I Wish I Had a Red Dress Read Free

are supposed to make you feel small, like Dorothy and the Scarecrow coming in to see the Wizard of Oz. The wizard didn’t really have to be powerful. He just had to look like he was.
    I think all negotiations should take place at a round table and everybody should have to rotate counterclockwise once an hour so that even the perception of head of the table, or foot, are ritually obliterated. It’s not good to sit still longer than an hour in meetings anyway. Pools the blood and encourages the territorial spreading of notes, expensive pens, leather-bound legal pads and a variety of electronic devices aimed at keeping in constant touch with the world outside of the room in which the meeting has been convened.
    Politicians are especially good at this. I don’t know whether they believe that an overcrowded desk is just the thing to impress a constituent or what, but I’ve been in meetings with these guys where they spread out so much stuff in front of them that it terminally clutters your brain if you even glance down at it. Sort of like being turned to stone for sneaking a glance at Medusa.
     
    “Re, re, re, re, re, re, re, re—spect!”
     
    The car skidded suddenly on a patch of black ice and I realized I was driving too fast. I turned off the radio and took a deep breath. The sun was already on its way down and all the snow that turned to slush during the day would be frozen solid in a few more hours. This was not the time to be careless. This was the time to review the events of the day and figure out what went wrong?
    I thought the proposal was perfect. Visionary without being mystical. Specific without being exclusionary. Optimistic yet firmly grounded in reality. Practical and passionate, it was, if I do say so myself , a fine example of the best kind of sixties rhetoric grafted onto the new millennium’s requirement that we “cut to the chase.”
    Maybe I should have taken better notes in that grant writing class. I can’t believe I actually took a class in saying what you don’t really mean so you can get money they don’t really want you to have. The instructors kept telling me the key to raising money was to maintain a “businesslike tone,” like I’m supposed to be ashamed of the fact that I tend to get excited when I’m talking about things that are important to me. As a true sixties voodoo child, I know I am required to bring passion to the table just like this generation is required to bring technology and rap music.
    That’s my legacy, but when I protested all this focus on what I regarded as style over substance, they gently suggested that I adopt a more civil tone when voicing my objections. At that point, I informed them on my way out the door that toning down is of zero importance to me. I would instead simply commit to the passionate telling of the complete, unvarnished truth.
    Seems like a simple statement, right? But it gets tricky. Firstof all, there’s the problem of presuming that everybody thinks it’s always a good idea to tell the truth when there’s really nothing to suggest that we all agree on that. In fact, there’s overwhelming evidence that we don’t, including the fact that as soon as most of us read a statement advocating universal truth-telling as a goal worthy of pursuit, we start thinking of exceptions immediately.
Sure, we think, truth is great, except when:
    —it’s your boss;
    —it’s your lover/mate/partner/spouse or kid;
    —it’s scary;
    —you might lose money/power/love/your job;
    —you might get killed for it.
    The thing is, once you start allowing for exceptions, everything becomes relative and people start talking about absurd notions like “everybody’s got a right to their own truth,” as if there can be more than one real truth, and the next thing you know, they’re putting up fences and assembling armies and we’re right back to where we started.
    But it couldn’t be my tone. The chairman even complimented me on the quality of our application