Maria Stuart's Open Salon Blog

For a taste of 'la dolce vita,' visit your local coffeehouse

Thu, 3 May 2012 09:05:42 -0400

I love coffee. Descended from a long line of coffee drinkers, I come by my caffeine addiction quite honestly, and I use it to my advantage. When I finish my work at hand, be it writing a piece or cleaning the bathroom or getting dinner in the oven, I treat myself to a fresh cup of coffee.

I’m convinced it’s an Italian thing, embedded deep in my DNA. Venice — the birthplace of half my grandparents — was where the first European coffee house opened in 1683. One of my ancestors likely owned the place.

I believe coffee in general and latte in particular to be among Italy’s many, many gifts to the world, like art, architecture, cinema, fast cars, fashion, cuisine, opera and amore.

Truth be told, I think everyone envies Italians just a little bit. Maybe it’s the approach to life — la dolce vita — or the ability to create wonderful meals from whatever is on hand. Maybe it’s the simple, yet sophisticated fashion sense that combines style with comfort.

Whatever it is, the reason coffee shops selling lattes and macchiotos and Americanos and espressos are so popular is that everyone wants to be at least a little bit Italian, if even for a just a little while.

How else to explain the invasion of Italian peasant food into the most chi-chi of restaurants? Created from meager ingredients — corn meal, rice, and potatoes — polenta, risotto, and gnocchi were creatively elevated by Italians to the gastronomic equivalent of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

Keeping us caffeinated and feeling Italian is big business. Coffee is the second most-traded commodity in the world, right behind petroleum. In the United States alone, it’s estimated that there are over 110 million coffee drinkers, and together we’re drinking over 330 million cups of coffee a day.

Coffee shops have sprung up in Livingston County almost as quickly as fast food joints. While many customers opt for creative, coffee-esque offerings, hard-core drinkers like me scoff at the syrups, whipped cream and flavorings because real Italians drink their stuff one of two ways: straight and strong, or tempered with milk.

As a little girl, my mother drank the caffe latte her father made as part of her bedtime ritual. It was mostly milk warmed in a pan on the stove with a little coffee stirred in, served to her in a small bowl — a scodelle — that she cradled in her hands.

Those caffe lattes laid the groundwork for more grown-up coffee drinking.

My parents courted over coffee. My dad would take a streetcar clear across town from the west side of Detroit to the east to see his sweetheart. When he arrived at my grandparents’ house, he and my mom would sit in the kitchen and talk over cup after cup of coffee.

The streetcars became history after my parents married, but their coffee ritual endured. I have a beautiful image in my memory of the two of them deep in conversation, drinking coffee at the kitchen table in their own house, the one in which they raised me and my siblings.

There was always a pot of coffee at the ready in my mother’s kitchen; the drinking of it was always a social affair.

These days, when I visit my mother, she always asks if I have time for a “quick cup.” When I do, we sip and chat and get caught up.

That’s the essence of coffee: its sociability, its magic; without that, a cup of coffee is nothing more than hot, brown water. Think about it: Magic transforms a cup of brown water into something over which we get to know people, talk politics, share secrets, laugh and fall in love.

That why people love coffee houses. They provide a comfortable place to sip the latte for which I don’t feel guilty paying $4; after all, I’m buying a whole lot more than a cup of coffee. There’s music for my listening pleasure, people for my chatting pleasure, wi-fi for my working pleasure. There’s the communal caffeine buzz — and the chance to live like a native Italian for a bit.

Coffee houses provide a homey atmosphere — much like my mother’s kitchen — in which to be with other people or spend quality time with my own thoughts.

And $4 for a latte over which I’ll linger for a half hour is a whole lot cheaper than a plane ticket to Italy

Bon gusto!

I get a cardboard box, Dubow gets $32 million

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 09:03:10 -0400

It's taken me nearly three years to go through the remains of my newspaper career, a successful one that spanned nearly two decades.

My Journalist of the Year clock sits beneath a worktable. I keep another Journalist of the Year award by the front door; it’s a heavy, faceted, etched-glass piece that fits nicely in my hand, at the ready if I need to prop open a door or chase away an intruder.

Other things — gifts and notes from former readers, drawings from my son when he was tiny and sweet, photos of me with politicians and at community events — are stuffed into a basket. My Associated Press column-writing award leans against a stack of books. I can’t throw any of it away just yet.

Then I found a printout of the dumbest corporate memo ever written, the memo that illustrates perfectly the disconnect between corporate America and the rest of us.

The memo is from November 2008, the beginning of the end of 20,000 jobs (or about 40 percent of the workforce) at Gannett, the corporation that boasts USA Today and owns my old newspaper.

The layoffs, which began in late 2008, hadn’t yet hit Gannett's Michigan properties. We were working like fools, though, feeling lucky to have jobs when our counterparts in other places were losing theirs, feeling frightened we were next.

That memo, which landed across the corporation like a digital IED, informed us that Gannett’s chief executive, Craig Dubow, was voluntarily taking a financial hit to show solidarity with his workers.

In what Dubow likely considered a grand gesture and a great PR move, he gave up 17 percent of his base salary — about $200,000 — for a year. But rather than steel the troops, that memo instead showed us clearly the rocky road before us.

When that memo arrived via email, heads snapped and fingers flew across calculators. Then, the realization hit home that this feeling-your-pain gesture was made by someone whose base salary was $1.2 million.

The ugly truth, though, was that Dubow’s actual take-home pay, amped up with the corporate perks du jour — bonuses, stock awards and options, deferred compensation interest earnings — came to $7.3 million that year.

After that memo came out, Gannett workers across the country had to take a week off without pay. We were happy to do it, and we were happy to take up the slack it created; we were, after all, frightened about the possibility of losing our jobs. Two percent of our salary was a small price to pay to keep the corporation afloat and us working. Those who reported the news, sold the ads, designed the pages and put out the papers — the people who earned 5 digits, not 7 or 8 — sucked up what amounted to a 4 percent pay cut for the same year in which Craig Dubow essentially commanded his workers to watch him perform the magical feat of pulling $7.3 million out of a $200,000 hat.

Two corporate quarters later, just as I was to be furloughed a second week, my job was "eliminated." My career ended as part of my paper’s 10 percent reduction-in-force.

Since then I’ve remade my life. I’ve scraped along doing freelance work. I started this community website. I count myself among the luckier; I give thanks each and every day that I have a roof over my head and a wonderful husband with a job and health insurance.

Every now and then, though, I think about that memo. I’ve started and abandoned many a post about its “let them eat cake”-type dumb-assed-ness, its disastrous disconnect from the real world, but I've always backed away because I want to move forward. I don’t want to keep looking backward, really and truly, but it’s unavoidable sometimes, especially when reminders of corporate cluelessness smack me in the face.

The latest smack came when Craig Dubow took a disability retirement, reportedly because of a bad back.

His retirement package?

Thirty-two million dollars.

You read that right: $32 million.

I really try to keep a good attitude, to not be bitter or disgruntled about losing my job, to be the better person, but at times, especially when freelance work is scarce, payments are slow, and the cost of living my scaled-down life goes up, I need to blow off some pissy steam, and today, as I sorted through old performance reviews and memos, I can’t help but feel angry about the tale of two very different newspaper journeys.

One of those journeys is, of course, mine, a story similar to 20,000 others in Gannett-land. The other is uniquely Dubow’s, whose stunning retirement package did not go unnoticed.

Posts popped up like one by David Carr of the New York Times entitled “Why Not Occupy Newsrooms?” The piece calls Dubow’s time at Gannett a “disaster,” and accuses the corporation of “slicing and dicing its way to quarterly profits.”

I thought about what I could do with a sweet retirement package worth $32 million. In my fantasy, just like the ones in which I win the lottery, I give most of the money away after paying off my little house and setting aside enough for my kid to go to college. How much does one little family really need, after all?

I think about the irony of these two careers ending with Gannett in two very different ways: During his six years at the helm, Dubow chopped 20,000 jobs while the price of Gannett stock plummeted from $75 to $10 a share. Then, after making millions of dollars, he walks away with $32 million more.

Me? After a good career as a loyal, hard-working and innovative employee, I got a cardboard box and a week of pay for each of the years I spent at the paper.

The difference in the ends of these two careers illustrates the Grand Canyon divide separating the haves and the 99 percent. It’s why I’d help occupy Wall Street if I could afford the gas to get there.

The strength of this country lies not in the wealth and greed of its corporate citizens, but in the productivity and heart of its middle class. We are at our best as Americans when we are investing in ourselves, when we stand together for the greater good. This country is at its worst when it is obsessed with maximizing profits, financial Ponzi schemes, bundled derivatives, if-you’re-not–a-bazillionaire-blame-yourself. It’s the “greed is good” school of thought that strip-mines workforces in search of profits.

The choice is clear. Until corporate personhood and corporate greed is reined in, we’ll continue to founder, and more and more of us will get the ends of our careers handed to us in cardboard boxes.

He made me a Daydream Believer

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 18:02:21 -0500

As I ice my sore, 50-something knee (which makes me feel kind of old), news of the death of Davy Jones of the Monkees shoots me back in time to when I was a girl, back to when I first fell in love.

The first object of my affection was Davy Jones, the cutest member of The Monkees and just about every fifth-grade girl’s dream.

What was not to love?

Jones was cute, funny and non-sexually threatening. In the midst of the British Invasion, he had a lovely English accent and a mod haircut. He was nice, kind and wore cool clothes. He sang well, smiled a lot, and his soft, brown eyes made my little-girl heart flutter.

I loved him as really, truly and deeply as any 10-year-old girl could.

“The Monkees” was must-watch viewing in my family’s little brick ranch in East Detroit. The shows were fun and silly, the music pretty good. I owned all the band’s albums and still know all the words to all the songs. (It’s funny how I lose my keys and forget what I need from the market, but I always know the words to every song I’ve ever heard.)

1966 — the year “The Monkees” debuted on television — was full of music and protest and a dramatic change in the way we lived our lives. It was the year my dad took me to anti-war marches, John Lennon met Yoko Ono, Richard Speck murdered eight student nurses in Chicago, ground was broken for the World Trade Center, “Star Trek” debuted on television, and Walt Disney died.

It was a time when my life stretched out farther than my imagination could see, when anything and everything seemed possible, when I spent all my time reading books and writing stories and poems, when my spirit was all shiny and new.

It was the year I struggled to figure out why we were fighting in Vietnam and how I could look like the girls in the Yardley ads that aired during “The Monkees.”

It was also the year I first fell in love.

For that, I will always have a special place in my heart for Davy Jones and the 10-year-old girl I was.

As I sit with an ice pack on my knee, I mourn them both.

Did Chrysler Super Bowl ad take aim at Mitt Romney?

Mon, 6 Feb 2012 12:02:40 -0500

Chrysler’s ad, “Halftime in America” starring Clint Eastwood, stood out among this year’s Super Bowl lineup.

Beautifully filmed and powerfully written, it stars one of Hollywood’s most-famous (and, truth be told, most-liberal) Republicans. And its big-tent, we’re-all-in-this-together tone can’t be missed.

Chrysler traded the attitude of last year’s Eminem ad for the political, something I’ve never seen from a car company before. Watching it, I couldn't help but think that the spot was swinging big at Mitt Romney, a native son of Michigan. His father, Gov. George Romney, who is buried in the town next to mine, was an auto industry executive at American Motors Corp. Was Chrysler’s ad inspired in part by Mitt’s opposition to the federal bailout of the auto industry, Michigan's backbone?

As Romney leads the pack to become the GOP’s presidential nominee in November, he struggles to overcome a series of gaffes, and connect with regular folks — like the ones in Chrysler’s ad. Romney now must battle the Chrysler ad’s populist message, which came through loud and clear: We prop each other up and bail each other out when times get tough; we’re Americans, and Americans don’t let Americans fail flat-out.

But fail is precisely what Romney said he would have let the auto industry do.

Time shows us that bailing out the carmakers was the right thing to do. As well as protecting an important industry, it showed respect and compassion for millions of U.S. auto workers who would have found themselves gasping for breath had the industry gone bankrupt, like Romney would have preferred.

"We all rallied around what was right and acted as one because that’s what we do," Clint Eastwood says in the ad. "We find a way through tough times and if we can’t find a way then we make one. All that matters now is what’s ahead.

“Detroit's showing that it can be done, and what's true about them is true about all of us. This country can't be knocked out with one punch. We get right back up again, and when we do, the world's gonna hear the roar of our engines.”

While Chrysler’s ad gives voice to Detroit’s mettle, it also champions the thought that there are times when it takes a government to raise an industry.

Connecting via Words With Friends

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 12:01:17 -0500

My father was a terrible speller. A voracious reader with a brilliant mind, he had some incomplete synapse in his brain that kept him from stringing together letters correctly to make words. If he were alive, he’d never, ever understand my affinity for Words With Friends.

For me, fewer things are more delicious than playing M, U, Z, J, I and K tiles in double- or triple-word spots. Well-placed words like “QI” and “JO” make me swoon. Once I played “JOYRIDER” in a spot with double-letter and triple-word bonuses; I racked up over 100 points in what remains my greatest WWF move ever.

I love words. I love spelling, too. Unlike my father, I am a human dictionary; I innately know how to spell (well, most words, at least). After winning a goldfish in the fourth-grade spelling bee, I went on to become a newspaper editor. Need I say more?

Since I now work at home, I use WWF as a reward, meting out playing time for writing a blog post or finishing a freelance job.

Without that bit of self-control, I fear I’d stay in my pajamas all day long with the television on, spelling this word and that on my iPad, grousing about the letters I drew and talking to myself.

It’s something my father would never have understood.

This past holiday season was the sixth without him, even though I think about him every day. Usually it’s a fleeting thought: “Oh, that’s something Eugene would’ve loved,” or I’ll smile at something funny that he once said or did.

When we realized my father was dying, it was too late for conversations or anything more than holding his hand. I hope he knew that we were there for him. Sometimes I think about his last few days in the hospital, in a coma, on a ventilator, and I comfort myself with the thought that maybe, just maybe, it was the way he wanted to leave: He wasn’t big on sentimentality.

Shortly after he died, as I was waiting for a lunch date to show up, a man walking into the restaurant took my breath away. From a distance, it was my dad. The height, the bearing, the profile: it was him! But the closer he got, the more I realized I was wrong.

I burst into tears, right there in the restaurant.

Was the man the product of a daughter’s heart longing to see her father again? Or was it my father, all right, spiriting in for a brief moment to say hello?

Maybe it was grief, plain and simple.

My son’s elementary school principal told me children grieve in waves. I’ve learned that’s how we all grieve: Some days, big waves; most days, water lapping gently on the shore.

Big waves happen more for my mother, I think, than the rest of us. She and my dad were married a long, long time, and his death left a huge hole in her heart and life.

But as the two of us got caught up over eggs and coffee at a favorite breakfast place yesterday, my mother told me that she had finally packed up my dad’s bathrobe and his favorite shoes. The bulk of his earthly possessions had been passed along earlier, but those things held special meaning for my mom, and it was hard to get rid of them.

She teared up as she told me about folding the robe. I understood her emotions, but I was glad that now, nearly six years after my dad’s death, she had conquered another wave of grief, that she was ready to move forward a bit more.

So it was that I thought about my dad all day, wishing once again that we had had the chance for a more proper goodbye, to hear him call me “sweetheart” one last time.

I struggled to work. With Words With Friends as a carrot, I started dinner and emailed a freelance piece to a client, before gifting myself some playing time.

I zipped through the various games in progress waiting for me. The final one had me flummoxed.

“What am I going to do with all these vowels?” I thought.

There were three Es. And a U. I could deal with the U, but three Es? Three?

I scrambled the letters once to get a handle on creating a word. Then, I scrambled them again.

Something drifted into focus.

Could it be?

With my finger, I swapped the position of the last two letters, a T and an E.

I shook my head in disbelief.

E-U-G-E-N-E-T. Eugene, my dad’s first name; T for Tolot, his last.

EUGENET.

I laughed out loud, delighted that my dad had come by to say hello again.