![]() ![]() I recall being so horrified, not at what was on the screen but at the fact that my mother and father were sitting beside me, that I covered my face with my hands and sort of folded up sideways into the seatwell. What I want to know: Did you see American Pie with any of your daughters? And if so, what on earth did you do when, you know, things of a certain nature took place on the screen? Put a bag over your head? Excuse yourself to move to another row? I still have an excruciating memory of sitting in some avant-garde San Francisco movie theater with my parents, I must have been 13 or 14 years old, and suddenly realizing that the trailer we were viewing was for an X-rated foreign movie in which people performed Acts in a naked conga line. Back then I was sorry when the keep-it-out faction won that argument (they found another less arresting and controversial picture to use), but boy, would I have switched sides on this one. What we were keeping off the page, in other words, was not the image in the photo but the image the photo conjured by association in the reader’s mind. The picture showed a curve of foot, indicating that the photographer was shooting from somewhere near the patient’s head, but nothing in the picture itself displayed body parts or anything that might be thought of as offensive nonetheless, one faction argued heatedly against running it in the usual large-format place below the headline because the very image of the doctor’s face, given the context of the story, instantly summoned for the reader the thing she was looking at: the visual we would not have put in the newspaper. Has the Great Gray Lady ever before run a photograph of the, ah, how shall we phrase this, aperture left behind by a young man’s occasion of self-stimulation? I am reminded of a fascinating and heated can-we-run-this argument that took place some years ago at the Washington Post, where I was working I had written a profile of an abortion doctor who was a beautiful white-haired woman by then in her 70s, and the photographer had made a wonderful picture of the doctor’s face, a mass of fine wrinkles and concentration, as she performed a routine aspiration abortion. “Come on, we put pies in the food section all the time.” “Not pies with three-inch holes in the top crust.” “What if it were a piece about achieving the perfect pie crust?” “But it’s not, is it?” Yeah, we are becoming fogeys in our dotage I was interested to discover that I was appalled by that pie picture, which I suppose was the intent of the layout people, since the story was about the vast quantities of appalling material–“gross-out comedy” seems to be the term of the moment–now finding its way into movies and prime-time television. First of all, I want a verbatim transcript of the newsroom discussion that preceded the decision to print that pie on that page.
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