Four Sure Fire Ways to Grab Her Attention
1. Compliment her on her hat. (No matter how much you dislike it.) Women like to be complimented on their millinery. Keep your comments simple and direct and do not offer an excessively detailed appraisal. To speak too knowledgeably about the hat’s appeal will have her mistaking you for Edward Everett Horton or one of his mincing ilk. She will invite you to afternoon tea but never to her bed.
2. Be topical. Show that you respect her interest in current events and public affairs by commenting casually on some news item that may have come to her attention. Do stay away from the following conversation killers: Hitler and Mussolini (unless you are to criticize them roundly and impugn their medieval stands on womanhood), electrophotography, coelacanths, or Kate Smith (because you will inevitably make some unkind comment about her size, and this may, in one of many ways, come back to haunt you.)
3. Touch her gently on the shoulder as you speak. Women like to be touched in conversation should the contact be friendly and chaste. It demonstrates that you are warm and winning. Do not venture beyond a light tap, and use such only for punctuation. Do not use the touch to fill a break in the conversation, for it will draw far too much attention to itself. Do not touch her repeatedly or she will think that you are palsied or battling delirium tremens. Do not brush her clothing with the hand, or she may think that she has clothed herself in a garment that is attended by lint. In her mind, your effort to remove this phantom bit of fabric fluff will demonstrate that you believe she is unable to keep herself clean and kempt in public. Finally, do not — I repeat DO NOT paw her or allow the fingers to move independently of one another. You will be mistaken for a masher, lothario, or Ed Wynn.
4. Ask her if she would like to join you for a cup of coffee. Add that you are on your way to have a cup of coffee yourself, so the invitation need only reflect a desire to continue a pleasant chat with no additional expectations incumbent. Should she agree to join you, do not under any circumstances offer to buy her anything beyond the java. Purchase of a doughnut for the young woman will indicate a level of interest that may discomfit her. A doughnut by its shape carries Freudian implications that will only serve to create an atmosphere of subliminal discomfort. The following cautionary tale should serve to warn you away from all thought of food in this initial encounter: A young man offered a beautiful young woman he had just met a cup of coffee, and once seated at the lunchroom counter, a doughnut as well. She accepted the offer. He placed the order for the doughnut while at the same time ordering for himself a frankfurter with mustard and relish. The man, at one point, found both the doughnut and the frankfurter in his possession, and, exercising a shameful lack of tact, proceeded to insert the processed meat log into the inviting hole of the doughnut with short rapid thrusts, its entry amply lubricated by the slippery mustard and relish paste. The woman, horrified, fled from the lunchroom, and was, in fact, never seen by the man again. The man did not realize his error until much later. By then it was too late to make amends.
9. However, there is little evidence that the two ever met. I could find no mention in Jonathan’s diary of his meeting with Lou Gehrig a week before the ballplayer’s poignant farewell address at Yankee stadium. But Davison does note in his own journaclass="underline"
“Last night Jonathan said he spent a couple of hours at O’Grady’s tossing back brews with none other than Lou Gehrig. He said that Lou ended up asking his help with a speech that wasn’t quite there yet and was grateful that Jonathan had edited out quite a bit of the foam.”
In Jonathan’s papers I did find a yellowed scrap of paper, with the scribbled heading “L.G. Goodbye Speech, July 4, 1939.” A good thirty to forty percent of the text had been lined through. A section follows (with elision noted in brackets).
“I’m lucky. When the New York Giants, a team you would give your right arm to beat, and vice versa, sends you a gift, that’s something. When everybody down to the groundskeepers and those boys in white coats remember you with trophies, that’s something. [When the fellows in the press box pitch in to buy you a shiny new toaster, that’s something too. So is getting a three-speed blender from your shoeshine kid who doesn’t have two pennies to rub together on the best of days. And when that woman who sits in the bleachers and sounds like a crow gives you cookie jar shaped like a fat chicken, that’s something that will make a fellow sit up and say,‘Gee! A chicken cookie jar from the crow lady!’ And when the guy who lives over your stoop with the Homburg and the caterpillar brows leans out his window and yells, ‘Hey, Lou — take this egg poacher — and oh yes, this “Champion” Croquet set with weatherproof varnish, and this “Waldorf”’ Wardrobe Trunk with vulcanized fiber binding and built-in shoe pockets!’ that sure is something too. I’ll say it again.] I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.”
10. Jonathan changed his mind about converting to Catholicism. Fate would treat Father McNulty none too kindly. Several years after his highly-publicized sanity hearing, the priest was defrocked for trying to exorcise an epileptic maid-of-all-work. I should note that Jonathan maintained a close friendship with McNulty in spite of all of his difficulties, and even as Jonathan began to take his first tentative steps toward a full embrace of secular humanism, which at this stage involved working the punch ladle during the refreshment portion of meetings of the Society for Ethical Culture.
It has also been alleged that Jonathan’s decision not to join the Catholic church can be traced, in part, to Adam Powers’s scathing anti-Catholic treatise Onehundred and seventy-eight Questions You Should Ask Yourself About the Catholic Church, which received an ringing endorsement by the Indiana Ku Klux Klan, although all of their copies were accidentally burned in the infamous Hoosier Book Bonfire of 1928.
Dismissing the publication publicly, Jonathan admitted privately to finding some merit to questions 3, 45, and 79. Only one copy of this notorious tract is known to exist, and it lives in the heavily restricted “Bad and Very Bad” vault at the Notre Dame University Library. I gained access only through heavy cajoling and the bribing of a particular sweet-toothed librarian with a dozen of my Grandmother Sally’s tasty miniature apple pies (called “teeny pies” in family parlance). I’ve noted those questions below:
#3 Why do only Catholics and never Protestants see the face of the Madonna in lumber knot holes and the bubbles of simmering cheese fondue?
#45 If the Catholic Church believes that in Heaven all men and women will walk in equality in the warmth of God’s beatific gaze, why does it bar female participation in the echelons of its terrestrial church above the station of nun or rectory maid?
#79 What’s with the funny Bishop hats? What’s that all about?
Adam Powers went on to write a number of other controversial pamphlets — offensive even for their time, and each was praised by extremist elements of the political and religious right. They include the following titles:
Dark Skin, Dark Heart
The Insatiability of the Oriental Woman, Fully Illustrated
Why the World Needs Bubonic Plague