Meet Our Guest Artists
Lesley Gore and Judith Martin (Miss Manners)
A Conversation with Judith Martin (Miss Manners)
Gentle Readers who deplore the everyday rudeness they see around them and who observe, regretfully, that our culture seems to be spinning into an ever widening vortex of coarseness and vulgarity, take heart. Things could be much, much worse. Miss Manners, our nation’s mistress of etiquette and our greatest champion of civility, can quickly list a couple of giant steps in civic civility in the last several decades.
“Well, for one, the open expression of bigotry has become unacceptable,” Miss Manners said in a recent telephone interview. “Politicians and business people making the same old bigoted jokes about African Americans, women, gays, you name it, now are getting in trouble. This doesn’t mean there isn’t bigotry. It simply means that the expression of bigotry is no longer cute and certainly not acceptable. So that is an enormous stride forward.”
Miss Manners does not want to suggest, however, that Americans are getting an “A” when it comes to etiquette. Sadly, there are many, many etiquette transgressions that have become so commonplace that few people bother to object. Our worst breach of manners?
“Blatant greed is the biggest failure of our time,” said Miss Manners. And she’s not even talking about the likes of Enron. She’s talking about such ubiquitous concepts as the gift registry. “Gifts use to be highly symbolic. You spent time and effort selecting something for someone that you believed they would like and would be perfect for them. You might be wrong. But nevertheless you tried, and it was the thought that counted. But now it’s turned into an exchange of gift lists. There are now registries for birthdays, graduations, even house warmings. It’s become begging.” Miss Manner disapproves with a vengeance.
As you know if you are one of her legions of devoted readers, Miss Manners, whose real name is Judith Martin, is never at a loss for words or an arch point of view.
Her thrice-weekly column on etiquette and manners is published in more than 200 newspapers around the United States – including the Seattle Times – and since 1996 she has also written a column for the Microsoft Network. Therefore the Seattle Men’s Chorus will surely be on its very best behavior when Ms. Martin appears as its guest star in the April 2 and April 3 concert called "Minding Our Manners. "
You may be saying to yourself at this moment, “Well, Miss Manners is obviously a person of great gifts. But does she sing in public?” The answer is a polite but firm no. (Though she adores music and especially vocal music. More on that in a moment.) She will instead be reading a sampling of her letters on stage while the chorus sings songs that have to do with manners, etiquette and social customs. The songs come from such composers as Sondheim, Cole Porter, Rodgers & Hammerstein, Kander & Ebb and Robert Lopez, who wrote the music for the hit naughty puppet musical, "Avenue Q." Miss Manners intends for her readings onstage to be both instructional and amusing.
“The one thing that might be comparable to this concert is that some of my work was set to music by the composer Dominick Argento and then sung by the soprano Phyllis Pancella at Glimmerglass Opera and the Lincoln Center,” said Miss Manners. “It had been commissioned by my husband several years ago because I love Dominick Argento. So last year I got up and gave a little talk about it. “
At time when many Americans appear unable to distinguish between an expletive and an adjective, and when people who are not close friends think nothing of quizzing each other on such sensitive topics as weight loss, face lifts and divorces, promoting good manners may seem like tilting at windmills. But Miss Manners notes that compared to 1978, when she started her column, manners have improved.
“In 1978 ‘etiquette’ was a forgotten word,” she said. “It was the age of being natural and the idea was to communicate your feelings all the time. Naturally it was a disaster. Because of the touchy-feeling thing, a lot of people had very bad manners. The thought was that saying something conventional, such as “I’m so sorry to hear about the death of your father,” wasn’t very creative. So instead people said the first thing that came into their heads. It was terrible.”
In fact when she first proposed an etiquette column to the editors of the "Washington Post", the managing editor asked her if she intended to write humor or instruction. “I said that my column would be both,” Martin recalls. “And it took a very long time for other newspapers to pick it up. But things have improved since then. Today people do not burst out laughing when they hear the word ‘etiquette.’ And though they may not practice it themselves, they certainly want other people to be polite to them.”
Born in Washington D.C., Judith Marin grew up there and in foreign countries before earning a degree at Wellesley College. She went on to become a reporter and theater critic at the" Washington Post". Since 1978 she has concentrated primarily on her etiquette column and the many books she has written on civility and manners. She also is a contributing editor at "Family Circle Magazine" and a columnist at "Child Magazine".
Her most recent book is "Star-Spangled Manners: In Which Miss Manners Defends American Etiquette (For a Change.)" In it, she traces the philosophical foundation of American etiquette – at least the kind of American etiquette she’d like to see more of – from our birth as a democratic nation.
“In it I defend the theory, if not the practice, of American manners,” said Martin. “Our founding fathers took manners very seriously. They invented egalitarian etiquette, the idea that everyone should be treated civilly, because European etiquette which emphasized pomp and ceremony and class differences was not appropriate. Even our presidents are called Mr. President, the elected leader among equals. The basic helpfulness and good nature of Americans has sometimes been sneered at by others, but our manners are about egalitarianism, which is a part of democratic society.”
Still, there are many aspects of contemporary American life where standards of manners and common courtesy have reached rock bottom in Miss Manners’ view. “What I call the ‘cash-only’ approach to socializing has killed hospitality. If you invited someone to your home for dinner you used to do it because you enjoyed their company and expected that in the future they would reciprocate and it all evened out. Now people arrive at your home and hand over a bag of groceries or bottle of wine and they feel they have paid their way.”
Another of Miss Manners’ great irritations is that blatant rudeness is often confused with moral rectitude. “You see it on the political talk shows and elsewhere,” Martin said. “People mistake rudeness for moral fervor. They yell and interrupt each other under the mistaken belief that people who disagree with each other politically must behave that way because they care. But you cannot get your idea across by being rude. So really they have no hope of changing the other person’s point of view.”
And though manners are improving, she still finds that there is plenty of advice that needs giving. She says she has “rigorously rewritten” her 20-year-old book "Miss Manners Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior", and that the updated book is scheduled for publication later this year. And she continues to write her columns: “If everybody behaved, I’d be happy to stop writing my column.” •
