Whale Tale

A nebbish, a Watergate Cassandra, and a museum security guard walk into a bar...

When I was in high school, I worked nights and weekends as a public address announcer at Yale sporting events.

For the uninitiated, the PA announcer provides the disembodied voice fans hear over the loudspeakers inside arenas and stadiums. This person introduces starting lineups, recounts pertinent information like goal scorers, penalty infractions, lineup changes, and, in some cases, performs advertisements.

(The story of how I worked in minor league baseball as a 17-year-old announcer is for another day.)

One particular experience that stands out is my work with the Yale women’s ice hockey team during the 1996-97 season. Those Bulldogs played valiantly but lost almost every game.

Though the team had little chance of winning, and only a handful of fans would usually show up, I still appreciated the experience of announcing games at Ingalls Rink.

Photo: Yale Athletics

The arena is more commonly known as “The Yale Whale” because of its humpbacked roof, the signature element of Eero Saarinen’s magnificent design. I loved that my “office” was such an architectural gem.

But I sure wish that those Bulldogs had won more games. Not for me or for the fans listening to my voice — but for the players themselves. The futility was so bone-chillingly deep, it felt like the team would be frozen forever.

Cut to this past Saturday.

I found myself sitting in Aisle 4 at Ingalls Rink, marveling at the warmth around me. About 2,000 fans had assembled to witness what once seemed impossible: the Yale women were hosting an NCAA Tournament game.

Over the past two seasons, the Bulldogs, improbably, have become one of the country’s best teams. They have great goaltending, they skate with speed, pass with precision, and shoot with power. I got chills watching them.

Though Yale ultimately lost to the Northeastern Huskies that day, what felt more meaningful than the outcome was simply that the game had happened at all — and that people had come out to see it.

My 17-year-old self never imagined that I’d witness such a thing at the Whale. And more than once, I found myself casting an envious eye toward the PA announcer’s booth, wishing I could get on that microphone just one more time.

On to the list…

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The Best…

…Series I Watched This Week

Paul T. Goldman (2023) — Peacock

I have some misgivings about this series, but the experience of watching it was so strange and compelling that I decided to write about it.

There are two stories happening simultaneously within Paul T. Goldman, a 6-part true(?) crime documentary series on Peacock.

One story is the making of a feature film based on a book written by a Florida nebbish named Paul T. Goldman (not his real name).

The movie — which he initially says is 100 percent true to his life story — centers on Paul’s experience being scammed by an ex-wife. It then widens out to include his investigation of and subsequent quest to take down the international crime syndicate he says his ex-wife and her boyfriend are running.

Paul, who is not an actor (a huge understatement), stars in the movie himself, opposite actual professionals. If you’re a prestige TV watcher, you will recognize several of them; their presence gives credibility to an utterly ridiculous film production.

The other story — the primary one, really — is a documentary about the making of this movie, in which director Jason Woliner presents a study of Paul T. Goldman, American eccentric.

Paul appears as a sweet, gullible, open-hearted loser who is just looking for love, acceptance, and maybe a bit of Hollywood fame.

Sometimes I had to rub my eyes to make sure I wasn’t watching a Fred Armisen creation on Saturday Night Live. But no, Paul is real, though much of the viewer’s energy is spent trying to figure out whether anything he says is real.

There are darker undertones to Paul as well, most of which the series doesn’t really touch, like the legal and ethical ramifications of his zany, conspiracy-minded mania. And, more darkly, the fine line between his behavior and that of someone who shows up at a D.C. pizza place with an AR-15, looking to bust up an imaginary sex trafficking ring.

The show, which has echoes of American Movie, The Disaster Artist, and even Being There, can be hard to watch at times. In fact, I sometimes asked myself why I was watching it.

But I also found it compulsively watchable and weirdly thought-provoking, a bizarre and unique viewing experience. I’m not sure the world needed Paul T. Goldman, but I will definitely be thinking about it for a long time to come.

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…Documentary Short I Watched This Week

The Martha Mitchell Effect (2022) — Directed by Anne Alvergue & Debra McClutchey
Available on Netflix

I went down a Watergate rabbit hole (or rat hole?) this week.

What sent me there was the Oscar-nominated documentary short The Martha Mitchell Effect, which seeks to carve out a bigger spot in the mythology for the “Cassandra of Watergate.”

At the time of the ill-fated burglary in 1972, Martha Mitchell was married to John Mitchell, the former U.S. Attorney General who was then chairman of President Nixon’s reelection campaign.

Martha was as well known for her outspoken support of Nixon as she was for her syrupy Arkansas drawl. She was popular among White House journalists because she loved to talk to the press and really loved to have a good time.

That was all generally fine for Nixon until the aftermath of the burglary turned Martha against the president. She started publicly criticizing him long before most people had ever heard of Watergate, and she was punished for it.

The way Nixon’s thugs — including Martha’s husband — treated her is shocking, even by Nixonian standards.

Though Woodward and Bernstein have spent the past 50 years as the protagonists in the Watergate story, no less an authority than Nixon himself publicly cast blame on Martha for contributing to his downfall.

You won’t see that in the movie version of All the President’s Men (which I recommend, of course), during which Martha receives only a passing mention. Played by Madeline Kahn, she gets a bit more screen time in Oliver Stone’s 1995 film Nixon (which I re-watched and also recommend).

And last year, alongside The Martha Mitchell Effect came Gaslit, a limited series that sets aside the Washington Post boys to concentrate on the two great apostates of the Nixon administration, Martha and White House Counsel John Dean. (Julia Roberts plays Martha.)

I watched half the series this week, and I’m not convinced that I’m going to finish it. So I can save you some time and recommend that you spend 40 minutes with The Martha Mitchell Effect rather than eight hours with Gaslit.

Thanks to reader Mark L. for the recommendation, sending me down a rabbit hole that let me hate Nixon all over again.

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…Audiobook I Listened To This Week

All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me (Simon & Schuster, 2023) — By Patrick Bringley

I’ve never known exactly what to make of museum security guards, those folks in sensible footwear who silently monitor exhibition rooms around the world.

I generally find them as inscrutable as Mona Lisa’s smile, characters who are always seen but rarely heard, except when a visitor gets a little too close to a Carvaggio painting or a Ming vase or one of Prince’s Hohner Madcat guitars.

I’ve often wondered: Is it appropriate to approach a guard and ask them a question?

Can you tell me more about the painting over here?
Where is the nearest bathroom?
Do you get tired of standing all day?
How did you come to have this job, anyway?
Do you, like, like art?

I typically end up keeping these questions to myself for fear of making a museum faux pas — I would hate to be distracting a security guard with some inane query at the precise moment when a heist is happening. (“No, officer, I wasn’t aiding or abetting the thieves. I really did want to know what kind of socks the security guard was wearing.”)

As a result, my curiosity was never satisfied. Until, that is, I had the pleasure of reading All the Beauty in the World, a new book by Patrick Bringley. (I listened to the audiobook, read by the author.)

Following the death of his older brother at age 26, Bringley quits his job at The New Yorker in 2008 and goes to work as a security guard at New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. He trades his burgeoning corporate desk job for one where he’s “happy to be going nowhere.” He would spend 10 years there.

What he finds at the Met is beauty, solace, and a tribe of fellow nowhere-seekers as diverse as the United Nations — a subculture that, to my knowledge, has always been hidden from public view.

Working in this context, amidst some of the world’s greatest artistic treasures, Bringley is able to begin processing his grief, remaking his life in a way that better aligns with his ambitions and his heart.

This is a lovely, gentle book that celebrates the restorative power of art, museums, and friendship.

The book also taught me that plenty of museum-goers have no compunction about asking security guards all kinds of questions. So, as usual, I just need to get over my own self-consciousness and inquire away.

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Here are links to some of my past essays, in case you missed any shows, movies or books:

TV Series:
Shrinking (2023)
Enlightened (2011-13)
Fleishman is in Trouble (2022)
Slow Horses (2022)

Movies/Documentaries/Comedy Specials:
Glory (1989)
The Player (1992)
Brick (2005)
Inherit the Wind (1960)
Marc Maron: From Bleak to Dark (2023)
The Elephant Whisperers (2022)
Fire of Love (2022)
Tár (2022)
Metallica: Some Kind of Monster (2004)
The Queen of Basketball (2021)
Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths (2022)

Books:
Hollywood: The Oral History by Jeanine Basinger & Sam Wasson
Code Name Blue Wren by Jim Popkin
Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann
Good for a Girl by Lauren Fleshman
It’s OK That You’re Not OK by Megan Devine
An Immense World by Ed Yong
The Boys by Ron Howard and Clint Howard
Folk Music: A Bob Dylan Biography in Seven Songs by Greil Marcus