Columnist Scott Dickensheets: The wonderful world of source material

Scott Dickensheets

Friday, Sept. 4, 1998 | 9:58 a.m.

FOUR WAYS OF looking at a columnist's life:

As a comedy of minutiae.

"Now this is worth a column," one of my lunch partners suggested, waving a slip of paper over the remains of my veggie something or other. What, some new wrinkle in Bimbroglio, perhaps? Another pop culture foible in need of perforating? What was that slip of paper?

The lunch tab. The Applebee's people had thoughtfully subtotaled each diner's portion of the bill, freeing us from the terrors of group subtraction. Innovative! To this friend, that seemed just the sort of social trivia that should fire my imagination. Finally, he seemed to be saying, a topic that measured down to my abilities!

As a tableau of raised eyebrows.

Purchasers of the "Titanic" video in American Fork, Utah, can now ensure that their souls won't go down with the ship. For $5, a video store there will snip two minutes of Kate Winslet's offending nudity from the tape. "It's a community service," says the store owner.

Tampering with a creative work under the dubious guise of community service? There go my eyebrows! If people can't reconcile their puritanical hang-ups with the movie as it is, I say watch something else. That nudity symbolized Winslet shedding her class distinctions, and, anyway, she's hot! Alas, the good people of Utah don't agree (about the symbolism, anyway). After the first day of "Titanic" sales, the store had a four-day backlog of tapes awaiting editing.

As a melodrama of mild outrage.

"We got to school Tuesday, and they said tuck in your shirt or go home," says a student at Bastrop High School in Austin, Texas. School officials, overreacting to recent school shootings in Oregon, Arkansas, and elsewhere (none in Austin), have decreed that no shirt in their district shall go untucked. Y'all could be hidin' a shootin' iron under thar!

It's a crock of shirt, I say, just another sign of The Man keeping us down. Some students agree: More than 200 of them abruptly left school the other day and marched on the school district offices. So, as I type this, I am sitting at my desk with my shirt untucked in solidarity.

Despite the rash of school shootings, figures aired recently on National Public Radio indicate that they're still quite uncommon; schools are overwhelmingly safe. Security measures? Fine. Install metal detectors. Hire guards. At least they don't interfere with a kid's ability to display a little personality. As the father of three schoolboys and a congenital rules-chafer, I'm mildly outraged by tiny restrictions that emphasize order and conformity over letting kids be kids.

As a never-ending tragedy of chastisement.

"How stupid can you get?" a reader is demanding after last Friday's column in which I described 1999 as the last year before the millennium. Pretty stupid, apparently; "the new millennium begins Jan. 1, 2001," he writes. Otherwise, a century would have only 99 years. "What a wonderful example for our kids," he sneers, his disgust evident.

Well, mea culpa. Thanks for pointing that out, sir, and so politely! What a wonderful example for our kids.

By the way, now that the boss has arrived, I've tucked in my shirt. Just another sign of The Man keeping us down.