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How to Live? Yes, I'm still in touch with a few of those folks. Charlotte Prozan, the woman I met on a Nation magazine fundraising cruise, had long been running ads in The Nation and The New York Review of Books looking for a companion, to no avail. When How to Live came out, she came to a bookstore reading I gave in San Francisco and befriended the gentleman sitting next to her. Reader, she married him. Ideally, what role could/should manners play in the current political divide? The world in general? In everyday life? Everyone thinks politicians' name-calling and negative campaign tactics are worse than ever, but in the elections of 1796 and 1800, the choice between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson was, according to the former's camp, a choice between "God and a religious president, or Jefferson and no God!" Pious people buried their Bibles in their gardens because they thought Jefferson-as-president would burn them. It would be great if, in elections, we could focus on the issues not the people. In general: We always think of bad manners as something that THE OTHER GUY has. It's never our fault. We always have an excuse for our own misdeeds: we didn't get enough sleep, or we were in a rush, or...or...or...But the truth of it is, we all probably have some terrific manners, and some not-so-terrific manners. Like, maybe you (like me) don't RSVP no to events until the very last minute. Or maybe you (like a lot of my friends) answer your cellphone at the dinner table. Or maybe you always ask people who have heavy foreign accents where they're from. None of these actions constitute good manners. But many of us are guilty of them. So, don't necessarily cast your disapproving glances outward. Look first within, my child.
lived across the hall from him in Coy their first year and whose son is Alford’s godchild. “I knew right away that Carl was interesting: he had a bust of Byron in his room! Hello! We developed a mutual interest in film while at Hotchkiss, and made a 40-minute movie together junior year.” (Carl, he points out, has gone on to work as production designer or art director for Martin Scorcese, Wes Anderson, and Bruce Beresford, among other great directors. “I like to say I gave him his first job in the industry,” Alford adds, “but it’s kind of a lie.”) After majoring in film at NYU, Alford worked as a casting director for four years; he cast the extras for a Michael J. Fox movie called “The Secret of My Success” and all the speaking roles for actor Brad “Midnight Express” Davis’s last movie, “Heart.” He also helped his boss, Joy Todd, cast the speaking roles for “Cobra” with Sylvester Stallone and Ridley Scott’s “Someone to Watch Over Me.” Eventually he started submitting quirky essays and articles to some of the trendier New York publications, along the way developing a genre of performance-art journalism that involved a certain degree of first-person humiliation, like entering dog-grooming competitions or trying out to play Santa at Radio City Music Hall. Honing his powers of comic observation while a staff writer at Spy magazine, he went on to sell stories to Vogue, the New York Observer, Vanity Fair, The New York Times, and The New Yorker. (In a comic coup, two of his “Shouts and Murmurs” pieces are featured in Disquiet Please, the recent New Yorker anthology of humor). At the same time he managed to satisfy an inchoate longing for stardom: Big Kiss, his 2000 book about trying to “claw his way to the top” of the acting world, chronicles the unabashed thrill of being hired by VH1’s “Rock of Ages” to ask disparate viewers – a bunch of third-graders paired with residents of a retirement home, say – to comment on the music videos of Madonna and Marilyn
Manson. As an admiring Time review put it, “cheery co-host Henry Alford elicits lines from small children that Bill Cosby sweats whirlpools trying to score.” Of his five books to date, How to Live: A Search for Wisdom from Old People (While They Are Still on This Earth) resonates most, and not just because in it he profiles his retired social worker mother’s gutsy move from a longtime home and marriage to a brave new solo life. Featuring advice from elder luminaries such as Granny D, who walked across the country for campaign finance reform, New Age icon Ram Dass, and Harold Bloom, respected Yale academic, it also includes the words of ordinary folk whose lives and circumstances have left them in possession of a certain, well, wisdom. Charlotte Prozan, a semi-retired San Francisco psychotherapist whom he met on a cruise to Alaska, explained, “One of the nice things about being old is that I don’t care about being popular any more. It’s a tremendous freedom.” She also felt smarter, she said, because she had more time to read. Exposing us to these and other musings of an older generation, which he does with characteristic humor and grace, dovetails neatly with Alford’s new mission of restoring the art of good manners to its rightful place. Empathy is essential, he points out, especially when it’s you dropping the other person’s apple. And it extends beyond putting yourself in their painfully small shoes. “Possibly the loveliest gesture of all is recall,” he writes in Would It Kill You to Stop Doing That?. “The person who remembers – even though you told him five weeks ago – that today is the day your loved one is being shipped overseas, or being given an important medical diagnosis, is a person who is a joy to have around.” WOULD IT KILL YOU TO STOP DOING THAT? A MODERN GUIDE TO MANNERS (2012; TWELVE, NEW YORK) IS NOW IN PAPERBACK.
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