Sunday, December 12, 2004 – The Moveable Feast

Sunday, December 12, 2004 – The Moveable Feast

One of the great perks of my being an editor was I got to go to a lot of parties, disguised as press receptions or press conferences. Now that I’m no longer an editor I get to throw these parties. The rationale for these events is some press announcement the host company wants to make or some gathering in which everyone makes a marketing pitch in the form of an educational presentation. There are several categories of invitees who tend to come. If the host is a public company listed on a major stock exchange, at the top of the pecking order are the financial analysts. If this is an upbeat event, the host company’s corporate communications office and their pricey PR firm pull out the stops to ensure the major analysts show up. Needless to say the company is holding the event at an upscale hotel in Midtown Manhattan.

Another group in attendance is the major business and general press—Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Fortune, Times, Newsweek, broadcast news, etc. This group is as coveted as the financial analyst. You could throw into this category, industry analyst from market research firms such as Dataquest, International Data Corp., among others. This latter collection is less coveted and likely to include a great many one-man shops—analysts who have gone off on their own and now sell market reports to a select clientele. Finally, there is the trade press, lowest on the totem pole but encouraged to participate—the PR term for getting a good crowd is “butts in seats” and the trade press will typically deliver plenty of butts in seats. I should know as I was one of those butts for a couple of decades.

There is one other group, which I put into the category of freelancers, stringers, etc. This group is the most fascinating of all because they include writers and editors in between jobs or on their own who are doing piece work and being paid by the word. They’re in attendance because a magazine has assigned them to cover the event or they’ve come hoping to write something they can sell. Then there are the gleaners, retired editors, chronically unemployed writers, or simply people who have learned that a business card with a magazine name and your name and an editorial title will get you into most any press event going on in New York nearly any day in the week—this was all before 9-11, however, and the rules in Manhattan might have changed as a result.

I remember attending the Microsoft event in Manhattan when the software giant announced MS DOS 5 in the late 80s, early 90s. As I collected my badge and my collection of “giveaways”—t-shirts, pens, leatherette binder and pad and all the press releases and background information, I noticed others presenting business cards to the receptionist and having badges hand written. I was speaking with a colleague when he pointed out a lady getting her handwritten badge. He mentioned that over ten years earlier she had worked at a magazine where we had both been several years before. He suspected she was using an old business card to crash the party. There were others with handwritten badges that also looked suspect, but I figured Microsoft could afford to entertain them. I admired their audacity. I would also know their plight several years later when I too became an unemployed writer producing an article for whoever had space to fill and were willing to hire me to fill it—often at highly discounted wages. I wrote several pieces pro bono just to have the byline that I could show to potentially paying clients.

I did find work, ironically producing events just like the Microsoft bash. I had become the master of ceremony at one of the moveable feast that I once attended. Recently, I got a chance to relive the experience of being an invitee at one of these events rather than the host. It was an evening affair in which my company was a participant along with many others. The reception began at 5:00 PM with dinner starting at 7:00 PM followed by a program of speakers until whenever. I arrived shortly after 5:00—the traffic on California 101 moves at a snail’s pace at this time of day and I have to maneuver a good 10 miles of it. By the time I received my badge the festivities were getting underway. The open bars—several were scattered around the cavernous hotel ballroom where the event was being held—were flowing with wine, bear, and mixed drinks. I opted for a glass of Chandon without the liqueur the bartender was about to mix in with it.

Champagne flute in hand, I began wandering around the hall looking for familiar faces, I would recognize someone engaged with a group. If he looked over and we made eye contact and his face flashed recognition, I would raise my glass smiling and he would return the gesture. The across-the-room greeting happened on a number of occasions. If I had still been an editor, he would have broke from his group and engaged me, but we both knew that I held no sway any longer. I was just another working guy like him. I did meet a PR lady who had her own one-person operation doing quite well. She had one client in Europe, and several local ones that kept her busy. We caught up the four years since we had last crossed paths.

What struck me about this gathering was all the gray matter in the room. These were mostly executives who had been in the business as long as I had been and we were all showing our age. (This was not a roomful of younger men in the late 30s early 40s. They had their own gatherings, their own moveable feasts.) We were all the age of the industry that had once been a high-flyer that enjoyed spectacular year-over-year growth. It had now gotten to be mature and no longer experienced such dramatic spurts, rather the opposite, years of modest growth mixed in with years of dramatic declines of late. Suddenly, the party—the moveable feast—that had nourished us all was beginning to attract fewer of us and the venues were not as extravagant as in the past.

When I finished the last party my company had underwritten with the support from a number of other sponsors, I asked the hotel catering manager to bring me a bottle of Coppola Claret and a couple of glasses. He indulged me and returned with three glasses. The two other folks who had made sure the event went off as planned shared in a toast with me. Afterwards, they took off for home, but I had a few lingering guests still talking in the reception area despite the open bar being dismantled. I took my Coppola in to where they were and we sat and talked till the bottle was empty and they went on their way and I sat at the table for a moment luxuriating in the moment before I too took my leave. I wondered how many more such parties I had in me.