To encounter one or two people in your life who don’t like your face, just get out of bed in the morning. To have a sizable number of those people, you’ll need to be on television.
Sipping my coffee this morning, feeling fantastic about wrapping the latest 2-week taping of Fons & Porter’s Love of Quilting, I accidentally found a gnarled thread on the Fons & Porter Facebook page. The venerable, incredible teacher and company founder, Liz Porter, visited the set to film two (excellent) episodes the other day and a picture was taken of us at work. I love working with Liz and felt quite chipper about it all until this morning.
“If they would just film with MaryAnn [sic] Fons instead of that nitwit daughter.. all would be good,” commented one Cora McDivitt Darrin, upon viewing the photo. Virginia Anne Lewis felt similarly, adding, “I wish mary [sic] would stop making faces and nodding and shaking her head.” Four people Liked that. And from the lady so irresistible she has not one but four last names, Pat Stubo Erickson Sullivan lamented, “I’m almost ready to stop watching….Mary drives me nuts. She talks WAY too much and her waving hands are so distracting. I’d rather have MaryAnn on alone with guests if we can’t have Liz back!” Various other folks digitally nodded their heads (not so vigorously they might’ve strained their necks, I hope) in agreement.
I took another sip of coffee. The cream was curdled.
Every well-intentioned mother in the world, including mine, would advise me to “just ignore it.” Just ignore it, the well-intentioned mothers say, shaking their collective heads, “some people are just negative.” This is the part that catches in my throat along with the hot tears in my eyes: Why do negative people get a pass for being wretched? I’m not negative. I’m all good. I’d never call a well-intentioned human a nitwit. Look:
nitwit |ˈnitˌwit|
noun informal
a silly or foolish person (often as a general term of abuse).
I’ll claim silly. I wear silly with pride. And perhaps in affairs of the heart, I am at my core, a fool. But you don’t know that, Cora darling, and since I don’t speak of my love life on Public Television, and since I know my job pretty well, I’d say that makes the word “fool” off limits. Besides, once the word “abuse” pops into the mix, you have wronged your fellow man. Ask around; it’s unanimous.
But hey, if you don’t want know strangers’ opinions of you, Mary Fons, stay inside your house. Strangers will still have opinions about you (you’ll be the crazy person who never comes out of your house) but you’ll never know what they’re saying, which is good if you’re a sensitive gal. But I did leave the house. I’m on a show that broadcasts to 93% of the PBS markets in America. I chose to approach this circumstance and I’ll lay in it. If I spent time whining about how a stranger in Montana (or hundreds of strangers in Texas) don’t adore me, I’d actually be the nitwit Cora believes me to be.
I can’t complain about negative comments happening. They’ll keep happening. But I can call people out for being simple and mean to me. Your name is as public as mine when you write on walls in binary code.
So: Does it feel weird to be talked about so intimately by someone you don’t know? It’s crazy, right, ladies?! Feels kinda crappy. Makes you sorta mad. But who should you get mad at? It’s hard to know! I know!! Such an impotent, helpless feeling. Just do what I do: try not to let this webpage ruin your day; instantly fail. Clench your jaw a few times, click over to Amazon and try to forget about it. Click back. Read your name again. Feel like a failure. Burn. Get paralyzed for about an hour. Literally, physically shake “it” off and set about your day. Eventually forget whatever nasty thing Person XYZ said about you, but not completely; no not completely, because they did say it and a bunch of people saw it. You mustn’t cry, though, even if you feel like you got punched in the face. If you cry, you’ll really feel dumb because people will say that if you don’t like it, don’t work.
As for all the strangers who said lovely things, I’d like to thank you individually for your your charm, your intelligence, your flawless skin, your timeless elegance, and those swan-like necks! Ms. Susan Parrish admitted to missing my mom and Liz but managed a sincere tally-ho: “[Liz and Marianne] made such a good team,” Parrish said, “But I like Mary as well; she is doing a great job. Keep up the good work.” The incomparable Leslie Fitzgerald went to bat for me, wading into the fetid comment stream to say, “For those of you who have been bashing Mary, what happened to the old adage, “if you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothing at all.” Sheesh!”
Ah, but Leslie. This is the Internet. Welcome to the Internet. Leave your face at the door.
p.s. Enjoy.
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