Playing Santa did strange things to Bob Rutan
or just the first line of the Esquire title:
Playing Santa does strange things to a man
“ They drank tumblers of Irish whiskey filled to the brim, illicit pours they secured with ten-dollar tips to a curvy Dominican bartender.”
“ For the price of three beers, he told me his story.”
“ In the two decades since the show aired, a hundred thousand American Spirits had yellowed Bob’s fingers and turned his voice to gravel.”
When I read things like this I find it very hard to take the wider message seriously, because it feels like writing-as-cosplay, the writer inhabiting a caricature of “hard bitten” and inserting that at the forefront of the piece.
Very odd.
13.7 per day, I guess it could be worse.
When I saw the title I wondered if Bob Rutan had any connection with Burt Rutan, the airplane guy. I guess not.
How do you get $200 an hour for a corporate Santa gig?
Article looks good. I'm just a paragraph or two in, but will probably read it.
Sometimes people really are hard-bitten.
* It's kind of like a specially designed room standing on the sidewalk of a city street, where you can put your iPhone on speaker and still hear the other person talk. Only it comes with it's own iPhone that you can rent for less than a dollar with an old form of Venmo.
I agree: but to me that's at least something kind of interesting and evocative, even if it's a trainwreck. (In fact, it might even be better when it's a trainwreck). A nice break from LLM's this-not-that. This one's not so bad IMO.
Personally, I liked the writing.