Product placement as a career option

           Not long ago I heard a report about how product placement fees helped pay for the latest Superman movie, and I’m thinking “How can I get a piece of that action?” When you think about it, in real life we’re surrounded by stuff with brand names. It always bugged me when a character drank a beer from a can adorned with a red-and-white design, but you couldn’t see the name. C’mon — it’s a Bud, so why shouldn’t Anheuser Busch pay a little to have one of their fine beers to be shown? It could always be Miller, another fine beer. And why not have characters get pancakes at an IHOP or make calls on an iPhone? After all, IHOP makes good pancakes and the iPhone is very popular. And nothing is crazier than showing a retail store that looks a lot like Walmart but has a name like Shop-Mart.

           I know after I leave the house to go to Ingles (a great supermarket) in my 2001 Honda Civic (which I love, by the way), along the way I will see some familiar logos — Dollar General, for instance, since my town isn’t big enough to have a Walmart, and BP, which is good gas but a bit more expensive than the generic gas I usually get. Sadly, generic gas doesn’t have a budget for product placement, and I don’t know who to call about it.

           Hmm. I see that I’ve placed a number of product names in this column, which has to mean that before long the man from the US Postal Service (a great mail delivery service) will be dropping a few checks in my mailbox. I’m looking forward to it. I will endorse them with my Paper Mate gel pen before depositing them in Fifth Third.

Rufa makes an encore

            With a book finished and finally in ePrint, and no serious plans to write another, the thought occurred to me to resume writing a column for the Black Mountain News if they’d have me — and new editor Paul Clark has graciously decided to grant me my wish. At my age I find writing to be more fun than fish oil for good brain maintenance, and while my body might be showing its age, I’ll be damned if I let my mind go to seed. Hence this encore in as many installments as I can squeeze into the rest of my life.

           For those of you who don’t write for either a living or for fun, it’s both a curse and a blessing. It’s a curse because you can’t not write, which puts it in the same category as drug addiction. It’s a blessing because you won’t get thrown into jail for writing — at least not in this country. Yet.

           The book, if you read this paper regularly, is “Maybelline Takes a Powder.” It was fun to write, and a few people have told me it was fun to read. That was our intention — mine and my collaborator’s, that is. We thought it was funny, and when we put it out there we took a chance that readers would get some giggles from what we accomplished across the miles.

           If you’re mystified, my collaborator is Leila Willett, who lives in Michigan, and while we never met in person, we wrote the book together entirely over the Internet. Ain’t technology amazing?

           But writing a book can (and did) take years, and I’m running out of those. Columns like this, on the other hand, I can dash off in an hour or two. Leila, meanwhile, is occupying herself with three adorable grandbabies — all born within minutes of one another. The Trips, as her daughter Nickie referred to them when her first ultrasound revealed triplets — Brogan, Ryan, and Danielle. Leila and I might not getting any writing done, but I she sends pictures of the babies from time to time, which is a joy.

           There’s another reason to resume writing a column. Sure I like to write, but what I like more is connecting with you. Whenever I’ve written in local papers in the past, whether here, Asheville, Southern Pines, or Pinehurst, I’ve made new friends. People would say, “Hey — I read your column,” and then express an opinion or two. The best thing anyone could ever say was, “It was funny!”