Corn on the Job

A grain of humor in every column...

(Original Santa Fe Reporter art by Anson Stevens-Bollen)

“Hello, I need to make an appointment to have my chimneys swept. The name is Basler. B-A-S-L-E-R.”

“You’ve used us before, right?”

“No.”

“Wait. Then, why do I recognize your name?”

“Um, maybe because I write that humor column in the ‘Santa Fe Reporter?’”

“YES! BLUE CORN! I LOVE THAT! It’s the first thing I read, even before I read the sex advice column! I’m going to take 20 percent off our regular price for you. Call it a fan discount!”

A fan discount? I could get used to that.

It’s kind of funny. I had spent decades writing for Reuters, with my byline spread around nearly every country in the world, and nobody ever recognized my name. Not once. But now, on a retirement whim, I was writing a goofy humor column for an  alternative weekly newspaper in tiny Santa Fe, New Mexico, and people were responding.

The cashier at Trader Joe’s recognized my name. So did the woman at the dry cleaners. And it wasn’t just the name. They would tell me specific columns that were their favorites.

I had fans, and they were giving me discounts.

Here's how this came to pass. Soon after retiring to Santa Fe, I began to miss journalism something awful. I composed an email to the editors of two daily newspapers and two glossy magazines, carefully worded to make it clear I wasn’t asking for a job. I just thought we might spitball and come up with a way to work together on something.

Over the next week, the silence was deafening. Not a single response. I was truly out to pasture, yesterday’s news. Washed up.

Then, while strolling downtown a couple of days later, I saw a newspaper box for The Santa Fe Reporter, a free newspaper with a loyal local reader base. The paper was also popular among the masses of  tourists, because it was a free way to find out what was going on in town.

The potential irony of spending my whole life in mainstream journalism, and then winding up at a potty-mouthed alt-weekly was just too delicious for me to pass up.

I emailed the editor and the next day she invited me to her office for what I thought was just a meet-and-greet. It wasn’t.

She told me she wanted to do a column. I said it would have to be funny, and she said that’s exactly what she wanted.

Then she asked what I wanted to name it, and I blurted out, “Blue Corn,” which is a very healthful grain that is popular in Southwestern muffins, pancakes, chips and lots of other stuff.

Perfect, she said, when can you start?

I’ll give you two columns next week, I said.

If I was a bit cocky about my ability to deliver the goods, it was only because after nine months in Santa Fe I knew the city’s goofiness quotient was off the charts. The place was ground zero for eccentrics, and all I had to do to produce a funny column was open my eyes. Heck, sometimes I didn’t even have to do that.

(Original Santa Fe Reporter art by Anson Stevens-Bollen)

I even got some good material out of my own life. When I visited Cuba as a tourist, I did a “Blue Corn” column with a legitimate Havana dateline.

I told my taxi driver from the Havana airport that I was happy to be getting away from all the beans and rice in New Mexico, and I asked him what they eat in Cuba.

"Beans and rice," he replied.

When an out-of-town visitor told us our guest house was haunted, I wrote about our plans to make it a lucrative tourist attraction, Bob’s Big House of Hell, where folks could pay to be hysterical.

My very first column was about Forrest Fenn, a wealthy former Santa Fe art gallery owner who had hidden a treasure chest worth a million dollars somewhere in New Mexico or some nearby state and then had written a book about it filled with clues.

Treasure-hunters were showing up in huge numbers, from all over, attempting to interpret Fenn’s clues and get rich, and he had become a national celebrity.

In my column I claimed that I had found the treasure myself, on a picnic table at a Santa Fe Lottaburger fast food restaurant. Without skipping a beat, Fenn himself posted a response to my column online, saying I was lying, because he had really hidden it at a McDonald’s.

Readers were having fun, and I was having the time of my life. I created a recurring character called The Santa Fe Science Dude, who would answer science questions. Of course, my replies were wrong, pointless and stupid.

Near the end of my first Science Dude column, I included a comment from a supposedly irate reader accusing me of knowing nothing about science.

“Busted. I’m sorry. I just thought if I seemed to really know my science, those brilliant folks up at the Santa Fe Institute would invite me to visit them, and my friends would be impressed. That’s all I wanted,” I sniveled..

The next day, the folks at the Institute, one of the most prestigious think-tanks in the country, called to invite me to lunch. I sat with the executive director, and met Nobel Prize winner Murray Gel-Man.

This was just way too good to be true. I was not writing in a vacuum. I had readers, and damn, did it feel good.

In 2016, during the presidential campaign, I read somewhere that New Mexico’s constitution prohibits idiots from voting. This can’t be correct, I thought.

But it was. Article VII, written more than a century earlier, outlines who is eligible to vote and then adds, "except idiots, insane persons and persons convicted of a felonious or infamous crime …"

Armed with that bit of information I wrote a column pretending to be the head of Santa Feans for Trump and said if the no-idiots clause were enforced it would be a devastating blow to the Trump campaign. Not a single reader objected because, you know, it was Santa Fe.

(Original Santa Fe Reporter art by Anson Stevens-Bollen)

Not every column I wrote was met with widespread approval. The worst blow-back came after my column on the bizcochito, which is a traditional cookie flavored with anise and often made with lard.

I found out that New Mexico had been the very first place to name an official state cookie, about 30 years earlier.

Did they choose chocolate chip or peanut butter or oatmeal? They did not. They selected the bizcochito. Lard, anise and all. Readers hated that I made fun of their state cookie. Some even sent me packages of the awful things, which of course I used for mulch.

I was very proud of myself for not making any juvenile anise jokes. By the way, bizcochitos were first introduced by Spanish explorers back in the 16^th century, and I’m pretty sure most of their original batch is still languishing on grocery shelves.

Nothing lasts forever, except for old bizcochitos, and in January 2017, my column went away. The newspaper was shrinking, they couldn’t afford to devote an entire column to humor, etc.

That’s right, irony of ironies, a couple of weeks after Donald Trump was sworn in, my final column ran. I was losing my soapbox just when I needed it the most. My last Blue Corn column was written in question-and-answer format, and here is how it ended:

I did want to ask you one more thing, Bob. Santa Fe Reporter stories tend to use some pretty salty language, liberally dropping the f-bomb, the s-bomb, etc. Why haven't you done that?

I'm a little too old school. I learned how to express myself in print back in the day, and I guess I just never changed.

That sounds like a fu**ing waste of freedom of speech to me. 

Perhaps it is, but it's my freedom of speech, and it has never been as precious as it is right now. So, if you spot me with my bullhorn on the bandstand in the Plaza, please come over and rant alongside me. We're all going to be ranting before long, my friends. 

I guess I called that one right.