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Tbrady

Tracy McArdle is the author of Confessions of a Nervous Shiksa and Real Women Eat Beef. She spent twelve years in New York and Los Angeles as a publicity executive at such companies as Turner Broadcasting, Twentieth Century Fox and Sony Pictures Entertainment before moving home to New England to wr...

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WorkingWoman's Blues

Tracy McArdle

Hey y’all.   Happy Sunday.  The above title is a reference to the Gratefu Dead album (yes, I had it as an album) that I used to listen to when I had feathered hair and feathered earrings.

Since it’s Sunday and we all have an extra minute in the day (Ma’am, step away from that laundry basket NOW!) I thought, if it’s okay with the Skirt Editors, to indulge in a long form essay. 

These are the musings and moments that I record that don’t live anywhere but the occasional reading.  This one I did in Cambridge or the series Four Stories a year ago.  I was initially scared to talk about it for fear of 1) being fired or 2) being outcast as an insecure freak.

Now of course, I don’t care about either.  And I’d like to share it with you.  SO kick back, grab some coffee, and think about all the times you wondered what it would be like to wear a tie and have a penis...

THE ONLY VAGINA IN THE ROOM

“What is the date today?!”  I demanded of the fragile cab driver, instinctively knowing he’d reply, “What?” and hating myself for being so insistent and aggressive, but really needing to know now what the date was, because I was about to record an outgoing message on my voicemail saying I was out of the office, today, November _ _ and if I didn’t get the information within the prescribed time limit I’d have to record the message all over again after navigating the maddening labyrinth of automated instructions and wasting another, say, ninety seconds of time into the infinite vortex of multi-tasking exhaustion. 

“The date, today’s date?  What is.  Today’s.  Date?” I repeated, pleased with myself for not adding, “Now, Goddammit!”

“The seventh, today is the seventh,” he surrendered, terrified, and I felt guilty, hideous, like someone I did not want to be and had somehow become anyway.  I didn’t even thank him, since the beep signaling my recording had come and gone and I was, well, out of time for social grace.  He stole a glance in the rearview mirror and I evaded his eyes, choosing instead to take in the blur of Queens housing projects melting by on my right. 

It was Monday, I was in New York, on my way to a branding meeting with a group of men from our New York office, all of whom had penises but one of whom lacked hands.  Childhood accident involving fireworks.  That was all I knew.  Three people in the office had aggressively prepped me before I was allowed to meet him, so I was ready for the shock.  Still, when the fourth guy said, “…have you met Gary?  Just so you know –” I snapped.  “I know,” I said.  “I’ve been told.  I can handle it,” I insisted, unaware of my cruel pun.

A group of us from the agency were meeting about the identity crisis of Spike TV, the network for men.  It needed an upgrade, or as the penis owners in the meeting were admittedly loathe to admit, a “makeover.”  As marketers who had helped reshape the way young hipsters choose their convertibles and how American moms approach meat purchases, we were here to help.  And Gary, the talented creative director, had no hands.  And I had no penis.  We both made insightful contributions and injected timely, smart comments as evidence of our intelligence and savvy, as advertising people in meetings often do.  But the meeting still went badly.  I had to admit, when it was over and we were saying our strung out, overly analytical recap goodbyes over the free leftover breakfast, it probably wouldn’t have gone any better if Gary had had hands and I had a penis.

What happened…We (the cool agency people) blamed it on Todd, the restless Spike TV programming guy who’d arrived late, left early and checked his watch in between.  He wrecked the whole potential of hot-advertising-agency – cold-brand-in-search-of-a-new identity harmony.  Because of Todd and his disagreeable vibe, no one was on the same page.  Because of Todd, we were done before we’d gotten started.  I suspected, and suspect in retrospect everyone else did, that Todd’s penis was small.

Sometimes, if I’ve had enough coffee or am wearing a good outfit, I like my job.  Mostly, though, like many people, I suppose, I spend my time in a half arrogant, half paranoid state, wondering how long it will be before it becomes apparent to someone besides me that I have no idea what I’m doing.  No one likes to feel this way – yet share enough caffeine and alcohol with the people you work with and you find, especially after a couple of layover scotches in the Akron airport lounge, most people will admit to a certain degree of professional fakery.  Everyone’s worried about being found out, but no one is finding anyone out because. . . they’re too busy worrying about being found out. 

I especially keep this in mind when mine is the only vagina in the room. 

The agenda at these kinds of meetings is loose at best, meandering even, and everyone expects someone else (usually the woman in the room or someone else who thought to bring a pen) to guide everyone to a conclusion or even a direction, when really everyone’s self preservation wheels are turning, waiting for their chance to make insightful contributions and inject timely, smart comments as evidence of their intelligence and savvy. 

We had the obligatory visual board, a compelling bull’s-eye graphic in red and gray championing our theory on brand identity (at our agency we call it the brand ‘truth’).  We had a dramatic second board with one sentence on it that was meant to convey our perception of the Spike TV brand truth, something about the eternal bachelor and what it means to be a man.  It sounded pretty good.  Believable even.  But Todd shit on it.  Verbally, I mean.  Psychologically too, and metaphysically - just evacuated his mental judgment all over our positioning statement like he’d been backpacking in rural Mexico for a week.  “I’m not sure I get it,” he sighed in that mock empathetic tone.  Gary’s body language became combative, like he might want to knock Todd into next week, maybe with his shoulders. 

“We’re sort of there already,” Todd explained, frowning, after we unveiled our statement board.  “I need you to think about, what does it mean to be an eternal bachelor, or a man on a deeper, broader, more intrinsic level?”  He stared at us expectantly and in my head I screamed, define intrinsic, Todd. 

Meanwhile Michael, the good natured, tall account guy was very busy trying to look patient while corralling Gary’s emotions.  Todd wasn’t finished.  “And, more importantly, how does that discovery then translate into getting men to watch the network?” he asked intelligently, but his face said, I have a two bedroom on the Upper West Side to pay for!  Gary’s eyes were narrowing when Todd launched into a two minute and forty second follow up question about the branding of being a man as it related to viewer loyalty (or disloyalty, as the case was), and his logic was meandering and confusing and deeply imprecise and I thought, Jesus, I think I just found Todd out – he has no idea what he’s doing.  Gary glowered while Michael nodded compassionately, like a good account director.

Later, even good natured Michael admitted he had no idea what the fuck Todd was talking about.  Todd finally finished his question, which if I had to translate, amounted to how do we make the network appealing to cool guys even though it has shitty programming that doesn’t deliver on our brand promise?  He was actually waiting for someone to answer him and I thought maybe at this point Michael might remind him that this was exactly the kind of question our agency got paid millions of dollars to answer over an extended period of time with lots of boards, power point presentations and charts featuring bull’s-eye diagrams.  But he didn’t.  He just turned white when Todd aggressively finished his question with a snide, “Does that make sense?” and Gary wrinkled the corners of his mouth in a politely defiant grimace and mumbled, “Sort of.”

The exchange reminded me of myself in the cab that morning.  I was filled with an overwhelming desire to search for my cabdriver among the chutes and ladders of New York, and explain to him that I was nothing like Todd; in fact, that wasn’t even me in his cab earlier.  Just a version of me that no longer existed. 

If I could find him, I’d ask him what it meant, intrinsically, to be a man.  I bet he’d answer, with no boards, charts, or brand promise.