The Untold Story of Gloria Rubenstien
Pseudonyms and pranks in a small town paper
Dinner is over, and we are relaxed in our chairs in the covered car port that doubles as a lanai, an outdoor Hawaiian seating area. A gecko runs across a beam but no one pays attention. My husband has gone inside with some dishes, and my daughters are distracted elsewhere. Nothing is ever silent with Ted, but there it is— the sound of a bird and our breath; the coqui frogs loudly announcing the arrival of evening. There’s a few beats with nothing to say, when I remember the digital clipping in my back pocket.
“You won’t believe what I found,” I say grinning, and pull out my phone.
I have known Ted as long as I have known anyone. Until recent years, his hair and beard were dark red, and his eyes the color of the Pacific. He looks like he fell out of Middle Earth, but really his claim to literary fame is a family connection to Captain Stormfield, a friend of Mark Twain. Ted and my dad shared a deep friendship that spanned decades. Together they railed about politics and culture, labeling Neanderthals and calling themselves “natural-born anthropologists.”
Ted collaborated with my dad on more than one letter, and occasionally they adopted a pseudonym, such as the fashion designer Gloria Rubenstein circa 1989. It is a letter I heard about throughout my childhood, and I found it in one of my weekend treasure hunts in the library stacks of old newspapers.
And so, under the evening glow of strand lights in a carport, I begin reading to Ted:
November 30, 1989
Dear Editor,
Recently I had the unique experience of visiting Homer, Alaska. I'm a fashion designer and marketing consultant for a major clothing manufacturer from San Francisco. My husband is an anthropologist and graduate at Brigham Young University. We each gained different perspectives. Although the snow-capped mountains in the bay are charming, I found nothing inspiring in the fashion world of Homer, and I can't even recognize the difference between a cannery boot and B.F. Goodrich’s neo preem extra-tough deck slippers.
On the other hand, my husband is absolutely ecstatic with this place, a wonderfully remote and magnificently preserved wilderness, he says, and especially with the primitive and diverse species he has encountered here, several of which he earlier believed to be extinct. And when I ask him what event so excites him, he mumbles something about the Nobel Prize and is continuously humming that Beatles song Lucy in the Sky with Love. He insists he will be taking his place in history alongside Leaky and Lucy when he brings living proof of what he has discovered here to the rest of the world. He believes he has found the missing links of Western culture.
Last night he was on the phone with a lawyer seeking advice as to the legality of capturing any Neanderthal as long as you can prove it to be the genuine article. He told his lawyer that he has spotted what he believed to be several other species heading out at what appears to be the local Star Wars bar on Pioneer Avenue. Although the town is Nuclear Free, it has no objections to intergalacular space travelers or universal time travelers who have managed somehow to stop time somewhere in the 1960s.
My husband says once he has captured proof of his discoveries, he should surely win the Nobel Prize in science and then the Pulitzer Prize when he writes about it. This is fine with me as long as he does it in San Francisco. For I'd rather be crushed in high heels than be caught dead dancing with a man in neo-preem deck slippers….just kidding.
P.S. But girls, please do go shopping. I've no doubt there is something at least to social evolution.
Gloria Rubenstien San Francisco
If you’re not from around here, there are a couple of references that are easy to miss. The “Star Wars bar” is a gibe at Alices’ Champagne Palace, which 25 years later since the release of this letter is still a favorite watering hole of locals. Also worth noting is the reference to “nuclear free”. Locals had recently convinced the City Council to declare Homer a “nuclear free zone”—it’s own worthy story for another dispatch. Many residents considered Homer ahead of its time for passing such an ordinance—my dad himself was dedicated to the project.
But alas, according to Rubenstien, despite all of these complexities and capabilities (time travel!), Homer was still mostly populated by neanderthals and women with no fashion sense.
I can imagine the exuberant late-night giggles of the two men hunched over legal pads writing their comedy sketch on Homer culture in the late 1980s. Under the cover of a made-up name and faux identity, they were free to say anything. All these years later, Ted’s eyes still twinkle with their collaborative mischief. Ted corrects me when I suggest they were riffing on Gloria Steinem, “No, no, no… it was Helena Rubinstein and Gloria Vanderbilt…we combined their names!” He goes on to tell me how annoyed women were and how the letter became the centerpiece of town gossip. When I gently suggest that the letter is a bit offensive, he bats back “It’s satire!”
But if I fumble in finding the humor, I am not alone. A week later, the following letter appeared in the paper:
December 7, 1989
Dear Editor,
In response to your letter from the fabulous Ms. Rubenstien of San Francisco, do you really suppose we Alaskan women would be dumb enough to go dancing in a San Francisco disco with our red-top boots? At least we know enough to adapt to the environment. And by the by, how did you find the parking lot at Alice’s in your pointy little shoes?
Everyone’s private opinion is sacred to them, and I respect your right to yours. (Really—I mean it.) But one so worldly as yourself must surely know how rude it is to volunteer your negative gibes to a people you’ve only just visited. And anyway, who asked you?
This incredible land called Alaska is simply not available to you to judge. You haven’t earned the right. We (well, lots of us) enjoy visitors and welcome new settlers; but we don’t enjoy high-heeled outsiders telling us how to go about living in this very uique place. Custer tried that. It didn’t work.
There. I feel better. Oh, and one last thing. How is it that a fashion designer for a “like, major clothing manufacturer” doesn’t even know what neoprene is? Hmmm. But as you said, this was all in fun, right? So you have a Merry Christmas down there, and we’ll do the same.
Kat Files
Somehow I think it’s a little unfair the writer doesn’t know she’s responding to a couple of local gents pranking their community. She chastises them for not having “earned the right” to judge, but only locals could have ever known just the right places to poke fun. I don’t know why the initial letter insists on misspelling “neoprene” but it’s certainly a clue that something is amiss. Next to both the Rubenstien letter and Files’ letter, this well-placed rule box appears, ironically highlighting the need to include a phone number with submissions so that the “authorship can be verified”:
It is black and starry by the time we are winding down. The kids have fallen asleep in their beds, with barely a goodnight from their distracted parents. I remember this from my own childhood: the comforting drone and spark of my dad’s late-night animated conversations with Ted lulling me to slumber.
Ted has over an hour-long drive back to his house so I offer him the couch, which he takes. The evening closes with crumbs still on the outside table, a gecko running across the wall, and the slow breath of a house of people asleep.
Gloria Rubenstien, as portrayed by a couple of men from Alaska, never existed. Perhaps the truest thing in the satire piece is the constancy of certain places, certain people—a durability of personality or essence. Ted hasn’t fundamentally changed in all these years, and while time has not stood frozen in Homer, it has, at times, moved slower than other places.
If my dad were alive I would give him hell for his letter, even though it is satire. We would enjoy the banter, talk about where feminism has taken us, and the conversation would inevitably shift to the excitement of our present election, which is suddenly so hopeful.
Until next time,
Mercedes
Notes:
1.) If this is your first time stumbling on an essay by me, this piece will help orient you to the larger project.
2.) Do you remember these letters or something else worth sharing? Please let me know! Part of the fun of this project is hearing from readers, near and far.
3.) Special thanks for Ted for helping me with a few details!
4.)Thank you all for reading and being a part of this project!
Another interesting read! 😊
Wow, you make me LOL. Knowing these two characters, Ted and your dad, I can visualize their banter, their egging each other on, debating "Gloria's" name, all in fun and jest.
I turn teary eyed at the end, "If my dad were still here..."
LOL and cry at within a few minutes.
Thank you for writing