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 Why Did Mayor Miller Give Molly McKasson The Heave-Ho? By Jeff Smith I'M STILL WORKING on getting you those vital Marcus and McKasson stats, but for the meantime let's move on to other matters. Apropos of which--moving on (Segues R Us)--I think I've got the politics of this whole stink about Councilperson Molly McKasson's office accomodations doped out.
The vote went 6-1 against McKasson. I will report, without comment, that councilmembers Shirley Scott and Janet Marcus voted against Molly. I will report, without comment, that council members Scott and Marcus both are women. I will venture the opinion, without further comment, that this nasty little feud over office housing is not a boys-against-the-girls issue, even though Miller is a boy and McKasson is a girl. One might assume, from the fact that Ward 2's Janet Marcus offered the pertinent motion--to wit, that council members shall have offices in their own wards "when there are suitable city facilities available"--and from the further fact that Marcus presently plays host to Ward 4's Shirley Scott, that Marcus empathizes with Mayor Miller because she wants Scott out from underfoot. I wouldn't call that an entirely whimsical notion either, though Marcus told me she and Shirley get on swimmingly and that, in any instance, plans are afoot to provide Scott new digs in Ward 4, amongst the planned Rec Center, library and police substation to be built with bond money there. Marcus also provides an interesting and telling historic perspective on this issue: Remember Lew Murphy? Big guy, silver hair, loud, Irish. He was mayor when Tom Volgy (picture Larry, of the Three Stooges, with Groucho Marx's glasses, nose and mustache) was Ward 6 councilman. They got along like Moshe Dayan and Yassir Arafat (who, come to think of it, does a better Volgy impression than Larry and Groucho combined). Murphy wanted Volgy out but Volgy wouldn't budge. Then Volgy got to be mayor and Sharon Hekman was Ward 6 councilbabe, and Volgy underwent some sort of foxhole conversion and wanted more space and asked Hekman to leave, but she wouldn't. Then we get George Miller as mayor and Molly McKasson serving Ward 6, and...the rest is almost, but not quite, history. So it's not as if the whole flap were purely personal. Parenthetically, political observers used to watch Miller and ex-councilman Bruce Wheeler flay one another, and often put it down to Bruce's spiney bedside manner. Now Bruce is gone and Miller still finds himself in continual political pissing matches. There's a common denominator here, for the algebraeically inclined among you. So, if Mayor Miller is a grumpy old man, how come everyone on the council except Miller's female adversary sided with him? Because they all secretly covet their own space. You can call it a space issue, a privacy issue, an empire-building issue or all of the above; it comes down to something Marcus observed in our chat: People in close proximity tend to rub up against one another, with inevitable friction resulting. A political pal of mine recounts numerous and hilarious instances past, when co-housed council members spied on one another's office visitors--and drew all sorts of juicy-if-fictitious political conclusions therefrom--or watched one another using the office copiers, and then tattled to the election police for alleged misuse of public funds. Chickenshit stuff like that. It may--hell, it does--sound petty and juvenile, but anybody who ever had delicate political business to do with a member of the County Board of Supervisors knows how near-impossible it is to keep things discreet. Say, just for hypothetical example, you're legendary something-or-other, and you want to drop by Paul Marsh's office with a manila envelope full of unmarked, nonsequentially numbered 100-dollar bills. How do you pull it off without Ed Moore seeing you and demanding to know where his envelope is, or Raul and Danny catching you and alerting the media, or Mikey Boyd spotting something in a plain brown wrapper and poutuing because he thinks you're giving everybody else copies of Hustler? In order for the Supes to do actual political business, they've got to go off-site and undercover, using pay phones, meeting in dark corners of cocktail lounges, convening for nooners at cheap motels. They may have started out clean and honest, but working in the milieu of the picaresque genre eventually imparts a bass-ackwards cause-effect effect. It's like dating two different women. It's challenging and risky under optimal conditions, but when those two women are roommates...don't even think about it. Putting simile and metaphor aside and returning to the real world, if you were seen calling at Molly McKasson's office five days in a row, and then on the sixth had an appointment with George Miller, there might be a little ice to break before diving into your agenda. True fact. As to where Molly will relocate and when, I don't know and by deadline time she hadn't called back. Nor do I yet know her measurements. I can tell you, however, than Janet Marcus is no Marilyn Monroe. Her words, not mine. And remember again, you got it here first.
"I don't bother to measure myself anymore," Marcus
answered, raising, unbidden, a Pandora's boxload of other questions.
She answered because I asked. A serious professional blanches
at nothing, when the pursuit of truth sets one's foot to the quest.
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It goes like this: George Miller doesn't like Molly McKasson.
Remember you read it here first. Of course it's not entirely as
simple as that--mostly, but not entirely. If you read Joe Burchell's
report of the Mayor and Council's decision to evict Molly from
her City Hall penthouse offices, shared cozily, if not comfortably,
with Mayor Miller, you may have detected the faint hint of a subtext.
