Could We Be A New Yorker Reader? Parte Une

Could We Be A New Yorker Reader?
Do We Have The "Right Stuff?"
Parte Une: "The Cold Fusion Yo-Yo."

We were chatting with a friend the other day when he said something about a "Cold Fusion Yo-Yo" in "The New Yorker."

We had no idea what our friend, at whose request we will identify only as "The Undersigned," was talking about but not wanting to look stupid we copied his facial expressions and shook our heads in amazement whenever he did.

Cleverly, we asked The Undersigned to show us and in this way found out without having to ask and look stupid that it was an ad in a magazine. We read the ad but still didn't understand it. However we did not feel stupid because neither did The Undersigned.

We wondered to ourselves why someone who lives in Peoria, Illinois would read a magazine for people who live in New York City but cleverly decided to ask a slightly but significantly different question, "Why do you read that?"

In this way we could appear to be not unfamiliar with The New Yorker and at the same time find out what kind of magazine it was. The Undersigned said that he got The New Yorker because "intelligent, powerful and sophisticated people" read it and because it had been called "perhaps the best magazine that ever was."

That appealed to us because we like things that are the best, which is why we get The Sharper Image catalog.

So being intellectually curious and a "social climber" who associates only with "the best and the brightest" like The Undersigned, we were now intrigued by this The New Yorker and wanted to look at it for ourselves but The Undersigned threw it in the bio-hazardous wastebasket before we could.

After leaving the County Free Health Clinic we then got on the bus to go home but we had so many thoughts going through our head that we got off at the newsstand to buy a copy of The New Yorker.

We were familiar with the location of Maxim magazine on the magazine rack and cleverly figured that since Maxim starts with an "M" that The New Yorker should be right nearby. We did not see it however.

We looked behind some issues of Maxim to see if a copy of The New Yorker got misfiled there. We opened an issue of Maxim to see if one got stuffed between the pages.

We spent an hour doing this.

We asked Abdul, who owns the newsstand, if he carried The New Yorker. We were told no. We went to leave but Abdul motioned to a sign in the store that said, "This is not a library!" We paid for a copy of Maxim but the sign clicked something in our head and we asked Abdul if he knew where a library was.

He did not.

After inquiring of several other people we were told that the library was located in the Government Center near the County Free Health Clinic, which we were familiar with.

We took a bus back downtown and in short order found the library. We went up to the periodicals circulation desk and asked for The New Yorker. We were given a month's worth at a time.

We noted that every cover had a drawing on it, like a cartoon. We were impressed. We leafed through the issue and saw more cartoons. There were lots and lots of cartoons. We thought maybe this was their annual cartoon issue, like Nickelodeon used to have its JuneBuggs Buggs-Bunny marathon every year, which we greatly missed.

However we discovered that every issue of The New Yorker had tons of cartoons. We were thrilled that maybe the best magazine that ever was had cartoons in it, just like Playboy, which we were familiar with. And that just like the only reason we bought Playboy was for the cartoons, we learned that a lot of people only got The New Yorker for the cartoons.

We were beginning to see that we had a lot in common with the movers and shakers who read The New Yorker.

Even with our confidence soaring, we got butterflies in our stomach when we prepared to read the articles. We read USA Today when we have the time to devote to it but we inferred from the things that The Undersigned said that The New Yorker was even tougher.

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

-Benjamin Harris