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Lisa Zeidner and John Allen Paulos

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Live and In Person

By Lisa Zeidner
Posted Thursday, July 1, 1999, at 3:38 PM ET

Dear John,

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To be a Letterman, or a Clinton--to be able to connect with strangers and make them feel included, appreciated--is a real talent. I know a cynical poet who went to an arts reception at the White House with the usual reservations about Clinton, and left in awe. "He quoted whole Yeats poems from memory! Hillary went to bed, but he stayed until the last plate was cleared! He wanted to talk!" Clinton is so gregarious that we mistrust him. And we mistrust Hillary because she's not.

I spent too long this morning looking at the photo of Bill Bradley shaking hands with some cuties on the beach in New Hampshire. He looks dorky in the white socks and sneaks. Anyone on a beach in socks looks like a dork. But what do I want him to wear? Go in a Speedo, clip the microphone to his chest hair? He is, however, tall, and fluid. Not stiff like Gore. Gore may have been Tommy Lee Jones' roommate in college, but it's Bradley you wish you'd known when you were both young. Plus Bradley has a more elegantly receding hairline.

I do try to stop myself from such shallow judgments. We're all supposed to know that appearances are deceiving, and pictures can lie. But I think most of us don't believe it. At heart, most of us feel we can freeze-frame the footage of O.J. trying on the glove--that wide-eyed, lip-synced "It doesn't fit"--and decode whether or not he's telling the truth.

So we've agreed here that words are inaccurate, and pictures are, too, and the two don't always jibe, and that's no revelation to any of us. But every day, I'm surprised by a disjunction: an event or encounter that I thought I knew all about, from books and TV and movies, but when I hit it myself I realize I'd gotten it all wrong. It's that crevice that fascinates me most--the space where preconceptions clash with actual experience.

You, by the way, are very different on the page than in person. I like your writing style, the nice frisson of your formality and accuracy with your goofy puns, but in person the whole package is significantly changed by how relaxed you are, with the Albert Einstein-ish hair and rumpled shirt--the most sane of Mad Professors. There is some real valid evidence you get about a person by actually meeting them. Most of us don't meet our political candidates anymore, and given cyberspace dating some of us even dispense with meeting our lovers.

Still, it'll be fun to see you for dinner tomorrow. You can drink your Diet Coke and Sheila can drink her white wine and (my) John and I can dispense with a bottle of red and, if we're feeling extra celebratory, even move on to a nice after-dinner grappa--a drink that, I happen to believe, scientists of the future will reveal to have astonishing anti-cancer powers.

Love,
Lisa