*

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 posts these photos to see if any of her readers can figure out exactly what she finds so amazing about the moments captured in these snapshots. But actually Laura doesn’t want to wait to post her question, then have a few people read it — all of whom, definitely would, even if they knew the answer, be too shy to post a comment. So Laura’s going to make that a rhetorical question to save herself and everyone else a whole lot of waiting and expectation and inevitable disappointment — in other words, The Weight of Oppressive Expectation (WOE) — and go straight to why she lit upon these photos of Ina Garten’s booksignings as being so fucking unbelievable remarkable:

?

Because Ina Garten and her book-buying fans seem to be relaxed and enjoying themselves and having a lovely lovely time and the author is not screaming at her publicist for that publicist to shut up or to move it or to get with it!

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…

*

Laura is thrilled to see that the nationally syndicated column “Ask Amy” has mentioned Laura’s website and brant after running a letter about breast cancer. Laura is already getting lots and lots of really positive comments about her “Breast Brants” and about her new book on Failure, and, oddly enough, about her “Just Jimmies” post (who knew there were so many rabid Brigham’s Ice Cream fans out there who still remember the days of yore?)

To all her new readers — Welcome! And please bookmark the brant! Or, if you’re just here for the day, thanks for passing through! For her regular readers, click here for the link to the “Ask Amy” column:

Laura promised, at the end of the summer (or at the beginning of the fall), that she would for Halloween post a piece she wrote two years ago (or was it three? Laura can’t remember. Laura can’t remember anything these days) for the New York Times about trying to make one of the incredibly complicated craft projects in Martha Stewart’s now defunct catalogue, MARTHA BY MAIL. Laura’s not ashamed to admit that she used to love that catalogue and purchased many truly excellent items from it and misses it to this day. But that is life, Laura knows. Here today; gone tomorrow. Which is true, but which is also neither here nor there.

Bad cliches notwithstanding, because the Haunted Gingerbread Mansion project took so long to build, the piece she ended up writing was way too long to run in it’s entirety in the Styles section, so it was, the following year, run on the Op-Ed page in an extremely abbreviated version. Laura always liked The Long Version of the piece much better since she felt that it really conveyed the hellish real-time feeling she experienced while in the thick of the project.

And so, here it is.*

Laura hopes you like it.**

And Laura also hopes you have a great Halloween.

(*Because it was written for the New York Times, Laura maintained a tone of journalistic integrity. Had she not written it for the New York Times, there would have been a lot of swearing.)

(**If you get bored, you don’t have to read the whole thing. Just skip ahead. But please don’t leave a comment that you got bored and skipped ahead.)

For those of you who have just arrived at Laura’s Website, you might want to read her Homepage and her Bio to see what she’s all about these days (self-promotion).

Up until now, Laura considered such public displays of self-absorption — PDSAs — completely unseemly and she refused to engage in anything which could, even remotely, be considered self-promotional. Of course, when invited to do a reading, or attend a book group, or give a lecture, Laura would always gratefully accept. Why? Because she hadn’t generated the attention; the attention had come to her.

But when it would come time to generate attention to herself for herself by herself — the way all authors are supposed to — she refused. Which is why, at this late date, 2006, years and years after every single Tom Dick and Harry has their own website and blog and newsletter and podcast, she is finally joining the pack.

Yet even though she is indeed joining the pack, Laura refuses to follow the herd. This has always been both a positive and a negative in her life. Because instead of just blogging away on a blog, she felt the need to create her own specialized forum of communcation — one she has renamed BRANT. Brant, she feels, better sums up exactly what this sort of activity is really all about — bragging and ranting — and now that she has her own brant she will be branting away as much as possible.

And so, Laura welcomes you to the introductory post for her brand new brant. She hopes you like it! (But if you don’t, please don’t tell her. The last thing she needs right now 24 days away from publication is a whole bunch of “honesty” from people she doesn’t even know. That would be a huge buzz-killer.)