On Friday the 15th of October, I cab it to the Pfister Hotel, glad to have an invitation to mingle with people. Down on a lobby couch I plop and am shortly joined by a tall gentleman who plops onto the couch directly opposite me. The stately clock reads 11:30 a.m. A woman with hair the color of peanut butter fudge prepares eye-openers behind the intimate bar. A fireplace blazes nearby.
The other couch-plopper studies his phone, so I wait to make contact, at least until his double espresso (with a shot of water) arrives. It does, and I launch my query: “Imagine I’m going to interview you. What would be the best way to approach a stranger, you, sitting in a crowded lobby in a busy hotel?”
He tells me he is a software designer currently living in Minneapolis, then he displays his techie toys and chats-up their merits. “I graduated from the University of Texas in 1981,” he says. “I’m a Democrat.” A friendly 50-something-guy wearing chinos and a dark blue blazer, he pulls forth a huge cigar, perhaps 6 inches long. “I’m not going to smoke this,” he says. I just play with it.” He expresses his admiration for Bill Clinton.
I exit the couch to see if I can spot anyone carrying a big fat black binder like mine, which is to say, one containing the credentials of 20 hopeful writers seeking the position of “Narrator” for the Pfister. A six month, $1,000 for ten hours of weekly interviews with hotel guests, plus two Pfister blogs weekly, is the reason I and four other panelists are about to lunch on the Pfister’s dime. We finally gather one flight up the marble stairs, in a private room divine in the way that Joan Rivers and Liza Minelli were divine when they opened at the now defunct Pfister Crown Room in the late 60s. If you were headed downtown to the Crown Room, you dressed to the nines. The memory lingers on about the night Ms. Minelli came to my table and asked where I bought my black and white silk organza frock.
“In Milwaukee at Hixons,” I gushed. Hixons, the Crown Room. Gone with the wind. Memories linger on. The Pfister will do that to you.
At the end of our two-hour lunch (cookies galore), we’ve eliminated (at time, painfully) 15 candidates. Generally, I am impressed with the quality of the writing samples, and in two weeks we lunch again to peruse additional samples from the chosen five. FYI: Joe Kurth, the Pfister’s calm and courteous general manager, excused himself from voting, and emphasized that the effort marks the Pfister’s initial foray into a Narrator series…
“Take more cookies home with you,” Kurth urges. I decline. The cab ride up the hill known as Prospect Avenue (once-upon-a-time a trail for Sauk Indians) deposits me at the entry point to my glass box where celebrities live, but that’s another story….
