MAILBOX

This Week: Someone recognized our parody of a magazine of parodies, but didn’t appreciate us explaining it; a Gladwell fan takes aim at Matt Elzweig; someone’s sleepwalking on Opana; and, in honor of our 20th Anniversary issue, a few great letters from the past.

Lampooning the Lampooner
Your April 16-22 cover photo (“If You Don’t Buy This Parody, We’ll Kill Tony Hendra”) is hilarious for those of us familiar with National Lampoon from the years when Hendra was a NatLamp stalwart. I stopped laughing when I saw the photo decision you made on page 4, hedging your bets just in case your readers aren’t old enough (or hip enough) to get the joke without this explanation.

Anyway, the joke you’re referencing was not created by the very talented Hendra. National Lampoon’s notorious threat “If You Don’t Buy This Magazine, We’ll Kill This Dog”—on the cover of Lampoon’s reportedly best-ever selling issue—was the only funny joke ever thought up by Hendra’s fellow Poonster, the grossly untalented Ed Bluestone.
—F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre, NYC

Matt’s no Malcolm
Did you guys bother to read Matt Elzweig’s ludicrous piece (“Gladwell Hunting,” April 2-8) before you put it on the cover of your paper?

No Nobel Prize winner was “taking on” Gladwell, and Elzweig’s beef seems to be that Gladwell is smart, successful, kind and really good at defending his actions. Malcolm is actually as good as he seems. The only foul, it seems to me, is Elzweig’s belief that after seven years of focusing on Malcolm, the world should focus on Matt now.

If this piece is any indication, I’m dubious it’s going to work.
—Seth Godin

Sleeeep Waaaalking on Opana…
Thanks for your informative article about Opana (“Bad Dreams,” March 5-11). I can add another possible [side effect], from my personal experience while on Opana. Opana causes me to walk in my sleep.  Sleep walking can be very dangerous.
—Suzanne, NYC

“Uh, Doctor, When You Get a chance,” Jack Shafer’s Letter from May 20, 1988
Tom Weisser’s literay account of his medical reeming (Press, 4/29) reminded me of my last encounter with the white coat fascists known as MDs. My throat, which was rawer than a New York strip, was discharging bloody chunks. The arsenal of my medicine cabinet—aspirin, aspirin substitutes, Pepto-Bismal, anti-malarials, contact-lens enzyme tablets—had failed to cool my molten temperature. It was time for medical intervention. Serious medical intervention.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not a whiner or a hypochondriac. I rarely even exaggerate. So when I visit the doctor, it’s only because I’m really sick and need help. So get out of my way. Miss Nurse, when I drag my ass into your office and tell me to take a seat and a magazine and “Doctor” will be right with me! I tell ya, it happened! For the next two hours I sat there, drooling my life’s blood into a Styrofoam cup, reading Highlights for Children, while the nurses twirled their fingers in their hair and talked about soaps.

I was getting pretty pissed. Finally, I was escorted to an examination room, and like a fool, forgot to bring something to read. Without reading material or a clock to monitor my wait, it was “Hello, Kafka,” or at least “Hello, Tony Perkins.” My jaw was doing its best peaking-on-acid clench. Bloody spots obscured my visual plane.

After my internal clock ticked off another 45 minutes, in walked this nurse who intoned in a sing-song,” How are we, Mr. Shafer?”

“We’re fuckin’ sick.”

“Well, we’ll do something about that.”

She strapped me on with the blood pressure gizmo, pumped me up, and hmmmmmed.”

“I’ll have to do this again,” she said. “You’re very high.”

“How high?” I asked.

“Oh, I can’t tell you. You’ll have to ask Doctor.”

As she was putting the squeeze on me the second time, Doctor appeared. It wsn’t my regular doc; it was a young cheese-ball with a bad rug.

“How are we, Jack?”

“We’re fuckin’ sick,” I said, spying his ID badge,” …Phil.”

He blanched. With a “FFFFFssssthhhh,” the nurse tripped the switch on the blood pressure unit and looked up, genuinely alrmed. “Oh, Mr. Shafer, your blood pressure!”

I tore the Velcro thing off my bicep and stood up.

“Yeah! I’m sick! And your’e a genius! Between the examination room and the waiting room I’ve been stewing in my white blood cell count for almost three hours! So get out of my way! I’m gonna knock over a pharmacy for some antibiotics!”

I haven’t seen a doctor since.
—Jack Shafer, Washington, D.C.

“A World of Addictions,” Susan Orlean’s letter from May 27, 1988
I wish I’d met Leslie Schwerin’s father (Press 4/22). Any man who weighed 300 pounds and still kept active the fantasy of being a jockey must have been a remarkable character. His plans to drive up the odds was one of the funniest and most poignant tales I’ve heard in a while. I do have a few complaints about Schwerin’s story, though: the analogy between phone sex and off-track betting is tidy, but not totally convincing. OTB parlors cater to peole who are titillated by wagering, not by horseflesh—I’d bet that most of them feel entirely fulfilled by the experience. And finally, she says that OTB parlors are “an acquired, possibly addictive taste.” C’mon, Leslie, out with it—did you like it or not?

Niggling aside, New York Press has been a treat. I can’t get enough of MUGGER, and “Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer” is really remarkable—strange, funny, sad and wonderfully drawn. Quite an auspicious debut.
—Susan Orlean, Manhattan

“Group Therapy” letter, Jan. 8, 1992
Occasionally a restaurant review appears that seems mean-spirited, or as if the reviewer is transferring his displeasure about something else to a restaurant. Sam Sifton’s views on Tennessee Mountain (NYPress, 12/11/1991) seemed such a review.

About a month ago I visited Tennessee Mountain for the first time. My meal was very good, and everyone else in our party of 12 was just as pleased as I was. The service was exceptional, which is not always easy to bring off when seeing to the needs of a large group, and the upstairs room we dined in was wonderfully pleasant. We lingered for a long time after our dinner because we all enjoyed each other’s company so much. This in itself was not remarkable, but there are too many restaurants in New York where to linger is to experience a letdown. Not to belabor the issue, when I’ve seen other participants of that communal dinner in recent days, they have all agreed that Tennessee Mountain provided us with a perfect evening.

Since we ranged in age from 15 to fiftysomething, Tennessee Mountain gets our collective applause.
—Mary Bringle, Manhattan

Sam Sifton replies:
I was feeling fine when I got to Tennessee Mountain that fateful night, principally because I was looking forward to eating ribs. That mood was shattered, however, by the array of pedestrian and tasteless food that came before me; I can assure one and all that I had no beef with the place before that.

Perhaps it was a mistake, though, to bring along my friend from the USMC. After all, as Cole points out so charitably, what could a jarhead lieutenant possibly know about food? Maybe instead of simply iforming readers that the wings “sucked,” I should have quoted verbatim from my notebook: “pimply, oversweet, and lukewarm, with tiny wisps of feather protruding from the crevices.”

There is no doubt in my mind that there are a lot of people who enjoy the food at Tennessee Mountain; how else to explain the crowds there on weekend nights and the tone of the above correspondence? There are also people who praise the seafood at Red Lobster and who say that Montrachet is terrible. Others disagree. But the bottom line is this: the food at Tennessee Mountain was, to my palate, grim and uninteresting. I’ll stand by what I wrote.