My Dinner with Gourmet

Part one: in which we “win” a free vacation to Cancun and dinner for two

I’m learning a lot this year about what it means to be engaged and part of planning one of the largest events of our lives.

Along came our first wedding show hosted by Valley News Live in Fargo. We went to this free event figuring we might actually win something. The show was held in Fargo’s Civic Center, a convention building with large open rooms filled with wedding vendors. I had imagined an event where we would get some good ideas for the wedding, perhaps some cake samples or decorating tips. Instead, it was like walking through the yellow pages. Except in this case, the businesses could see you. And there were no free cake samples.

We were asked by a few places to schedule times to try on dresses or register for gifts. On top of that, the place was a special kind of hot that makes your self-control particularly pliable. “Yes, sign me up, please, as long as that gets me through this crowd faster and back out into the hallway where I imagine there is air.” Soon, the only place where the crowd wasn’t participating in mosh pit physics was near a wedding DJ wearing a Hawaiian shirt, handing out leis, and dancing to “Celebration.” He was the sort of guy who would have had bully issues in high school, and now was managing to create a bubble of uncomfortableness for the 10-foot radius around his booth. In short, he was awesome.

I was signing up for possibly free hotel stays while Fiancé hit some other booths. By this point, two hours in, we were just signing things in order to get out of this hellishly hot space and back to a safe place where we could imagine puppies and kittens living in harmony.

One such sign in, Fiancé described thusly: “This beautiful woman, real nice, came up to me with a little purple card. She said, ‘Do you want to register for a free honeymoon, two nights, three days in Cancun?’ So I did. I thought nothing of it.”

She said there was some cookware behind the woman, but it seemed haphazard and secondary to the registering for free gifts.

Fiancé: So she asked if I had all these things for the wedding. I was like, “No. No. Nope.” She’s like,  “You should just elope.” I’m like, “Don’t think I haven’t thought about it.” And that was the extent of it.

Me: So she didn’t mention cookware. At all.

Fiancé: No.

Me: At all during this whole conversation?

Fiancé: No. 

We stayed through the runway show, which was an exercise in interesting freeze frame poses and overly choreographed yet sincere male dancing numbers. We left feeling drained, overwhelmed, and a little bit vomity.

Two days later, Fiancé received a call from a company called Simplicity Gourmet telling her she won a honeymoon vacation to Cancun.

I was skeptical, and a quick search of the company confirmed my skepticism. They sell very highly priced cookware, and everyone that has ever signed up or perhaps even tried on a dress at the wrong bridal shop gets a free vacation from this company.

Online, there are many sites that say this is a scam. I don’t know if this is a scam in the strict sense of the word, and I don’t think they are doing anything illegal, but there are several things I noticed while researching:

A.     Their website has pages for shopping online and gift registry that are under construction. They’ve been under construction since I first looked in January. It’s now nearly May. It seems like a good bet that these particular pages on their website are perpetually under construction, because who in their right mind would order this stuff without someone in front of them extolling the virtues of the cookware?

B.     Many people on chat rooms complain about this company, or talk about getting the cookware. Several say they will be going on the vacation and will report when they get back. No one ever does. Some do say they enjoy the cookware.

In our case, the free vacation was topped off with a free gourmet meal cooked in our very own home! Fiancé described the phone call to me:

Fiancé: I said, “Is someone going to come here to sell me something?” “No, no. You don’t have to buy anything.”

Me: I don’t think that’s what you asked.

Fiancé: What?

Me: That’s not what you asked. But ok.

Fiancé: Yeah. You’re right. That isn’t what I asked. Wow. Tricky motherfuckers! They totally spun the language on me. Completely. I feel so screwed!

And:

Fiancé: So I was excited; we really won. Then I said, because I’m ridiculous, “Do you really like your job?” He’s like, “What?” I was like, “Do you like your job because all day long you get to call people and tell them that they won stuff?” He goes, “Well… kind of.”

Me: Some honesty.

Fiancé: Yes. “I only get to call the select few with good news.”

Me: So he didn’t want to admit that that’s all they do all day. That there’s some other job he has that takes up more of his time.

Fiancé: Yeah. We’re the chosen select few.

Me: So you had some inkling that we weren’t the only people they were calling.

Fiancé: No. I never did. I thought we really won. He made me believe him. He had this southern charm. Then he got giggly about it.

Neither Fiancé nor I had ever been a part of such a high-pressure sales tactic before, and we were both nervous about it. Scared about what might happen, I decided that this would make a good experience and told Fiancé as much. I’d been starving for something worth writing about for months. She supported this decision, to my surprise, and agreed to have this person come over and cook for us. The person on the phone had supplied directions and a brief menu for the meal.

Fiancé: He said, “I need you to provide the dishes and beverages.” He said it would be chicken breast. I said, “That would go with a lovely white wine.” … Stop looking at me!

Me: What?

Fiancé: You are giving me the “I can’t believe you are talking to a stranger” look. I’m unemployed! I have no one to talk to! Oh my God, I talked about how I liked sweet wine!

Me: So you are talking to a complete stranger about your love of wine.

As the day approached, I asked my brother and his wife to join us for this dinner. I was completely open about what it was. That this would be a high-pressure sales event for 90 minutes, and that I would most likely write about it. I wanted their help and perspective for the article. I secretly believed that having them there would help keep my guard up in the face of unknown sales tactics. Even my own brother decided not to sit through a free dinner to help me. That’s the power this type of sales event has over people.

I called Valley News Live and talked to the person there in charge of the bridal show. She said that one other person had e-mailed about this situation. She said she had been at the bride show last year as a bride and went through the cookware presentation. “Every name they get gets a honeymoon,” she said. “If you take advantage of the free trip, they cover the cost of the hotel. You have to pay fees. It’s just a marketing technique they use.”

Valley News Live saw no issue with inviting a company with what some would consider dubious sales practices into their Fargo event. Simplicity Gourmet was the only company from outside the three-state-region to have a booth there. But hey, you could use the same adjectives for Men’s Warehouse and David’s Bridal. I’m still getting calls from them on a weekly basis. Much of the whole wedding industry seems dubious, but Simplicity Gourmet isn’t in the wedding business. They are targeting young couples at bridal shows who are already working to pay for a wedding and get a solid start on their marriages. These couples are full of American Dream hopes and perhaps easily duped into thinking that it won’t happen without this cookware.

Although we are a little bit older than recent college graduates, Fiancé and I are in that same boat – trying desperately to get a toehold on our future together. We’re vulnerable, bootless, and we just invited a cobra to dinner.

Next time: Part two: In which I grill my Fiancé about how this dinner touches on all our hopes and fears

Open query letter to travel editor of Midwest Living after listening to her presentation

Hey girlfriend!

I’m going to dial down my snarkomatic quip-generator for this letter. I learned during your presentation that while you enjoy making snide comments to degrade writers and the writing profession you claim to love so much that you only do it for 5-10 percent of your job, you are not a fan of hearing snide comments from writers. For the bile that remains, I’m sorry.

I’m also sorry to see that perhaps another trait you carried over from newspaper writing to magazine writing is an unhealthy dose of cynicism. I feel lucky that I was able to escape newspapers after several years with my enjoyment for writing and hearing from other writers intact, and that I am able to translate those skills into writing award-winning magazine features. I see that you’ve applied for an American Society of Magazine Editors award and won a gold recently from the American Society of Travel Writers. Congratulations! It was interesting to find out during your presentation that my awards are meaningless since editors like you do all the work that earned those awards while we writers apparently stumble through life helplessly spouting out words and sentence fragments with no chance of being understood without an editor taking over and writing it herself. Thank God there are editors out there who, rather than work with writers and see them as colleagues, have the writers simply do the scouting so the editors can write the features themselves. It’s good to know that while a writer’s style can ruin a pitch by being unprofessional (like this very letter!), you simultaneously believe that style doesn’t matter because it’s your job to fix said writing.

It’s wonderful that in no way does this competing set of views on query letters scream out to you a big problem. The style or formality of a pitch letter has less to do with a writer’s chances at your magazine than your personal idiosyncrasies and gut response based on ethereal moods. I typically start an email more formally and with respect and a hint of dignity, as I believe many in the business would want to be treated. Your advice to a room full of writers, some of whom may not know better, was to start out a query with a simple “hey” and the editor's first name. Seeing that as a sign of maturity versus opening an email with an address as a sign of amateur writing – I’m still trying to process that bucket of gold nuggets.

I actually enjoyed, in all sincerity, what you said about branding – that readers come to a brand for specific needs. With travel writing, you want the reader to imagine herself at that location. You like small-town content like articles on destination bakeries. I suggest you listen to yourself on this one because minutes later you casually dismissed any possibility of appealing to younger readers by expanding this limited travel focus while at the same time lamenting the median reader age of 52.

As you suggested in your presentation, you like people who want to help write for you, but I’d much prefer to help you in your presentations. You have a room full of people, yes, actual people, in various stages of their communications careers. They come to listen to someone provide insight on travel writing or publishing. The insight they get instead is how jaded the process is toward writers. And while the jokes may receive a few chuckles, they are at the expense of some of the very people who are there to learn, earnestly, and with humility in such tough times. These are people who seem to be looking for something to hold on to in an ever-diluted field. I consider myself fortunate to have a position where I can share others’ stories and experiences. I wanted to see what was out there for the stories I find that don’t fit in my position’s goals – for instance, traversing a red-scoria gravel road through more than 30 miles of cow pastures and burning coal veins in October, when every hill crested reveals a new panorama reminiscent of colorized photographs from the 1950s, like a Technicolor fairy tale come to life. The fields of wild sage and tall grass sway like neon-green ocean waves sunder a brilliant North Dakota sunset. The red ribbon of the road winds through the small valley to the next round hilltop. Cattle, at first unnervingly close or even on the road, become comfortable witnesses of a journey where few other cars travel in favor of the tourist mecca known as Medora, N.D.

But why put in the work as a lowly writer not worth the two words of a byline? I don’t get bylines often, and am comfortable with the fact that some stories don’t get them because of the official nature of the piece. But to make a blanket statement that the writers wishing for a byline in your magazine need not apply goes against both your own website's writer’s guidelines and against any writer’s wish to diversify his or her portfolio.

The sad fact is you can treat us like dirt because there are so many of us. We are lost amid legions, and more often than not, we give away our work for free for the chance to stick out of the throng. My venom-filled sarcastathon chock full of grammar tics and run-ons may keep you feeling busy and superior, but will not change things when the next writer is willing to do the grunt work of pre-reporting for just two measly words, perhaps a hyphenate. Oh, you don’t do bylines? The next one will do it simply for the cost of travel! Side note: sorry to hear your personal travel budget has been cut to a scandalous $7,000 a year. I’m sure many in the room who are piecing together freelance jobs to eke by felt your pain.

I don’t write this as a “diva,” although it may be easy to dismiss me as such. I have no wish to write for people who denigrate the profession. Instead, I write it with all the feeling I can gather for other writers who will put up with such belittling from the one person on earth who should understand the various, sometimes wonderfully invigorating challenges inherent in writing, the editor. I understand that your job, like many, has a certain grind to it. I’m sure you have to deal with certain types of people (like me!) that make life a little less worthwhile, day in, day out, without end. I’m sure you find yourself dispensing the same advice again and again to no use because the next person has not heard that advice and will make the same mistake. It’s the nature of working with people. But, please, remember that they are people.

Sincerely,

A writer (I will withhold my byline here as well)

First post: Who I am

My first blog post:

Thanks for checking this out! I thought I would cobble together a slapdash mission statement of sorts for this first post, in case later on you happened across this site and are wondering who the heck is writing this and why you should put your plans for world domination on hold for a few brief minutes to let your eyeballs scan this page for something, anything that might provide a bit of merriment, a touch of meaning, or a wisp of relief in knowing there’s someone out there sort of like you. I think we all want a little of that.

I’m a professional writer who makes no pretense at spelling. I’m using this blog to vent some creativity and frustration that if unchecked would build up to dangerous proportions. I have chips on my shoulder about institutions, the American Dream mythology, the American myth as portrayed in local and national media, and many others that will be touched on in the months to come. 

I’m trying to keep this anonymous for many reasons.

I’ll also try to keep it light.

Thanks,

Fargo Jones