Dr. Tewell at Fifth Avenue Presbyterian was charismatic and demanding. He didn’t suffer the Sunday-only Presbyterian who ignored their duties of officium et pecuniae (service and donation), and so FAPC had a very active volunteer team. It wasn’t unusual for Dr. T to finish service with “we’re not leaving here until I have two more overnight volunteers for the men’s shelter this Thursday”.
They had close ties to Habitat for Humanity, and I was on the list, but biding my time until there was a “skill”week – I knew my way around some power tools and had spent a summer doing construction (ok, it was electrical wiring on new homes) and I didn’t want to spend two days clearing a vacant lot. I got the call, grabbed my super-dope hammer, and headed out to Deep Queens.
I hit the site and John the Foreman asked “can you do drywall?”. I confirmed my experience (and showed him my hammer) and he said “go see Gary in building three”. Gary was an unassuming gray haired dude in his early 50s who was in the middle of a 7-day commit. He initially seemed “peer-ish”and once the instructions were laid down, we eased into usual NYC/dude conversation. I nibbled around the standard “so what do you do?” and he said he did animation. I was just off a year in the MTV Animation Studio, so I knew enough to ask “do you story board, or are you an in-betweener or do you color?”. He was cagey and just gave a little “I do a little bit of everything.” He wasn’t biting, so we went back to the Met’s prospects for the upcoming season. Right before lunch I pushed a little more…”strip or block”, “funny or drama”, “where could I see it?”. Finally, he broke down, it seems I wasn’t building with “Gary”, I was putting up plaster with “Garry”, as in Doonesbury’s Garry Trudeau. “So”, I said, “I guess I can see it in about 20,000 newspapers”. “Closer to 30,000”, said Garry.
There was no change in the dynamic, we just kept talking about day-to-day stuff, with a slight flavor of media and entertainment. One conversation made its way to Garry saying “I can’t get my kids to volunteer, they’re just not motivated. We’re working on college applications and need to round them out.” I said I had gone to Northwestern and he lit up, saying it was a top choice for his kids and was asking what was unique about it. He said he had gone to Yale. I asked about his wife and he said she was an Indiana grad.Being from Ohio, probably 10% of my graduating class went to IU (including myHS best friend) and so I said “most of my IU buddies did either engineering or broadcast…what did your wife do?”. “Broadcast” Garry minimally shared. “Cool”,I continued, “what did she do with her Comms degree?”. “She’s Jane Pauley” he deadpanned, and without missing a beat I said “wow, that’s a pretty good job”. I think his kids ended up going to Brown and Yale.
We rolled to McDonald’s for lunch and he shared that he was fascinated by a recent article he had read about “acquired narcissism syndrome”and how people surrounded by sycophants lose the ability to form normal relationships.Garry mused that he occupied a weird corner of celebrity. He was a household name (or at least Doonesbury was) in middle- to better-educated homes, but lacked “visual fame”, i.e., he was rarely picked out on the street. As a cartoonist he was at the top of his game, but didn’t really have the power to help other cartoonists. On the one hand, comic strips continue to be syndicated long after they are relevant or funny, but also there isn’t a competing syndication network to pick up the strip if Garry came to odds with his employer. He’s still in new syndication 20 years later. To that end, Garry said he was“unburdened” with the influences that lead to ANS. We compared our primary experience population for some overlap and eventually found that I worked a little with Jeffrey Katzenberg who he knew personally. “Oh yeah”, said Garry, “that guy could have been on the cover of the story”.
That was a good day.
