We are sitting on the couch when one thing leads to another.
He's my BFF's husband, which, technically, makes him my back-up husband, but still, there is such a thing as going too far. I recognize this and I apologize.
Did we mean to go all the way? I can't say. I think maybe each of us was waiting for the other one to hit the pause button.
We had to know we were going to get caught. The Suburban Executive is no fool. You don't win sculpted glass journalism prizes in the shape of beachballs for being gullible. She'd taken apart far craftier schemes over the years.
It starts, as so many of these things do, with just a little harmless channel surfing.
The Executive is working in the next room when we discover a new episode of HBO's The Newsroom in the recordings queue.
The three of us had watched the first two episodes together and were hooked, despite the fact that it is set in a television newsroom where they don't seem to do any actual reporting: "My old college roommate is confirming that Richard Nixon directed the cover-up..."
Lou Grant's reporters didn't exactly nail their scoops down air tight either.
It's still fun to watch Aaron Sorkin characters deliver speeches no one ever gets to spout in real life at a news-based operation where no one, apparently, ever has to sit through a four-hour public hearing on garbage rates or read through 400 pages of testimony in a contract dispute between insurance brokers.
The point is, we shouldn't have watched it without her. Then, compounding our betrayal, we try to lie about it.
We are sitting around with our newsroom flasks and our notebooks later that night trying to recreate the magic of previous episodes we'd watched together. But with the unfailing instincts of an Aaron Sorkin character, the Executive recognizes that something is up. She doesn't have to make a single phone call.
"You guys already watched this," she says. It isn't a question and she doesn't identify her sources. I can't meet her eyes. Her husband squirms in his seat. I try to convince her we only watched part of it. I try to play it off as an accident. I try to make her believe we spent most of the time having sex on the couch.
"Look," I say finally. "It didn't mean anything. We're just three people trying to get by in a world that doesn't even recognize what we do as relevant anymore, a world that thinks the New York Times and the Huffington Post do the same thing, a world in which "googling" is passed off as reporting, a world in which journalists are portrayed on television doing interviews without ever writing anything down. Why doesn't anybody ever have a notebook? Where are their fucking notebooks?"
She has no answer for that.
Photo: Jeff Daniels as anchor Will Something in The Newsroom.
I LOVE this show. As far as I can tell, only one character has a notebook, but he's continually being told by that asshat Don to put the notebook away because he doesn't work there yet and nobody wants to hear about his notes from his (college roommate) sources. Apparently, once he does begin to work there, he will have to lose the notebook entirely. It's smart quippy speech heaven, that show. Journalistic fluff and all.
Posted by: MommyTime | July 11, 2012 at 01:00 PM
I recognized the fake byline on your story from a mile away. It smelled of Journatic.
Posted by: Executive Suburbanite | July 11, 2012 at 02:00 PM
Hilarious! I have been guilty of similar crimes, and you're right -- it's hard to recreate the magic a second time. They just know.
Posted by: Dawn | July 11, 2012 at 04:14 PM
Bogie: If that plane leaves the ground and you're not with him, you'll regret it. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life.
Ilsa: But what about us?
Bogie: We'll always have Paris. We didn't have it before...we'd...we'd lost it until you came to Casablanca. We got it back last night.
Ilsa: When I said I would never leave you...
Bogie: And you never will. But I've got a job to do too. Where I'm going, you can't follow. What I've got to do, you can't be any part of. Ilsa, I'm no good at being noble, but it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Someday you'll understand that. Here's looking at you, kid.
Posted by: Audubon Ron | July 11, 2012 at 08:03 PM
I tried to tell her. "We'll always have episodes 1 and 2," I said.
But a hill of beans is still just a hill of beans when you think about it. Who even wants to amount to a hill of beans?
SK
Posted by: Suburban Kamikaze | July 12, 2012 at 06:10 AM