URBANNA — My first Sentinel column, “Journeys,” that began 40 years ago this July was my story of a canoe trip to Perkins Creek and the shock of finding a drowned deer half submerged in the water.
Within a week I had a call from the Virginia Department of Natural Resources asking me for more details about the dead deer. I realized they cared about the animal as much as I did. It was my first lesson. What I wrote in my column would be read by many people and I needed to take responsibility for everything I wrote.
I also wrote about the small town people I loved in my hometown, Vermilion, Ohio, and how they resembled my neighbors in Urbanna. I began to understand what all writers eventually learn — all people are the same everywhere.
I began to write comedy, especially about my early years adjusting to life in Virginia. I described my arrival at age 18 in 1959 to Randolph Macon Woman’s College in Lynchburg and the shock I had experienced at a totally different life.
Of course, that is what college is supposed to do — wake us up to the world around us. Father had wanted me to leave Ohio and experience another lifestyle and I had surely done that. I thought I had arrived in a foreign country.
I struggled to cope with “Southern belles” and debutantes from all the major cities in the south that came armed with a new quality of which I soon discovered I could not compete: Charm.
Charm is something southern women are born with which developed after the Civil War in order to keep Yankees in their place. I am the first to admit that Northerners are helpless in the face of Charm. For no one born north of the Mason Dixon line had ever heard of such a trait nor were we prepared to combat it. I folded it immediately.
My college magazine published my comedy and I got my first flack. There was a huge contingency of girls from Texas in college and the ladies from Texas even 25 years later did not like being portrayed as “cowgirls who paraded throughout campus in cowboy boots, Stetson hats singing the “Yellow Rose of Texas” everywhere they went.” (which they did.)
I wrote comedy of my trying to fit into my husband’s church (which I had agreed to join and raise my children at marriage in 1963, a promise I have kept.) I wrote a very funny series titled “In Pursuit of God,” which cast me as a country bumpkin of (very ) “low church” from the wilds of Ohio (where savages still ran naked through the cornfields) trying hard to accustom herself to a respectable religion but who had no idea of what respectable religion was.
Feedback was immediate. Most everyone loved the stories. But not everyone. One day in church a lady followed me out the door and shouted “STOP WRITING ABOUT OUR CHURCH!” Another criticized my stereotyped characterization of “the church.” Another met me at the door one day and told me to “find another church.” Not exactly a Christian attitude, but then not all churchgoers are Christian.
I learned the trick to writing comedy is to spoof yourself and then no one will be offended. And if the jokes are on the writer, no one feels threatened.
Another important lesson I learned went beyond writing humor. Some people do not care to be written about, period. Even glowing compliments are not welcomed. These folks are private and want no mention whatsoever in the media.
Once a lady I met on the street told me she would never want to go to lunch with me. “Why ever not?” I asked, incredulously. “Well, you would write about me in next week’s column!” she answered. I laughed. But I made a note never to mention her name in my column. A writer should respect the right of privacy of others.
(Perhaps a writer should only write about people who are dead? The dead would never think of issuing a complaint.)
Another rule is never write humor about the poor, weak, sick and old unless you fit that model yourself. Rather use the rich, powerful, strong and especially the pretentious and hypocritical. That’s where real comedy dwells.
Thus, I took on lawyers, judges, doctors, politicians, professors or so called “brights” that think highly of themselves and look down on others, even the headmaster of my husband’s exclusive prep school, (fair game because at the time they did not accept girls) — anyone that had some degree of power.
Writing comedy is not for sissies. A writer can’t please everyone, nor should he try. His gift to society is his individual voice that provides choice to readers.
The motto of the Sentinel is “Pluck, Perseverance, Progress.” Let others be concerned with perseverance and progress, I decided. I would do pluck.
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