Recalling "Meet Phil Donahue Day"

Back in the late 1970s I was living in downtown Atlanta and someone gave me a couple of free tickets to see Phil Donahue. Like most men, I was not a Phil Donahue fan, but I wanted to be in a TV audience. I puzzled over the ticket, wondering why the show wasn't at the television network's local affiliate. It was at Atlanta's Civic Auditorium instead. But I went anyway. By myself.

The Civic Auditorium in Atlanta was the biggest auditorium I'd ever seen before. The seating area was easily the size of a WalMart Super Center. The place was packed, mostly with women. I scooted down in my seat so no one could see me.

Finally, out came Philmeister and the women went wild. You'd have sworn that Jesus Christ had just made his second appearance on Earth. But, hell, there weren't any TV cameras. Phil Donahue looked about as big as a gnat on that huge stage.

Phil sucked up to the women in the audience right off the bat by announcing that the most beautiful women in America lived in the state of Georgia. I would have laughed at his lame attempt to milk praise from the audience except for one thing: he was right. I'd never been west of the Mississippi River but, east of that, Georgia had the highest percentage of beautiful women per capita I'd ever seen. Nine out of every ten women in Georgia was a peach. Still, I could see where his "PR Show" was going. At one point, he jumped down off the stage to shake hands. I thought he'd be mobbed to death by salivating liberal females before he managed to hop back up there. Would have served him right.

At that point, I left. When I got outside, I looked a little closer at the remaining ticket. The event was called "Meet Phil Donahue Day". It was kind of a reception, I guess, for people who weren't important enough to get a seat in the TV audience when he taped his show earlier. I tore up the ticket and tossed it into the nearest trash receptacle.

After that day I never watched the Phil Donahue Show again. And I always inspected my tickets very carefully after that. And I never accepted another free one.

Ghost of a Chance

I used to wonder what would have happened if I had not turned down the job offer from Time Magazine in 1978. It wasn't much off an offer, just being a stringer. A stringer is a writer who does on-call reporting without his or her name appearing on the story. It's the proverbial "foot in the door" and who knows what might have happened to me afterward?

At the time, I was living in a studio apartment on the tenth floor of The Howell House on Peachtree Street NW in Atlanta, Georgia, a half a block from the famous Fox Theater. Time Magazine's Atlanta Bureau Chief, Rudolph Rauch III, had called my answering service a few days after I'd met with him without an appointment at his office at the Time Magazine Atlanta Bureau Headquarters in one of the Gaslight Towers.

I called him back and he offered me the job. I accepted his gracious offer and made a quick trip to Pennsylvania where I'd flown to tell my family the news and to see my four-year-old son who had been living with his mother since our divorce. He didn't even know who I was and I'd only been gone a couple of months. That did it for me.

I flew back to Atlanta where I called Rudolph Rauch III and told him I wouldn't be able to take the stringer job after all. Then I packed my bags for Pennsylvania for the last time. Mr. Rauch probably thought I was crazy or something after the way I'd so brazenly pitched myself and my writing ability to him. But, I had my priorities, and making my writing career the biggest reason for my being alive wasn't my top priority.

When I look back on my missed opportunity to write for Time Magazine, I see myself trapped in a roving wormhole that opened briefly to spit me back out before it haphazardly attached itself again to another point in the space-time continuum. Trying to remember it as anything else would be a fruitless search for a past that never existed.