Hot Stuff

I have said many times that Donna Summer's Bad Girls album was the first album I bought with my own money -- but this might not be true. It feels true, and the timing is right, so it's likely true. I am pretty sure I remember buying the record on a Christmas-money spending spree. But the details of my childhood are so, so hazy. And no one was paying super-close attention to me in 1979 and 1980, so I don't know whether there's anyone who could verify this independently. Maybe my mother owned the record, and I just appropriated it ... although my buying the record seems likelier, given what I know about her musical tastes.

If it wasn't my first record, I don't want to know. It should've been my first record, and that's good enough. I like my version of history -- in which something in Donna Summer's music called out to me, spoke to me of the glittery disco balls and glamorous nightclubs and sans-souci fun that were waiting, waiting, waiting for me just beyond adolescence. Donna Summer was one of the voices of the gay generation just before mine. I felt the reverberations of her musical revolution -- I responded without knowing why. It would be years before I knew what "I Feel Love" was really all about (before I would feel love -- in the way that Summer meant -- for myself). But I knew it was my music.

As was the song "Bad Girls," which makes me think of my sisters. Not that they are bad girls (again, I think it was a while before I was hip to what "bad girls" were in this context). Rather I think we, or maybe just I when I was that age, aspired to be the candy-coated bad girls the song conjures: tough, playful, sexy, and streetwise. I can picture my sisters and me dancing around our living room to the song. This is likely a composite memory, and the song we were actually dancing to might've been "Hot Stuff," or it might've been the MTV video for "She Works Hard for the Money" -- or maybe we never danced to Donna Summer at all. But, again, I prefer my version of history.

All this is to say that Donna Summer's music was woven through my childhood. But by the time I got to nightclub-going age, disco had died twice. It was the late 1980s, and AIDS was killing everyone. Being gay had become a lot less sans-souci and a lot scarier. Then a nasty rumor (which had Summer saying something cruel and stupid about people with AIDS) greatly damaged Summer's standing in the gay community. She vehemently denied the rumor and worked very hard to repair her reputation among, and reaffirm her support for, gay people. I don't think anything was proved either way.

Who knows. But I believe and prefer Summer's version of history. You know how people love to tear down their idols. ... And even if the rumor were true, I'd be satisfied with her penance.

Anyway. These were the things in my mind today when Facebook -- our modern Greek chorus of celebrity death -- started singing Summer's eulogy to me this morning. What is a life? Well, there are plenty of half-remembered and misremembered moments, and then there are lies that become true, or true enough, through repetition. But there's also music, and disco rollerskating, and jubilant nightclubs, and moments of joy. ... That's what Summer's Facebook eulogy describes -- and who could ask for a better one? In millions of lives, Summer's music was the soundtrack to, or the very reason for, moments of joy: little kids posturing gleefully as "bad girls," hard-working women demanding to be treated right, and young gay men like me feeling love.



Thank you and farewell, Donna Summer. I hope you loved your life.

30 Million Jobs

Read about my appearance on Dylan Ratigan's MSNBC show, and watch a clip: "Choosing a Career Is a Lifelong Activity."

The Giant Value Seal Mural on Bartlett Street

Source: Uploaded by user via Charles on Pinterest

Go Ahead: Use Your iPhone at the Table

I haven't been writing a lot about etiquette in recent years, but I'm still occasionally asked to talk about manners matters of the day -- journalists working on etiquette-related articles find me online and ask for a few quotes.

It happened today: A journalist wanted to ask me about the use of mobile devices in restaurants (a common topic) -- and as is frequently the case, she expected me to deplore their use. She had pre-cast me as a prim manners maven with sensibilities firmly rooted in a pre-smartphone era: She wanted some quotes along these lines: "No phones at the table! Smartphones at the table are making us ruder and ruining civilization!"

The problem is, I just don't think that's true.

Disagreeing with Myself
I flipped back through my book to see what I'd had to say -- way back in the early 2000s -- about cell-phone use, and I found some quotes that would've have pleased this reporter. For instance:

"People who use their cell phones to carry on chitchatty conversations when dining look, to those around them, not only rude but also silly...."

Yes, I still agree with that one. Then there's:

"Keep cell phones ... off of the table during a meal."  

On this point, my attitude has evolved.

Here's the thing: Smartphones aren't, in and of themselves, rude. People behave rudely; machines are just tools. You can be just as rude at the dinner table with a facial expression or a gesture as you can with a mobile device.

I think it's naive to say that this or that new technology is "ruining civilization" -- keep in mind, people have been saying this with every new technology that's come along since the printing press. The tone of the absolutist anti-smartphone crowd sounds very similar to the tone of, say, the absolutist "anti-unescorted-ladies-in-saloons" crowd and the "anti-teaching-poor-people-to-read" crowd. Their cry is "It just isn't done!"

As someone interested in etiquette, I always ask, "Why isn't it done?" There's always manners friction at times of great change -- when old assumptions about the way things ought to be done bump into new technologies or social mores.

New technologies don't make us ruder. New technologies make us different 

What's So Rude About Texting, Anyway?
We understand that obtrusive noise is rude -- this includes loud cell-phone conversations in otherwise subdued environments, such as restaurants. I wrote my book way back when using a portable phone was likely to mean talking into it -- how quaint, right? But now we're using our smartphones primarily for silent activities -- so what's the problem?

Well, the other reason that using your smartphone at the table is rude is this: It's disrespectful of the people you're dining with -- it takes your attention away from your shared meal, and shared meals are highly symbolic (being that they are the very basis of human civilization).

So it's this display of disrespect that's the problem, not the device (you could be just as disrespectful by turning your chair a bit to one side).

But not everyone feels disrespected by others' using mobile devices -- and this group is growing. For instance, I frequently dine with a set of friends whom I also interact with on various social platforms, and with whom I share a large interconnected group of friends. With these friends, using my iPhone to quickly tweet my location isn't disrespectful -- because we're all familiar with the activity. At a business lunch, it's now quite normal for a group of acquainted colleagues to pause and check in with their BlackBerries. These things are happening; it's time to remove the absolutist ban.

When in doubt about the attitudes of your companions, it's always better to err on the side of caution -- but the complexity of the real world means that "Never do this" rules don't make sense. You have to pay attention to context. As is often the case with questions of proper behavior, the answer to "Is it rude to use your smartphone at the table?" has to be "It depends, dear. Use your common sense, and employ moderation."

Looking to the Future
Recently, a Los Angeles Times story discussed how restaurants are resisting, or adapting to, this change in the way we behave. It struck me that the restauranteurs who wanted to ban smart devices from their dining rooms were objecting primarily to the aesthetics of them -- their basic argument is that the people using them looked tacky. Fair enough. But "tacky" is subjective -- and yesterday's tacky (men without ties and jackets in nice restaurants) is tomorrow's normal. I was much more interested in reading how restaurants are adapting to the new normal.

In some ways, I am old-fashioned. I don't think a phone should be set down on the table, usually -- but there have to be exceptions. When I dine alone (as I often do when I'm traveling), I prop my iPad on the table to read -- call it tacky if you must.