Trying to Get a Line on Writing Lyrics

In writing a hymn to Los Angeles the other day I included these lines:

I love your Thai and Chinese food,

Your women, slim and semi-nude.

I have not been bullied for using semi-nude , but for slim .

A Cerritos female who signed her name mysteriously as String Soup Konikoff wrote that she was “pained” by my use of that word. “ ‘Semi-nude’ I can stand, but ‘slim’ ? Did it ever occur to you that there are thousands of us fat women out there who are perfectly happy as we are? I refer not to those lazy, overbearing mounds of meat who lie about in sweaty unwashed night clothes watching cheap TV shows and gobbling junk. I’m talking about we who are fatter than our height dictates we should be, but not fat enough to be unhealthy or lethargic, who wear normal clothes and live just like any other inhabitants of this city. . . .

“I’ve lived in L.A. County all my life. . . . I am, in short, a real L.A. woman. Weight has nothing to do with that! In a city like ours, with such a vast variety of excellent grub to choose from, it often tends to come with the territory.”

I telephoned Ms. Konikoff to find out more about her. Her father answered. He said she was in school. He said she would be 18 the next day, though he wasn’t sure she would want me to know that. I left my number. She called the next evening.

Her real name, she said, is Westin Estevan. She is in Cerritos College but intends to transfer to UCLA. She has written a book called “The Last Exit,” a parody of the hard-boiled detective genre. String Soup Konikoff is one of her characters. The detective is a woman, Shakedown Wall. Her pen name is L. M. Samuels. “Westin Estevan is too poetic for a detective novel.”

She sounded to me like a very imaginative young woman.

I want to reassure Ms. Estevan and any other women who are not fashion-model slim. In using that word I was being ironic. In television commercials we see a parade of uniformly slim women. They stroll around swimming pools in their semi-nude swimsuits; they lie in rows under the sun; they frequent bars in the beer ads; they whip down sidewalks, slender legs flashing; they display gorgeous stems in pantyhose, they do aerobics and lift weights in body-building gyms.

The slender female in the skimpy swimsuit is part of the L.A. image, as ubiquitous as palm trees, convertibles and outdoor barbecues. To any Easterners visualizing Los Angeles only from television and magazines, the slim, semi-nude look is a staple of our culture.

I sympathize with Estevan in feeling left out by my lyrics, but I didn’t want to tamper with the illusion that we are all fashionably slender in Los Angeles. After all, image is all we have.

Meanwhile, Kathleen Clark of Cambria takes me to task for referring to the “monster football teams and cornfed cheer girls” of Ohio in writing about the wines of that state. What I said, actually, was “I’m willing to give Ohio wines a try, and give up thinking of Ohio as a state whose main cultural image is of monster college football teams and cornfed cheer girls.”

Mrs. Clark says, “My first 29 years were happily spent there although I have been a willing California transplant since 1959, and many of us from these beginnings have a hard time swallowing the consistent cornball stuff exhibited perennially by the media.”

On a recent trip to the Midwest, she says, she found that most of the people were “intelligent, tolerant, sophisticated, well-read, traveled, fashionable, all-shapes-and-sizes lovely people.”

I don’t think I’m as guilty of stereotyping Midwesterners as Mrs. Clark implies. Obviously, I was simply invoking an artificial image of Midwesterners like the image we try to create of sun-tanned bathing beauties.

Besides, I said I was going to give up thinking of cornfed cheer girls and monster college football teams as definitive of the Midwest.

Mrs. Clark concludes, “If you say so, I’m still a cornfed size 8 petite cornball, mellowing but holding! I love corn-on-the-cob, don’t you?”

Indeed I do.