Once upon a time, in a magazine editing job long ago in my past, I had a Miranda. Fresh off watching a planned double-feature of Prada last night, the story was shuffled to the forefront of my memory.
I planned to see The Devil Wears Prada 2 with one of my best friends and thought it was a decent sequel to the first film, which I put on yesterday afternoon while crafting. I don’t agree it’s as lackluster as its 2.5 stars on Roger Ebert though the review there is accurate—I’m just a sucker for nostalgia. Watching them back-to-back, the first one made me cry and the second one didn’t, if I wanted to swap out a “wet tissue” versus “rotten tomato” review approach. I get the typical “second one never as good as the first one” effect many films suffer, but it’s worth seeing for the performances of Meryl Streep, Emily Blunt and Stanley Tucci. To me, “Anne Hath-a-way of always playing Anne Hathaway” if you catch my drift, so no change there— but all four of them haven’t aged much in 20 years.
In the theater last night, I was reminded of my small-town Temu Prada journalism experience just before the first film came out. I was working as a managing editor of a regional magazine, and my personal Miranda was a tyrant publisher who terrified the entire editorial staff, particularly at our weekly Monday Morning Meeting. She’d go around the room choosing different publication editors to verbally belittle, demean and humiliate, often screaming. When she was in the office, the atmosphere was filled with fear and currents of gossip hummed as people worried whether, when and where her wrath would descend. I kept to myself in my tiny, windowless depressing cubicle, so proud of my first full-time editorial position—the stuff dreams were made of allegedly, just keep your head down and do your job, I thought. As a kid who was raised in an alcoholic household, the feeling was familiar: avoid conflict at all costs.
One day, as our collective monthly publications had already gone to print, I was the last one working late in the office—alone, I thought, when suddenly: it happened. Marshall’s Miranda came stomping down the hall screaming “WHO DID THIS!” My heart gripped with fear. I knew there was no one else to answer that question, and that my cubicle was the last in an empty row. I had no way to flight, and didn’t want to fight. She appeared, red-faced, furious, and clutching a loose magazine wedding cover.
“Who approved this black-white wedding?” she screamed as she got to my cubicle, turning the wrinkled page to display the beautiful Jamaican wedding cover that had been featured, photographed and sent to print. It took my brain a second to register that a mixed-race bridal couple was what she was referring to when she said “black-white.” I remembered the feature produced by my friend, the weddings editor.
But it was a color photo, and in that moment I learned of her racism. I didn’t know how to respond. She already knew how the publication process worked in terms of approvals, so I just offered: “It’s already at print.” She screamed, “Pull it! We are pulling it.” I suggested that the cost of this would be extremely high, but also that the optics of stopping the presses for her were poor. It was then I remembered the freelancer who wrote the piece—either the bride or the groom was her kid. She didn’t care, it was getting pulled and she stormed off.
After I heard her leave the building, I quietly packed my few belongings into an empty copy paper box, printed out a two-line resignation letter to leave on my desk, and left the building. It was one thing to work for an insane person, but another to work for a racist.