Author: Jennifer Vogel

Some people become authors because they are of the exact opposite temperament from a movie star. Putting on a clean shirt can, in itself, be a chore; putting on a pressed one is out of the question. Author photos, then, are the art of making these schlubs and misanthropes look believable, wise, and even a touch mysterious. Nancy Crampton, who for thirty-five years has shot the likes of Norman Mailer, Gabriel García Márquez, Ian McEwan, and Lorrie Moore for New York’s Unterberg Poetry Center, is particularly astute at portraying warmth and piquancy, without making authors look like someone other than themselves. She will discuss her book, Writers: Photographs, a collection of more than one hundred duotones, at the library, where her photos will be on display. RSVP required. 612-630-6155; www.friendsofmpl.org

Citizen’s arrest is no joke, as fans of The Andy Griffith Show can attest. In a memorable 1963 episode, Barney Fife issued Gomer Pyle a ticket for making an illegal U-turn, and then, as Fife was wont to do, began philosophizing. “It’s from little misdemeanors that major felonies grow,” Fife said, adding that even citizens have the responsibility to stop crime. “You’ll be a better man,” he told Pyle, “if you try to think of us all working together for a common cause.” At that, Fife left the scene, making a U-turn himself. That’s when Pyle ran after him, yelling, “Citizen’s ar-ray-est! Citizen’s ar-ray-est!”

It may come as a surprise that, in the Twin Cities, regular people issue citizen’s arrests all the time. Statistics are hard to come by—both the Minneapolis and St. Paul police departments threw up their hands—but it’s pretty safe to say that there are hundreds in the metropolitan area each year. The bulk of these citations are issued by “loss-prevention” officers, store staff who skulk after shoplifters. The rest, around a quarter of the total, are made by the public at large, usually for minor offenses such as littering, open bottle, and public urination.

Minnesota has a rather generous citizen’s arrest law. It affords a private person the right to arrest another for any misdemeanor or felony committed in their presence, and for felonies not committed in their presence (amateur felony busts are extremely rare). If the target flees, the citizen may engage in a hot pursuit. “For that purpose,” says the law, “the pursuer may break open any door or window of a dwelling house if … the pursuer is refused admittance.”

The right of one person to arrest another dates back to medieval England, when sheriffs encouraged people to make their own collars. Tom Walsh, the St. Paul Police Department’s Public Information Coordinator and an officer for thirty years, is very much in favor of the practice. “There is always the element of, ‘I don’t want to get involved,’” he said. “Police departments like to see people held accountable for their actions. We are in favor of citizen’s arrest. It works.”

Such arrests are made by organizations like the Guardian Angels. According to Minneapolis chapter spokesperson Alice Splawn, her group is learning about the statute in anticipation of a brand-new effort: riding city buses at night in hopes of quelling violent crime. “Our plan,” Splawn said, “is if there is a weapon, we would have somebody notify the driver immediately so he could stop the bus. We are not there to get shot or knifed, but we would try to detain the individual until help arrives. That would be citizen’s arrest, because we are not allowing them to leave.”

“This is a great tool that is grossly overlooked by citizens,” said Minneapolis police officer Mike Killebrew, who last year championed an effort to restrict pedestrian traffic in the city’s alleyways. “The police can only do so much and citizens have to pick up the slack.” Before attempting to pick up the slack, however, there are a few sticky matters to consider. First, by statute, you must inform your target why you are arresting them and “require the person to submit.” Then, the arrestee must be delivered to a judge or peace officer “without unnecessary delay.”

In the likely case that the target doesn’t wish to be arrested, Walsh explained that “you may use force sufficient to detain that person until they can be turned over to law enforcement.” The key is to keep your cool. Don’t go overboard, he advises, lest you find yourself “on the dark side of a lawsuit or in a physical altercation you can’t win. You have to be sure that the amount of force you’re applying fits a misdemeanor crime.” He added, “You can’t use deadly force.”

If a situation gets too contentious, don’t make the arrest. “I’m not suggesting that you walk away,” Walsh said. “On the contrary. I’m suggesting that you call the police. Walking away in my view is not a satisfactory option.” Get a good description of the individual, and a license plate number. Follow them if you can, preferably while filming with a digital camera. Killebrew heartily concurred: “You don’t want your mouth to write a check that your body can’t cover.”

Once the police arrive, you will be asked to complete a form explaining the arrest and stating that you will testify under oath. Making an ill-advised citizen’s arrest—or causing one to go wildly awry—can lead to civil and even criminal penalties. There are laws against assault, false imprisonment, and impersonating an officer. It is not recommended, for example, that you read anyone a Miranda warning, even if you’ve seen it done on television. “You are not a police officer,” said Walsh. “You are not required to give Miranda, nor can you allow a person to waive their rights.” Finally, whatever you do, do not wear a blue outfit with a hat and badge.

Kevin Turnquist, a psychiatrist for more than twenty years, currently cares for some of the most seriously ill patients in the Hennepin County public mental health system. The good doctor, who specializes in schizophrenia, has pretty much seen it all—such as the woman who believes that during sleep she grows extra limbs that are clandestinely harvested for Wendy’s. If that sounds outlandish, consider a recent study suggesting that one in two Americans will suffer a mental illness at some point in their lives. Nowhere does that feel truer than here in the North, where winter is widely regarded as the season of mental apocalypse. We caught up with Turnquist to discuss the reasons we crash and burn.

Why do people get depressed, or is that a ridiculously simplistic question?
That’s a great question because it goes along with the idea that there is a single cause of depression, which my profession and especially the drug companies would like to perpetuate. There are all kinds of depression. Some people react to loss. Some people react to day length. But one commonality that seems to go across all the types is hippocampal atrophy.

The hippocampus seems to thrive on new memories and experiences. Should people take more vacations?
I think everybody should take more vacations! The Australians and people like that who get six weeks to two months every year, they seem to be happier people than us.

Which produces more endorphins, good sex or good food?
If you’re starving you might get an endorphin release from food. But there is this hierarchy of needs and I think most people would vote for the good sex.

How well do psychiatrists understand the human brain?
We don’t. We’ve learned a lot in the last ten to fifteen years, but look at how that’s translated into action. If you see five different psychiatrists, and you have a mental problem, you are likely to get five different diagnoses. Fortunately it doesn’t make much difference because whatever diagnosis you get, you are likely to get the same hodgepodge of medications regardless: an antipsychotic, a mood stabilizer, an antidepressant, a minor tranquilizer. It’s fair to say that we don’t know what causes any mental disorders and we don’t know how any of our medications actually work.

Yet sometimes they do work.
Well, the bath of surprise worked, too! Where people would be led down this walkway and fall through a trapdoor blindfolded into icy water. Almost anything will work if you induce the expectation of change.

What’s so bad about antidepressants?
The new ones seem to decrease the intensity of the connection between what you think about and what you feel. It’s been likened to turning the brightness knob on your TV all the way up. So everything kind of looks the same. And you don’t really feel that bad or worried about anything, but on the other hand, nothing touches you in the way that it normally would.

Should the emphasis be on therapy instead?
I think that in the next ten or twenty years, the research will show that good psychotherapy produces genuine brain changes. I don’t want to put you in the position of having to explain amygdala versus hippocampus.

I appreciate that.
But as you start to use brain structures, the pathways become reinforced. If you are exposed to any stimulus for ninety minutes, your brain starts to build new synapses to accommodate this. We start to form new symbols, because we construct our reality with symbols, for self and other. I’ve always thought one of the key elements of good therapy is being in the presence of someone who can tolerate you for who you are, and then starting to identify with that attitude.

Why don’t we understand the brain better?
It’s so complex. We’ve taken a very reductionistic approach, which works for other organs, like the liver. But the brain doesn’t yield to that sort of thing because there is brain and then there is mind.

How would you define brain versus mind?
Oh, I wouldn’t.

In what ways are we mentally similar to our primate cousins, chimpanzees?
Sex and aggression are the two basic drives. You watch humans on the freeway and interacting with each other and we’re no different than apes fighting over who is going to sit on the sunny rock.

And the main difference between us and them?
They’re shorter.

How do we fare mentally in Minnesota?
When you look at statistics, we kind of fall in the middle in terms of mental health. I do think there is something to this latitude and seasonal affective disorder. I think for some of us it tends to make us much more unstable than we would be otherwise. I use a light box every morning, during the winter anyway.

Are northern people more neurotic than those from other parts of the world?
I’ve never seen any studies on it, but intuitively I think there is something to it. If you are living close to the equator and the weather is always pretty much the same, you don’t have this winter to prepare for every year. You might not develop the same brain structures that you do if you are living somewhere where you are looking at six months of cold and dark. And the parts of the brain that are involved, frontal lobe structures, allow us to say, “What might happen?” “How can I prepare for what might happen?” As soon as you start to really grow those structures, you can think of all sorts of terrible things that might happen. I’m really good at it. I can think of a million terrible things that may happen in the next minute.

I guess we have “spring mania” to look forward to, the rejoinder to seasonal affective disorder.
Right. The classic example is Vincent van Gogh. His wild stuff was done in the spring with brilliantly intense colors, and in the fall he tended to cut off body parts.

Once upon a time, say fifteen years ago, portraits of chief executive officers had much in common with oil paintings of George Washington or Robert E. Lee. There was a man (they were pretty much all men), shot from a slightly low angle so as to amplify his stateliness and power, with his hand on a chair or maybe a globe. Sometimes he smiled, but not too broadly. After all, running a company was a grave matter.
These days, however, it’s not unusual to open a business magazine or an annual report and find a CEO reclining on a patch of grass with a football, or wading waist-deep in a lake. They are posed nuzzling cows or other barnyard animals or buried up to their necks in breakfast cereal. New to these photos are shiny open grins, expressions that seem to say: “You can trust me with a suitcase nuke—but I also might put a whoopee cushion on your chair.”
This more playful and quirky style of portraiture is partly a result of the overall loosening of corporate culture as baby boomers have moved into the top ranks. Perhaps having difficulty reconciling past protests against The Man with their current status as The Man, these business titans wear jeans to work and pal around with their underlings, sometimes with David Brent-like results. Self-effacement in a CEO is now a highly valued quality. Sara Jorde, a Minneapolis photographer who has been shooting CEOs for twenty years, has witnessed the shift to this new mindset. “One thing I’ve noticed is that CEOs are often eating in the lunchrooms with their employees,” she said. “Maybe not at the same tables, but in the same lunchrooms, as opposed to being out having their bourbon and steak. I’ve seen CEOs of really big companies in the break room with their Tupperware. They know everyone’s names. It’s the Nike generation moving into positions of power.”
Yet there also are more complex forces at work behind modern corporate photography, as anyone familiar with the work of Leni Riefenstahl, who managed to make Hitler appear statuesque, might suspect. Eric Guthey and Brad Jackson, professors at the Copenhagen Business School, are some of the rare academics studying CEO imagery. In a recent article titled, “CEO Portraits and the Authenticity Paradox,” they noted how, as companies become more diffuse, it becomes more difficult to portray them visually. “This poses a problem,” they wrote, “ … because visible presence has functioned as a traditionally accepted prerequisite for authenticity … This quest for corporate presence, visibility and authenticity helps explain the proliferation of photographs of top management figures, who often come to represent their organizations not just in a managerial sense, but also in an iconic one.” In other words, the CEO serves as the face of an otherwise faceless entity; at his best, he is a warm and likeable personality set out in front of a sprawling, impersonal, and, if you believe the most ardent critics, psychopathic corporation.
In that regard, CEOs have had a tough time of it lately, as companies like Enron and Halliburton have become synonymous with corruption. Back in the 1990s, during the tech boom, the American public was largely pro-corporate and looking to privatize everything from the postal service to public schools. Now, we watch the rise and fall of companies and their superstar CEOs—players like Ken Lay, Carly Fiorina, and Martha Stewart—almost as a spectator sport. It hasn’t helped public opinion that the average CEO’s salary is approximately four hundred times that of the average blue-collar worker. Not surprisingly, a 2002 CBS News poll found that only one in four Americans believes most corporate executives to be honest.
It’s easy to surmise, then, that as esteem for big business has declined, big business has become more determined to put on a friendly face. A lot goes into creating these dynamic images: What should the executive wear? Should she put on goggles and hold a welder? Which company products should appear in the background? “I think people want to portray more personality and let people see a little bit more of who they are,” said Jorde of her clients, “but still maintain a level of dignity and professionalism about their image. They want to be seen as confident but not cocky, and also approachable.” A corporate photographer in Britain put it more bluntly on his website: “Do you look slick, shifty, or vacant? Or a mix of all three? It’s time to move on … Your corporate portrait should say: Look at me—I’m OK.”
Guthey and Jackson argue that CEOs suffer from identity issues just as their corporations do, thanks to “downsizing, outsourcing, the stripping away of productive functions, and the governance of corporate activity through increasingly fluid networks.” Thus “authenticity” is a notion currently making its way through the corporate world, the same as “teambuilding” and “thinking outside the box” once did. It’s become a movement, a way to quantify the existential crises that are bound to occur among those at the helm of unwieldy enterprises. Gurus of the ideology describe authentic leadership as continuing to do “real work” with one’s life, “telling it like it is,” and “treating people, especially the disadvantaged, with love and dignity.” The concern that one may not be authentic seems like a distinctly modern problem, one that likely never occurred to Washington or Grant, or even Cyrus West Field, founder of the Atlantic Telegraph Company who was, in fact, photographed in 1858 looking stately and powerful with his hand on a globe.
One of Jorde’s most illustrative photos portrays three men, the top executives of local Tiro Industries (formerly Lamaur, manufacturers of such once-famous hair products as Apple Pectin shampoo and Style hairspray). The trio sits in old-fashioned salon chairs, black plastic ponchos over their white shirts, with globe hairdryers on their heads and goofy grins. To get such unusual shots, Jorde strives to make her clients feel comfortable, a decidedly simpler task these days. That may mean ditching a CEO’s personal assistant, or sharing an embarrassing life story. “If you can establish that connection, no matter how small it is, people trust you and let their guard down and they are willing to give you something.”
These more wacky CEO portraits further the perception of the executive as a creative type, as an unbridled optimist—and even as the guy or gal next door. Just as we’re encouraged to vote for the presidential candidate we’d like to have a beer with, it’s assumed that we may buy a computer or car based on our affinity for a particular CEO. Images of Steve Jobs often show the co-founder and head of Apple dressed in casual genius apparel: jeans and a T-shirt, usually black. Sometimes he’s sitting cross-legged on a floor, a pose no doubt appealing to Apple users, who consider themselves less corporate than PC loyalists. Jobs is the ultimate CEO superstar, sometimes called “Apple’s showman nonpareil” and a “master magician.” His image has served the company well. However, when he was questioned in January in relation to stock irregularities, analysts began to worry that Apple’s value could plummet, especially if Jobs should ever be shown in another, increasingly familiar CEO pose: head down and hands cuffed. Such is the risk that comes with building a corporate identity around one man, even one who “seems at times to defy gravity.”
Corporate heads are framed differently depending on the success or failure of their companies, according to Minneapolis photographer Doug Knutson, who has been shooting executives for two decades. “Things are cyclical,” he said. “In a bad year, they want to look more serious, and more focused on their job.” In such images they’ll stare directly at the camera, the idea being that they are “looking the investor in the eye, facing up to the company’s circumstances, or the challenges of the industry. Other years they want to show how dynamic they are so they aren’t looking at the camera. Maybe they’re looking off or talking to someone.”
Whatever the message, Knutson added, the CEO wants to appear sincere. “That’s why some of these places hire me,” he said. “I’ve got a style of getting people warm and comfortable with the camera.” Knutson, who is a fan of Yousuf Karsh, the man who famously photographed Winston Churchill for the cover of Life magazine, was one of the last photographers to shoot Bill McGuire, the former head of UnitedHealth Group. “Shortly after I took that picture, he started getting more attention for his income, and he got camera shy.” In the photo, McGuire is standing next to a glass door, his image reflecting back at him. He’s wearing a traditional suit-and-tie uniform, and also a slight smile. The photo is shot from above, the opposite of the traditional power angle, but Knutson said there was no message in that. “The photo was not intended to be looking down on him; it was intended to make a fascinating composition, including the geometry of the floor,” he said. “When the pictures succeed best, they are aesthetic commerce. They may not be art, but they are fulfilling a communication purpose.”

If you visit the P.M. Bedroom Gallery in Blaine or Woodbury, you might run into Jim Borofka, co-owner of the stores and one of the last waterbed salesmen in the Twin Cities. The showrooms at HOM, for example, don’t feature waterbeds, though the store was once called the Waterbed Room. Borofka accuses HOM of “disconnecting” itself from its history, of disavowing its former cash cow. But P.M. Bedroom also changed its name a few years back, from P.M. Waterbed, in order to expand its market, update its image, and, especially, to minimize what Borofka calls the waterbed “stigma.”

Nothing conjures the decadent 1970s quite like the waterbed. Firm in the mind is the image of a giant, free-flowing bladder of a mattress undulating to the rhythms of Sly & the Family Stone, vulnerable to both hoop earrings and spiked heels. People picture mirrors on the ceiling, mustaches, and smears of Gentle Emotion Lotion. Borofka says that occasionally a customer will call and say, “‘Do you have waterbeds?’ And I say yes. And they say, ‘Are you sure?’”

And then he goes on to explain that waterbeds are not what they used to be. Designs have improved since that first “pleasure pit,” invented by San Francisco State University student Charles Hall. The problems of old have been mitigated: Interior fibers or compartments slow water flow; most modern incarnations are “soft-sided,” meaning that water pouches are encased in foam, and resemble standard mattresses. This makes for a bed that’s resistant to punctures, but still offers what waterbed enthusiasts list as health benefits, including body-molded support, constant warmth to aid sleeping, and a lack of dust, mites, and other allergens. “We can sell a soft side and, fifteen years from now, that person is still sleeping on the same surface,” Borofka said. “It wears very well.”

Borofka has slumbered on a waterbed for decades, ever since leaving his family’s Wisconsin dairy farm to attend college in Eau Claire. “I drove to school in my dad’s old truck and one of the first things I did was pick up a hard-sided waterbed. I thought, ‘I’m really getting somewhere now.’” Borofka desired something new and exciting, a way to express his independence. “Everyone who purchases an adjustable air bed nowadays, that type of clientele purchased waterbeds back then. They were curious people into new things, new technologies, not afraid to push the edge.”

Who buys them now, I had to wonder. Borofka, who sells around seven waterbeds per week, said they mainly go to “people who think, ‘We got a good night’s sleep on a waterbed, we don’t care what the neighbors say.’” He’ll gladly sell a customer whatever type of bed she wants—spring, foam, air, water. But, he confided, “In a bar over a beer, I would say the waterbed is the best bed.” —Jennifer Vogel

This was the first interview I’d ever conducted with my shirt off. Standing before me in the mirrored pink closet was my subject: Lonnie Eiden, a nattily clad woman of supreme confidence, a professional bra fitter for forty years. “I think I’m a 34C,” I offered, playing right into her hands.

“Let’s see what you’ve got,” she said. She looked me over with the keen eye of a physician. And then came the assessment: “Oh, sweetheart.”

“Am I wrong?”

“We’re going to start with a D, a 34D. Boy, I’m going to see a D on you.”

I grew up believing that C is the ideal cup size, having heard it once on television or something. Undoubtedly, it was a meaningless distinction, sort of like the old claim that a long middle toe connotes royalty. Still, I believed that a woman’s breast should perfectly fill a martini glass. It shouldn’t clog a margarita tumbler. This notion, apparently, had led me to make a very common mistake, which is choosing bras that are too small. “Part of it is that there is a mental illusion about cup size,” said Eiden. “The minute you get to D or double D, people think huge and that’s not true. Cup size really doesn’t mean anything because we can make a person look much smaller in the right cup size.”

A too-small bra causes chest flesh to bunch up and shoulders to roll forward, warned Eiden, a stickler on matters of posture. “There isn’t room for the breast tissue in the cup, and then you start this process of bending over and you look heavier. Your breasts hang down and you lose that waist.” To compensate for undersized cups, she said, women often purchase bras with bands that are too large. These enormous bands ride too high in back, which leads to the snowman effect, something otherwise known as “back fat.”

The best a bra can do, according to Eiden, who was trained at an actual bra-fitting school in Minneapolis, is provide a woman with “breasts of stone.” Such stationary breasts, she said, can be had only after a professional fitting. “I just dread it when I see an article about how to measure because I know that in the next two months we’re going to be flooded with people who say, ‘I know what I am and don’t tell me that I’m not.’”

With Eiden’s estimable guidance, I strapped myself into the D-cup model. I fastened it with the snaps at my back, rather than connecting it in front and spinning it around. I leaned forward before snapping, so that my breasts fell into the cups. “Now what is the step three you forgot?” Eiden asked. Dutifully, I bent at the waist and shook, sending every smidge of chest flesh forward. Then I stood upright and looked in the mirror, newly sculpted, with cleavage like a smile. —Jennifer Vogel

Back a long time ago, in the olden days of the last century, we all knew how to respond to a set of enormous fake breasts. We stared. We muttered, “Oh my Lordy.” It was new then, and comical in a grotesque, medically questionable kind of way. Pamela Anderson was nothing if not an absurdity, a fifteen-year-old boy’s dream girl blown up to comic-book proportions. Dolly Parton, at least, had the sense to make fun of her extreme, and extremely lucrative, implanted bosom. “I was the first woman to burn my bra,” she once said, in her girly southern lilt. “It took the fire department four days to put it out.”

Now, things are much different. You can’t go anywhere without encountering boobs that’ve been inflated, a face that’s been peeled, or a butt on the back end of a tuck. In 2004, according to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, nearly twelve million men and women succumbed to various elective “procedures.” Almost a half million had liposuction. More than 300,000 had their breasts enlarged. Hundreds of thousands more had their eyelids chopped and their noses sculpted. People now walk around with Pete Postlethwaite-sized cheek implants, snipped ears, hair plugs, fraudulent six packs, and lips that look to be melting. It appears that we’ve overcome the aversion to purchasing what nature didn’t, or would never in a million years, provide.

The question arises, then, as we teeter on the brink of total plastic surgery acceptance: How should the casual observer respond to these sudden changes in the people we know and sometimes love? Because even though Americans are going under the knife in record numbers, we innocent bystanders still seem required to pretend as though nothing’s happened. (It’s no coincidence that teenage girls often ask for breast implants before heading to college, where a new crowd will be none the wiser.) We’re supposed to keep our wrinkly, thin-lipped yaps shut when a once-craggy face suddenly appears taut as the blanket on an army cot, when B cups miraculously turn into double Ds, springing forth from a cocktail dress like beach balls bobbing in a swimming pool.

There are bodily changes we’re meant to acknowledge, even admire. Like tattoos and purple hairdye jobs. But then, an alteration as dramatic as a new nose is supposed to pass without comment. Perhaps it’s part of our growing collective belief in fantasy, the fuzzing line between truth and fiction, our willingness to be complicit in enormous lies. Spider-Man really can leap from building to building, Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and this is definitely my original butt.

Conventional wisdom dictates that we wait for those who’ve had plastic surgery to mention it first, to indicate whether the enhancement is intended to be noticed. But that seems ridiculously tactful, not unlike the way you’d treat someone with cancer or a mental illness. It certainly would be a relief if the conversational climate were more open, more breezy. Then a person could come right out and ask whether there are crunching noises during rhinoplasty. We could ask if, as plastic surgeons like to suggest, a man with calf implants truly feels like a butterfly released from a cocoon. How refreshing it would be to stop merely observing the sped-up, tilt-a-whirl evolution of the race, and say, “You know, the cleft in your new chin looks like a tiny butt.”—Jennifer Vogel

The room was smaller than I would have liked. And there were no tables to stand behind and very few chairs. I was on an upper floor of the Cosmopolitan Club in Manhattan, celebrating the eightieth birthday of my husband’s father, the lights of the surrounding buildings twinkling through the windows as the bow-tied and velvet-draped guests poured in. Soon there were more than forty men and women in this compartment, most of them over sixty, all of them standing and talking, sipping cocktails, performing with ease an age-old ritual known as mingling.

I’m generally not a “greatest generation” person, but I couldn’t help but notice that these people knew exactly how to behave at a mixer. There never was anyone standing nervously and alone in the corner, pretending to read the fine print on a napkin. Nobody fell down. Nobody cried. Smiling guests approached, hands outstretched in confident greeting, a sparkling tidbit of information at the ready. My father-in-law is an accomplished author and also was a writer for CBS for thirty years, so the conversations tended toward the journalistic. There had been a presidential speech that afternoon, providing endless fodder for this group of lefties. Andy Rooney, who is almost exactly as you’d imagine, spoke amiably with a portly gentleman about whether Bush had put on a good show. When the man walked away, Rooney waved over a friend and asked, “Who was that who’s gotten so big I can’t recognize him anymore?”

So, two important arrows to have in your cocktail party quiver: interesting information about the outside world, as opposed to the latest on that uncle in prison, and also the skill and grace to make others feel comfortable, even if that means pretending at familiarity. Keeping a conversation going—with talk that is neither frivolous nor grave—is paramount. That’s where things often fall apart with my friends. I come from a generation raised on quick-cut commercials for everything from cereal to tampons, electric billboards, headphones, and home theaters. It’s always easier if there is a band on stage to stare at, or a movie. In those settings, socializing is restricted to snarky, mumbled one-liners and face-making in the shadows. My friends and I practically invented “social anxiety.” Among these comfortable old-guard New Yorkers, consummate adults at ease with nothing to look at but each other, I felt like a person in a state of arrested development. My attention span was roughly that of a seventh grader.

I headed to the bar for a stiff drink, an ancient tactic that has carried over nicely to modern times. A few slugs and back out into the room I went. Several guests had been briefed on my background. It kept coming up that my mother lives in the same town where the actress Jean Seberg was born. Had I thought ahead, had I known what to expect, I would have Googled Seberg and marked all the details—that she’d stood up for civil rights and against the Vietnam War and had been accused by J. Edgar Hoover of carrying a Black Panther’s baby. I would have known that she’d miscarried and, in a ballsy, tragic move, presented her dead white child at a press conference. I would have known that she herself had been found dead several years later, in a car in suburban Paris. An impressive chatterbox I would have been, indeed. Instead, I said, “Are you kidding? I love old movies!” mildly insulting the retiree to whom I was speaking.

Oh well, I thought, any minute and I’ll be face to face with someone new. That’s another fascinating aspect of accomplished socializing, the moving toward and away from conversations as though entering and exiting a freeway. Deftly, a man might say, “That’s just great. John will get a kick out of that. I think I’ll find him and tell him about it.” There are very few stutters or hesitations. There is no feeling that you’ve been interminably captured by someone boring, that a ransom note is forthcoming. Of course, this constant rotating of people requires a knack for remembering names, because decorum requires a final round of handshaking at the end of the evening, during which everyone explains how nice it’s been to meet everyone else.

The temperature in the room was on the rise. I’d had a few more cocktails and eaten more than my share of the smoked salmon and puff pastry appetizers. I’d chatted with just about everyone there was to chat with, occasionally breaking the rule against lingering. And then my own dear husband bade me to step out onto the balcony. The air outside was crisp and fresh, the skyline stunning. Looking around, I noticed that there were others leaning against the railing, also not talking. It was surely no coincidence that they all looked to be under forty.—Jennifer Vogel