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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 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 just posted a message on her Discussion page because it’s the Official Publication Date (OPD) of “Piece of Work” (POW) and she doesn’t know what to do with herself. An OPD doesn’t really mean anything anyway: it’s just an arbitrary date a publisher picks within the month of a book’s publication. The problem is, everyone thinks the OPD is like a birthday, which means they think something special is supposed to happen, which means you start to think something special is supposed to happen even though nothing special ever really happens on OPD (at least, not to Laura). And so, because of all of this expectation (from others, and from herself), she’s kind of at a loss for what to do today. Which is why she posted a message on her Discussion page asking people to help her figure out what to do today and how to distract herself from the oppressive weight of expectation (OWE) — or, the Weight of Oppressive Expectation (WOE) — of OPD.

Which brings her to the issue of “confusion” — Laura actually wasn’t sure whether she should post that message on her Discussion page or on her Brant. Laura really isn’t clear on any of this website stuff, and this is a perfect example. Since it seemed to her to be more of a “discussion” type of issue — it was, in fact, was a direct solicitation — a plea, even — for a dialogue, Laura naturally thought instantly of posting it on her Discussion page. But what about the Brant? Doesn’t the Brant have a discussion-like feature — the “comment” — to make it conversational and dialogue-ian as well? Since she thinks the Brant, too, can be used as a forum to discuss her personal and professional issues, she decided to post the same message — a paraphrased version, anyway — here as well.

And so, for anyone who didn’t visit her Discussion page, please try to think of a topic of conversation or something Laura could do today. Thank you.