'Tis the season for regifting: Presenting a cautionary tale

by Ken

My goodness, can it really be coming up on 19 years since the classic Seinfeld "regifting" episode first aired? You can find the script for "The Label Maker" here, on the SeinfeldScripts website.

Again, the script of "The Label Maker" can be found here.

I don't know that Mssrs Berg and Schaffer, who wrote the script for "The Label Maker" (Season 6, Episode 11), invented the term "regifting," but I'm pretty sure I'd never heard it before, and even Widipedia acknowledges, "The term was popularized by an episode of the NBC sitcom Seinfeld ('The Label Maker')," but feels obliged to add that "the practice pre-dates the term substantially" (with three footnotes). Well, of course the practice is older. I'm guessing that people have been re-gifting almost as long as they've been gifting.

The first recorded regifter, however, was that snooty, sly, occasionally treacherous dentist Tim Whatley. (I see from IMDb that "The Label Maker" was the second of the five Seinfeld episodes in which Tim Whatley appeared.) Which reminds us too that before Bryan Cranston was Breaking Bad's villainous Walter White, before even he was Hal, the hirsute father of Malcolm in the Middle, he was the ur-regifter, so called by Elaine when she is outraged to find that he has regifted the label-maker that she gave him to Jerry.

Elaine confronts the ur-regifter, shifty dentist Tim Whatley.
(Note all that hair on Bryan Cranston's head in 1995.)

ALL OF WHICH IS BROUGHT TO MIND . . .

. . . by Food Network Magazine Editor in Chief Maile Carpenter's "Editor's Letter" in the December holiday issue. "While we were putting together a story for this issue about fun ways to wrap up wine (page 47)," she writes, "I was relieved to learn that my compulsion to regift wine is totally normal: According to one survey, 69 percent of us have regifted a bottle in the past, and I'm as guilty as anyone."

Now I don't know who exactly was included in this survey. It must have targeted some very different demographic from mine, one where the gifting of wine is common enough, not to mention the parties at which such gifting apparently most often occurs, to give rise to all that regifting of the stuff. Nevertheless, Maile has a swell story to share, which I think we might elevate to the status of a "regifting cautionary tale."

I live in fear, particularly at this time of year, that I'm going to hand a bottle right back to the person who gave it to me.

I almost got caught last December. In a mad rush to get to a party, I scanned our wine fridge [Um, "our wine fridge"? Let me just check what I've got in my wine fridge -- Ed.] and grabbed a Brunello that a friend had given me a few years ago. In the cab, I noticed that the friend had signed the back of the bottle -- with a Sharpie. Smart idea: If we would all just start writing personal notes on the bottles we give, we could end wine regifting for all time. That night I was forced to carry the Brunello around in my purse (fair punishment), then bring it back home and do what the original giver intended: Drink it.

Ah, well, so the regifting close shave had a happy ending!

If you're still thinking about that wine fridge (I know I am; I wonder if there's been a survey to find out what percentage of Food Network Magazine readers have wine fridges), Maile has more to share.

I have to hand it to my husband. He never regifts his wine. He gets so many nice bottles from friends in the restaurant business, and while I sit there Googling the price of them and thinking about how many points we'd score if we brought them to the school auction, Wylie just thinks about which one we should try next. He'll break open a $30 bottle of rosé to drink with Thai takeout, and he'll dust off something he's been saving for 20 years just because my parents are over for dinner. The holidays with him are even better -- the good stuff flows nonstop.

I aspire to be that relaxed about fancy wine someday. The only time I came close was by accident, when I opened a bottle of white to share with my mom and sister one Sunday afternoon. For some reason, Wylie hadn't put this bottle in the special DO-NOT-DRINK area of the fridge, and as a result, we polished off $250 worth of white burgundy while we were sitting around doing a ballerina puzzle with the kids. The wine was delicious, but had I known, I'd have opened one of my favorite $12 bottles and wrapped up the $250 one for my boss -- with a message in Sharpie on the back: "Happy Holidays. This is yours to keep."

And you thought you had problems?

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Justice Stevens's grandkids may not care, but he has some things to get off his chest

by Ken

Admittedly, as subject categories go, the category "Most Charming Utterance Uttered by the Late New York Yankees Owner George Steinbrenner" doesn't promise to be especially broad or arresting. That said, the most charming utterance I'm aware of The Boss uttering was in a respone to a question about the cartoonish version of himself incorporated as a Seinfeld recurring caricature during the period when, improbably and often disastrously, George Costanza worked for the Yankees.

The caricature was actually surprisingly gentle, but still, George had ample reason to be resentful. Instead, he declared himself delighted. He had become, he said, a hero to his grandchildren. For that matter, I recall that the actor Lloyd Bridges said much the same thing about the hilarious character he created on Seinfeld. Bridges had a long and distinguished career on both big and small screens behind him, but suddenly he was on his grandchildren's radar.

Add to the list now retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, who appeared recently before the Arlington (VA) Committee of 100 and, according to the Fall Church News-Press's "Man in Arlington," Charlie Clark, "brought down the house."

Stevens verified a few legends from the sports world. Yes, he knew Branch Rickey, the Brooklyn Dodgers executive portrayed in the current film "42" who brought up pioneer Jackie Robinson to integrate baseball. He also interviewed Ty Cobb while researching baseball economics.

Most memorably, he did witness, at age 12, Babe Ruth pointing to the outfield stands during the 1932 World Series in Wrigley Field and placing a home run right where he promised to. Decades later, when the Chicago Cubs invited Stevens to throw out the first pitch, "I was a hero to my grandchildren," he said, "which is more important than these other things."

It occurs to me that this might be a better world if our major players thought occasionally about how their deeds would register with the grandkids. Your average Wall Street or bankster predator, for example. It wouldn't provide any guarantee of superior job performance, but it might give some of those folks pause for at least a second thought before doing their worst.

Not surprisingly, Justice Stevens harked back to a different world.

Memories the justice volunteered included several from his 1975 confirmation hearing after having been named by President Ford. As the first nominee to undergo a new tradition of personal visits with senators, Stevens recalled that Barry Goldwater promised his vote because the two shared enthusiasm for airplanes. Strom Thurmond knew not to ask how Stevens would vote on the death penalty -- "It's not proper to probe candidates' views, one requirement being to keep an open mind until you hear the parties and read their briefs," Stevens said. But Thurmond conveyed his support for capital punishment, and at a later meeting, Ted Kennedy conveyed his opposite view.

The audience participated actively, and here, for the record, are some of the points Justice Stevens made:

• The high court needs more diversity, legislative and military experience and trial lawyers such as Thurgood Marshall.

• The Bush v. Gore case resolving the 2000 election "should have been rethought," as suggested recently by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. "It was nonsense to apply an equal protection argument to hanging chads versus dimpled chads when the voter's intention for both was clear."

• The 2010 Citizens United decision on campaign spending was "incorrect," but "don't hold your breath for the court to change it."

• The 2012 decision mostly upholding Obamacare vindicated his confidence in Chief Justice John Roberts' "integrity and independence" in following the law even when it's not his policy choice.

• In the coming twin rulings on same-sex marriage, he guesses the court will dismiss the California challenge for lacking jurisdiction and strike down the Defense of Marriage Act as unfair tax policy.

In addition:

Asked by [VA] state Del. Patrick Hope whether he backs mandatory retirement for judges, Stevens said people 70 and older can still contribute. He would have loved to keep working but realized during Citizens United he was having trouble "articulating."

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At last, the "New Yorker cartoon" episode of "Seinfeld" is authentically deconstructed

"Every now and then, when I really want to know what the joke of a particular cartoon is, I just ask someone in the magazine's art department. That is the perk of being a cartoonist myself."

-- New Yorker cartoonist and Seinfeld writer Bruce Eric Kaplan

Elinoff, the fictional New Yorker cartoon editor played by Paul Benedict in this Seinfeld episode written by writer-cartoonist Bruce Eric Kaplan, explains to Elaine why he can't explain the cartoon that's driving her crazy. Actual New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff notes in a postscript to his new blogpost: "Whenever Bruce asks us to explain a cartoon, we resist the temptation to say, 'It's like gossamer, Bruce, and one doesn't dissect gossamer.' "

by Ken

No doubt many of you have been following New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff's recent series of newsletters-blogposts in which he has once again delved into the Seinfeld Season 9 episode, "The Cartoon," in which Elaine tries to get to the bottom of a New Yorker cartoon she can't understand -- and clearly suspects she's being hoodwinked by.

It all began with the July 11 post "I Liked the Kitty," which Bob began:

The question I get asked most often as cartoon editor is: How much money does The New Yorker pay for a cartoon? All I can say about that is: sell us one and you’ll find out.

The second most frequently asked question is: What did you think about that “Seinfeld” episode making fun of New Yorker cartoons? Well, it was written by one of our best cartoonists, Bruce Eric Kaplan, and my initial reaction was “Et tu, Bruce?,” but over time, the episode has grown on me. I’ve used it before to compare fiction to reality when it comes to what my desk looks like and how the cartoon department operates.

And I have decided to do so again, because the episode provides a fun way to comment on issues I’m interested in. For those of you who haven’t seen the episode, I’ve created a stripped-down comic-strip version of it that includes just the pertinent parts.

And here's the first installment of that version:

BOB M'S "KITTY" SERIES CONTINUED . . .

. . . with "I Liked the Kitty: Part II" (July 18) and "I Liked the Kitty: Part III" (July 25), and even included its own cartoon caption contest, before coming to rest today with a post called "Goodbye Kitty." Along the way Bob pursued all sorts of modes of inquiry into the episode and beyond, and if you haven't read the series, I'll leave that to you. But today's post, Bob says, "concludes my love/hate affair" with the episode, "by taking you behind the scenes with the guy who wrote it, Bruce Eric Kaplan, whom fans of the magazine know as 'BEK.' "

INSERT: AN AUTHENTIC BEK CARTOON


"TAKE IT AWAY, BRUCE," BOB WRITES --

And take it away Bruce does.

You would think that my idea for the cartoon episode of "Seinfeld" came from my own experience as a New Yorker cartoonist. But, like everything you would think, you are not exactly right.

About fifteen years ago, I was on an airplane, reading Time magazine, which had a small item in the front about how a New Yorker cartoon by Robert Weber had elicited an unusual number of queries as to what the caption meant. The image (an exquisitely drawn one, I want to say) is of a boy walking into the living room where his mother is vacuuming. He says to her, "I had the most incredible nap." Actually, it says, "That was an incredible nap!," but part of the fun of recounting a cartoon is slightly altering the caption to the way you hear it in your mind when you think of it.

The meaning of the cartoon was clear to me -- it is a hilarious comment on the fact that we live in a culture that feels comfortable saying that anything is incredible, or, more often these days, "Amazing!" We have incredible lattes, amazing socks, etc. But apparently some readers didn't get this.

I have a theory I just came up with in this moment -- perhaps people don't get the genre of ironic cartoons because they themselves are incapable of irony. But then again, I have only had this theory for a few moments, and it may be completely off base.

In any case, the reason for the Time item was that there has always been this widely held notion that some New Yorker cartoons are inscrutable. And even though this one wasn't inscrutable to me, others have been and continue to be. At least once a month, I turn to my wife and say, "What does this mean" about some cartoon. I could give you an example, but I don't want to because, I don't know . . . it seems wrong somehow. I will say that oftentimes they are cartoons by the same one or two (wildly popular and critically celebrated) artists. So obviously the vast majority of people understand and connect with what these cartoonists are commenting on.

Every now and then, when I really want to know what the joke of a particular cartoon is, I just ask someone in the magazine's art department. That is the perk of being a cartoonist myself.

When I saw the item in Time, I was writing for "Seinfeld," and of course always looking for things in my life that could be the basis of stories. And I thought, I would love to write an episode where a character is frustrated by not knowing what a New Yorker cartoon means and then goes about trying to find the answer by going to the New Yorker art department and asking what the joke was.

So this is all to say that this plotline came somewhat from my life as a New Yorker cartoonist but more so from being a lifelong reader of New Yorker cartoons and an occasional reader of Time.

And so, Seinfeld fans, there you have it, from the horse's mouth.

POSTSCRIPT: A COMMENT ON BEK'S STORY

Commenter Concertmaster has added this comment to BEK's account, referring to the Robert Weber cartoon that caused the fuss in Time that planted the idea of the Seinfeld cartoon episode in BEK's head:

I didn't get the point of this cartoon either, and I think the reason is revealed by Bruce Eric Kaplan's comment that the image is "an exquisitely drawn one". The cartoonist as visual artist has stolen the show from the cartoonist as verbal ironist. What jumps out immediately at the reader is that wonderfully vivid image of the mother vacuuming: She extends her arms at full length to thrust the vacuum wand deep under the chair; even her face is elongated to focus our attention on her target; her effort forces her body into provocative curves which are echoed by the snaking vacuum hose; mother and vacuum cleaner are centred in the image and sharply outlined in black. So the reader's eye declares that this is a cartoon about household chores; given this expectation, the caption makes no sense, and the rather subtle point about the boy's use of language doesn't have a chance. It would have worked better if the setting had been the kid's bedroom, with the visual focus on him.

That's way more than I would say, but it gives me the confidence to own up that I didn't get the cartoon either. I have a feeling, however, that I may have less difficulty than Bruce with those "one or two (wildly popular and critically celebrated) artists" whose cartoons he has to have the New Yorker art department explain to him.

INSERT: ANOTHER AUTHENTIC BEK CARTOON


BEK, BY THE WAY . . .

. . . in addition to his Seinfeld credits, was a writer and then a co-executive producer and an executive producer for HBO's legendary Six Feet Under (IMDb lists 40 episodes he was involved with), and more recently has been a writer and co-executive producer for the first season of HBO's Girls.

AND AN AUTHENTIC BEK NEW YORKER COVER
(with explanatory notes from the artist here)


FINALLY, IF YOU STILL HAVEN'T SIGNED

UP FOR BOB MANKOFF'S NEWSLETTER . . .

. . . you can sign up on the New Yorker website, including at any of the above-linked pages. As I keep pointing out, its arrival every Wednesday is the happiest thing that comes regularly into my e-mailbox. (Yes, of course it's free.)

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George Steinbrenner (1930-2010)

George vs. George: On HuffPost, Dan Abramson has assembled "George Steinbrenner on 'Seinfeld': The Funniest Moments.'" (History records that then-Yankees manager Buck Showalter hadn't been fired as of when this episode was made. As the TV "Boss" intimates here, though, it was just a matter of time.)

by Ken

For a lot of years, if anyone had told me that the day George Steinbrenner died would be no big deal, I would have been incredulous. For the tempestuous first 10 or 15 years of his tenure as principal owner of the New York Yankees, George -- "the Boss" -- was the man Yankee fans loved to hate, for his bullying imperiousness and his infernal interference with the professional baseball people he had hired to run the team.

Moreover, it seemed clear that George was of that bullying personality type most of us have encountered so unpleasantly in our real lives, the kind who blustered and screamed at and humiliated the people who worked for him, and seemed actually to enjoy having the power to make, say, secretaries cry. (Of course it takes a pretty clueless mogul to think there's some great accomplishment in terrorizing powerless underlings, but it's a personality type that's more common than many people realize.)

Things change, though, and I think most of us have long since made our peace with George. He didn't always, or even often, get it right on the first try, or necessarily on the second or third or fourth, but he was capable of learning -- about baseball, about New York, about his own place in the cosmos. And he not only made the Yankees competitive, but he actually sold his sport, a job that few other baseball owners can be troubled to take on.

Within hours of the announcement of George's death, you could find online links to comments (here, for example) by seemingly everyone who ever had contact with him. The one name that caught my eye was ESPN's Buster Olney, the best baseball beat writer I'm aware of the NYT ever employing, who covered the Yankees for four years in the '90s, and spoke to ESPN Radio about the differences between the Boss he knew and the man he heard all those stories about from the '80s, and also about George's contribution, not just to the Yankees, but to baseball.

There's understandable resentment around the baseball world about the way the Yankees spend money. Hey, it gets fatiguing for us here in New York too, and you wish the team would go back to other ways of making the product on the field competitive -- the rest of the baseball world likes to forget how much of the last great Yankee teams was built on home-grown talent. And loudmouth idiots in the rest of the baseball world manage to ignore how much money the Yankees pour into other teams' coffers; most everywhere they play, they're the biggest draw the home team has, putting fans in the seats whom the local ownerships have no other way of getting there.

Even in the matter of free spending, the rest of the country likes to play dumb (they are just playing, right?) when it comes to the dimension of what the Yankees have achieved commercially. The fact is that the great old Yankee teams of history rarely drew a lot of fans -- it just doesn't seem to have mattered much to the franchise. But George developed the Yankees into an attendance machine. (You can see the numbers here.)

And what the country's Yankee-haters manage not to consider is the dimension of the selling problem a New York sports franchise faces. Sure, this is a "big market." But the competition for local entertainment dollars is several orders of magnitude fiercer than in even the other big markets, let alone the small ones. Not only that, but attendancewise the Yankees are competing with themselves. With the exception of a few games each season that fall into network cracks, every single Yankee game is on television -- and Yankee telecasts are also orders of magnitude better than anything I've seen from anywhere else in the country, not just in technical quality (which money can buy) but in the competence and outspoken frankness of the announcers (money is often used to buy the exact opposite).

Not that George grasped all of these things all at once. For example, he spent a lot of years bitching and moaning that he was afflicted with an antique stadium in ferchrissakes the South Bronx -- without any damn luxury boxes, and in the damn Bronx. He pulled every damn crony string he could to get himself a shiny new stadium somewhere else, maybe anywhere else. He talked to Jersey people. He had Rudy Giuliani trying to hustle him a Midtown Manhattan stadium. In his desperation to escape the Bronx, he all but double-dog-dared Yankees fans to show up in the Bronx. And when attendance crossed the 2 million mark, he kind of had to shut up. Eventually he did get his new stadium, luxury boxes and all, right across the street from the old Stadium, right there in the South Bronx.

Like I said, George was capable of learning.

Thank goodness, while he was still able, he made peace with Yogi Berra. The old George seemed genuinely incapable of understanding how deeply he had hurt Yogi by firing him as manager near the start of a season he had said Yogi would manage all the way through, win or lose, and especially by not doing it himself. Yogi vowed that he wouldn't set foot in Yankee Stadium again while George ran the show, and how hard this must have been for him became clear after the rapprochement, when suddenly it seemed you couldn't keep Yogi away from the Stadium, which is as it should be. Yogi is the beating heart of the Yankees.

And then came George's decline, physical and mental. It's a horrible thing -- horrible to experience, obviously, but pretty horrible to watch, all the more so in George's case when so much of the animus of previous years had dissolved. The Steinbrenner family and the Yankees have been pretty close-mouthed about the extent of that decline, and with his having been kept mostly out of view for years now, it seems safe to assume that the direst rumors about how far gone he was weren't far from the mark. There's something almost scary about seeing someone who had been that controlling, that autocratic, so reduced by time.

All the obituaries are recalling, and rightly so, the weird and wonderful version of George Steinbrenner that Larry David created for Seinfeld (with David providing the voice himself, while actor Lee Bear, always photographed from behind, flailed away) during the time when George Costanza (Jason Alexander) was employed as assistant to the traveling secretary of the Yankees. It wasn't the tyrannical Steinbrenner, although there was never any question about the Seinfeld Steinbrenner's dictatorial powers. It was a rather addled, borderline-ADD dictator, who could fixate on such arrant nonsense as the famous calzones.

But what I remember best about George's (George Steinbrenner's, that is) Seinfeld career is that George himself professed to love it. While it's true that the character soft-pedaled some of his less attractive qualities, it can hardly be said to have been a flattering portrait. But suddenly George found himself a hero to his grandchildren! I remember the late Lloyd Bridges saying something similar -- and some of his grandchildren had pretty famous dads, who probably didn't much impress them either, never mind old Gramps, until he turned up on Seinfeld as that old crackpot Izzy Mandelbaum. If no man is a hero to his valet, the grandkids can be a pretty tough audience too.

So George is gone. I don't even know what to say.

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