So I get an e-mail containing what has emerged as the world’s single most terrifying statement: “I wasn’t sure if you knew there was a clip of you as a student on YouTube.”
Oh. My. God.
But the sender is friendly correspondent — isn’t she? Although a friendly correspondent could also be the one warning you that you’ve got to be careful, got to call in the lawyer and — at the very least — warn the spouse.
Oh. My God.
Not that I did a damn thing wilder than anybody else between 1975 and 1978. Seriously. And certainly NOT while anybody with a video or film camera was around. Those things were HUGE back then — not like the tiny evil cell camera movie-making possibilities existing today and putting all of us in jeopardy.
Not that I’m bitter.
But there I am, dumb-struck, open-mouthed, and wide-eyed — no kidding — by this wholly unexpected (I have to say it, because we’re talking about the 70s after all) blast from my past, and I realize I hadn’t read the subject line in the email:
“You & Milton Friedman.”
It swept back to me at once and in full, like one of those recovered memories garbled by a weeping lost soul from a show on the Oxygen network.
Me and Milton Friedman. Oh.My.God.
I was working on campus — I had two jobs, one at the writing center as a tutor and one at the Office of Financial Aid doing clerical stuff — and my boss at financial aid asked if I’d talk to an economist who was coming to campus in order to interview scholarship students. “This is where I get to be The Little Match Girl?” It was sort of a running joke, because I really was a poster child at Dartmouth for the seriously working class, identifiably ethnic, high-achieving kid who was grovellingly grateful to be at the school. I accepted their scholarships (and loans and earned my own keep — let’s not forget it) and felt that showing up and smiling was not too much to ask of me when they needed to show why scholarships and diversity were important.
Milton Friedman interviewed me for an hour. It took me about 10 minutes to realize he wasn’t interviewing me. He was trying to get me to say what he wanted me to say.
I was willing to be the poster girl, but not to be ventriloquist’s dummy. He wanted me to say that, had I gone to a state school, I would not have been as motivated to learn. That wasn’t true and I wouldn’t say it. MF wasn’t a happy bunny; it was easy to read his displeasure. Didn’t they explain to me what I was there for? Yes, I said, I was there to talk about my experience as a scholarship student thankful for the privilege of being at an Ivy League school. Right, says the producer (who,like all producers, is doing the real work) so, then, wouldn’t I agree that, had I not been given a sense of how privileged I was to be permitted to be part of this elite world, I would have been thrown into a heap of mediocre students from which I would be unlikely to emerge with any success snug in my little ethnic fist?
Oh.My.God.
I wouldn’t say it. All my friends from home were at state schools and they were smarter than I was; my brother went to Hunter and I was calling him for advice on my papers.
No. I was very, very lucky to be at Dartmouth and glad for the money they awarded me and offered me in my many loans. I was enormously and publicly grateful for all the opportunities. But that was as far as I would go.
As you’ll see, if you care to click on the link, I’m practically biting my tongue. Even 30 years ago I was never that quiet; I was so frustrated but I was also so determined to do a good job for my friends at the financial aid office, and both frustration and determination are manifest in these low-talking, carefully pronounced couple of tightly edited sentences.
I’ve learned some things over the years: 1. What you say is less important to an interviewer than how useful your words will prove for their own purposes; 2. Don’t talk to Milton Friedman; 3. Don’t say anything in your youth that you don’t want to have show up in your middle age; 4. Get your eyebrows shaped. Oh.My.God. Mine look like there are sea anemones plastered on my brow.
Here’s the link. I’m pretty much toward the beginning. Don’t laugh.
