Laura’s “Recovered” Memories
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Laura often refers to herself as a Recovering Publicist, given the fact that her early training as a highly-neurotic trained-anticipator-of-all-bad-things-that- could-possibly-happen-to-make-anyone-late-for-anything (i.e., traffic, weather) and creator-of-endless-suggested-back-up-plans (i.e., leaving an hour earlier; leaving 8 hours earlier; leaving the day before; why not just move there so we’ll already live there when we have to be there, etc.) has been very hard to shake.
OK, let’s be frank. Laura was so traumatized by her job and her subsequent cold-turkey quitting of it that in the process of recovery she had “blocked out” many disturbing work-related memories (which, at the time, accounted for most of her frontal lobe’s memory bank).
And so it was when she recently started to undergo deep psychiatric brantalysis (branting four to five times weekly in a stream-of-consciousness way) that some of those “bad memories” were “recovered.” Additional memory-jogging was achieved in other ways — in this particular case by Laura coming upon some (copyright infringementable) photos of Ina Garten at a recent book signing.
Laura’s particularly impressed by the top photo where clearly someone - a bookstore employee probably (she’s wearing some sort of pin) — is standing next to the signing table and she is not sweating and shaking and looking incredibly stressed out and miserable and harried and tormented. In fact, that (probable) bookstore employee looks incredibly relaxed, as if a really nice person(Ina Garten) has offered to do the bookstore and a few hundred people a big favor (sign their books) in return for the big favor this bookstore and these few hundred people have done for her: buy her book(s)!
Laura assumes that everyone assumes that that’s how all booksignings are — fun — and certainly Laura hopes that her own personal booksignings are like that — but what people perhaps don’t realize is that most big booksignings like those for the Barefoot Contessa where hundreds and hundreds of devoted fans wait in a line that snakes out the door of the store and down the street are incredibly tense and stressful and full of anxiety. Laura writes in her latest book (caution: shameless self-promotion coming!) Piece of Work about how the recently back-to-work Julia Einstein feels like she’s going to die everytime she has to be with the angry bitter former-star-of-stage-and-screen has-been Mary Ford at one of her celebrity fragrance in-store events because Mary is always screaming at her to either move faster or move slower, talk louder or talk softer, and to move the perfume boxes she’s trying to sign for each customer/fan at some mysteriously perfect pace which will finally make Mary shut the fuck up for a minute or two.
Now, Laura doesn’t want to imply that all the famous-author booksignings she supervised as a publicist were as bad as the one described above and (oops! cheesy cliche here!) that was woven into the fabric of her novel, though the one described above is sort of how a lot of the ones Laura supervised went. Especially the ones with the author on whom (faction alert!) she based her Mary Ford character on.
In her next post Laura The Former Publicist will tell a funny story about spending a week with Julia Child in Washington DC helping Julia Child promote one of her cookbooks. The story itself isn’t what’s so “funny” — it’s what happened after that week she spent with Julia Child…
