Beau Jeff
Letters to the editor - published 12/08/2019 and 12/15/2019
Alakazam!
By naming this post Beau Jeff, I have subliminally caused you to think of the word “Bridges,” or, if that attempt was too subtle or you lack the proper frame of reference, I have now just made you think of it by blabbing my secret aloud.
Thus mind-contolled, please, step into my parlor…
As foreshadowed in a recent post featuring another two-letter series, this post presents a pair of related letters which I managed to get published by, essentially, arguing with myself. This was necessary (in my world where publication is soul sustenance) because there was no discernible reaction to my first letter. Besides, since the newspaper prints letters but not much longer commentary from plain old readers, the two-letter series is a backdoor way of getting in the equivalent of a multi-hundred-word column on a topic.
The first letter:
From The Anniston Star of 12/08/2019. Click this link to see the letter.
The second:
From The Anniston Star of 12/15/2019. Click this link to see the letter.
I noticed something odd about that second editorial page. Notice the IN THEIR VIEW column called “For whom the bridge tolls.” Notice also the classic “I’m a jokin’ good ol’ boy just about to bust out laughing” expression on the face of author Phil Williams. His column is a free-wheeling, jokey screed in support of that issue we all stay up late thinking about: bridge tolls. I have not seen its like, before or since, in this newspaper.
I honestly wonder if there was an editorial meeting, and they had both my second letter about bridge, and Mr. Williams’s column on bridge tolls, and the editor said, “OK, Marcy [there’s a Marcy in this fantasy], tell Skeets [the fantasy head typesetter] I said run the funny bridge letter. We’re done here. I’ve got to get that boil on my sit-upon lanced. You can reach me on my new rose-gold iPhone 12 cellular device. Oh, and cancel my meeting with those slackers Roger Ebert, Mike Royko, and not only Woodward but also Bernstein.” He patted the prinout of my letter and said, “The Opinion page is officially full now.” Then he clapped his rumpled fedora onto his head and limped out through the clamorous newsroom after first dodging Neil Sheehan and his damned hand truck with boxes of yet more documents, secure in the knowledge that the paper would soon be put to bed and that he would also finally gain blessed relief at the hands of a surgeon. [Some fantasies are more lavishly detailed than others.]
Sighing, Marcy shoves all the submitted letters into a folder and goes out and hands it to Skeets with a note that says, “Run the funny bridge letter,” and then she returns to her post outside the editor’s now-empty office. Ol’ Skeets picks through the folder and he finds the whimsical letter about bridge tolls, and it wrings a wry chuckle from his smoky ol’ gizzard—especially the line about brethren and sistren. That Phil Williams is the funniest thing since ol’ Archie Campbell and the story of The Pee Little Thrigs. And topical? You bet: Skeets agrees that no one north of Montgomery should be paying for a bridge down in Mobile, so it darn well better be funded through tolls! Yee-ha and a ha-ha! He gets it all set in the typesetting software from Digital Technology, Incorportaed (this being a fully modern fantasy).
Then he realizes there’s another bridge letter—some kind of apology to the bridge community. It seems to express utter confusion followed by some kind of revelation. It’s not funny at all—Archie Campbell wouldn’t take the time to spit on it, much less work it into his act. But Skeeter remembers that the editor is sometimes kind of peculiar, so maybe this was the funny bridge letter. Naw, it couldn’t be. But what if? He calls the editor’s office number but Marcy says the boss man is probably up on the table at the doctor, getting that nasty boil lanced—you know how he’s been walking funny for the past month—is this an emergency? Skeeter winces and says no, no, he thinks he can handle it. Covering all bases, he runs both bridge letters. Can’t have too much bridge humor. Skeets didn’t get to be head typesetter by being afraid to crawl out on a limb, publishially speaking.
Or maybe the editors just liked both items and ran both of them on purpose. It’s pointless for me to speculate, so I won’t.
Notice that in the second letter I claim to have received feedback which led me to change the opinion expressed in the first letter. That was a white lie. I received no feedback at all. In fact, both letters were a put-on, done for the sake of getting published and amusing the readers. But there was some truth to the letters.
The truth is, in December of 2019 I started paying attention to the bridge column in the paper. I thought maybe I could learn bridge by studying the column, and maybe things would just sink in. It didn’t work. There’s a special language used by bridge analysts, for their space in the paper is very limited (they should try blogging, where you can write unlimited words!) Between the notation and the specialized language and the expectation that the knowledgeable reader will assume all the things the column doesn’t tell you, you cannot figure out the game just by reading analysis of noteworthy hands. And so I fired off the first letter expressing my frustration (but actually for publication points) and then immediately set out to find out how to learn bridge. The second letter summarized my findings while also making fun of them, and the editor/Marcy/Skeets thing, or something like it, happened and my two-letter series made publishing history (in the sense that in the past [a historical time] they were published).
But my bridge quest was only beginning.
Rather than just read books and websites, I made the rare and astonishing (for me) decision to try to learn from people. There is an active bridge club in Anniston, and I found out that their clubhouse was in a strip mall just minutes from my house. So in late December I attended a Friday morning session, figuring I would just sit and observe. After all, at that time I had not read the first thing about how to play the game.
At the session, I met the club president and the director, plus several other members. Everyone was extremely nice and welcoming. And old. I had just turned 59 a couple of months before, but I was the freshest young thing in the room. I didn’t know it at the time, but it is well documented that bridge players tend to be old folks. Yes, there are some kids and young adults playing, and there are always efforts underway to attract more, but the reality is it is a pursuit of the aged. It is of course completely understandable that early Friday bridge club sessions would only attract retirees or people with flexible schedules (only two were not retired: a practicing orthodontist and an active real estate agent), but I observed the same prevalence of elders at a later, very well-attended Saturday session.
It turned out that that day was the very last day for the club at that location. They had rented the space for many years, but the rent was going up and the space was too small anyway. At first I was peeved, thinking that they might be moving miles away, but it turned out that they were moving to a Jacksonville State University extension building that I could see from my back yard if I was twelve feet tall! It is easy walking distance from home, and about a 2-minute drive.
But on that last day in the storefront location, the officers were bustling about gathering up things—mostly books—that hadn’t been moved to the new location yet. I saw a vast, shiny row of trophies across the back of the room and I asked whether the new clubhouse would have a proper trophy case. They laughed and said that was junk and they were discarding it. The president even grabbed one and gave it to me. It looks like Thing from The Addams Family, but still…trophy. I was so dazzled (a trophy, before even playing one hand!) that I didn’t think to ask if I could instead take one of the really gigantic, glorious trophies. A missed opportunity, but perhaps it is well that I did not put my greed on display, even for objects which were bound for a landfill. Trophies do, after all, represent achievement, so publicly claiming the largest, gaudiest one available, even if it is soon to be picked over by rats, would be offensive in the same way it is offensive to wear other men’s military medals. Oh, this little old Medal of Honor? Well, I don’t like to boast, but I rescued it from the flea market, don’t you see.
Besides, if you are a certain kind of egomaniac, you can actually order up any kind of trophy you want, award it to yourself with as much or as little ceremony as you like, and then enjoy it at home with no need to reveal to the world your sick need for golden, glittery affirmation. But that’s psychopath territory, trod only by the worst of the worst.
Anyway, back at the tables, it turned out that only seven people had shown up to play. They need at least eight to play duplicate bridge, because the scoring is not based solely on how you and your partner do in each deal, but on how you do relative to everyone else in the club, all of whom play the same deals in each session. For that you need two full tables, so eight people. They proposed to play some practice hands instead, and I was all set to watch and learn but they insisted that I sit in at a table. I was very intimidated at that prospect, but they were nice and they assured me that I would have guidance every step of the way.
And so I did! The director herself stood behind me and told me what was going on, and how to handle the cards, how to bid, and how to play. None of that was intended as a crash course from which I was supposed to understand the game (or the bridge column), but it was just a very nice hour spent immersed in the game and seeing the kind of people I would be playing with.
After that, I signed up for a bridge class that was offered by JSU, and which was taught by members of the bridge club at that JSU building so close to home. I also joined the American Contract Bridge League. I only got halfway through the class before the pandemic shut down the class and the bridge club. Geri and I have since taken a bridge class over Zoom, taught by a really good teacher in South Carolina. While we are not actively studying and playing right now, once the pandemic is over I plan to get back into it with real people, in person, again.
Now that I know a bit about the game, I think back to that first hour I spent playing at the bridge club, and specifically to the very first hand. The cards were dealt and even though I had only a few ideas about how the game was played, I knew that the bunch of aces and high face cards I held were pretty good. In fact, my partner and I wound up bidding and winning a grand slam. That means we took all 13 tricks, and since we had bid it that way we earned monster points. I gathered up my hand and tucked it into my pocket, saying that I was just going to play with that hand from now on. The bridge folks smiled graciously at my little joke.
Looking back, though, I smell a setup, and I also think maybe they were smiling for each others’ benefit. One thing I learned in the class is that in bridge education, they use special decks that allow the instructor to quickly set up teaching hands. Clubs also use a dealing machine that allows them to quickly deal out all the hands needed for a session, and that machine can also be programmed to yield any hand you want. Given both those facts, I now strongly suspect that this club must have had a few honeypot decks tucked away, all set up so that South would be dealt a monstrously good hand which, combined with his partner’s hand, would guarantee a grand slam. The helpful director would get South to be first to bid no trump, then the experienced partner would bid it up to a grand slam, then sit back as dummy and watch the newbie play an unbeatable hand, thus making him feel like the reincarnation of Charles Goren.
If that is the case, I think it’s a great idea—kind of like when you introduce a little kid to a difficult game, but you help him score the first few times out. Nobody falls in love with a sport because they like being expertly defensed and denied any points; they want to land a punch, hit a home run, make a basket, etc. I was probably going to be hooked on the game no matter what, eventually, but I must say being coddled along and receiving a trophy just for showing up and then being dealt the hand of the century—great recruiters, those bridge club people. I look back over that scene and I see that it conjures a certain Special Olympics vibe, and I was the only Special one, but you know what? I like the Special Olympics. I like the fact that these folks, undoubtedly disappointed that they didn’t get to play an actual session that day, stuck around to perform that bit of theatre just for me.
<madea>And I lurves mah little bridge trurphy.</madea>
And so, despite what I wrote in my bridge letters, bridge is a great game and it is quite comprehensible after just a little bit of instruction. From there it gets vastly complicated, but a great thing about it is that once you know the basics, you can play (and likely lose a lot) but still enjoy it while you learn more as you go along.
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Boing!
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