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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Last year, Hallmark Cards began sending members of its writing staff to various cities to talk about what they do for a living. The program, called "Hallmark Writers on Tour," was created in response to inquiries from devoted greeting-card buyers--for whom the encounters nevertheless raise a delicate philosophical issue. A couple of weeks before this year's first trip, Bill Gray, who has been a Hallmark humor writer for sixteen years, told me, "It's kind of a double-edged sword to talk about greeting-card writing, because, in a way, you don't ever want the people who give or receive cards to think about the people who write them. You want the person who receives the card to think only of the person who gave it." The job of a greeting-card writer is to articulate emotions for people who have chosen, in effect, to contract out the work instead of doing it themselves--a process that probably functions best when the authors remain anonymous. Still, the tour has been popular with customers and with Hallmark writers, and when Gray and a few colleagues travelled to Phoenix, a few days before Valentine's Day, I went along.
One of the Phoenix sessions took place in a small dining room at a homey restaurant in a shopping center on the north side of town. After twenty or so guests had squeezed into the room, a member of Hallmark's public-relations staff played an introductory video, in which several writers spoke about their jobs. Then Gray--who has a slight build, wears glasses, and has thinning salt-and-pepper hair and a trim gray beard and mustache--briefly told his life story. He was born in 1952 and grew up in rural Pennsylvania. He adored comic books and Mad magazine (the Latin and Greek of the boomer-age American humor worker). On Friday evenings, he and his family would go into town, where he sometimes entertained himself by reading all the greeting cards in the display at the drugstore. He earned a degree in communications at Cornell University. In 1988, while working as the editor of and humor columnist for a small newspaper in western Missouri, he noticed an advertisement in Editor & Publisher for a writing job at a relatively new humor-oriented card imprint at Hallmark, called Shoebox. Gray's wife had recently given him a Shoebox anniversary card, whose message had struck him as both funny and incisive. (The card said, "I love you more today than yesterday. Yesterday you really got on my nerves.") He submitted ten card ideas, was hired, and has been at Hallmark ever since. "It always sounds geeky to say this next part," he had told me earlier, "but it just turned out to be this perfect little job for me. I have a certain kind of narrow talent, and this job fits it exactly."
Gray's presentation was followed by that of another humor writer, Chris Brethwaite, who has worked at Hallmark for fifteen years. The two men then answered questions from the group, which consisted mostly of women. After the questions, Michelle Keller, a Hallmark editor and the evening's m.c., asked if any members of the audience would like to share greeting-card stories of their own. A woman raised her hand. She said, "One of the things I noticed when I met my husband--we were dating--is that he would go into a Hallmark store and just take forever to look through all the beautiful cards to find the perfect card for his mother. Or for me. And that was one of the things that attracted me to him. Now we're married and I still have all the cards he ever gave me."
This story impressed the other women in the room, including the Hallmark employees, because one of the great irreducible truths of the greeting-card business is that the vast majority of cards are bought by women, and most men shop for cards carelessly, if at all. "That's wonderful," Keller said. "And for being the first brave soul to share a story we would like to present you with these Hallmark...
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