I still was ineligible to attend a Gridiron show. Women simply weren't allowed in then.
Women were not allowed into many places and events in the ancient sixties (even women politicians who were rudely satirized in Gridiron skits weren't allowed to attend). Since I had written satirical skits throughout high school and college, I wasn't about to stop simply because I wasn't allowed to see the shows I was writing for. So I continued to lampoon local and national events, and continued to get my Gridiron skits returned with the editorial injunction: "dirtier."
Just what kind of show were they running here? Within two years, I became the first woman to officially attend a Gridiron show along with hundreds of male political, business and media leaders, and I found out.
Women were admitted at last because ticket sales were slumping and the shows were costly. When the bottom line sags, iron-clad exclusions tend to snap like rotten rubber bands, A sign that I had successfully integrated myself into die Gridiron show I had never seen came when a neighboring executive in the audience, quite drunk, leaned toward me during one skit and suggested that "It's a shame a nice young lady like you has to listen to this."
"Listen to it?'' I replied with some amazement. ''I wrote it!" In another two years I became the first woman show chairman of my local Gridiron. That show achieved several firsts--
participation by 40 people instead of the same eight insiders, the first multimedia satirical slide show, and the first mobile set piece (a baby-blue outhouse on wheels).
It, like Midnight Louise, did not impress the old hands.
At the post-Gridiron party, a fellow writer lurched up to tell my husband and myself that
"the really classic Gridiron show" was one he had chaired, which he wrote all by himself in two weeks flat. The Gridiron died, appropriately, when this paragon of modesty again became show chairman a couple of years later. Any communal project twisted to oblige the egos of a self-serving few does not survive.
I no longer write topical satire. I don't need to since I became a fiction writer, which allows me to make up (almost) everything. Fiction really is stranger than Truth.
Trust me.