January 17, 2013
By Mickey Friedman
News commentators like me, Maureen Dowd, and David Brooks, and old-fashioned reporter-types like the Woodsteins – who met their source in a dark parking garage, then blew the whistle on Nixon’s plumbers – well, people tell us things. Slip important documents under the door or throw them over the transom.
We don’t have a parking garage and I don’t have a transom but I got mine when I returned from the bathroom at Fuel and found it tucked under my almond croissant.
I don’t know who slipped it to me. But like the Woodsteins I feel a certain responsibility to share it with you:
“Not For Public Consumption – An Innovative PR Approach To Downtown Revitalization. A Smidley, Crump and Crump Proposal for Great Barrington’s Ad Hoc Committee For Crack-Free Sidewalks and Spiffy New Streets.”
Quite frankly I didn’t even know about the GBAHCCFS&SNS or that they had commissioned a Smidley, Crump and Crump Proposal. Clearly, the GBAHCCFS&SNS has clout.
You might not remember the ground-breaking, award-winning work Smidley did for Lenox. But by simply and boldly adding an extra “n” and an additional “x” to Lenox, they increased tourism by 1.4372%. And it’s striking how much better the new Lennoxx is doing than the old Lenox. People seem so much happier. There’s a lot more humming and more women are knitting sweaters. Of course, there are some folks who thought Smidley’s $60,000 fee was a wee-bit excessive but you can’t really argue with success.
Abigail Starkfield-Crump offers a short introduction: “The task is simple: How Do We Have Fun While We Tear Up The Old, Tear Down The Trees, and Fill In The Cracks. Or, put another way, It May Not Be Easy Making The Best Small Town in America Even Bestier But We Sure As Heck Are Going To Enjoy It.
“Now,” Ms. Starkfield-Crump continues, “it’s never easy turning what will be dreadful into something special. So let’s start with words. We’ve got several ground-breaking branding ideas for you to choose from. There’s ‘Turning Misery to Merriment.’ Or ‘Destruction to Delight.’ Or our favorite, ‘Traffic = Transformation.’
“Of course, it’s easy to talk transformation but with the help of the business community, we’re actually going to transform. Every moment, every inch of the excruciatingly long trip from Castle to Cottage Street offers an opportunity to grow, to learn, to stretch, to think, to sing, to hum. To transform. Yes, to transform.
“We at Smidley, Crump and Crump have been lucky enough to have been working over the last few months with Marty and Mindy Bright-Sky, leaders of the GB holistic healing community. Marty is best-known for his Lake Mansfield fire-walking workshops and his weeklong intensives for middle-aged male entrepreneurs with bad backs, ‘Be The Bobcat.’ Mindy, of course, is well-respected in the self-help movement for her pioneering seminar and nutritional supplements, ‘Six Minutes To Spiritual Rejuvenation.’ The Bright-Skies have recently been featured on Oprah promoting their new memoir: ‘How To Make The Most of A Miserable Marriage.’
According to Ms. Starkfield-Crump: “We’re suggesting ever-present opportunities to transform – a continuing program of education and entertainment on both sides on the street during each and every construction hour. Our positive message proclaims: ‘Live, Learn, Learn to Live from Castle Street to Cottage Street and Back Again.’
“We’ve learned at other road construction sites that a typical driver will begin to lose his sense of humor about seven minutes into the traffic jam experience. Accordingly, for northbound traffic we’ll be deploying our first wave of massage therapists along Searles Castle on the East, and for southbound traffic on the sidewalk by Kimball’s Fuel Oil office.
“We like to think of the three-minute massage as early intervention. It’s hard to be pissed when someone’s just rubbed your neck. We’ve put out a call to massage therapists as far north as Stockbridge and as far south as Sheffield so that we can have massage stations on every block. We’re asking the massage community to consider a sliding scale so that no one is turned away just because they didn’t diversify when they had a chance.
“The mimes and clowns come next, building on the goodwill we’ve just established. They’ll be assorted baked goods, and for those whose growing annoyance won’t be satisfied with sugar, we’ll have a series of small hibachis, and an array of toaster ovens offering English Muffin pizza. For those with a finer palate, we’ll be serving Brie On A Stick.
“Several foreign language specialists have created a Traffic Special we at Smidley like to call “Hello. Goodbye. And Where’s The Bathroom?” They’ll pop into the back seat, teach and test in under two minutes. So far we’ve got Italian, Spanish, and Armenian covered.”
Unfortunately, the rest of the document was missing. At the bottom was a handwritten note: “Want more? Bring five hundred bucks in twenties to the bandstand Tuesday night at ten. No cops.”