The mere mention of hardcover titles like Goodbye Columbus or Portnoy’s Complaint might ignite a booklover’s grin from the tiny overshadowed self inside that loves to cuddle up on a rainy fall day in the Carolina’s and read pages critics and literary scholars have described as being some of this nations best.
Since his debut in 1959 Phillip Roth has become one of this generations most decorated authors winning numerous trophies including the Pulitzer Prize in 1997. If you really want to get technical, hailing from Newark, Phillip was doing the Jersey shores thing way before The Situation, Snookie J-Wow, Ronnie and Vinnie.
With so many bad Jersey jokes written and performed on late night television the average Joe Blow is convinced nothing great grows in one of the thirteen original colonies. If that’s true…how did Mr. Roth come into being?
“One page at a time…”
Nothing more…nothing less; on a blue faced computer screen with letters brighter than white can be. It’s like taking a single note from a Beatles classic and stretching its past the recommended daily allowance of quarter notes mixed with kazoo harmonies.
One page at a time.
Writers, poets and newspaper columnists might roll their eyes at such well behaved disciplined tactics thinking, “I can burp out three pages without taking a breath and still leave the editor begging for more.”
Watching Phillip Roth speak was like stepping into an extremely dark tunnel where notion becomes your guide; there are walls but are they rounded? There is a ceiling but has Lionel Richie danced on it? The chunk of soil to which your feet are placed would it be warm enough to place your bottom to make writing easier than having to stand up and pretend you’re spelling each word correctly?
As I write these words on what once was a extremely blank computer page a tiny brown spider with white stripes decides to walk across the screen sending my imagination toward every childhood fantasy of learning how to talk to the animals while understanding the reasons why we cross paths at the most inappropriate times. Might a former now deceased reader of Mr. Roth be visiting this new sun?
The ego that carries my two hundred twenty seven pound frame stops to stare at the paragraph released bragging that two weeks could be spent on the life and style of a brown and white striped spider reaching out to a poet because of a special sentence that Roth might have written and it was the spiders job to give it to someone in the future.
But could I perform such a presentation in the way it was originally tossed onto this screen? One page at a time…
When I write and produce radio commercials 99.9% of the time what’s been laid out is revised not once but four to seven times. I’m admittedly addicted to relating with readers and listeners. There’s nothing more important in the 24 hours of everyday than you and everything you do to be you. Larger than a breadbox and more colorful than a rainbow billboards along side a boring stretch of a concrete highway carry no emotion, they answer who, what, where, when and how inside three to seven seconds which allows your senses to whisper, “You need the burger…please get it with cheese and French fries.”
My radio commercial’s are designed to convince your nose it smells something.
Outside these four walls writing is how I breathe and it’s become my loyalty to open the clogged arteries of other creative’s who used to drop ink in unusual places and call it art. I hear the term “Used to” so often it should be our national anthem. I used to write. I used to do martial arts. I used to want to be a radio disc jockey.
One page at a time…
True story…a well known business owner, richer than rich can be walks up and asks in the most calming way, “Look…what’s it going to cost me to get my son up to a black belt inside three months? We've got summer vacation coming on and he’d be the killer of the party if he walked in there with that thing.”
That thing? My knees didn’t bend, the body didn’t break nor did the mind feel need to whip out a can of Tae Kwon Do bragging rights. Standing on the sidelines of a class in full motion, I slowly turned toward his son to take mental notes of the color wrapped around his eight year old waist. His white belt wasn’t tied properly, his front stance resembled a weeble wobbling but he didn’t fall down and his fist was more like a tube surfers race through in Hawaii.
One page at a time…
The extremely proud very rich business man persisted, “What’s it going to take?”
To which I replied, “I’ll give you my 2nd degree belt right now if your son can perform the single most important rule of every school.”
His eyes lit up like a Christmas tree at a supersized mall store, “Blank Blank…get over here and let this guy see that you know the rules.”
Quickly the child ran having no clue what his father was up to. Across the mat the kid did fly landing strong next to the man he visually loved loved loved! It took everything in my heart to stare at the father in the eyes and calmly say, “He didn’t salute the flag on the way out of the study area. How can I honor someone with the leadership a black belt holds if they can’t perform the first rule of every school in this nation?”
The father never returned but I write and produce his radio commercials to this day.
The message today is to do everything one page at a time…when you race to accomplish because it feels so good to be recognized…the end result will forever be a used to be.
I will always believe in you first…
arroecollins@clearchannel.com
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