LETTERS FROM HOME: THE ART OF THE GOSSIP SHEET AND BREAKING OUT OF BOXES

Jan. 6, 2000

Dear Julie,

I have been wondering what happened to Barbara Mullen. The last time we saw each other she was sitting in the Alibi bar with a vodka and tonic, scratching open lottery tickets. She said she was going to go live in Hawaii near her daughter, Lucy.

I came to know her as the editor-publisher-reporter of Babbs Blabbs, the gossip sheet she distributed at the nightspots around the square. She was a true reporter, did it for truth, not money.

Every town needs a gossip columnist, but progressive Arcata was a bit unprepared for a straight-shooting, bartending psychologist from Missouri. She offered a refreshingly reasonable antidote to the fey political predictability of the time, including my own.

How some people laughed and oohed and others trembled when a new edition of Babbs Blabbs appeared. You were sometimes a target of hers but only because she distrusted politicians with high ideals, having theretofore known none.

But gossip and not criticism was her forte. Barbara omitted nothing but the names: What construction worker told his wife he was out drinking with the boys when he was at the Jambalaya with a certain actress? The charm of Babbs Blabbs was that the people whose world orbited the square already knew or suspected what Barbara had the chutzpah to print. Nobody else cared.

She was threatened with lawsuits but what good reporter hasn't been. She claimed she went over the line only once, and it concerned someone who was thinking of coming out of the closet. Babbs Blabbs helped.

Her surveys were juicy. She didn't bother with the "How do you feel about the prospects for peace in the Middle East?" kinds of questions you see in most newspapers. "Where were you the first time you had sex?" was of much more interest to her and her readers.

We have no gossip columnist in Cape Girardeau. Our news is about who died, who's opening a business, how the government wants to spend our money next and when the weather is going to change. Who's snuggling with whom or who has left town owing everyone money never make it into print though that's the news people really care about.

Our gossip columns are rendered vocally at the gym, where Jack and Art and Lloyd dispense scoops over one of the chest machines, or at the mostly male coffee klatches at Cafe Cape or Hardees or the BP gas station.

I went looking for a Babbs Blabbs in the box I keep my past in. None could be found but I came across an exultant review of Junior Walker's soul-shaking performance at the Old Town Bar & Grill. There was another review of the L.A. punk band X. I'd spent the afternoon hanging around their motel room, then had my ears pinned to the back wall that night by their music.

The box contains hundreds and hundreds of letters from friends of that era, only a few of whom I still correspond with. It is as if those relationships and experiences existed in a different universe.

My present box is much more conservative. No Babbs Blabbs, no Exene's wail, no dancing to "Shotgun" in the middle of the night.

But Barbara showed me that boxes are meant to be broken out of. She had left Missouri for California a single mom and got her counseling license at an age many people are beginning to plan for retirement.

She schooled me on bartending before I left Northern California to live in New Orleans, hoping to spare me from joblessness. Barbara was the only bartender I've ever known who could make a Planter's punch. She hated nonsense from the other side of the bar, like orders of drink names designed to titillate rather than quench a thirst.

I imagine her now hanging out on the beach between counseling sessions, trading knowing quips with the bartenders about their customers and taking notes for the Babbs Blabs Maui edition.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian