J'Accuse

 

Centre spread by Michael Piaskoski - the Hearsay Sex Issue 

Before I continue the tale of the small student publication and the giant downtown law firm, I thought I'd mention that a reader of this blog told me that she thought the whole idea of a sex-themed student humour magazine was utterly irredeemable. Talking about sex in the workplace is a form of sexual harassment.

She's right. 

But, in 1992, just to prove we had a ways to go, while I was uncomfortable with the concept, it also had the allure of the taboo. As I told the Jewinskis: "I am, by most accounts, a fairly nice person, with only a few, very small, evil bones in my body."

Those evil bones did not help me with my brief chat with the Dean on that dreadful Wednesday morning. He didn't want to talk over the phone. He wanted to meet in person. The only time we could do that was at 3:00 p.m. on Friday, so I would have a full two days to figure out what else I might do besides pursue a career in law.

After the Dean hung up, I called my fellow editors, gave them the good news about the meeting on Friday, and then went to class.

Back at home around 4:30 p.m., I saw I had four messages on my phone. Three messages were from my co-editor Mike Dunleavy, who said in his first message that he had worked at Fasken Campbell Godfrey as a summer student just a few months before. 

In his second message Mike said he would call the firm himself. He recorded in his third message what he found out:

We decide to put a raunchy picture of Madonna on the cover, and say "SEX is sponsored by Fasken Campbell Godfrey" at the same time that the law firm is undergoing an emotionally-charged sexual harassment policy review and is worried about being seen to have sexist hiring and promotion practices.

The conclusion drawn by the firm was that the editors of The Hearsay had deliberately chosen to mock them.

The fourth message on my phone was from a friend of mine who was articling at Fasken Campbell Godfrey. I called her back first.

She confirmed what Mike had said in his message. The minute our obligatory sponsor's copy showed up at the firm, rumour ran rampant, hysteria flew high.

At the time, to me, this was both terrifying and preposterous.  Whatever else you could say about the questionable content and dreadful writing in The Hearsay, there was no deliberate intention to mock the firm. We had no knowledge of their internal policy reviews ... but I wondered, when I learned Mike had worked there, if we could deny that.

Still, guilt needs to be proven. I felt in my few, small, evil bones that the best way to deal with a tempest in a teapot was to let it blow itself out.

So, even though Mike called and offered to apologize to the firm, and even when my friend called me again and said I could apologize, I stood my ground. I said we had nothing to apologize for. The intended audience of the magazine - the students - had seen nothing wrong with it; our motives were innocent. The law firm over-reacted. In a week none of this would matter.

Of course, the meeting wth the Dean was less than two days away and, according to my friend at the firm, my co-editors and I would be talking to the formidable threesome of the Dean, the senior partner at the firm and, god help me, the President of the Law Society of Upper Canada.

To give you an idea of my raw nerve in the face of such absurdity, this is what I said to my friend:

"Let them bring on the big guns if they want to. I'll just let them keep talking until they convince themselves they are being unbelievable asses. It'll also give me a chance to do some networking. How many opportunities am I going to get to meet the President of the Law Society?"

Next week, the thrilling conclusion to "two days that went down in the history of the firm as the 'least hours billed in a 48-hour period'." 

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Not my puppy.

 

  

Innocent Enough

The Hearsay had a three-person editorial team, because one person working alone wouldn't have been able to get themselves into enough trouble.

My co-editors were Mike Dunleavy and David Kaufman. Mike was a 3rd-year student whose sense of what was funny is illustrated by his sex advice column for law students:

Some Hearsay articles were thinly veiled slanderous attacks on recognizable people, which I assume (I didn't take Secured Transactions) is the case here. 

David was a 2nd year student whose contribution to editing the Hearsay was to sometimes write one article per issue and hand out the printed copies (leaving the hard work for me and Mike). He didn't have a funny bone in his body. Case in point, for the SEX issue, he wrote - at length - about how he found it hard to use a public urinal when another man was present. 

As for me, I was the brainy one with glasses, and, as the sole female editor, also the Hearsay's "feminist shield." For the SEX issue, I wrote a fake interview with Madonna who allegedly got it into her head that she wanted to go to law school.

Standard conventions of the publication were, as illustrated in the photo at the top of this post, that contributors were ritually humiliated by having their names turned into bad puns or stupid aliases (the editors got the same, but gentler, treatment), and every issue had a theme.

As an editorial team, it was our collective idea to publish a sex issue. When we picked the sponsoring law firm on the rigorous basis of who was next on the list, we also agreed as a team to spice up the sponsorship line to say SEX is brought to you by Fasken Campbell Godfrey.

When I wrote to the Jewinskis about the SEX issue, I said I'd had some misgivings, one of which was my drawing of Madonna, which was supposed to have gone inside the magazine. But, we had so many submissions, there was no room for it. Rather than cutting it, my two male co-editors said we should use it on the cover.

The issue went out on a Monday. As I told the Jewinskis, for all of that day and the next all I heard from my fellow students was that "the treatment of sex was playful and funny."

I was glad, and relieved.

Relieved, that is, until Wednesday morning, when I picked up the phone to hear Robert Sharpe, the dean of the law school, say to me, "the law firm doesn't think it's funny."

Thanks for reading!

Get that vaccine!

Karen

Another source of misgivings - a 2-page
spread of law prof dress-up dolls,
by M. Piaskoski

No Lessons Learned

Before there was hurricane Katrina, there was Ivan. Before the devastation of 2005, there was the near miss of 2004, a category five storm hurtling across the Gulf of Mexico that, had it hit New Orleans, would have done everything Katrina did, but, instead, it took the turn to Pascagoula, and everything was fine (at least for New Orleans). For some people, that was proof enough that the worst would never happen. 

And then it did. 

Before the Nov/Dec '92 issue of The Hearsay, there was the Jan/Feb issue the same year. Both issues alluded to other publications (the latter to SPY a real magazine that was actually funny; the former to an unintentionally hilarious book, SEX, published by Madonna in 1992). I drew the cover art for both. 

All issues of The Hearsay were sponsored by one or another of the big law firms downtown. The sponsorship rate was $500 and covered the per issue cost of printing 350 copies. Other than sending them a copy of their issue for their files, there was no communication between the editors and the firms.

The Jan/Feb issue, with the theme "great pretenders", included the usual mishmash of articles ranging from mildly amusing to dreadful, authored by law students relentlessly nagged by the editors to please just submit something, anything, or by law students whose writing no one ever wanted to read.

An article in the second category pretended to be postcards describing despicably punny, unfunny adventures. One adventure, set in Egypt, tastelessly alluded to the crucifixion of Christ, and made a bad pun turning "jury" into "jewry."

  

As a co-editor, I suffered from the embarrassment of publishing such trash, but balanced that with the knowledge that the magazine was just good, clean fun.

Then, as I told the Jewinskis in a letter: 

I was confronted by a member of the class who demanded of me, on behalf of all the jewish students at the law school, an apology ... and, if the apology was not offered ... he threatened to send a copy to Goodman and Carr, the sponsoring firm, which would waste no time in calling the Dean and have The Hearsay laid to rest forever.

The upset student didn't know Goodman and Carr already had a copy. 

I told him I was sorry that he'd taken offence, and told him we would publish any rebuttal he thought appropriate to write and submit. Of course he did not do that, and he did not blow the whistle to Goodman and Carr.

Because my co-editors and I were lawyers in training, every subsequent issue of The Hearsay that term (so, two more issues) included a disclaimer that has more words in it than this post. Highlights were:

... articles are written in the spirit of satire ... we would never print an article motivated by prejudice ... we cannot be the final arbiters of what is appropriate ... sorry if past articles ... have caused offence ... we'll adjust our editorial policy ...

By the beginning of the next term, my two co-editors had gone on to their glamorous legal careers. That disclaimer was never again seen in the pages of The Hearsay.

I didn't "adjust" the editorial policy either, because the Jan/Feb issue was proof enough to me that the worst would never happen.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

  

Another Blast From the Past: Introduction

Trumpeter swans, Leslie Street Spit, February 21, 2021

Working on The Hearsay when I was at law school was the closest I ever got to achieving my dream of editing the great Canadian humour magazine.

The Hearsay was a student magazine that was at least supposed to be humorous. Most of the time it published a mishmash of rarely funny offerings by law students, some of them plagiarized. 

Submissions often began "...well, I guess I better write something for The Hearsay..." and then jabbered on for far too long about nothing interesting.

A few of the contributors had some talent. One of them reads this blog. And if I mention his name - Michael Piaskoski - he will send this blog to his friends and spike my page views. 

That's how the world works.

Anyway, The Hearsay. 

In 2nd year I was a junior editor, subject to the will of the two 3rd year students who were also posing as editors. I kept my head down and my mouth shut - or as much as I could reasonably be expected to.

But in 3rd year, I was the senior editor. I had big plans. Under my watch we revamped the dreary Student Orientation Guide (wittily changing the name to "DisOrientation Guide"), and improved The Hearsay's typography and design, transforming it from utterly ghastly to merely awful.

The Hearsay, being what it was where it was, attracted controversy from time to time. Once, on charges of an alleged anti-Semitic statement in an issue, a fellow student seriously threatened he would get a big downtown firm to demand the death of publication (we survived).

Big reactions to small slights is nothing new on a university campus. But The Hearsay under my leadership burst beyond the confines of the University of Toronto and brought a Bay Street law firm to an almost complete standstill. For two days.

Law school was a long time ago. I've forgotten lots of what happened, especially what happened with The Hearsay. But, in December 1992, I wrote my friends the Jewinskis and told them how I made a big splash with the unfunny student humour rag I edited. I'll share the details over the next few weeks.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

  

 

Demon Weed

Peer pressure got me started smoking cigarettes when I was thirteen years old. For the next twenty-seven years, I was never a heavy but always a habitual smoker.

In September 1997, for my 40th birthday present to myself, I decided to quit.

I wrote to my friends the Jewinskis to tell them what it was like.

I described my desperation when smoking was banned in the workplace:

“I battle with the demon that sometimes lives in my belly, sometimes in my head, sometimes in my hypothalamus and sometimes in all three. There it lurks and pokes and jabs and torments, makes me frustrated with longing, panicked with craving and desperate for that moment when I can flee, seclude myself, light up and drag deeply. When I'm back in the company of my colleagues, I'm still edgy and self-conscious. I reek of cigarette smoke and failure.”

And the comforts of addiction:

“A small voice used to reassure me, when I pulled a cigarette out of the pack and fired it up, that there were “no consequences.” This meant no smoking-related illness would arise from that single cigarette. Smoking that cigarette would not keep me from quitting some day. “No consequences” meant that I existed in a perpetual present as a smoker; there would be no reckoning.”

And past attempts at quitting:

“When I was nineteen, I’d been smoking for six years. I went to London, England, in September 1976. I stayed there a month and did not smoke. I returned home to Trenton in October and did not smoke. In November, I took a three-week job as a cook at a truck stop and was smoking regularly by the time the job was done.

“The second time I almost quit was a six-month-long project where I got myself down to one cigarette a day. From January to June 1995, I sharply reduced my consumption and waited, patiently, for the day to come when the ravening beast within me would be too starved to call for more nicotine.

“My error was leaving it up to my addiction to tell me when to stop.”

And explained the reason for my success:

“Now it’s October 27, 1997. It has been more than four weeks since I bought my first box of nicotine patches, and ten days since I gave up the patch. Since I made the decision to quit, I have smoked eight cigarettes, six within the first 48 hours, the last on October 18. None since then and never again because, lord help me, I never want to go through the agony of quitting again.” 

And I never did.

Thanks for reading!

Karen

My trimmed finger:
Healing nicely

Exit Seeking and Cuts

New York, November 2010 

All I managed to accomplish this week was to cut Bruce's bangs and the end off my left index finger (photos to follow).

Not at the same time. And the former before the latter. The scissors and the knife were both a little dull, but sharp enough to get the job done. 

This post features snips from that letter I wrote in May 1988 about our first trip together to New York City. 

The Museum of Natural History 

"It's a big taxidermy shoppe... and is revolting. Once stuffed, animals have no dignity, are nothing but trophies; the effect is depressing....

"The strange thing about the MNH was we had trouble getting out of it. New York is a city of unexpected closed exits. Just when you figure you're on your way out of a place, you find a guard telling you to go back the way you came. At the MNH at shortly after two in the afternoon, the revolving doors at the main entrance were locked. A guard directed us to a small side entrance. Several hours before closing, this huge museum let people in and out through only one small, obscure, unmanned portal."

Public Restrooms

"We stopped in a little restaurant for a couple of beers while our host finished her classes. These establishments usually have a single toilet and sink hole-in-the-wall type washroom, never roomy, but clean enough. I believed, therefore, as I went in the direction of the little arrow marked "restrooms" that I would end up not too badly shaken. 

"Once through the first door, I was in an industrial-sized hallway full of pipes, with unwholesome-looking puddles on the grey-painted concrete floor. A fellow who followed me through the first door indicated another as the way to the restrooms. I went through that door, down a flight of metal-treaded stairs, across a dank concrete corridor which extended as far as the eye could see in either direction, up another flight of metal stairs, down a long corridor full of steaming pipes, around a corner, up another five steps and into a huge rectangular room. At its far end, on a wooden platform, stood two Port-a-sans. I estimated I was

about a block away from the restaurant."

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

NYC Veterans Day Parade, November 11, 2010

The Past Is Never Dead

Vancouver Island, September 2005

Publishing History

Late in December 1987 (yes, that 1987, the one more than thirty years ago) I made a deal with my friends the Jewinskis that I would write them two letters a month during 1988 and, at the end of that year, we would compile, edit and publish the letters. 

This was not to be mere art for art's sake. No. Those letters would become a best-seller and the proceeds would finance the establishment, with me as the founding editor, of a Canadian humour magazine called The Minute.

Certainly sounds plausible.

I wrote one letter a month (half of the promised output) until June. Then I got a new job at the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce and was so distracted by office politics and drinking with my co-workers, that I forgot the deal. I didn't write again until December.

The reality of a paying job blew away all my publishing ambitions.

But I kept writing to the Jewinskis. And they kept more than fifty of the letters I sent them between 1982 and 2000.

Late last year, they sent the letters back. They were downsizing from their 3,000 sq ft farmhouse in St. Clements to a 485 sq ft condo in downtown Toronto. 

I've gone though all the letters. Reliving the '80s and law school was more embarrassing and painful than I'd have guessed.  But, some parts of some of the letters met the promise of the original deal.

This is from May 1988, describing a trip to New York Bruce and I took to visit a friend:

We sat one night in a bar called Icabod's and drank $100 worth of fancy drinks, smoking incessantly, talking and talking and talking. It was wonderful: that sort of flat-bottomed pleasure that comes when you feel as though you've hit a pocket of timelessness. You keep on drinking but never get too drunk; you keep on talking but there's always more to say; you keep on smoking but the pack never runs out.

What happens first is the cigarettes run out, then the bar closes and you realize you're tired and you want to go home, but in a happy sated state, slightly weary, but still buzzing with the energy from the conversation.

There are others - like the letter from October 1997 describing what it was like to be a smoker in a world increasingly unaccommodating of same - but I'll save those for later posts.  

Hip-Gnosis

I visited my orthopaedic surgeon on Friday, just to get an x-ray and tell him about the strange interlude from the 17th to the 29th of January. He'd never heard of anything like it. The x-ray showed my hip was exactly the same as it was in 2017 and 2016. He said there was nothing wrong that he could see. So I'm good.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

New York, November 2010