From “Land of Lincoln” by Andrew Ferguson

(From the chapter describing an Abe Lincoln impressionist convention)

Whatever their station in life, they share an outlook and humor peculiar to themselves. "You don't look like you've been dead for a hundred and forty years!" is a common greeting. In Santa's coffee shop, where the Abes ate their lunches and breakfasts, an Abe might take his seat and say, "Normally I wouldn't sit here. I'm not real fond of Booths. "

"I'm so hungry I could split a rail," another would announce, tucking into a plate of flapjacks and bacon. "I'd follow you anywhere," an Abe said to his wife one night in a stage whisper, hoping to be overheard by his fellow Abes, "just don't ask me to go to the theater again!" If you were looking for a particular Abe and asked one of them to point him out for you, he might say: "Just look for the fellow with the beard and top hat." None of these gags, or their many variations, seemed to go over like a lead balloon.

****

Over iced tea or lemonade in the coffee shop Abes would gather to one-up one another with stories from the Abe life. One Abe from Vidalia, Illinois, told of being hired by a ladies' club in a nearby small town to do a team appearance with an untested Stephen A. Douglas.

"It was a big parade," he told us. "Or as big as that town could have. This Steve Douglas they had, well, he was a good man but he was a drunk. He just was. It got real hot and sure enough, before the parade even starts, he drank what must've been eight, ten beers. So we're on our float and he's trying to stay upright, just having a fine old time, waving at everybody, till we turn a corner and head into the very small African-American community they had in this small town. So Steve Douglas turns back to me and shouts, 'Hey, Abe, here's a bunch you ain't freed yet!'"

The Abes around the table gasped.

"That's right," he said. "I was mortified. Everybody was. When we pulled up to the parade grounds the president of the ladies' club comes up to us and says, 'Well, you two gentlemen can both walk home!' Which I did. And which I did not get paid!"

****

(Ferguson writes about workshops)

I don't even like the word. In Jakes Thing, a novel by the great, grumpy British writer Kingsley Amis, an even grumpier character says, "If there's one word that sums up everything that's gone wrong since the war, it's 'workshop.''' Whether in diversity training, team building, time management, or skills development, the workshop has become an unavoidable ritual of American business. On a horrifying handful of occasions, an employer has enrolled me and colleagues in "routine" workshop training. Each time I approached the date with clammy palms and sandpapery tongue; I expect the worst and I have never been disappointed. I dislike being thrown together with strangers in close quarters under the watchful eye of a facilitator. I dislike being told to "leverage the brand." I dislike the forced chumminess, the coerced informality, the deceptively gentle, vaguely totalitarian expectation that any natural reticence or hesitation "to share" one's feelings is somehow suspect. I dislike facilitators.

Workshops have always been a lowest-common-denominator enterprise, intellectually, but the past decade has seen the introduction of a software program that makes them even dumber.

I couldn’t agree more!