The Christmas Party

I attended a holiday party for a group of apparel industry executives last night. The usual cosmopolitans and vodka/tonics were flowing; the usual surface-level conversations were drowning out the Christmas carols. It was my job to mingle, photograph, and get names and titles of the so-called important people.
I began talking to a woman who, with her husband, had recently started her own lingerie line. I began talking to her from my usual perspective: that of an industry trade magazine writer. This includes the usual set of questions about when the line was created, inspirations behind it, colors, styles, size ranges, etc.
But this woman seemed resistant to this line of questioning. Perhaps she is like me, and didn’t want to have another one of those conversations in which you don’t really learn about another person, but instead you feel like you are a trained circus monkey going through a book of moves. Or maybe she read right through the mask I put up everyday in order to get through the pure crap that is this job for me.

Whatever it was, she began very quickly to tell me out her past. And I was intrigued. She told me that she has worn a lot of hats, and I asked a lot of questions. She was born in New York, but had lived in the Virginia town where I grew up for a short time in her 20s. She had been an investment banker, real estate broker and now, lingerie designer and small business owner. And all I could keep thinking, instead of thoughts of how interesting and dynamic this woman was, and how much I enjoyed her easy-going nature and conversation, was that I wanted to be able to tell her story.

I wanted to be able to write my account of her life, and her history. I wanted to be able to pull myself out of this job that has me so creatively drained that it makes me feel as if I don’t have the words to express my own emotions, let alone someone else’s. I wanted to tell her story as it touched me, as a newspaper reporter, who investigates all the facts, rather than who I am now, who is only there for drinks, false conversation and advertising dollars.
I had formed an identity that suited me more than anything in my life and now that is gone. I am no longer able to write what I want, or the whole truth. I write what, and about whom, my boss instructs me to.

I want to feel how I did after talking to a mother of a fallen Iraqi soldier. Or a science teacher that has cancer. Or the 8-year-old kid who just won a community service award. Whoever it is — I want the feeling the connection with another person on a deep level, the complete understanding of a person’s place in the world, and the ability to translate that into words.