Jackie Danicki

Friends

Originally uploaded by dynamist.

Our dreadfully missed friend, Cathy Seipp, would have celebrated her birthday this past Saturday. Cathy’s daughter, Maia, wrote a poignant poem to mark the occasion.

Sometimes, friends and I will exchange emails - quite out of the blue - about how much we miss Cathy. So many news stories break and I think, “I GOTTA hear what Cathy has to say about this!” (Above, me with Nancy Rommelmann and Cathy in Cathy’s cozy living room in Silverlake, March 2005.)

I am going to Los Angeles later today. The last time I was there was in February, a few weeks before Cathy died. I had gone there for the express purpose of spending time with her; I planned to cook and bake and do what I could to make her more comfortable. Before my visit, I was full of apprehension that I would do something to increase her pain, her annoyance, her sadness. In the end, my time with Cathy was more special and rewarding for us both than I could have imagined it would be.

“You really know how to enjoy yourself,” Cathy told me one night. “I hope Maia has as much fun in life as you do.” Judgement from Cathy was never given lightly or without consideration. From that day forward, I have never questioned the fact that I do know how to enjoy myself (when I want to, anyway).

After Cathy died, I started putting together a collection of my favorite quotations from her articles and interviews. I never finished, as the job was simply overwhelming; there’s too much material for a blog post, or even a series of posts. But here are a few bits that I pasted into a draft post:

I say don’t trust a religion if they haven’t gone beyond disliking dogs.

I grew up in conservative, practically all-white Los Alamitos, a hicksville suburb in Orange County…In high-school history class, the teacher mentioned that Jesus spoke Aramaic. This shocked one girl so much she started to cry, insisting tearfully that “Jesus spoke English!” If you explained you didn’t celebrate Christmas because you weren’t Christian, people often looked at you uncomprehendingly – as they did if you said you wanted to live somewhere else one day, or if you described a book they hadn’t heard of, which was practically any book.

So I spent my formative years in a constant state of irritation, which was good practice for my life today. Because here in Medialand, people often look at you uncomprehendingly if you explain that not everyone in America agrees with the received media wisdom about topics like affirmative action, abortion, and gun control – and that, furthermore, these people with different ideas are not necessarily evil bigots, even if some of them do go to church. The insular cluelessness of many of my colleagues actually irritates me more than the insular cluelessness of my uneducated old neighbors. Because journalists, unlike the descendents of Dust Bowl refugees, are supposed to be curious about – or at least aware of – other people with different points of view.

[On Maia’s schooling] I think it’s just as well to go to school with people who are different from you. I think that’s part of the problem with all these West-side liberal Jews. Everyone around them is exactly alike and they never meet anyone who is different…It makes me grateful for this Okie area I grew up in, even though I hated it then and wanted to get away. It teaches you that not everyone thinks the way you think. It’s a good thing to learn as a journalist that most people are not like the cultural elite in the newsroom. It’s so easy to shock journalists. If you have a different opinion, they’re shocked.

Luke: “Was there ever time when people’s anger at you overwhelmed you and inhibited your writing?”

Cathy: “Never. If you are going to care about people getting mad, you should be a social worker, not a journalist.”

…Luke: “What are the most common mistakes entertainment journalists make?”

Cathy: “Their biggest mistake is that they don’t know what they’re talking about.”

Filed under: Life