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Ellerbee’s
Memoir Chronicles an Insightful ‘Adventure’
(By Stacy Jones, October 15, 2005) |
Using
a concept similar to “Our World,” a show she once hosted
on ABC, Linda Ellerbee’s autobiographical collection of
essays titled “Adventures in the Real World” offers
a fascinating look at her life, juxtaposed against events in
American history.
Ellerbee pegs herself a feminist,
she explains, simply because she believes in equality. A Texas-native,
she ascended the ranks to become one of America’s better
known journalists and is a veteran of such programs as “NBC
Nightly News,” “Today” and “Good Morning
America.” In addition, she has worked as a CNN commentator
and syndicated columnist for King Features.
The focal point of Ellerbee’s
book is change, or, as her title taken from a Stephen Sondheim
song suggests, “moving on.” She carries this music
motif throughout, coordinating essays with the titles of songs
that have been important to her or that she felt had something
important to say about her life in particular. For instance,
in the first essay, “Truckin,’” taken from a Grateful
Dead song, Ellerbee prefaces the book by giving background on
her jobs, four marriages and two children whom she has raised
to adulthood.
In the second essay, “Sympathy
for the Devil,” titled after a familiar Rolling Stones tune,
Ellerbee tells the story of her best friend Lucy, with whom she
had devised a plan to fly when they were only seven. Lucy’s
family broke down and bought a television around that same time,
after which Lucy was never heard from again. Little Linda Jane
Ellerbee swore that the television ate her friend.
In “We Refuse the Right to
Serve You,” Ellerbee writes of the summer after her high
school graduation when she went to Colorado to work at a resort
for a man she thought was her friend. During this time, she saw
her beginnings as an activist when the pay and conditions were
below acceptable.
The former Betty Ford clinic graduate
discusses in wry detail quest for love in the essay titled “What’s
Love Got to Do With It?,” borrowed from the Tina Turner
song. Despite her father’s alcoholism, she still loved him
and witnessed the love he shared with her mother. Observing her
father holding her mother’s hand just before her mother
went in for heart surgery, Ellerbee knew she wanted someday to
share the love she saw in them. But it simply took her longer
to get it right, she says.
Her mother remarked to cohorts
after Ellerbee had been married, divorced and married again,
“Linda? She’s going to keep on getting married until
she gets it right.” Ellerbee began her quest for marital
bliss with a Junior Executive Trainee in Memphis, moved on to
the cowboy-poet in Texas, and then went on to the coffee shop
intellectual. After having married for the fourth time, however,
she felt as though she had finally found what she had been looking
for in Rolfe Tessem, also her partner in Lucky Duck Productions,
a company the two created to provide viewers with a more informative,
less commercial option than basic network broadcasting corporations.
Having faced cancellation and other
disappointments in the business, Ellerbee does not always paint
a pretty picture of television, especially corporate TV news,
but she admits that television does have benefits. “Television
will be, is and has been a major force for change,” she
writes. “Television was a major player in every reform that’s
taken place throughout Eastern Europe.” She suggests that
it is not necessarily the medium of television that is detrimental,
but rather the blind faith too many people put into it.
Two particular experiences of Ellerbee’s
struck me on both an intellectual and emotional level. The first
occurred in the ladies’ restroom at the 1988 Democratic
Convention in Atlanta. The last night of the convention, Ellerbee
witnessed a white woman and a black woman—who were not together—enter
the restroom at the same time. After exiting their respective
stalls, the white woman, whose credentials on a tag around her
neck revealed that she was a Midwesterner—not a Southerner,
as some might expect—said to the black woman, “’There’s
no toilet paper in my stall. Don’t you think you ought to
fix that?’” Of course, what the white woman did not
know was that the lady to whom she had spoken was Rosa Parks,
the hero in the 1960s civil rights movement who sparked the Montgomery
bus boycott.
The other moving story concerns
Ellerbee’s experience to overcome alcoholism at the Betty
Ford Clinic. On one occasion the patients formed four groups
of twenty for the “Lifeboat Drill.” They were told
that each group was on a lifeboat sailing for Europe with enough
food and water for eighteen. Therefore, two passengers from each
group had to be jettisoned. One of those from Ellerbee’s
group was an older woman whose arm was in a cast—which she
tried to explain would be good for hitting fish on the head when
the participants had to plead their cases to be saved. The woman
told the group she knew they did not want to save her because
she was old and had a cast on her arm. Ellerbee was sad for her
and realized that all those thrown away are, as she writes, “the
old, the injured, the weak, a homosexual, a black man and ...
the witless,” a situation in which she sees a metaphor for
society at large.
Ellerbee’s book takes an unsentimental
approach in combining memoir and history. She is frank, unflinching
in her ability to admit her fears and shortcomings. She captures
the reader’s interest by writing clear, precise prose about
her experiences and the subtle meaning she has garnered from
them. She chronicles our progress as a nation—and as humans—but
she doesn’t neglect the distances we still we have to go.
Her stories are those of human frailty and courage and, in the
end, triumph.
(Stacy Jones, a Southerner,
is a Master of Fine Arts student in fiction writing at The University
of Memphis. She is a native of Guys, Tenn., and her columns,
which appear on Saturdays, are archived at Southern-Drawl.com.) |
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