Why I won't get to sit next to Conan O'Brien at dinner

UPDATE TO UPDATE:  The gist of my original post was that I was never going to sit next to Conan O’Brien at dinner. Wrong again! Okay, it was lunch, not dinner. And, I wasn’t actually beside him. I had my back to him. And, technically, he didn’t actually know I was there, but he knew someone was behind him checking in. But still, I found it weird to run into him in this context but not as weird as an old Conan video that popped up on my phone (I saw after lunch). Maybe because my phone heard me say “There’s Conan O’Brien.” I am used to that. Or was it because my phone knew his phone was within a six-foot radius (social distancing)? Either way. No coincidence.

UPDATE: I posted about this encounter and was surprised to find that several people felt Conan behaved like an entitled celebrity. I did not see it that way at all. I simply felt he was wandering into a public area and I was the person who alerted him. I found it funny. I felt as if my post had slimed him. I took the post down.

Conan O'Brien did his last show on TBS last week and the milestone went unnoticed on my Facebook feed. I think that is because many people of my generation do not like or get his humor. Some actively dislike him. I'll admit some of his bits make me uncomfortable (as intended I am sure) but some make me laugh out loud. 

I recall reading back in the nineties when he got the job at the Late Show that someone, perhaps Lorne Michaels, explained the choice by saying he was the guy you'd want to sit next to at dinner. 

When I heard he would be interviewed at the Kennedy Library, I signed up. I was a little disappointed to be sent to the overflow room. (My fault I lingered over dinner.) He was smart, modest and hilarious. Someone you'd want to sit next to at dinner. 

Before leaving the library, I wandered down the hallway towards the (closed) snack bar where the view of Boston Harbor is the best. At the same time, Conan wandered out of the elevator hallway. I assume to enjoy the view. Then, he spotted me. I like to think he realized he was wandering into a public area, and it was what I represented and not the sight of me that made him recoil. No matter. I don't think I'll get to sit next to him at dinner.

© 2021 Jane Kelly

Juicy Fruits - what does the green mean?

They were so innocuous-looking. A young man, Caucasian, in his twenties. A middle-aged woman, African-American, in her forties. One seated to the left of me. One seated to my right. They never acknowledged each other.  Or did they?

I was spending the day in the Charlotte, North Carolina airport. I suspect I missed a connection from Charleston, West Virginia to Philadelphia. I wouldn't plan to spend six hours in the Charlotte airport.  But since I had a layover, I filled the time as I normally would. Eating.

I found a restaurant in the concourse and was seated in a row of tables for two. I sat with my back to the wall facing into the restaurant. When I arrived,  there was a young man seated at the table to my left. I am not sure how much time passed before a woman was seated at the table to my right. They in no way acknowledged each other's presence.

I noticed the man do it first. He took out a box of Juicy Fruits and pulled out a green one. He laid it on the table in front of him.

A few minutes passed, not sure how many, before the woman on my right got out her box of Juicy Fruits. She also pulled out a green one and laid it on the table in front of her. 

First, let me say, that to my knowledge, I had not been in close proximity to any box of Juicy Fruits in years, but when I had been, they had never been positioned as an appetizer. I mean, really. Who eats Juicy Fruits before a meal? Let alone, one Juicy Fruit. Let alone, one green Juicy Fruit.  Even if green, a Juicy Fruit can not be considered a salad.

The three of us ate our meals with zero interaction as far as I could tell. I do not recall if any other Juicy Fruits came into play. I didn't want to know too much (and this was before I watched The Americans). I left first and began a complete tour of the terminal looking for a Juicy Fruit promotion. Someone had to be giving away free boxes of Juicy Fruits. If they were, I couldn't find them.

I told myself I was being silly. They were probably playing an elaborate game. This was not a real brush with espionage. Or was it?  I  posted about this odd little incident on Facebook but no agents--from the good guys or the bad guys--showed up at my door. Still, I find this a little suspicious. Especially after I watched The Americans.

© 2021 Jane Kelly

Mingling with spies in DC

During the late Cold War years when I lived there, the thing about residing and working in the District of Columbia was, even if you couldn't watch The Americans for another twenty-five years, you knew that spycraft was going on all around you. You knew because some of that spycraft was obvious and clumsy. I probably would have - and should have - been frightened by the spies I didn't see. (Ref: The Americans) But, I wasn't. Spies were a fact of life. A humorous fact of life.

Everyone knew there was a man sitting in a top-floor window across from the Soviet Embassy. I don't think I am misremembering when I say that he was visible. The way I recall it, he would sit on the window ledge of an open window with a long-lens camera in his hand. I don't think that is accurate except as a visual metaphor - although that technique would certainly have kept spies from going in and out of the embassy’s front door.

What do I mean by clumsy spycraft? My favorite incident involved a laundry truck. One Sunday night I was taking relatives on a tour of DC at an hour when the streets were not usually crowded with laundry trucks. Nonetheless, we seemed to be encountering the same one repeatedly circling Georgetown but never stopping to deliver laundry. At one point, we were behind the van and as it made a left turn at a speed that allowed the curtains on the back windows to swing open. We could see inside easily. What we saw in the well-lit area was not rows of hanging cleaning or stacks of boxed shirts, but a wall of electronic equipment and a team of men monitoring it. Okay, it might have been an American spy vehicle. I hope it wasn't. I would not want my safety to rely on a bureaucracy sophisticated enough to design state-of-art electronics, but too dumb to install a rod at the bottom of the window in order to keep the curtains from falling open.

Of course, it was possible for one's imagination to run amok. After the Russians killed one of their enemies on the streets of London with a poisoned umbrella tip, waiting on the corner for the light to change became a harrowing experience although I knew of no enemy - foreign or domestic - that wanted me dead. 

I may have overreacted once on a Sunday stroll through the Kalorama neighborhood, home to many bigwigs and diplomats. As I walked down the street a mailman in uniform came down the path from an impressive house - as I recall the only kind in the area - after making a delivery. He gave me a hello along with a big smile. I returned the greeting and passed as he hopped into his truck. I had not even walked another block before it occurred to me that there was no Sunday mail service. I picked up the pace and headed for home along an illogical route all the while keeping an eye out for the mail truck and its assassin driver. He knew I had seen him. He had no choice. He had to kill me.

When I went to work on Monday, I found out that perhaps I had over-reacted. The Post Office had started Sunday delivery of Express Mail.

Okay, I saw spies where there were none, but I bet I didn't spot spies where they were. I wish I had seen The Americans before I moved to DC. I would have seen spies everywhere.

NOTE TO SELF: You had other brushes with espionage in Monte Carlo, Charlotte and London. They are written up separately.

© 2021 Jane Kelly

And then everything looks so normal . . . after the RFK assassination

The other day I was reading an article that mentioned in passing that Andy Williams had been staying in the Kennedy suite at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles when Robert Kennedy had been assassinated in the ballroom below. It occurred to me that I had, at very different times, encountered several people who had been present at that event. I was not. I was starting my summer job that week. I was not at the site until close to twenty years after the assassination. 

I am sure it was sometime in the 1980s that, sitting at a conference dinner in the ballroom at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, I became amazed that, although it was just a ballroom like dozens of others where I sat through after-dinner speeches, it had been the scene of a major event in the history of America in the 1960s. If there was a historical marker, I didn't see it. 

I was simply sitting at another business event when I looked up and wondered if the lighting fixtures - not fancy enough to call chandeliers - were covered with the same dust on June 5, 1968 when Sirhan Sirhan waited to shoot the winner of the Democratic California primary in the pantry for the kitchen behind the ballroom where I assume our meals had been prepared. When Robert Kennedy said his last public words, "On to Chicago and let's win there," on the same stage where conference speakers discussed the world's information needs. When Americans had a few moments left before they would need to clarify which Kennedy assassination they meant. 

I am not being ridiculous. There was a lot of dust. The room is no longer, torn down along with the hotel although the lobby lives on in many TV shows and movies.

I never saw Bobby Kennedy. On the day word went around the school cafeteria that he was coming to speak in Broomall, I was interested in cutting class to go. The only problem was none of us from the other side of Philadelphia had any idea where Broomall was. I wasn't upset. I figured I'd have another chance. Of course, I didn't.

I thought about how many people I had run into who were somehow connected to the RFK assassination. The first I recalled was Roosevelt Grier, NFL legend and Kennedy supporter. I stepped into a hotel elevator in New York - I think it was the New York Hilton - and found him leaning against the back wall. He was smiling. I think Rosey Greer was almost always smiling.  

I never speak to celebrities but Rosey spoke to me. For the entire ride. He said what a great day every day was and he hoped I felt the same. He said he felt blessed.  He gave off a contented vibe. At the time, I don't think I put him together with the assassination. The encounter was so upbeat that I forgot this was the man who was said to have wrestled the murder weapon away from Sirhan Sirhan.

It wasn't until the movie Mank came out in 2020 that I put Frank Mankiewicz together with the Hollywood Mankiewiczes and with the Robert Kennedy assassination. Memories can get a bit muddled as the years go on and mine did. I know that Frank Mankiewicz, at the time a middle-aged, Caucasian, political advisor, was not often confused with Julian Bond, at the time a dashing, young, African-American civil rights activist. It isn't that I can't keep the two individuals straight. I can't quite get a handle on our interactions. A friend and I were charged with escorting both of them to an event at our college, picking them up at the airport, dining with them, getting them to the lecture on time. I clearly remember Julian Bond in the car. I clearly remember Frank Mankiewicz at dinner. The rest all jumbles together. At far as I know, Julian Bond was not in LA at the time of the assassination, but Frank Mankiewicz announced the death of Robert Kennedy on June 6, 1968.

Of course, Ethel Kennedy was there with her husband. I ran into her with Andy Williams whose presence in LA got me thinking about this "theme." The circumstances were the opposite of the assassination and require some context. My brother used to work in Nassau, a frequent docking locale for the Christina, a yacht owned by Aristotle Onassis who married Jacqueline Kennedy only months after Robert Kennedy's assassination. One evening a friend and I were on the dock when a group of bicyclers swarmed off the boat.  Among them were Ethel Kennedy and Andy Williams. (For the record, the others I recall were Williams’ wife Claudine Longet, Christina Onassis, Mountaineer Jim Whittaker and his wife.) Not exactly meaningful contact. Actually no contact at all.

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis did not come out to ride bikes that night but I ran into her on other occasions around New York when I lived there. She was present when RFK died.

Even more tenuous connections are two Kennedy children. Robert Kennedy Jr. was in LA with his father. Rory Kennedy was present in the sense that she was expected at the time and born almost six months after his death. I've heard Rory speak. I only ever ran into RFK Jr. in the Stamford train station with his family. The surprising thing about him to me was that he has incredible blue eyes. 

There is nothing significant about these encounters. These coincidences are more like an unpleasant game of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. There is nothing magical. If there were, I would have run into George Plimpton and I have no recollection of ever seeing him.  The number of brushes with people who were connected just strikes me as odd.

NOTE TO YOURSELF:  In fact-checking Julian Bond, you discovered you and he share a birthday.

NOTE TO YOURSELF: You were exhausted from your second day at your summer job at Home Life on June 5 and went to bed shortly after dinner. You had no idea that there even was a California primary that day. When you woke up you remembered a dream. Robert and Ethel Kennedy were running an ice cream shop in a building that was shaped like a coffin. A windowless brown box on top of a chrome base. The ice cream store was inside the base. The shop was on a hillside without other buildings around. At the time you figured someone had a television on that you could hear and that put thoughts of the Kennedys in your mind. For proof that you were not psychic, see your story about Christopher Reeve.

© 2021 Jane Kelly

Cocktail hour with the Kellys

When most kids were collecting bottle tops, I was collecting little paper umbrellas from cocktail lounges. Eventually, the collection wore out and was discarded but the sentimental attachment remains. To this day, I am surprisingly at home in a bar.  Especially for someone who barely drinks. 

Just about any drinking establishment will do, but I do have a preference for a place that stocks paper umbrellas or the 21st century equivalent. Cocktail lounges. Lobby bars. Places with comfortable chairs clustered around low tables. They are my favorites. The kind of place where you linger and the visit is not about alcohol as much as relaxation and conversation. Where you feel at home. At least, I do. Possibly because our living room became a cocktail lounge every afternoon.

My parents were fifties parents. Strong believers in cocktails. Every night when my father got home from work, they would appear in the living room with a large silver tray stocked with cocktails and their favorite hors d'ouevres: cheese and crackers. I say they because they prepared the tray together. There was no hint of the little woman waiting patiently with a cocktail for her hubby returning from the business wars. They might have been fifties parents, but my mother was never a fifties housewife.

Originally, the cocktails arrived in a silver cocktail shaker that might well have been a wedding gift in 1937. Then, they received a lovely silver-trimmed pitcher as a gift. Very elegant. A lovely tradition, until they discovered that Skippy Peanut Butter jars had measurement markers on the side. At that point, the pitcher disappeared to be replaced by two Skippy Peanut Butter jars--one for her, one for him--that held perfectly mixed drinks. 

My mother would have to run to the kitchen occasionally to make sure dinner didn't burn but for the most part the next hour was devoted to conversation. I would hang around sometime, but I don't recall ever interrupting. I did, however, snack from the tray as the two friends chatted over Manhattans (I got the cherries), martinis (I never wanted the olives) and Gibsons (I was thrilled when they switched to cocktail onions). To this day, cheese and crackers are comfort food to me. Cocktail hour was far more important to me in my formative years and as a memory than dinner.

My parents really enjoyed each other's company. They shared a friendship of the type that modern research tells us is so important in a couple. They never ran out of conversation.

My father outlived my mother by less than three years. I don't think I ever realized until this moment how painful cocktail hour must have been for him without his best friend. I don't recall his ever having a pre-dinner cocktail after she died.

NOTE: A little irony. On March 7, 2020 I was lingering after an MWA New York meeting with some friends and told them that was my favorite way to spend a Saturday afternoon, sitting around a table, this one in a pubby-like bar, having good conversation. By the next Saturday, no one was hanging out in any bars. Over a year later, I still haven't been able to do that again. I don't miss the drinking. I do miss the conversation. It just isn't the same on Zoom.

© 2021 Jane Kelly

My mother and the man from the bleachers

Within the past few years, I was walking through a store and noticed that little, round, plastic, blow-up pools were on sale for $.99. $.99! I cannot tell you how much I wanted one of those pools as a child, but my parents never relented. I, who was overindulged in more ways than I could list, was never given a simple plastic pool. That sale got me wondering why. 

Parents in the early 1950s were understandably fearful of polio and there was a relationship between swimming pools and transmission, but I don't think plastic pools no more than 48 inches in diameter were the issue.  Also, I think my desire for a plastic pool extended beyond the polio scare. I did not understand. And then it hit me. Baseball. Not an actual baseball. The idea of baseball.

My parents loved baseball. I am pretty sure that baseball had not been routinely broadcast on television for many seasons when I started asking for a blow-up pool. Realizing that made me understand. It wasn't that my parents didn't want me to have a pool. They didn't want to sit outside and watch me in it. Not when there was a Phillies game on. And, if recall from childhood memories of baseball sounds flowing onto the street through the windows of mostly unairconditioned houses, there were a lot of televised games.

Just as an aside, denied a blowup pool, I spent the summer digging a pool in the back yard. I was completely focused on my construction project. Well, that and the tile collection I assembled from the dirt I excavated. My efforts evolved into both a construction and an archaeological project-- all to the accompaniment of roaring crowds and the click of a bat hitting a ball (although not that often when the Phillies were at bat).

My mother loved baseball. Truly loved the game. My interest has always been superficial. However, I have always loved an underdog. (If you were going to be any kind of sports fan in Philadelphia you had to develop a love for underdogs.) So when New York got a new team with an impressive stream of losses, I had to love the New York Mets. And since I was entering my teen-age years, some sort of infatuation had to factor in. I developed an affection for Ed Kranepool. How I don't recall, but I was devoted to him as well as to Troy Donahue, Edd "Kookie" Burns and, inexplicably, Walter Pidgeon.

So, my mother, always interested in a trip anywhere new, got tickets for a Mets' home game at Shea Stadium. She got three so we could take along Debbie Shettsline, now Wernert, a true baseball fan as well as an admirer of Ed Kranepool. However, Debbie got sick and had to bow out at the last minute leaving my mother with an extra front row, box seat, along the first baseline. I don't know if she could return it, but I don't think she ever thought of doing that. Instead, we lurked near the ticket office until my mother saw a man headed for the box office. I suspect she could see that he was going to buy one ticket for the bleachers. Being a teenaged girl, I might have kept my distance as she sidled up to him and asked if he'd like to use our ticket. Not buy it. Use it.  

I still remember what the guy looked like. Average. Summer clothes appropriate for the ballpark. Nothing fancy about him. The kind of guy who likely stopped by his neighborhood bar on the way home from work. I don't know why but he struck me as single, no kids. Maybe because he was alone at the ballpark on an afternoon when most people were working.  It's easier to say what he did not look like. A doctor. A lawyer. A judge. Since it was a weekday afternoon, he probably did not work on Wall Street.

When we took our seats, this man thought he had died and gone to baseball heaven. He pointed out the bleachers where he thought he'd be sitting. He and my mother made easy conversation and he taught us all about the Mets. He bought us drinks and snacks. The three of us had a wonderful time together.

It was a great afternoon at the ballpark. The weather was gorgeous. The Mets won. Partially because in the first inning Ed Kranepool came up second in the Met lineup and hit a home run. My mother enjoyed making me happy, but she also took great joy in making that man happy. I am sure we knew his name at the time, but I have long since forgotten it. I would suspect that he is no longer on the planet, but I bet until the day he passed on he remembered his day at Shea Stadium with my mother.

© 2021 Jane Kelly