Could We Be a New Yorker Reader? Parte Deux

Could We Be A New Yorker Reader?
Parte Deux: Dr. Seymour M. Hersh
and the Inspiration of Tyrone.

Did we have the "right stuff" to be a New Yorker reader?

As we took our hands off our eyes and began reading the first article we were pleasantly surprised. One article was called "Letter from Pennsylvania, Darwin in the Dock, Intelligent design goes to school."

We already knew where Pennsylvania was and so we didn't feel the need to read that one.

"Corduroy rules," was the title of a USA Today-length article in a section called "The Talk of the Town" on December 5. As a guy living in Peoria, we have owned corduroy pants our whole lives.

In another issue we saw, "How the White Sox won." Besides the cartoons, The New Yorker had sports too. There was just more and more common ground between us and readers of The New Yorker.

Since we already got Sports Illustrated, The Sporting News, ESPN The Magazine, and USA Today we already knew that the (Chicago) White Sox won the (baseball) World Series so we didn't need to read that article either.

In reading another article we saw that the writer was Seymour M. Hersh, who is also our urologist at the County Free Health Clinic! We actually knew a writer for The New Yorker!

So having read a "critical mass" of the "allegedly" "daunting" "articles" in The New Yorker we now just leafed through some other issues, to soak up the "milieu" as a New Yorker reader would say.

As we went through more and more we noticed that apparently they had a mascot, "Eustace," we forget his last name, who was pictured on the index of every issue.

"Eustace" wore a top hat and looked down his nose at a butterfly through a pair of those old-fashioned glasses that you have to hold up to your eyes because they don't go behind your ears.

Then something clicked in our head again like it did when we saw the sign "This is not a library!" in Abdul's newsstand: How could we spot a New Yorker reader when we saw one?

We thought for a second that maybe they all dress like Eustace but then we thought that was stupid. Do the Philadelphia Phillies dress like the Phillie Phanatic?

Don't make us laugh.

What it was was that The New Yorker was a very old magazine. It went back to the Truman administration in the 1920s and more people back then must have dressed like Eustace. They just didn't update the mascot's look.

What clicked in our heads when we were thinking about all of this was that to be a New Yorker reader you had to LOOK like a New Yorker reader. We recalled something our friend Tyrone said one time at the Free Clinic when we asked him why he was dressed in a gangster-striped suit, spats, and a black shirt. Tyrone said, "If I'm going to be impo'tent, I'm going to look impo'tent."

We had always remembered that.

We needed to find out what modern New Yorker readers wore and what stuff they bought if we were to be able to recognize them, go to the places they went, hopefully meet some of them, do the things they do, and ultimately, BECOME one of them.

-Benjamin Harris