It was a hot summer night ...
30 June 2009
They call people like me “tall building lawyers,” not because I’m especially tall, but because the building I work in has 50 floors,1 which makes me think I should have put a hyphen between “tall” and “building.” In any event, high above the sweltering streets of New Orleans, where two-inch-long cockroaches regularly violate the laws of aerodynamics by actually flying, and where the natives know that anyone wearing Mardi Gras beads during Lent is a tourist, I sit in my four-walled chamber, where the HVAC keeps things as cool as a meat locker in Greenland. On my computer screen appears a post by Coleen Barger on Legal Writing Prof Blog, who scooped me on this story like I was a tub of Rocky Road at Baskin-Robbins. The 2009 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction awards had been doled out, and Coleen beat me to the punch, like Sugar Ray Leonard sparring with Helen Keller.
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1 I remember the time this hot number asked me how many stories were in my building, and I said, “Babe, it’s got 50 floors and a million stories.”