© 2014 Peter W. Yaremko. All rights reserved.
Published by
Pamet River Books
Box 1160
Truro, Massachusetts 02666
http://www.pametriverbooks.com/
The essays in this ebook appeared in a slightly different form in the author’s blog, http://paradisediaries.blogspot.com, during 2014.
ISBN: 978-0-9909050-0-4
Introduction
When I set out to publish this collection of essays from my blog, I did so with trepidation. Because when writers sit to write, we are signing up for the private agony of sending forth into the world a child conceived of our creativity. We are desperately apprehensive about how our offspring will fare before a judgmental public. What was it that Mary Cheever said about her husband, John? “His was the loneliness of a writer, when he would sit by himself working alone. They all complain about it. It’s not a social craft.” But when your writing works—when it’s good and true, to paraphrase Hemingway—there’s nothing more gratifying.
When I launched my blog in 2013, my intent was to examine a single year of living in two of the planet’s accepted paradisiacal locations—Cape Cod and Vieques, Puerto Rico—and shed some light on the experience and perhaps share some humor about it. The blog is titled Paradise Diaries. It was inspired by my almost 20 years in a home overlooking lyrical Cape Cod Bay and my more recent experience in a home 300 feet up, atop a Vieques mountain. To my way of thinking, neither place exactly fits what the ancient Greeks meant by the word paradeisos—a royal park. But my wife and I operate successful bed-and-breakfasts in each place, so these obviously qualify as paradise: people pay good money to be there.
Jazz composer and musician Bert Jackson says in one of the blog essays, “Listening to jazz is like watching a movie for the second or third time. Each time, you see something you didn’t notice before, and there are lots of aha moments.” I found that when I lived my life the first time, there were many things I didn’t notice. It was only in replaying those scenes—as I sat each week to write the essays—that I had the aha moments.
The act of writing is seldom predictable. Like a feisty stallion, writing has a mind of its own and often gallops when you want to canter, veers right when you want to go left, and leaves the writer wondering who really is in control of the journey. So a good number of the essays draw upon my career working for and with corporations.
I discovered early that the only passable skill I have is writing. So I started out in newspapers—the Daily News in New York City and the News-Tribune in New Jersey. Great, fun work. Bad pay. So I dove into the bluest blue-chip company I could find—IBM. Then on to the global electronics giant, Siemens. And finally my own corporate communications agency, Executive Media.
For someone who had to repeat Algebra II, I had an inordinate number of high-tech clients over the years: Avaya, Cadence, Cisco, Citrix, Digital Equipment Corporation, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi, Lexmark, Lucent, Motorola, Polycom, Symantec. For these companies and others, I wrote or produced more than 500 product launches, sales rallies, customer events, press conferences, management meetings, board meetings and recognition events throughout North and South America, Europe and Asia–Pacific. The speeches I wrote are too numerous to tally.
The portfolio of corporations I worked with was led by the best and brightest to be found in any business setting. These companies’ executives— as well as the other people I write about here—possessed their own special light that shone upon, revealed and brightened my own life. This is the common denominator of these essays. It’s as Elisabeth Kubler-Ross said—and whom I quote in “Queen of the Fairies”: “People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within.”
So this collection of essays is dedicated to the men and women for whom I’ve written and about whom I write. Some are named, many are not. But each had unique value. Each revealed a light from within.
Contents
Introduction
Pre-Paradise
Being a Little Off Can Pay Off
“I Am Spiderman”
Corporate Hara-Kiri
When the CEO Sees Red
How You Get to Be Chairman of the Board
Starship Commanders
Magic to Do
Yellow Brick Road
Seas
Islands
Starstuff
The Miracle Swim Master of Sarasota
A Boy Named Josh
Goddess of the Hunt
Making Life Work Best
Cape Cod
Meet the Savage Goddess of Cape Cod
Dark
Light
The Ladder of Love
Birds of Paradise
When in Command
The Lady of the Dunes
Queen of the Fairies
Stealing Paradise
This Paradise Is the Bomb
Top Ten Things I Didn’t Do on Cape Cod This Summer
Trees from Hell
Brain Massage
Vieques
Gateways
Lady and the Tramp: Pooches in Paradise
Writing Barely
Tormenta
Dove Stew, Anyone?
“N1DL”
Tapping Vinny Tozzi
Another Similarity
My Bout with Gout
The Real World
An Amazing, Awesome Blog
What’s Not in a Name
Culture of Competition
Un-Maintenance Men
Lighting the Match
Grandma’s Lost Donuts
WTF!
The Last Time Ever I Saw Your Face
Chasing Dust
Let’s Strangle Siri!
Time after Time
Lonely or Alone?
On Time
The Sounds of Silence
Will I Be Around?
Pre-Paradise
Being a Little Off Can Pay Off
When I was a speechwriter at IBM, my wife and I used to take our two daughters to Cape Cod for a month every August. The reek of fried seafood so heavy you could smell it from the car as you drove by the clam shacks. Sand everywhere. And the sweet joy of observing your little girl’s face prune up at her first mouthful of ocean brine. During one of those vacations, I was dozing on Coast Guard Beach (perennially picked as one of the world’s Top 10) when a voice woke me: “I had to see for myself that there is such a thing as a joke writer for IBM.”
I opened my eyes to see my four-year-old, Wendy, standing over me with a nice-looking young guy in tow.
“She told me her father is a joke writer for IBM,” he said. “I just had to meet you.”
Now, those were the days when IBM’s mostly male employee uniform was vested, pinstripe suits, white shirts and fourteen-pound, wingtip shoes. The guy my daughter befriended on the beach that balmy day couldn’t fathom that a mega-conservative outfit like IBM paid people to write laugh lines to perk up executives’ speeches.
Oddly, I myself had never thought of my work as odd. But as Philip Larkin once noted, “You have to distinguish between things that seemed odd when they were new but are now quite familiar, such as Ibsen and Wagner, and things that seemed crazy when they were new and seem crazy now, like Finnegan’s Wake and Picasso.”
Sure enough, when I think about it, just about everything I’ve done with my life fits most people’s definition of odd:
• Going to work for newspapers just when broadcast journalism was ascendant
• Getting married without a penny in the bank
• Staying married for 49 years
• Starting my own business without a penny in the bank
• Attempting novels without ever attending a writers’ workshop
So this book is offered as inspiration and demonstration that if I was able to retire to a live-aboard sailboat and fancy residences on Vieques Island and Cape Cod, then you, too, can make being a little off pay off. Not that you’d ever want to be a speechwriter. Ask a little kid what they want to be when they grow up. They’ll never say “speechwriter.” Is it any wonder? Consider this from the May 18, 2009, New Yorker regarding a Malaysian politician: “Anwar was removed from the cabinet. He was charged with corruption—and with sodomizing his speechwriter—and convicted.” Incidents like this help explain why speechwriting pays so well. The pay could be even better if buggering a reluctant speechwriter qualified as billable time. Still, young people seldom ache to become speechwriters.
If you write speeches for CEOs of blue chip corporations, you have to write anywhere and at any hour of the day or night. To keep your job, you learn to do it and do it well. I’ve written corporate speeches and shows in places most would consider paradise spots: Bali, Maui, Buenos Aires, Honolulu, Orlando, Acapulco, Puerto Rico, Rio de Janeiro, Vegas, Cabo, to name some. And I’ve done it on planes, trains and ships ... poolside and on the beach ... hotel rooms and hotel balconies ... on the floor ... at the dining room table ... in bed ... at the kitchen counter ... on the backyard deck. Even in my office. I’ve never written in the bathroom, but I have used its mirror to watch myself recite the speech that I’ve drafted to see if the words slide out of the mouth easily.
I once flew coast-to-coast coach while the CEO—up in first class—sent glass after glass of Chardonnay back to energize me as I drafted the speech he would give the next day.
I often flew in the corporate jet to work on speeches for a board chairman. We sat across from each other at a small table, with me facing the rear of the plane. I was Ginger Rogers to his Fred Astaire—backward and close enough to knock knees.
But the absolute worst place to write is in the second row of a corporate meeting. You are sitting right behind your executive client, who is waiting his turn to give his speech. The speaker onstage tells a joke, and your client half-turns to you and whispers, “Give me a line.” In seconds, you must come up with a riposte that your client can deliver when he goes to the lectern—to demonstrate what a quick wit he is.
Still, speechwriters seem to materialize like mushrooms on a misty morning. Where do they come from? Usually, a diffident journalist or public relations staffer with passable brain bandwidth is “called upon” to write a speech for a client. Ta-da! A speechwriter is born.
Speechwriters are instrumental in articulating an organization’s platforms. They put ideas on paper for a client to react to, adapt and adopt as his or her own. But many clients take their speechwriter’s first draft and run with it without adding much thought of their own. I was so struck by an experience with a newbie CEO that I fictionalized it in one of my novels (not yet published):
Lauterbach needed a motivational message for his first speech to his company’s employees as their new chief executive. After their exhausting effort to develop and launch the cluster product, the rank and file—more than 600 of them—had to be re-energized for the implementation phase.
“The story you wrote about me in the newspaper made me look like a leader,” he said to Jenny. “If you can get that perception across in my first talk to the folks, that will give me a great head-start.”
Jenny asked him what he wanted to cover in the speech.
“Why don’t you write something for me to look at?”
With that, he ended the brief meeting. He had given her no direction, no idea of his strategy for Network Dynamics, no call to action.
“What made them hire this guy to run their company?” Jenny asked herself.
A week later, she was in his office for their scheduled 7:00 A.M. meeting. While he read her draft, Jenny sipped coffee from a china cup. She was too nervous to mix in sugar and cream, the way she usually drank it, and the black coffee scalded her tongue. Like the last time she was in his office, not a single file folder, notepad or sheet of paper was on the desk except for her draft. She watched him turn each page of the speech as he read. He got to the last page, scanned it and said, “This is good. I can go with this.”
What do you mean, “go with this?” she thought. I made everything up! Don’t you even want to discuss it? Add some ideas of your own? Change some words, at least?
She put her thoughts aside and said, “I’m happy you’re comfortable with it.”
As she exited the building, Jenny was embarrassed to remember that she had left her half-empty coffee cup on his desk, complete with lipstick smear.
Even university commencement speakers touch on the idea of being a little off, though they don’t phrase it that way.
Apple CEO Tim Cook spoke at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business in 2013 and counseled the MBA students, “You should write the rules. If you follow in a formulaic manner, you will wind up at best being the same as everybody else.”
Jon Lovett, a former speechwriter for Barack Obama, told Pitzer College graduating students:
There are moments when you’ll have a different point of view because you’re a fresh set of eyes; because you don’t care how it’s been done before; because you’re sharp and creative; because there is another way, a better way. But there will also be moments when you have a different point of view because you’re wrong, because you’re 23 and you should shut up and listen to somebody who’s been around the block.
But unwritten rules are, I believe, more powerful than the written. Violate them and you’re dead man walking.
When I was 23 and a newbie at IBM, my manager counseled me that I’d never get ahead because “your hair’s too long and you walk too slow.” I started going to a hair stylist, bought a clutch of crisp white shirts and picked up the pace. A management spot magically opened where performance alone hadn’t done it.
My turn to divulge the unwritten to a newbie came when I was manager of speechwriters. My rule for hiring was to recruit from the Washington, D.C., pool because speechwriters accustomed to the 24/7 cauldron of the national political arena proved to be quite comfortable operating in the tense climate of the chairman’s office. One of my recruits had been speechwriter for a senator. Another for a cabinet secretary. Both were buttoned up, seasoned pros. But my next new hire—a former reporter for a national news magazine and then press secretary to a Midwestern senator—showed up on his first day at IBM in a sports jacket.
IBM had no written rules about dress. So I took the new man aside, asked him to look around, and suggested, “You might feel more comfortable in a suit, like everyone else is wearing.”
He went home at lunchtime, changed, and went on to a fine career.
People had fun at IBM’s expense because all the men wore vested suits, white shirts and sincere ties, and women mimicked the look with pinstripe suits, white blouses and bow-knotted scarves posing as neckties. But at Apple’s 2013 World Wide Developers Conference, there seemed to be an unwritten dress code at work among the executive presenters: they all wore long-sleeved casual shirts untucked over their slacks.
It ain’t easy, maneuvering a career between the Scylla and Charybdis of written and un-written rules. I myself defer to the late Christopher Hitchens, that rough-and-ready correspondent who lived as he liked: “Be careful about up-grading too far to single-malt Scotch: when you are voyaging in rough countries it won’t be easily available.”
“I Am Spiderman”
I once wrote speeches for the head of an IBM operating unit whose go-to line when he screwed things up was “The staff let me down.”
It was indicative of the low regard he had for the people who supported him.
An example. I was in his conference room with his chief of staff one afternoon, reviewing a draft, when a fly landed on the speech. The CEO whacked it with his bare hand and killed it. Then he flicked the fly’s carcass with his thumb and forefinger—launching it right into the chief of staff’s eye.
“Did I get ya’?” he asked, gleaming with pride at his marksmanship as the staffer daubed his tearing eye.
I enjoyed a moment of schadenfreude once when I watched Barack Obama standing embarrassed at the lectern because his staffer had failed to place the speech there beforehand.
Two things spoke to me as a speechwriter:
• The edge in Obama’s voice when he twice called out to his “people”—which betrayed the pique beneath his attempt to make light of what was happening
• The speechwriter tripping as he dashed onstage to deliver the missing manuscript
When executives are on the podium, it’s theater. It’s their face that everybody’s watching. The last thing a speechwriter wants to do is cause embarrassment.
On the other hand, Obama himself has owned up to the fact that “As president you’re held responsible for everything, but you don’t always have control of everything.” It was a reminder of my own experiences with a couple of corporate speakers.
In one speech, the CEO promised his sales force that he would resolve the supply problem they were having with their manufacturing plant in Raleigh, North Carolina. I had given him a quick humor line to underscore the unacceptable performance of the manufacturing unit: “It’s gotten so bad, they’re telling Raleigh jokes in Poland.”
Back in those days, neither the CEO nor I was sensitive to the fact that we were poking fun at the manufacturing people at the expense of employees of Polish descent. He got complaints about that line. But he took responsibility for the words I had put in his mouth. Our relationship remained strong, and I learned a big lesson—nothing teaches responsibility more than having someone put their trust in you.
Then there was the day a chairman of the board mistakenly started to deliver the wrong luncheon speech. His assistant had put into his three-ring briefing book as background another speaker’s speech. The chairman read the entire first page before he realized his mistake. He simply turned to the correct tab, where he found his speech, and started over.
Afterwards, he returned to his office and stayed behind closed doors for the rest of the afternoon. I don’t know what he did in there, but he must have had a long, long talk with himself. Maybe it went something like Peter Parker’s concluding soliloquy in the first Spiderman movie: “With great power comes great responsibility. This is my gift and my curse. I am Spiderman.”
Corporate Hara-Kiri
Watching Beyoncé shatter mirrors in Pepsi’s “Live for Now” commercial reminded me of the night my wife become a casualty of the Cola Wars that have been ongoing since the 1980s.
Jo Anne was working as an event manager at a Pepsi show in Palm Springs. If you’ve ever produced an event for one of the warring cola companies, you know the de rigueur routine Jo Anne followed. She made sure the food and beverage department served only Pepsi drinks at meals, and she directed soda and snack machines throughout the venue to be switched over to Pepsi products. If there was an exposure in the plan, it was the banquet act—the Beach Boys. Their rider stipulated Diet Coke. Period. So the show team hand-wrapped the boys Coke cans in colored paper to conceal the names and logos.
Everything went swimmingly until the meeting ended—when client kudos were anticipated.
As soon as the hundreds of happy Pepsi sales reps filed out of the ballroom, the show crew began breaking down the set.