Category: Uncategorized

The secret of successful personal ads, revealed!
I got a call from Jane Lederman, 44, a divorced Boston business manager whose ad touted the “high cheekbones of Renee Russo plus personality of the young Katharine Hepburn.”
She didn’t write the ad, she said. It was ghostwritten by Susan Fox, founder of Personals Work, a professional personal ad ghostwriting service in Boston.
“She interviews you and gives you homework assignments,” Lederman said. “She asks you to name an actress you identify with. And you have an assignment to ask your friends, ‘If you were to think of me as a celebrity, who would you think of?’ ”
It was that process that inspired Fox’s lyrical ode to Russo’s cheekbones and Hepburn’s personality.
Now, Lederman says, she can pick out a Fox-written ad at a glance: “When you see a reference to an actress, you figure she had a hand in it. Or somebody was copying her style”…
As soon as I hung up with Lederman, the phone rang. It was “Head-turning good looks evocative of Diana Rigg.” She was willing to talk but not to be identified by name. Her ad, too, was ghostwritten by Susan Fox. In fact, she said, it was Fox who came up with the Diana Rigg line.
“I said, ‘I don’t look like Diana Rigg,’ ” she recalls. “And she said, ‘This is advertising!’ ”
I called Fox. She was eager to talk. A former freelance writer, she has been a full-time personals ghostwriter for 11 years. She charges $125 an hour for a job that she says takes at least three or four hours. She has “hundreds” of clients, 75 percent of them female.
Fox doesn’t think it’s cheating to hire a ghostwriter to compose your personal ad. Nor does she think she was deceptive when she used the phrase “evocative of Diana Rigg” to describe a woman who says she doesn’t look like Diana Rigg.
“We said evocative of,” she explains. “We didn’t say a look-alike or a carbon copy.”
Personal ads are, she stresses, advertisements.
“It is, after all, advertising, and people have to put their best foot forward,” she says. “If you say you’ve got a botox appointment and a screwed-up 17-year-old kid in addition to being bright and fun, it doesn’t work.”

Here’s my story from today’s front page, the latest in the Schools That Work series. It’s about the Carver Academy, the new school Spurs center David Robinson has founded in San Antonio. I just got an email that 60 Minutes saw my story and now wants to do a feature on the school. So when you CBS watchers see that San Antonio dateline at some point in the future, remember it was crabwalk.com that gave you the love first. (Oh, I’ll also be on TXCN at 4:35 this afternoon talking about it.)

I am so screwed.
Side note: I’ll be leaving for Louisiana tomorrow morning for a much needed long weekend. Expect blogging to slow from its recent breakneck pace to something more snail-like. Or maybe creeping-mold-like.

“Memphis, Michigan — A high school senior says he earned an A+, not an A, and has sued to get the grade changed to bolster his chance at becoming valedictorian.”
A little later in the story, you learn the class in question was a work-study gig in his mom’s office. In other words, Mom said I deserve an A+, so I deserve an A+!

Word of the day: jackleg. Very useful.

Letters, we get letters:
HELLO MY NAME IS [omitted]. I HAD TO REPLY TO YOUR WRIGHT UP IN THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS. I WANTED TO SUGGEST THAT THE ONLY WAY THAT WE CAN STOP OUR SCHOOL SYSTEMS FROM SUFFERING SANCTIONS, DUE TO WEAK ENGLISH STUDENTS, IS TO STOP TRYING TO BE SO POLITICALY CORRECT. I DO NOT KNOW FOR A FACT, BUT I AM WILLING TO BET THAT A LARGE NUMBER OF THE LIMTED ENGLISH STUDENTS CAME HERE ILLEGALLY, ONE WAY OR ANOTHER. AND UNTILL WE STOP REWARDING PEOPLE FOR BREAKING THE LAW, OUR SCHOOL SYSTEM WILL FALTER. THANK YOU [name omitted]

The Wifely Duty: Marriage used to provide access to sex. Now it provides access to celibacy. One less thing to look forward to.

Missed this: Hugh Trevor-Roper, the gentleman historian who (oops!) said the “Hitler diaries” were genuine back in 1983. That obviously put a dent in his credibility, and unfortunately brought the Holocaust denier and anti-Semitic historian David Irving to prominence.
Isn’t that a great name for a British aristocrat? “Hugh Trevor-Roper.” He could have been a West Texas rodeo star.

Oh, one other thing: I’ll be “performing” at 20×2 at SXSW next month. I’m supposed to take up two minutes answering the question “What are you waiting for?,” in whatever way I choose. Ideas are welcome.

Two stories in today’s paper: a new report claims that afterschool programs are a failure and new federal testing requirements target kids who can’t speak English.
The first story there was a national exclusive until 5 p.m. yesterday, when the U.S. Department of Education went ahead and released the damned report I had an advance copy of. Damned P.R. people and their release of reports!
I said it on Friday and I’ll say it again: I need a weekend.