The Lexicographer's Rules

"In my case, the FBI visited The Weavers' booking agent, the recording company, my neighbors, my dentist husband's patients, my friends. In the waning of our career, the Weavers were followed down the street, accosted onstage by drunken 'patriots,' warned by friendly hotel employees to keep the door open if we rehearsed in anyone's room so as not to become targets for the vice squad. It was nasty. Every two-bit local wannabe G-man joined the dragnet searching out and identifying 'communist spies.'"

—Online Journal. During the Fifties, Ronnie Gilbert was a member of the folk music group The Weavers, which was investigated by the FBI for possible Communist connections. Now, as part of a peaceful movement called Women in Black, she finds herself under investigation again. "In all those self-debasing years, how many spies did that dragnet pull in? Nary a one. Instead it pulled down thousands of teachers, union members, scientists, journalists, actors, entertainers like us, who saw our lives disrupted, our jobs, careers go down the drain, our standing in the community lost, even our children harassed. A scared population soon shut their mouths up tight."'

"Inside the club, on the dance floor, a gal has all these different parts to move. I mean, here in Seattle, you can back that thang up, but there in Kingston you can wine your waist, swing that engine, wiggle like a milkshake and gyrate like a rattlesnake; you can ride the riddum, undulate, and roll; you can bubble and you can back back so."

—Adventure Divas. Sunny Speidel contemplates her buttocks via the socialization she knew from life in Seattle and the perceptions she learns from her husband's Jamaican family. "Another time, when Auntie B and I waited in the car, a woman in sneakers marched by, walking vigorously. Auntie BÑwho is quite musicalÑpatted my arm in perfect tempo with the woman's large bottom, cheerfully chanting 'good afternoon, good afternoon, good afternoon.'"'

"The lens of public attention attracts a certain brand of person; and in America, at least, those people seem unusually good at finding their own lunch. Sometimes a subject will distort his story; sometimes the media does it for him. Often it's a collaboration. We had a photographer who carried a woman's high-heeled shoe in the trunk of his car. Fortunate enough to chance upon a ghastly auto crash, he'd put that shoe in the foreground before he took the picture."

—Archipelago. Benjamin Cheever, novelist and son of a well-known writer, occupies himself with the difficulties of pimping his third novel and of pursuing a writing life of any kind. "He and I worked together once on an article about the local emergency food cupboard. The photographer went out to take a picture of the cupboard. When he got there and opened the cupboard, it was crammed with food. So our photog, he turned to the woman who administered the program and said, 'Now, this is a story about an empty cupboard. I'm going out to the car to get fresh film. When I come back, if the cupboard is empty, weÕll have a picture and a story. If it's not empty, you got no picture and no story.'"'

"The outcry against it proved equally swift and sharp. In 1767 the author of a letter to the editor of the New York Journal bemoaned the fashion that led women to double the size of their heads with the use of pomatum, artificial pads, and hair procured from corpses. But most distressing of all, the writer claimed, the 'frizzled' style resembled the shock head of a Negro.' The insult was twofold, for the so-described 'shock head'Ñthe combing and bunching of hair high over the foreheadÑwas a style worn by African American men, free and enslaved. Not only did the writer deploy a racial category to mock women's appearance, he also questioned the femininity of those who chose to sport the new fashion."

—Common-Place. Big hair is part of American history, and we can blame Europe for it, not Texas. "The high roll took on a starring role in street theater against the backdrop of a city rife with social and political tension."'

"I helped a guy shore up some 4-by-4s that were placed alongside a firehose laid across Church Street then joined a line of workers carrying empty, new 5-gallon buckets, some of which bore paint company labels. This led me right up a pile of wreckage along the southern edge of the property and straight into a horrifying situation which was exactly why assholes like myself shouldn't have been there and why I may be destined for hell. Seeing my white suit, some of the workers grabbed me and said, 'Oh, good, you're here!' They led me up the pile to a rescuer who handed me a disposable flashlight, said he smelled something and pointed an opening under a girder."

—Acid Logic. Two days after the disaster, Steve Forbis sneaks onto the scene, basically a curiosity-chaser passing as a relief volunteer.'