Cooking with Dee

I’m a geek. Not a numbers or computer geek, however.

Recently out of college, I had spent the summer in my usual summer job, arts programming for a summer festival. That done, I had a tough time finding full-time employment a full day’s drive from where I graduated so I moved back. I took an incredibly inane temp job so I could look for a real one.

A summer festival met me, offered me a job as press secretary in a heartbeat. The salary was horrible, and the job was seasonal and to make it full-time year-round I had to agree to be a “secretary” for one of the principals in the off-season. I knew in my heart that in my second year as press secretary my authority would be permanently marred by having been their “secretary” so I said I’d think about it. That was Wednesday.

Thursday I had an interview with a lady who worked for the State Assembly. Her Insurance Analyst was off on maternity leave and they needed an assistant for all four committees (including Real Property Tax, Banking and Consumer Affairs) but I’d really be subbing for the insurance person. Much better salary than the arts institute. She asked me if I knew anything about insurance. No, I replied. McKinneys (New York State’s law books)? Nope. I left knowing I blew that interview and in my mind committed to the arts job.

Friday morning the Assembly lady called. Can I start Monday? Holy S***! I said yes, called the arts organization and set about finding my suits and ironing blouses. As kids, my sister and I, about to do something scary, would say “Mom didn’t write me a deep end note for this.” That brought us back to our learn-to-swim days when we couldn’t help build a pool in the back yard until we both graduated Intermediate Swimming and no longer needed a note to enter the deep end of the college Olympic-sized pool.

So, I had no deep-end note but dove right in and learned insurance and government and politics and sharpened my writing skills. This was pre-PC so everything was longhand. We had our own secretarial pool who had network word processors that kept “bill reports” from prior years. One year as an assistant, summering in the staff library to keep me on salary awaiting a committee of my own to open up. Voila. Exactly one year in I got Governmental Operations, the largest committee in the Assembly save Ways & Means and Judiciary. They had large staffs. I had me. It was a grab bag committee that encompassed reapportionment, State fire and building codes, cable television franchising, Native Americans, Veterans, crime victims, the flag and state flower et al, holidays, legislative ethics (!), human and civil rights and some other stuff no-one but me knew anything about.

First year, I realized that something I made up and wrote by hand could make it into law and affect the lives of 17 million New Yorkers. Gulp. Along with the dread at potential errors, was a pride in my state and being chosen to do this job. Me, of all people. I created, in 1984, the first cable television privacy bill because we were afraid that interactive cable would be a threat to privacy. Not content with just that, my boss and a lawyer friend and I created the “P-Team” and we worked with all other Assembly committees to launch privacy initiatives in health care, banking and more. Those were heady days, we were invincible.

One day I was talking to my counterpart in the legislative bill drafting commission, who told me he loved my bills, that they were well organized, concise and almost always perfect. I thanked him for the compliment and asked how my family, my colleagues, fared in that regard. He replied that no-one writes their own legislation but me. I was OK with that. Often I came up with my best ideas at three in the morning so that was OK.

One time a “marginal” member, one in a terribly unsafe seat, said he’d talked to a father who did Revolutionary War re-enactments and wanted his underage son to be able to join him. Unfortunately, the way the law was written, anyone who participated in these re-enactments could be called up into the State (National) Guard. No-one wants a fifteen year-old in the Guard, least of all his parents. No-one could figure out how to make it work. Weeks went by. Three a.m., like clockwork, I thought of it, re-wrote a bunch of the Uniform Code of Military Justice and sat next to the member while his bill passed the Assembly. I gave him a tin soldier to mark the occasion.

I should’ve been a lawyer, I know. But I was so young and naive and unsure of myself I didn’t even think of the LSAT’s. So I became a bit of a law geek. I love putting together the pieces and seeing the big picture. I revel when justice is done and mourn when civil rights are breached and immigrants have no right to an attorney and are whisked off by masked men to parts unknown.

SO, here’s the backstory for what comes next. So please return. Same bat time, same bat channel. Yours in favor of the Rule of Law, Dee