy. It’s forever unfinished, often complicated and sometimes extraordinary, and it renews itself with or without you. Everything matters, because every moment is unique.

Nothing is immutable; not even the stars.

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Images From Minnesota

This past week I was able to visit one of my dearest friends, who happens to live in Minnesota. Here's a collection of photos I took in and around Minneapolis and Lake Harriet.

(PS - I was also experimenting with how to include a slideshow in a Blogger post, and I found the answer on YouTube. Thank you, Katie Diebold!)

Happy Birthday, Harper Lee

July 13, 1960, New York Times

Today marks the 89th birthday of one of my favorite writers.

I've posted about Harper Lee before, but I was reminded of her again today when The New York Times tweeted an image of its original review of "To Kill a Mockingbird" from July 1960. It begins:

"ALL the magic and truth that might seem deceptive or exaggerated in a factual account of a small town unfold beautifully in a new first novel called 'To Kill a Mockingbird.' At a time when so many machine-tooled novels are simply documentaries disguised behind a few fictional changes, it is pleasing to recommend a book that shows what a novelist can accomplish with quite familiar situations."

This passage from the book itself has always been one of my favorites:

"Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town when I first knew it. In rainy weather the streets turned to red slop; grass grew on the sidewalks, the courthouse sagged in the square. Somehow, it was hotter then: a black dog suffered on a summer’s day; bony mules hitched to Hoover carts flicked flied in the sweltering shade of the live oaks on the square. Men’s stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three-o’clock naps, and by night fall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum."

When I first met my wife Nancy, she mentioned the teacake ladies as one of her own favorite images. I knew right then my life would never be the same.

It's a Bird; It's a Plane; It's a Miracle

“Is that Superman?” I asked, from the back seat of our car.

We were stopped at a light late last night, at the intersection of Court and River streets in Hackensack, and my question came during a lull in conversation.

My wife was driving, with our older daughter in the front passenger seat (she claims to get car sick when sitting in the back) and our younger daughter (our baby, who is over 21 years old) beside me in back.

“Yes, it is,” said my wife, matter of factly.

“Wait! What?” my younger daughter exclaimed.

“Something wrong, Maddy?” I asked, pointing to the second-story window of the office building on 60 Court St. “See, there’s a large cutout Superman near the book case in that office.”

“Oh,” Maddy said, “I just thought you had finally gone crazy.”

“Finally?”

“You have to admit, it’s a thin line,” she said. “What’s worse is that Mom wasn’t concerned at all. She simply accepted the fact that you had seen Superman.”

“Well, she’s used to me,” I said.

“I think that’s sweet,” said Cathy, the daughter who always cons me out of riding shotgun.

This had been the tone of our family conversation ever since we had retrieved Maddy from the train station in Newark a half hour earlier.

Through some quirk of fate – Maddy has a job interview in the city today, and Cathy wanted to crash somewhere closer than her apartment after an evening graduate class at Montclair State – both daughters were home last night.

So the four of us were together in the car for the first time in many, many months. Like a jazz band that resumes playing together after many years apart, it didn’t take long for our conversation to fall into the teasing, laughter-filled and jumbled rhythms of our younger selves, a dozen years ago, packed in a car and headed for vacation on the Cape.

I closed my eyes and enjoyed the music: Maddy was telling a funny story about trying to adopt a rescue Flemish Giant rabbit from an animal shelter in Canada; Cathy was talking about horses, of course, and working with autistic children; and everyone independently had somehow known about and played Google Map’s recently introduced Pacman game.

Source:Flickr Creative Commons

So it has occurred to me that during this Easter season some higher power really was in New Jersey last night. It circled the globe so fast it halted, and then reversed, the direction of Earth on its axis.

And as I have done every morning for half my life, when I left for work a few hours ago, I whispered goodbye to each daughter outside her bedroom door – and I told them I loved them.

Thank you, Superman, for turning back time for just one night. This morning, this crazy man was no longer whispering into any empty bedrooms.

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