Bucket full of crazy

I didn’t wait long to see if Amos Loewenstein had meant it when he said he wanted to keep in touch with me. Three days after our media panel in front of the Teenage Right-Wingers of Canada, I sent him an email. I waited three days because I thought doing it the next day looked too eager, or like I was trolling for work...though that possibility wasn’t far from my mind. Heck -- I could make an excellent contributor to the Red Deer Report, couldn’t I? But I didn’t want Amos to think that was all I wanted, as it certainly wasn’t. I liked him and wanted to know him better. He had so impressed me on that panel. And I kept thinking about his pudgy, rosy cheeks. So cute. So I didn’t email the very next day.
Or two days later. I was going to email two days later, but something so exciting happened, I needed time to process it and buy cheap, sparkling wine with which to celebrate. What happened was, I got a phone call from the editor of the Toronto Daily Scum, Toronto’s worst daily paper (and that was saying something). The editor wanted to offer me a weekly column! My very own column, where I would get to write about whatever I wanted! I was over the moon. And the pay wasn’t bad. After years of struggling as a freelancer, I actually had a bit of hope. Okay, it was the Daily Scum -- a paper that still had girls in bikinis, the Scum Girls, they were called, on page three every day. It was not exactly Le Monde, or anything. But because it was so appalling and stupid, it was extremely popular with Canadians, the most trivial people on God's earth. There was also the advantage that occasionally my columns would get reprinted in the other Scum papers across Canada, for the Scum network was national, spreading its bile, ignorance, sports and cheesecake from Kelowna to Antigonish. So I would have a national voice. Me, Jane Avril.
In other words, when I finally emailed Amos, I had something exciting to report, at least in the relative sense. His reply came quickly -- only ten minutes later. I saw that he was on a Crackberry, which somehow, didn’t surprise.
"Dear Jane," it read. "Thanks for your friendly note. I’m delighted to hear you will be writing for the Scum! Did you know that I have a column in the Red Deer Daily Scum? I will be looking for your work, from now on. Congratulations. Listen, did you hear that Rebecca Chestnut has been hired by the National Highbrow Tabloid? I can’t believe it. She is a convicted felon. What is this going to say about conservatives in Canada? We have to do something about this, don’t you think? I wonder what Charles Taylor thinks about this. Anyway, it so happens I am in Toronto this week. Would you like to get together for a coffee?" He signed it "Cheers," with his signature, "Amos Loewenstein, Publisher, Red Deer Report," underneath, along with various phone numbers.
A nice note, but I was surprised he gave a hoot about Rebecca Chestnut. Chestnut was a Canadian girl who was, put simply, a bucket full of crazy. She had become famous when she was at university in Saskatoon and sued a professor for sexual harassment when he asked her the time one day. Chestnut claimed that the way in which he asked the time made her feel threatened, and campus feminist groups supported her, calling on the university president to fire the running-late professor. The professor claimed he simply had forgot to put his watch on that day, and was worried he wouldn’t get to his next class on time. He was suspended from teaching for a semester and made to take a gender-sensitivity training workshop, in spite of his claims, when it was discovered that on that same day he had asked two other female students the time, making them feel intimidated and, in the words of one of them, "used by an older male, only for my time-keeping abilities." Months later -- curiouser and curiouser -- Chestnut was convicted of stalking the prof-with-no-watch, after she bombarded him with erotic emails and threatening phonecalls.
The whole situation was nuts -- one of the many things that have helped make Canada the trivial, silly, ridiculous country it is. However, she earned herself the never-ending hatred of many men, academics, people without watches and normal women everywhere.
Since those days she had reinvented herself as an arch-conservative, talk-radio type. So when the National Highbrow Tabloid hired her, it didn’t seem a good fit. They considered themselves highbrow (though they really weren’t), and she was proudly vulgar, not to mention a lousy writer. While I was ticked that they had hired her, it was only because they had not hired me! Her lack of writing skill or the fact that she was purportedly a bucket full of crazy didn’t bother me, nor did the possibility that she might "ruin" the reputation of conservatives in Canada. Heck -- no one read the National Highbrow Tabloid anyway, and even if they did, conservatives in Canada face an uphill battle, no matter who writes for whom.
But I didn’t say all of that to Amos. I replied with a classy and careful, "Well, I don’t know about Chestnut’s past. My main concern about her is that she is not the best writer." And that was all I said about Rebecca Chestnut. I went on to say that I would "love" to meet him for a coffee, and asked him to suggest a day, as I suspected he was busier than I.
Again, within ten minutes, he got back to me. "Jane, Would you like to join me, along with some of my friends, on Thursday, June 2nd, at the Royal Club in Toronto, for dinner? Pierre-Marie O'Reilly will be giving a lecture about privatizing Canada's sidewalks."
"Sure!" I replied, enthusiastically. "I’d love to. Thank you for thinking of me."
If I’d known what lay ahead, I may have replied, "Sorry, I'm washing my hair that night."