Thursday
Then: Devices
Having worked in most areas of marketing communications, I liked public relations the least. When I had to do PR for my own creation, the Hometime Weekend Home Projects CD-ROM, in 1993, I wasn’t very good at it, even though I had just finished eight years as a partner in a large PR firm. Late that year, I flew seven hours to and from San Francisco in one day to have an hour-long meeting with Bill Crosby at Sunset magazine about my title. It was the first time we’d met. And, I don’t know about Bill, but I left the meeting knowing this guy would become a great friend.
We stayed in very close touch through my journey because he was at the start-up Improvenet.com, thanks to my recommendation to the founder, trying like a lot of us to be one of the rare winners in the dotcom craze. And our running joke leading up to and after surgery was that what I was going through was all about ‘devices.’
I’m still not sure if Bill has ever been to Mitchell Brothers in San Francisco, dubbed by Playboy magazine as ‘one of the top men’s clubs in the country.’ But Bill was a constant jokester about my stories of having visited there twice. (To all concerned: my visits were for observation only.) Bill took great delight in my Midwestern amazement that patrons of Mitchell Brothers could actually pay to occupy various booths and then select from what looked like a gangster’s ‘violin’ case various devices for the female staffers to use in probing their own anatomy. Other items on the menu included lap dances.
While describing the various devices that probed me, like the nasty biopsy gun, or the scope for inside the bladder, Bill took great delight in joining me in amazement that I was now a ‘probee’ and not an wide-eyed Midwesterner watching the probing.
An update:
Lucky for me, best friends Channing Dawson and Bill Crosby are now colleagues at Scripps Networks in Knoxville, TN. Scripps owns Home & Garden Television and other cable networks. And their work and mine in emerging media audiences are intersecting, so despite their distance, we remain in close contact. ¶ 1:33 PM
We stayed in very close touch through my journey because he was at the start-up Improvenet.com, thanks to my recommendation to the founder, trying like a lot of us to be one of the rare winners in the dotcom craze. And our running joke leading up to and after surgery was that what I was going through was all about ‘devices.’
I’m still not sure if Bill has ever been to Mitchell Brothers in San Francisco, dubbed by Playboy magazine as ‘one of the top men’s clubs in the country.’ But Bill was a constant jokester about my stories of having visited there twice. (To all concerned: my visits were for observation only.) Bill took great delight in my Midwestern amazement that patrons of Mitchell Brothers could actually pay to occupy various booths and then select from what looked like a gangster’s ‘violin’ case various devices for the female staffers to use in probing their own anatomy. Other items on the menu included lap dances.
While describing the various devices that probed me, like the nasty biopsy gun, or the scope for inside the bladder, Bill took great delight in joining me in amazement that I was now a ‘probee’ and not an wide-eyed Midwesterner watching the probing.
An update:
Lucky for me, best friends Channing Dawson and Bill Crosby are now colleagues at Scripps Networks in Knoxville, TN. Scripps owns Home & Garden Television and other cable networks. And their work and mine in emerging media audiences are intersecting, so despite their distance, we remain in close contact. ¶ 1:33 PM
