{"id":442,"date":"2014-11-21T15:50:14","date_gmt":"2014-11-21T15:50:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/margotdarby.com\/news\/?p=442"},"modified":"2014-11-22T18:14:19","modified_gmt":"2014-11-22T18:14:19","slug":"a-note-to-the-reader-draft","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/margotdarby.com\/news\/2014\/11\/a-note-to-the-reader-draft\/","title":{"rendered":"A Note to the Reader (draft)"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is a proposed draft for the foreword of the regurgitated Teentime book.<\/em><\/p>\n

A Note to the Reader<\/strong><\/p>\n

This is a memoir, and therefore somewhat fictionalized, like\u00a0most memoirs. The\u00a0action takes place more than forty years ago, but as most of the players were pretty young them, most of them\u00a0are still alive. They will give me no end of trouble if don’t disguise them. And they would be absolutely right, because my recollections are pretty nasty.*<\/p>\n

So I’ve changed everyone’s name\u2014with the obvious exception of a few public figures\u2014and invented new backgrounds for some people.\u00a0Some trifling\u00a0characters are made into “composites.” The major alteration to the story is the time-scheme. Events that played out over\u00a0four or five years are squeezed into the year or so of the book’s action (1973-1974).\u00a0This compression gives the story a semblance of narrative drive and, I hope, a kind of\u00a0plot.<\/p>\n

Place names and businesses are real, for the most part. The unnamed “educational TV” stations in New York and Boston are WNET and WGBH. I don’t name them because they like to call themselves\u00a0Public Television, which in the context of this story would be confusing. Forty to fifty years ago people said Educational Television. A few\u00a0kiddy shows (Zoom, Sesame Street, The Electric Company) are given their real names. Otherwise most\u00a0of the television programs in this book are renamed or completely made up.<\/p>\n

The subplot about Sal Mineo and his lurid screenplay, Sacred Bubblegum, is almost entirely true. It was a real script, and I lugged a bound\u00a0copy\u00a0around for a while in the summer of ’73. His agent wanted a treatment (i.e., synopsis) of it, and somehow that task\u00a0got passed on to me. I did write\u00a0something, but I wasn’t\u00a0in Nantucket when I did it.<\/p>\n

The business about the Jackson Whites, on the other hand, is pure invention. Putting a segment about Jackson Whites on an “educational” kiddy show is exactly\u00a0the kind of daff’y, unbalanced idea that Mr. Hornblower liked to come up with. But he didn’t really visit the Jackson Whites.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

________<\/p>\n

*I’ve been at the receiving end of this procedure. About ten years ago\u00a0a bumptious, lame-brained acquaintance of my youth wrote a kinky sex memoir that got a lot of media play. He wanted to put me in it, and sent me few pages of draft. It was really bad. His expository\u00a0style had become thoroughly corrupted by years of writing juvenile paperbacks\u00a0full of indistinguishable 14-year-olds.\u00a0As a result of this, his\u00a0delineation\u00a0of “me” was inept and malformed (“Whoa!” she said, “Cut me some slack!”<\/em>). So\u00a0I told\u00a0him\u00a0to kill the whole section. That peeved him greatly. He took revenge on me by rewriting the section with\u00a0a repellent new character. She was presented\u00a0as a composite of me and some other girls and women he had known, though she\u00a0was\u00a0pure fiction, and badly done fiction at that. Suffice it to say we\u00a0haven’t spoken since. If this shallow scribbler had simply disguised the memoir’s characters and not begged for\u00a0approval from the putative originals, this whole kerfuffle could have been avoided.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is a proposed draft for the foreword of the regurgitated Teentime book. A Note to the Reader This is a memoir, and therefore somewhat fictionalized, like\u00a0most memoirs. The\u00a0action takes place more than forty years ago, but as most of the players were pretty young them, most of them\u00a0are still alive. They will give me […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-442","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cocoa-marsh"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6KTdR-78","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/margotdarby.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/442","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/margotdarby.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/margotdarby.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/margotdarby.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/margotdarby.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=442"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/margotdarby.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/442\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":460,"href":"https:\/\/margotdarby.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/442\/revisions\/460"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/margotdarby.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=442"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/margotdarby.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=442"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/margotdarby.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=442"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}