Read Online But Enough About Me by Jancee Dunn - Free Book Online

Ritchie moodily sip his tenth Molson of the evening. Ritchie would take me to noisy parties, where his freewheeling pals seemed to have more fun than my more conservative friends. Everyone at my school was too uptight to have costume parties, or softball games sponsored by Dick’s Auto, or go camping in the Pocono Mountains with five cases of beer, or dance to bad R & B like Klymaxx or L’Trimm. I can fit in anywhere, I would think as we formed a cheering ring around Matt’s brother-in-law’s beer bong. “Smell ya later!” I would cry after a night of revelry.
    â€œTake ceh!” they would chorus back.
    At one of these shindigs—it might have been a Halloween party where, inevitably, there would be one white guy who would dress up as a black man with an Afro wig—I met a girl named Amy who worked in the marketing department of Rolling Stone. She was doing the usual post-college activity—hanging on to high school buddies whom you will eventually stop calling. As the celebrants around us started up a game of Beer Pong, I quizzed her about her job, which seemed unimaginably glamorous. I’d subscribed to Rolling Stone for years, and indulged in a ritual when I read each new issue: start with the Charts page in the back, then read “Random Notes,” the gossipy column in the front. Then move to the reviews and, finally, to the cover story.
    I remembered as a teenager hurrying with Heather to catch the 1985 John Travolta movie, Perfect, the story of a Rolling Stone reporter, on opening weekend. The film commenced with Travolta as a restless reporter whowas plenty tired of working the obits desk of the Jersey Journal. He wanted more. At the time, I was an intern at New Jersey Monthly magazine, fact-checking a column called “Exit Ramp.”
    â€œHe’s just like me,” I whispered to Heather.
    Cut to Travolta a few years later in New York City, working as a reporter at Rolling Stone. I watched, openmouthed, as he interrupted his fast-paced life long enough to lunch with his boss, “Mark Ross,” played by Jann Wenner. Soon they started kicking around story ideas, because his mind was always going-going-going.
    Travolta ogled some women who walked by in full-on eighties aerobics regalia: candy-pink butt-floss bodysuits, puffy Olivia Newton-John “Let’s Get Physical” headbands. “Why not do a story about how health clubs are turning into the singles bars of the eighties?” he says. How, I marveled, was he able to just pluck that idea out of the air?
    â€œMark” mulls the pitch over for about a nanosecond. “Hot tubs? Alfalfa sprouts?” he muses. “We haven’t done California in a long time.”
    Next, we see Travolta at a Los Angeles health club, leering at “Slimnastics” instructor Jamie Lee Curtis. After she rebuffs him a few times, he finally wrangles a meal with her, but is unable to persuade her to be interviewed. After lunch, he is driving back to the Sunset Marquis hotel and pulls out a tape recorder. “Notes on lunch,” he announces briskly. “She’s smart, but I’ve gotta be smarter.”
    Later, he is introduced to a guy at the gym. “I loved your Carly Simon piece,” gushes the man.
    â€œSo did I,” John modestly replies.
    I was mesmerized, utterly blind to the cheesy dialogue and hackneyed plot (no reporter in their right mind talks into a tape recorder, especially to say “Notes on lunch”).
    â€œYou could easily do that job,” whispered Heather, ever steadfast.
    â€œRight,” I said. Surely I was just the kind of person Rolling Stone was searching for: a Jersey girl who pulled down B’s and C’s in a state school, with long hooker-red nails and a passable knowledge of music.
    Meeting Amy was my chance. Emboldened by my seventh Old Milwaukee and inspired by the success story of a fellow Garden State girl, I asked if I could send her my