STARBUCKS & STROLLERS
In his Sunday diary item, David Frum likened Maureen Dowd to Jayson Blair, accusing her of plagiarism.
Fresh from the scandal of being caught abusing ellipses to twist President Bush's words, she is now using other people's work to pad out a column when the deadline clock is tolling.
Yesterday, Dowd wrote one of her trademark gaseous columns about popular culture turning its back on the accomplishments of feminism, etc., etc.
As the column trudged wearily to its end, there unexpectedly appeared an unusual thought, vividly phrased: "There's even a retro trend among women toward deserting the fast track for a pleasant life of sitting around Starbucks gabbing with their girlfriends, baby strollers beside them....
Now compare Dowd's words to these, broadcast on National Public Radio's "Morning Edition" two weeks ago:
"You see them at Starbucks at two o'clock on a weekday afternoon, pushing a stroller and balancing a latte, with a slight look of bewilderment on their faces, as if to say, 'How did I end up here?'...Yet forty years after the launch of the women's movement, this is exactly what many former career women find themselves doing."
The broadcaster in question happened to be my wife, Danielle Crittenden, and the "trend" to which Dowd refers (in the late 1990s, the percentage of mothers of young children who worked dropped for the first time in a quarter century) provides the theme for Danielle's new novel.
If you hear something on the radio and then work the same idea into a column, that action may or may not be "plagairism." But it certainly isn't originality.
It's unlikely that Dowd came up with this idea herself, for a very simple reason: You hardly ever see a mother with a stroller in Starbucks.
I'm not saying it doesn't happen; the Starbucks in the Frums' neighborhood could be atypical. But Starbucks is the touchstone example in my own new book, and I've spent a fair amount of time hanging out in their stores. The typical Starbucks store is remarkably, and blessedly, child-free--the last non-alcoholic environment without the squeals of kids who haven't learned the meaning of "Use your inside voice," the last place adults (or teenagers) can have peaceful conversations without being carded.
At two o'clock on a weekday afternoon, the typical Starbucks is in fact a work environment, with business meetings in progress and free agents and students typing away on their laptops. Amanda Bright and her friends are pushing strollers through the malls, whose wide aisles and play amenities are kid-friendly. Starbucks is for the rest of us.