I got into newspapers in high school because I liked the way they look. In college, I chose writing and editing over design, but two decades later I keep wondering if I made the right choice.

We’ve been attempting a bit of visual branding with some of my longer reviews/essays about television in the Style section. This means deeper thoughts (haha) and most of all, Better Art. I’ve been loving these illos that we hired graphic artist Owen Freeman to do for Treme, Betty White, and my piece on mockumentaries. They give off a bit of an Alex Ross graphic novel realism …

What do you think? I think they’re sharp and nicely distant, almost spooky. Anything is better than canned art from wires and network publicity depts. Freeman is 5,000 x better.

This is one of the great benefits of the print product. For a variety of technical issues (and excuses) and freelancer legalese (I think?), these illos don’t ever make it online. I know the iPad age is upon us, so I hope to actually live to see the day when the Washington Post website (or app) is anywhere near as elegant to look at as the newspaper is.

When casting about helplessly on my own articles (or just putting off the inevitable), I like to randomly, briefly cruise through The Post archives and see what was up 10, 20, 45 years ago in the paper.

Just now I came across this appreciation that Jura Koncius and Martha Sherrill wrote when Nina Hyde, the Post’s fashion editor, died of cancer 20 years ago. I try to never post things in their entirety from the archives, but this is so old and it was never online, and I think it’s a great read.

What strikes me now is not only the way Nina Hyde worked, (New York fashion shoots? For the Washington Post?), but how she really didn’t care for things and fashion so much as personal style, and what that meant, in a world before a gazillion fashion blogs, before the celebrity/fashion nexus grew into the beast it now is. This is about a real sense of journalism. I didn’t know her. I loved learning from this that she just constantly stopped people in malls and on the street, and asked them about what they had on. That’s fashion reporting. (It lives on, a little bit.)

Appreciation: In Her Own Inimitable Fashion / (c) The Washington Post [p. F1, May 6, 1990]

By Jura Koncius and Martha Sherrill / Washington Post Staff Writers

The Style of Nina Hyde. She didn’t own high heels. She wore a Swatch Watch for years that she’d picked up at the airport. She didn’t put on much makeup, and she taught a couple of us to bite our nails. When she found a favorite outfit, she’d often wear it three times a week. She kept a pair of silver earrings — cone-shaped snail shells — in the top drawer of her desk for TV interviews. Usually they were the only jewelry she wore besides her wedding ring.

She was a city girl. She was handsome, beautiful. She spoke with an old-line voice from the Upper East Side where she was raised. Nina, who died Friday night after a long battle with cancer, had style but taught us all about substance instead.

She would always drag us out, her assistants past and present, to lunches at the O’Mei Restaurant — around the corner from The Post — to celebrate anything. And before long, we’d become each other’s friends, each other’s bridesmaids. We’d throw baby showers for each other and we would laugh hard when we told The Nina Stories.

We would mythologize. Nina, The Fashion Editor With a Social Conscience. Nina, The Queen of the Cleveland Park Yard Sales. Nina, The Impossible. Several assistants hadn’t lasted long. One, more fragile than the rest — we always reminded Nina — had a nervous breakdown after a strenuous fashion shoot in New York and was never heard from again.

The shoots provided the most material. We’d go on about models wearing fur coats in 100-degree weather. About staying up half the night with Michael Borden — Nina’s New York stylist and The Funniest Man Alive — taping the soles of new shoes so they wouldn’t scuff. About how we’d put on cocktail hats with veils and gotten stuck in clothes sometimes two sizes too small. About hitting Studio 54, or Xenon or the Palladium, with Nina. About how she’d interview people there as though she were Margaret Mead on an expedition.

Nina never was as frivolous as the subject she covered. She lived like a Yankee. She cared nothing for china or linens, silver or decorating or status cars. She cared nothing, really, for things. If you admired something, she might give it to you. She’d lend anything she owned. She had a homemade black taffeta skirt at least 15 different women have worn, and which Patsy Rogers in the Home section still has in her closet because Nina told her to keep it. And when you gave Nina a present, she’d often give it away to somebody else. There was a polished antique leather box that her former assistant Kathleen Stanley gave her one year, and that Nina confessed months later that she’d handed over to Ralph Lauren as a house gift.

She shared her gossip, her thoughts, her contacts, her bran muffins. She smuggled us into parties. She showed us her mail. She bragged about us to her friends. She wanted us to meet Bill Blass, Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein. When Diana Vreeland called, Nina would whisper: “You want to hear her voice? Pick up your extension — go ahead, listen in.”

And she shared her courage; watching her in action made us feel stronger. She could pull out a note pad even at the most awkward moments, and ask the tough questions. We watched her try on wigs when her hair fell out, and buy a cane when it got hard to walk. She even gave fashion tips to nurses while she got chemotherapy. She stood before hundreds of people and talked about her terminal cancer. Until several months ago, she was flying around giving speeches, appearing on television. She came into work just a few weeks ago and wrote her last Fashion Notes column.

Sunday Fashion Notes. It was like a running journal of Nina’s life. Since 1976, she wrote every week. She called in columns, when she was dog-tired and depressed, from the shows in Milan and London and Paris. She called in from Beijing when there weren’t supposed to be telephones there. She called from India, from Tibet, from Africa, from Australia, from Grenada and from a spa in Baja, Mexico.

She adored her job — both as fashion editor of The Washington Post, and as a freelancer on far-flung assignments for National Geographic. “I have the greatest job in the world,” she’d always say, which might be why she was never not working. This could drive you crazy. She got to work two hours before anyone else — and turned the lights on in the Style section every morning. At restaurants and shopping malls, you’d find her cornering somebody — like a woman in a yellow suede miniskirt — for a quote. An outfit she’d seen as she was walking to lunch would become something for her Wednesday shopper column, originally called Cheap Frills and Glad Rags, then just Cheap Frills, then Capital Assets and then Try It!

She knew fashion — the business, the trends, the designers, the dirt — but she didn’t always buy it. She’d say: “It isn’t fashion until somebody wears it.” And to Nina, her job wasn’t just reporting The Important Sweater that was chic in Paris, or where you could find a Chanel knockoff bag for under $25. She believed in what she saw around her. She believed in shopping discount stores. She believed in wearing what you had in your closet. Her favorite story she’d written for the paper was called “Black Style,” which ran in 1980. “To be brought up Black and clothes-conscious in urban America is virtually redundant” was Nina’s lead.

“Nina’s People.” That’s what Ben Bradlee used to call the hordes of wannabes who lined up on Wednesday mornings for 10 minutes of Nina’s frank fashion advice. They came with batik ties, leather ponchos, denim furs. The jewelry was usually hard to look at. But for those with a sign of talent, Nina was generous with encouragement.

There were other Nina People. You came to know them. You became one. She had a universe of loyal friends. And a galaxy of people she helped along the way. She loved them, they worshiped her. Some were la-di-da Washington cave dwellers and French aristocrats. There were good ol’ boys at National Geographic and international photographers. There were no-nonsense housewives she’d met along the road — parents of her daughters’ friends. There were gay men, fashion types, and old battle-ax garmentos from Seventh Avenue. Designer Issey Miyake would call from Tokyo. The Maharani of Jaipur from India. Bill Blass from his country house with a joke he’d heard — or his meatloaf recipe. For years, Geoffrey Beene sent postcards from around the world.

She was motherly without meddling. After she found out one assistant, who was new to town, lived down the street from Bob Woodward — then unattached — she wangled an invitation to the Metro section Christmas party because it was being held at his house. She later introduced them so many times that Woodward had to say, finally: “Nina, we’ve met.”

She seemed almost shy sometimes. She never wanted to talk about herself, she wanted to know about you. And, as she had with her daughters, Nina encouraged her assistants to be independent. To travel. To see new things. To rely on ourselves, not our husbands or boyfriends.

And she stood by us. She encouraged us to move on at the newspaper — to write or edit — even when it meant losing someone she valued and having to train a new assistant. She wrote us letters of recommendation. She helped us get jobs, then threw parties for us when we got them. She gave us rides home. She would have had us to dinner every night, if she could. And she believed in us, it seemed, when nobody else did.

Her friends would flock faithfully to every Nina Event — her lecture series at the Smithsonian, her fashion symposiums at Constitution Hall, the designer lectures at The Washington Post, and the many parties honoring her, which for the last 4 1/2 years that Nina struggled with breast cancer seemed almost like a monthly affair.

And they’d even turn up at her yard sales, an annual ritual. Her assistants and friends would gather at dawn with their wares, in her Cleveland Park back yard. First we’d eat doughnuts. Then we’d begin dealing with the people who showed up — sometimes before 7 a.m. Nina’s items never sold too well. And they were not what you’d expect from some glitzy fashion editor. A broken movie projector. Ugly vases from all the flowers she’d gotten. Dusty napkins and greeting cards from a party store that she and Lloyd, her husband, owned when they first came to Washington. Nina was famous for haggling with customers. There’d be old paperbacks she was selling for 25 cents each, and when one was finally purchased for 10 cents, she’d throw it into a glossy shopping bag from, say, Jean-Paul Gaultier in Paris.

We’d do anything for her. We’d bring guest towels to her parties. Our husbands mowed her lawn. When Nina needed her suede jacket cleaned, our job became finding the best leather cleaner in Washington, and then Nina would write a Fashion Note about it.

We transcribed totally incomprehensible interviews she’d had — half in French or Italian — with The Fashion Greats. We’d hear wine glasses clinking in the background. We heard Yves Saint Laurent’s bulldog, Mougique, breathing heavily under the table. Once, we even transcribed a reading of Nina’s tarot cards, a copy of which remained in her file drawer for 10 years under the heading: Spooky Tunes.

And we’d do anything to make her laugh. We fooled her with fake phone calls — “Would you hold for Halston, please?” asked an assistant calling from the Post cafeteria. We put on outrageous clothes. And in 1986, during the weekend of “The Nina Hyde Tribute” when hundreds of big-name designers and store presidents and celebrities flew in from around the world to honor her 25 years as a fashion editor … we roasted her. We Xeroxed pictures of Nina and stuck them around the walls: a young Nina in Paris sitting reverently at the bedside of Madame Vionnet. Nina in her “penguin dress.” Nina and Karl Lagerfeld’s ponytail. Nina joking around with Calvin.

We told The Nina Stories. We called it “A Tribute to Anita Heinz.” We gave her a cake with her portrait in chocolate frosting.

On her last birthday in September — her 57th — a few friends gathered at the home of Betty Ann Ottinger, one of her closest friends. Her daughters, Jennifer and Andrea, came, her brother, Howard, her husband, Lloyd. And there were several former assistants, and the current one, Julie Bresnick. The next day, Nina sent one of us this message in the computer:

“I know this sounds nuts, but last week was one of the worst weeks in my life, and my birthday was one of the best.”

Reached a Yuletide peace in Seattle. The book is out there and doing whatever it’ll do. The flights have all been on time. The hotels have offered solitude and quiet and high threadcounts. The morning TV anchors at Seattle’s Q13 were perky and interested for exactly four minutes, which in their world is lavish attention. The public radio station hosts are always so deft with their questions. The December sky is beautiful; the temps dropped below 30. I queued up my Czars playlist on the drive down to Seattle from Bellingham on Sunday afternoon. Discovered that Seattle does a nice Christmas vibe, with lots of street bustle, lights, pedestrian-shopping. The very thing exurbanites crave this time of year, so long as it doesn’t get too … edgy. Anyhow, enjoy some Czars, and keep reading:

My friend Dan Savage – the syndicated and world-renowned sex-advice columnist, book author, and Xacto-sharp cultural pundit – had me over to dinner (lovely salmon, buttered carrots, delish cookie bars with ice cream) at his house Sunday night, with Terry and The Kid. They’d just put up their tall, aromatic Christmas tree, which Dan trimmed into perfect symmetry, and which Terry very intricately swathed in a multitude of clear mini lights; furthermore Terry insists the tree be adorned with only top-quality glass ornaments. Tammie Parnell would give him a grade of “absolutely phenomenal.” (I showed up with junky ornaments from Bellingham’s Xmas store — absolutely unphenomenal.) It’s interesting to watch what I call “PhD-level homosexuals” in their natural habitat of householdedness: longtime partnered, with an actual child that they raise, living in well-appointed, still-in-progress property refurbishment; add a tiny deaf dog with one eye and chenille-soft fur, and give the whole scene clarity and a sense of absurd purpose. And yet they are still utterly hip and plugged into the world at large. The Kid is a tween now and uses a steely glare to leaven the household snark, such as when both Dads excitedly explain their idea for a rather gay iPhone app; The Kid also hates it when the grownup talk goes down to a whisper. Boy oh boy, do I ever hope he writes a memoir someday! Don’t you?

From his Grand Poobah day job at The Stranger, Dan wrote a nice blog item about me on Monday, trying to get people to come to my reading. He referred back to some of the essays I’d dashed off for The Stranger’s annual, counter-programmed gay pride issues in the last decade or so. I’d forgotten how much fun I had writing those.

Alas, the low temperatures combined with a Monday night ennui combined with my chronic failure to become famous and beloved all o’er the land meant Monday night’s reading remained low-key, but pleasant:

About 15-20 people were there, and they turned out to be a perfect audience. I’ve reached a zazen point with these things. I’m thrilled when anybody shows up and I make it work and I don’t fret about it one bit — no, really I don’t. At this reading, I tried doing the Cookie the Elf scene from Chapter 12, and might do it again in St. Louis, if the situation calls for it. There were lots of good questions afterward.

The fate of the Elliott Bay Book Company is in flux, or so I’ve read, and I wish them well. Frankly, Mr. Shankly, it wouldn’t hurt the store to get out of that neighborhood – historical though it may be, among pretty 19th-century buildings, old-fashioned streets and all. That neighborhood gets slummier and crackier (heroin-ier?) every time I visit Seattle. And that basement off the café, where Elliott Bay stages their readings, a sacred literary space that they are so proud of? Yeah, not so much for me. The upstairs is so much nicer. The bookstore in Bellingham does the same thing – welcome to tonight’s author reading/signing … in the dreary basement! And Powell’s puts you up on the top floor, awash in fluorescence and gray concrete and safely away from, you know, the customers.

So far, I give ambience awards to the brand new Legacy Books, the indie store in Plano; with a close runner-up being Full Circle Books in OKC.

**UPDATE, 12/9: Breaking news: Elliott Bay is moving to Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood.

Kim Voynar, a film writer whom I knew in 5^th grade and 9^th grade (it’s complicated; she transferred schools a lot), came to the reading and we went out to dinner. Twenty-five years is just about the maximum amount of time that can pass before a person simply has too much tell you to bring you up to speed; it’s on the precipice of being strangers. So in a way, Kim, it’s nice to finally meet you! She’s having some pretty scary surgery on Wednesday; I’ll be thinking of her.

I think we’re pretty much caught up on Tinsel press, and arn’cha relieved? Hold on, hold on:

• There’s an excerpt in Wednesday’s Washington Post – nice front display from my Style peeps: Thanks, Lynn Medford — and HJ and Cavna and Padget.

• And there was a delightful 20 minutes spent on New Hampshire public radio’s “Word of Mouth” on Monday afternoon, if you want to have a lis’sen.

* * *

MEANWHILE, THERE’S a whole world going on out there that has nothing to do with me. Imagine.

I have been so bad about keeping up with my news diet, but did anyone read this riveting, cannot-put-it-down dreck in the New York Times Magazine on Sunday? Who’d wanna be married to either of the people in this story? Show of hands.

I have seen this marriage – not this specific one, but I’ve seen its many analogues. Two self-reflective quasi-hipsters meet and marry. The husband comes standard-bundled with some all-consuming passion that must be treated as lifestyle, not mere hobby, and preoccupy the entire household. (In this article it’s gourmet cooking, but it could be anything: building a “sanctuary” shed out back, from scratch with reclaimed wood. Carpentry. Rebuilding vintage autmobiles. Growing all your own food. Brewing your own beer. Playing lead guitar in a band. Starting a record label. And the worst: getting a book contract.) The wife plays along until the baby (babies) are born and then she goes understandably batshit on his stunted ass. The grandbaby-obsessed in-laws (her parents, usually) encroach. The blog posts and freelance articles become increasingly personal. Suddenly all this crap ain’t so funny anymore and before you know you it, you are building an entire NYT Magazine cover story around the clever idea of getting your husband to go into all sorts of marital therapy with you. Oh, those straight-n-married white people problems: the NYT will never tire of them, will they? Let’s hope not. Two dollars a word! (Right? More? Less? How would I know.)

Gays, besides the $2-a-word-to-write-about-our-emotional-travails (which the NYT doesn’t buy so much), are we sure this is what we want? Or should we be paying more attention to George Michael, who said this week that he smokes seven joints a day and that he gets casual, outside-of-his-relationship sex twice a week?

Freedom!

To answer the question all my journo friends have been asking me for the last three days: Yes, I saw the whole thing (the verbal and then physical fray Friday night, right on deadline, between an editor and writer in the Style section) and yes, I have many thoughts about it, and no, I won’t share a whole lot of them. (The story I’ve linked to, the second dispatch from Erik Wemple in as many days, is the most accurate telling of the event.)

The story has circled the globe — NPR, The Guardian UK, blogs galore. But, as I’ve told the media reporters who’ve called me (I have a bit of a reputation as a helpfully on-the-record Post employee to media critics in need of a quote), this is one I’m trying to stay mum on, because it feels like family.

Henry Allen was my editor for nine wonderful years. (I switched editors when I was made the TV critic in August.) There is not a day when he’s in the office that I don’t learn something from him. Henry, who is 68, had already decided to leave The Post. He took the buyout in 2003, and to my great benefit, has worked about eight or so months a year, on contract, ever since. As I’ve said many times, Henry’s already written every story I would want to do, and did it 8,000 times better, and has been a strong, generous editor and champion advocate of my work. Also he’s my friend and inspiration.

People love him; readers love him, still, and rejoice when he files, even though his byline appears a few times a year (since he is principally an editor). By this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a bronze Henry Southworth Allen statue being erected as we speak — maybe in front of the Newseum, except that Henry quite publicly holds the Newseum (the idea of a news-eum, the fakey word news-eum, even) in characteristically low regard.

The fight embroiders his legend, and if that’s the narrative people outside the newsroom desire here (brilliant elder writer and editor fights for the last shred of quality in the middle of the newspaper’s identity crisis), then I can understand that. Henry was angry for one very right reason: It’s about the work.

But everything else was wrong. What happened on Friday night was scary and sad; it was not enthralling and it did not have a Front Page, golden-era quality of glory. To think so is like believing that old cliche that all journos used to have booze in their desk drawers. Please do regard Henry as one of the greatest newspaper feature writers who ever lived and please do think of him as a tough-as-nails, thoroughly passionate editor who does not suffer fools. Please do allow this event to be a fantastic flourish to one of the greatest careers at the Post, as a stand-in for your own despair about the business. But also, dear journos? Get a grip.

My only other angle to the story is this: What made Henry snap was that a writer called him a naughty word, an epithet that rhymes with “coughstucker” and is playfully or spitefully reserved as a way to insult a man, by implying he’s gay.

Being an enthusiastic coughstucker myself, I would someday like to ask Henry if it was the insulting delivery of the word, or the subtext of gayness that the word implies that angered him most? Seeing as how our department is gleefully R-rated in much of its casual discourse, it’s hard to know. (The worst thing about all this? The possibility that we could all get hauled into a sensitivity seminar. Not Henry, of course, he’s outta there, but the rest of us. To which I say FUCK THAT, oops, I mean, aw hell, no.)

Back to my question: Was it about the person who said it? The way he said it? Or that it was said at all? If another person in Style called me a coughstucker, I’d just have to shrug and use the Popeye retort: I am what I am.

Some nice feedback on this Style section feature I wrote on the east coast/mid-Atlantic convenience stores chains. You got your Sheetz and you got your Wawa. Which one do you like better? Me, I dig both. Mostly I just dig driving around for no reason, thinkin’ while drinkin’ enormous diet sodas. Even though I know it’s all bad for the environment. Some comments on the Washington Post web site have been along the usual lines of GET A LIFE.

Dammit, people, can’t you tell I’m trying to?

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By Hank Stuever
Washington Post Staff Writer

All the wild-fowl sang them to him,

In the moorlands and the fenlands,

In the melancholy marshes;

Chetowaik, the plover, sang them,

Mahng, the loon, the wild goose, Wawa . . .

– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “The Song of Hiawatha”

Wawa in the morning, Sheetz at night.

Sheetz in the morning, Wawa at night.

They’re just convenience stores, you shouldn’t think too hard about them. (Fair warning: This story thinks too hard about them.)

By late July, this much came clear: Some of us were going no place exotic in this, the bummer summer. There wasn’t the time or there wasn’t the money. Things keep not happening, or the wrong things happened. We never got farther than the Sheetz convenience store off the interstate. Stood there paralyzed by the choices in a Wawa — what kind of chips, what kind of sandwich, what kind of soda, what kind of frozen chocolate thing? What kind of life? Which? What?

How about just resigning ourselves to summer’s fate? What about a local sort of road trip, a mini-mart epic, bouncing between all the Sheetzes and all the Wawas you can find? Sheetz just opened its 360th location. Wawa will open its 571st this week. We live right where their territories overlap, a lovely Venn diagram of two same-but-different worlds.

Where are you going?

I got the jits tonight. I’m going for a drive.

Where?

I don’t know. The Wawa store in Waldorf and back. Get a big soda and something else. The Sheetz, maybe, out toward Fredericksburg. Or up 270, then Buckeystown. Through Antietam, curving through the dark American mist. I’ll do the Wawa and then a Sheetz, then turn around at Hagerstown. In either a Wawa or a Sheetz I will listen happily to … READ THE REST HERE.