Fifty-sixth posting - lie

Friends, I am writing to you from 30,000 feet, on my way home from a few days in sunny, sunny, sunny San Diego. At my old company, sales meetings were in Chicago or suburban New York. Yawn. At my new company, they’re wherever the team wants to go. At my old company, hundreds of people went to sales meetings. At my new company, I presented to the entire retail sales organization – all nine of them…. Although the hotel was beautiful and reminded me of a Disney theme-park, the trip isn’t really the subject of today’s blog….

So I’ve developed a bit of a Saturday morning ritual. When the weather’s crappy, I take an indoor cycling class at 8, then walk across the street to the Byways Café for breakfast. It’s a great place and has been around for decades, and the latest owner (Anne) has filled it with kitschy 50s diner memorabilia, like plates and placemats and… yes, MUGS! Of course, they fill the mugs with phenomenal Peet’s coffee, which makes them that much better.

Anyway, this past Saturday, sitting at the counter, I started talking to the 50ish woman next to me, Susan. She pointed out the café owner and introduced me to a couple of other folks who worked there. Evidently she’s well-known around the area. Turns out that she’s also a good friend of the director Gus Van Sant, who lives down the street, she’s the mother of a not un-famous actor, John Robinson, who starred in The Lords of Dogtown and Elephant. It turns out that John’s latest film is scheduled to be released in March but not without a little controversy. For those of you artsy, literary types, you may have read about this in the New York Times. I hadn’t, but it’s interesting.

Several years ago, JT LeRoy wrote a book about his childhood as a truck-stop prostitute. It’s called The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things. Catchy, eh? Evidently it was a terrible, terrible story, but it somehow ended fairy well in that he was placed in foster care and later adopted by a loving couple. His problems didn’t end, though, and years later, he successfully underwent surgery to become a woman. After the book got some initial publicity, and JT made the literary rounds (as a woman), several famous people, including Suzanne Vega, became personally involved because of the book. This involvement led to the story being made into a film, starring the aforementioned John Robinson.

The reason I’m telling you this now is that John’s mother learned that very morning that morning that JT was a completely made up person. The two conspirators who “created” JT LeRoy tried to throw off any leads with the sex-change act, and the woman who’s been traipsing around as JT in front of the literati was the sister-in-law of one of the conspirators. Oprah thought she had something with the author of A Million Tiny Pieces. This one’s even bigger. I don’t know how the ruse was finally exposed, but it had something to do with where the royalties were going and what expenses were being billed.

At first I thought, good for him/her/them for sticking it to the Man. Then I realized that JT’s creators were asking for sympathy and lying about a horrible childhood tragedy. It’s one thing to fabricate a harmless story; it’s another to use this tragedy for pure financial gain.

Enjoy your weeks. NATHAN

(By the way, lest you think Play to Win!; Fewer, Bigger, Better; and All Hands On Deck are the meaningless slogans of just my old company… Nope, my new one uses them, too.)