Chop! Chop! A Hurried Attempt to Find 15 Minutes of Fame

Long before society's obsession with blogging and reality television, getting noticed in the media took plenty of time and effort. There was no such thing as Survivor or prime-time talent searches or even blogging. The internet was far from being a standard household centrepiece and cell phones where the size of a copy of War and Peace.

This is my story of the time my older brother and I tried to get noticed in print, before CNN and YouTube. We were 16 and 18 respectively at the time.

Like most big cities, ours had its own lifestyle magazine that was delivered free once a month with the Sunday newspaper. It featured restaurant reviews, fashion updates, politics and editorials. It was like The New Yorker, except it focused exclusively on my own (at the time) little Metropolis. You weren't a somebody unless you had been featured at least once in the magazine's society pages.

One of my favourite columns in this monthly magazine was called Chop! Chop! It was penned by an aspiring writer who delivered chinese take-out in the city's most upscale neighbourhood - which just happened to be my own.

We lived in a tightly-knit little hamlet of big houses, Beemers and 2.5 kids/address.  Ours was the neighbourhood that the middle-class secretly aspired to move "up" into, all the while dismissing our section of the 'burbs as full of preppy rich kids and stay-at-home-moms who played bridge all day. Sure, we lived in an area with the 2nd highest income per capita in the country, but we were far from living like the Desperate Housewives of Orange County or the Kardashians. 

The Chop! Chop! columnist never used his real name and never disclosed the name of the restuarant he was working for. He did however identify the neighbourhood because that was the whole point of his supposed satire - to make fun of the "silly rich people".  Given that there were only two chinese take-out places within the Free Delivery! 15 mile radius, it wasn't hard for us to figure out who he was. He was anonymous, but his column also had a cartoon of him next to it. That only made it easier to point him out since he was the only white guy with a mohawk deliverying dim-sum and fried rice in the area. We all knew who he was.

Each month, he'd write about the "rich" people who would stiff his tips or come to the door half-dressed and drunk, generally painting them all as fools. 

Then my brother and I decided to see if we could get him to write about us. Once a month for six months we ordered take-out from that restaurant and did increasingly outrageous things when we answered the door.

Surely he would want to tell the world about those crazy kids who....

...Dressed their two pugs in party hats and let them run around in the front hall

...Brought a wheelbarrow to the door and rolled the potstickers and wonton soup off to the dining room

...Blasted Barry Manilow's "Can't Smile Without You" in the background

...Gave him his tip in a jar full of quarters (It was a $15 tip. We never stiffed him.We weren't that mean.)

...Wore pink wigs and Groucho Marx glasses

....Had a fully lit and decorated Christmas tree on the porch in July 

But noooooo,  he never once wrote about us. Six months and $300 worth of MSG-laden take out later, I finally asked him, "Aren't you the guy that writes Chop! Chop! ?"

"Yes", he said sheepishly.

"Why haven't you written about us? Aren't we crazy enough for you? " I asked like a 5 year-old whose feelings had been hurt.

"Actually, you guys are hilarious. I've loved coming here. I was afraid that if I wrote about you, you'd stop getting take-out. You guys are far too bright and intelligent. You are way too nice."

I huffed, "You mean we're not snobs. So we don't fit your stereotype, huh?"

"Well, yeah, " he conceded.

He never did write about us, nor did he have any sort of epiphany and come clean about how he exagerated his stories for the sake of selling magazines.

That was my first real life lesson in pulp-journalism. Since then, I've never put much weight into tabloids or gossip columns.

I take it all with a dash of monosodium glutamate.

What is the craziest thing you've ever done to get noticed?

Pay No Attention to the Little (Wo)Man Behind the Curtain

I'm not the sort of person who squeezes, pulls the pin, throws the grenade and then makes a run for it.

In my youth, I loved playing the devil's advocate. I was always asking tough questions just to make people think critically. And whichever way they went, I'd wind myself up and go at it from the other direction. But now I'm trying to be little more laid back. I live and let live. (***Sigh*** - I can even live with someone writing blurb all over my blog, I suppose.) I'm more interested in saying what I have to say, listening to what other people have to say and then finding common ground. The exception to the rule is when someone's words or actions are clearly harmful to someone else. I don't take that lightly and I'll get uppity about it if I have to. The rest of the time, I like to simply admire the many shades of gray that life has to offer. ("But why does it have to be gray? Why can't it be blue and teal and pink and yellow?," whispers my devil's advocate.)

When I came back here this morning, it occurred to me that my previous post was somewhat open-ended. I was a wee bit vague about the so-called issue on my mind. Was the issue prostitution, anonymity, writing, career choices, the media, blogging? The article that I linked to could lead to so many amazing discussions and posts, but right now I want to focus on anonymity.  That is the issue that I have been thinking about lately.

What grabbed my attention about La Belle Du Jour's story was that she was yet another blogger being forced to reveal her "other side." She was under threat of being unmasked by an ex-boyfriend. And in a Thelma-and-Louise type of move, which I have to say I admire, she revealed who she was. On her own terms. She had a lot to lose because of it. She took a risk, but she was in control. If her blog was going to be driven off the edge of a cliff, dammit, she was going to be the one at the wheel.  I think I'd do the same.


For now, I am choosing to be an anonymous blogger. But that may change. I'm sad that I can't always write about some personal details of my life. I think that a little part of me gets lost that way. At the same time, I also know that writing anonymously has given me a tremendous amount of freedom to say things that due to class, status, and cultural norms ad nauseum, I wouldn't normally be able to say.

Just a few days ago, I read an interesting comment on Hot Piece of Sass's post about being anonymous. (Her post was what first got me thinking about anonymity.) The commenter said that she often found herself accidentally revealing personal details on other blogs, yet she worked really hard at keeping her blog clean and detail free. I've done the same thing myself - revealed details in comments. I think it speaks to the human experience, and the power of relationships.

Bloggers draw other bloggers out, and that can be a good thing. It means that people are connecting, relating and talking.