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EDITOR’S PAGE D Year In Review: Highs, Lows, Hate Mail, and More

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Despite the fact that 1988 was, on balance, pretty much of a drag, I predict that sometime around mid-May we’re going to wake up with an acute yearning for the year that just was. I mean it. Nineteen eighty-nine is shaping up to be Really Dull. BORING. Ennui City. Just think about another two years of Madame Mayor Get-Along.. .a quiet influx of computer nerds into Waxahachie… nightly news from Five Caucasian Males with nice smiles… detente with the MCA entertainment sharks.. .scandal-free Mustang football, . .no more Jerry Rucker to kick around. Why. people are actually beginning to my out fowl at cocktail parties that they agree with John Wiley Price, What kind of a fun city is that?

We can hibernate till it’s over, or somebody can ask Ross Perot what he thinks about the urbanization of Latvia-or anything else for thai; matter. Meanwhile, nostalgia buffs can cling to this annual recounting of bests and worsts during the past year here at D…

Our best-selling cover: Lacking a Major Highland Park Scandal like last-years best-seller on the mysterious Sandra Bridewell, our annual Best Si Worst issue? featuring Guv Clements on a dart-board, resumed its usual place as the newsstand winner. Rita Clements refused all subsequent requests lor interviews, but, hey, that’s the price of success.

Our worst-selling cover: Go figure. We thought you would want to know about a mysterious con lady who wasn’t from Highland Park but acted like it, and who systematically bilked thousands from innocents all across this great land. You didn’t. Best parody of D: The ill-fated Contessa of Con cover did, however, achieve a degree of notoriety, albeit posthumously, when it mysteriously appeared in an issue of that Paradigm of Hipness, Detour magazine. (In case you aren’t familiar with Detour, the publication signifies, we would postulate, a fundamentally circuitous method, as it were, of viewing Dallas.) Well, these folks know whashappenin. and they don’t find it in D, which they have renamed B, for Boring. Ouch. That’s a good omen, though, for our prospects in ’89.

Best reaction to a story: We don’t expect everyone to like us. really we don’t. And that’s why our feelings weren’t hurt when Fritz Von Brien, patriarch of the wrestling Von Erichs, got a little riled over writer Skip Hollandsworth’s use of the word “bombastic” in describing Fritz’s style. Said Fritz, “I’m gonna have Doris look that up in the dictionary, and if it means what I think it does, you’re in big trouble.”

Worst reaction to a story: Big trouble is exactly what we were in with happy graduates of the Lifespring program worldwide, all of whom just happened to be within the geographical reach of D Magazine (or maybe we really do have a pass-along readership of 32 million). Seething Lifespringers continued, until the waning hours of 1988, to chastise writer Many Primeau for her “callous” portrayal of the two-day self-help seminar.

Most tedious reaction to a story : This one has to be a tie; first we snored through letter after letter correefing HoUi?tdswe:th, son of a Presbyterian preacher, for some minute errors in his depiction of Cowboys quarterback Da/my White’s Mormonism, But that subject seems, titillating next to the continued sniping between two makers of wooden swingsets, both of whom accuse the other of making up The Great Pallas Swingset War while bitterly criticizing the other’s exposed joists.

Best rumor: It’s probably not all that odd in this topsy-turvy world of mergers and acquisitions, but for a time there last fall [lie mill was churning on “news’’ of D Manazing acquisition by the Dallas Times Herald-an enterprise itself still reeling from ils sec-ond ownership change in as many years. Herald editor Roy Bode expressed surprise when told of Ute rumored move, but. he added quickly, “That’s a lot better than the last rumor I heard about us, which had the Herald closing one afternoon at 5 p.m., their reopening the next morning as a tabloid.”

Worst liming: Speaking of ill-timed departures, how’s this for a clinker? The day “we went to press with a fashion spoof called “How Dapper Is The Dapper Bandit?’’ (June 1988), the infamous bank robber shot himself m the neck as police officers closed, in on him after a fateful final heist. Hard to Zook spiffy in prison gray.

Best excuse for a missed, deadline: Having exhausted all reasonable explanations for his late copy, contributing editor Reid Slaughter had to go all the way to England to come up with this one: according to Slaughter, he was, uh hum. helping an elderly American lady find her way around Victoria Slatton, when he turned his back on his luggage for less than thirty seconds, and whoosh! everything was gone-his manuscript, every tape, every note, every pennyworth of that new lap computer. Really, Reid, we believe you.

Worst unsolicited, story idea: If you don’t count one freelance writer’s proposed spoof on the Kennedy assassination (sample line: “How much of JFK’s popularity has to do with being dead? I call it ’Ritchie Valois syndrome’ “), or another’s suggestion that we take “a humorous look at abortion,” top honors have to go to “My Barium Enema X-Ray,” by An Anonymous Victim.

Best move by a former D staffer: Another tie: former art director David Hartis moved. to New York’s Vanity Fair as assistant an director, and Skip Hollandsworth joined (he ranks of television producers in Grant Tinker’s new operation, working on “USA Today” The Television Show.

Best new addition to the D staff: But departures make way for new faces, and D is proud to have lured art director Sieve Connatser on staff. Also beginning this month. Dallas writer Glenna Whitley, whose works have appeared often in this magazine, as w\l as The Dallas Morning News’s “Dallas Life.” will join us as associate editor. Here’s to ’89!

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