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Mom's
This was a button I made for the people who attended the first "Last Session" fan club convention, held in Denver in July of 1999. Stressed? I have no shame Confucius sez... I am a theatre critic OK...so it's a new "career", but if you're interested in reading my reviews, go here WHAT I'M READING When Peggy was here, we listened to a lot of John Denver music (which I don't think Steve has forgiven me for). I was so intrigued by so many of his lyrics that I wanted to read the story behind them, so borrowed the book from her. also House of Sand and Fog Lynn left this book for me; I'd just seen a discussion on Oprah about it and was anxious to read it. That's it for today!
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JUICE AND CRACKERS 31 January 2001 The soon-to-be-published new Davis Magazine, of which I have been the community news editor, may be defunct before the first edition ever rolls off the presses. We had a meeting last night--the publisher, the general editor and I. The publisher, whose brainchild this is and who has funded it to date, is a very wise businessman. He sees a need for a magazine in Davis. He realizes that three other Davis magazines have gone by the wayside, but he feels that he has a different level of expertise and knows how to sell ads and make a success out of businesses. It has all sounded very positive. Last night he confessed that while he has seen interest on the part of some potential advertisors, nobody is willing to put money into real ads (one guy even was standing there looking at his proposal and saying "I just wish there were some good venue for the advertising in this town...") I sat there listening to him and all I could think of was "juice and crackers." Juice and crackers is my philosophy of life. I developed it when the kids were in nursery school and it has stood the test of time. Let me share it with you. When the kids were little we joined a nursery school called Tiny Tots. It was a cooperative nursery school, which meant that family had one work day a week and one work weekend a month (usually the mothers worked at the school and the fathers kept the dilapidated building from falling down on the kids). The kids attended half day sessions, during which they would play indoor games or outdoor games, do craft projects, and have snack. Snack would be something like cookies and koolaide. All the kids loved it. The parents would prepare snack in the kitchen and serve it at break time in the middle of the session. One night a month there was a parents' meeting and at some point shortly after we joined the school there was a major fight about snack time. Koolaide and cookies were unhealthy for kids and someone was suggesting that we switch to apple juice and graham crackers, which the kids would also love, but which would be better for them. The koolaide and cookies contingent pointed out that apple juice and graham crackers were more expensive and our iffy budget would have to be stretched to the max in order to make the more nutritious snack available. The fight went on late into the night, with the budget conscious butting heads with the nutrition nuts. In the end, it was decided that the health of the kids was really more important and we would make the switch. So we did. Now the kids had graham crackers and apple juice, and the nutrition conscious parents were very happy. In another six months time we had a turnover of parents. One night at the parents’ meeting one of the new people stood up and announced that the school was in such financial straits that we should look at cost cutting measures. The parent suggested that one place where we could cut costs was in the snack area. Yes, the juice and crackers were nutritious, but they were costing too much money and we could save a lot if we gave them koolaide and cheap cookies. Again, the meeting went late into the night and in the end, the cost-cutters won and the kids went back to having koolaide and cookies. In the years we were at Tiny Tots, we discovered that this argument seemed to come around every six months. Every time there was a sufficient number of new people half of them would get this "wonderful new idea" of changing snack for the kids. And so every six months we would change snacks. I started looking at the world around me. Isn’t that what happens everywhere? Walt has been in his job for 40 years. He’s been around long enough to watch juice and crackers happen in his office. Every so often some new guy comes in, doesn’t do his homework, doesn’t know what has gone before and will come up with this wonderful new idea that will put the whole office in a tizzy, they’ll do what they actually did 10 years before, and then in another x months, someone else will realize that it’s not working and things will go back to what it was before, until someone else has this "wonderful new idea." We seem to reinvent the wheel over and over again. We work so hard to implement what we think are wonderful, innovative, needed "things" in the various places where we work or volunteer. Somehow we don’t build on the past experience of others, but we rush in, convinced that because we have the expertise we can make it work in a way that others have not. In the end, nothing gets changed and all that happens is that time has passed and we are back where we were in the first place. Look at Washington, D.C. How soon before women will be back on the streets demonstrating for abortion rights again? How soon before Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell will be a thing of the past and there will be witchhunts in the military again? In the case of the Davis Magazine, the publisher is discovering what all the other people who were convinced that Davis needed a magazine and that they knew how to do it better than the people who had failed discovered--Davis is a different sort of town. People are slow to buy advertising, inhabitatants already have their favorite restaurants / bookstores / clothing stores, etc. Merchants see no reason to spend exorbitant amounts on advertising. Without advertising, there is no point to a Davis Magazine. The Davis Magazine will go forward or not, depending on the additional time for gathering advertisements (we’ve agreed that a March date for start is no longer realistic). But you can bet that if it ends up being scrapped as an idea, in another year or so some other enterprising person is going to hit town, discover there is no town magazine and see how s/he can make a success of a magazine here because s/he knows how to make it work where nobody else has been able to do so.. Reduced to its least common denominator, it’s juice and crackers all over again. |
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Some pictures from this journal |
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Created 1/31/01 by Bev Sykes |
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