1700 West Washington Street: The Arizona State Capitol Complex.
It’s where I spent my springtime… there, and hunched over my computer furiously emailing members of the Arizona state legislature, the editorial board of the Arizona Republic, other unsuspecting members of the press, and innocent bystanders like yourselves, who (used to) call themselves my friends.
I am (unofficially) a lobbyist… which means I have now worked in three of the most reviled jobs in the universe: Journalist, salesperson, lobbyist. If only I were to enroll in law school, then I could hit for the cycle!
SO DON’T SAY YOU WEREN’T WARNED: YOU ARE ABOUT TO WITNESS THE CURTAIN BEING PULLED BACK ON THE SAUSAGE-MAKING EXERCISE OF LAWMAKING. (And it’s a long, blow-by-blow process) Make a drink, take a seat and continue… we’re gonna change government for the better, and we’re gonna do it TOGETHER!

Continue reading Stacy B Goes to Washington (Street, that is) →

Yes, it’s real.
Yes, my Mom and Dad know.
No, they have not disowned me.
No, I’m not the first in my family to get a tattoo – that would be my Dad, and he did it when he turned 60.
Yes, it hurt.
Wanna hear the whole story? And see photos of what real pain looks like? We’ll see you after the jump…

Continue reading I went to New Orleans… and all I got was this TATTOO! →

Back in the golden age of radio – well, the golden age of radio SALES – when ad reps had four-martini-lunch expense accounts and eight-martini-Happy-Hour slush funds, and payola wasn’t considered a premium form of whole-grain cereal…
Back in the good ol’ days, I’m told, there were legendary junkets whereupon a radio salesperson (like me) would take a client or two (like, say… representatives of a gigantic, world-dominating, Internet search-engine and a cool web start-up) to an out-of-town location… perhaps a concert? Then said sales rep would ply them with hookers and crackpipes… or at least concert tickets and copious schwag that would resemble a Texas-high-school football recruit’s haul of Camaros and underage cheerleaders back in the glory days of the Southwest Conference.
… And then, and only then, would they proceed to make some memories.
Business may or may not have been discussed… but much fun would have been had by all, and bonds would have been posted by shady organizations, and perpetrators would have been released from the county lockup under the cover of unmarked taxicabs, and vaccination records would have been doctored to protect the innocent, and then (and only then) would the “OUT OF TOWN RULE” have come into play – the “OUT OF TOWN RULE” being the precursor to “What Happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.”
This was, after all, the 1970s… when I was about 6 (years old).
Fast forward 30 years… to the following true story (or not) of the most debauched and depraved National Public Radio junket ever undertaken (actually, probably the ONLY NPR junket ever undertaken that did not involve Diane Rehm reciting Shakespeare at a poetry slam or Robert Siegel singing Kum-Ba-Yah at a vegan protest).
You thought you’d heard the stories about Carl Kassell doing the Macarena atop the bar at Coyote Ugly… You’d caught whispers of Susan Stamberg filling a bathtub with her family’s cranberry relish and Tanqueray gin… You claimed you saw a grainy photo that purported to be Corey Flintoff doing bong-hits in Fred Flintstone pajamas… And yes, on YouTube, you’d searched, however fleetingly, for records of Scott Simon singing the theme song to Shaft at a karaoke drag bar in Sao Paolo.
He’s a bad mother- Shut your mouth! … But that was before Stacy B found her way to San Jose.
Draw the acid bath, fire up the rubbing alcohol eyewash, prepare to scour your ears, and read on if you dare:

Continue reading Scott Simon is my BITCH! The true story of the most depraved NPR junket ever →

It sounded like a good idea at the time: Entering the Phoenix Summit Challenge.
In a smaller scale version of the epic “Seven Summits” – the highest peaks on each of the seven continents – we would scale seven smaller summits in the Phoenix Mountain Preserve… in one day.
“We could do the two-day event, you know – three summits one day, four the next,” I said to Team Limoncello member Kristi Olson, who was tasked with entering said team in said event.
“Seven summits. One day. We can do this. Don’t be a wimp,” she insisted. “One day.”
Yet that one day would be days after I succumbed to the antibiotic-resistant mega-bug known as consumption or maybe it was typhoid… or dysentery… or cholera… I consulted The Big Book of Things That Can Kill You: Self-Diagnosis for the Hypochondriac and determined that it must have been SARS… or maybe even MRSA.
And so, the month of October disappeared in a fog of Tylenol Cold and Sinus, NyQuil, DayQuil, Airbourne, pseudoephedrine, sneezing, hacking and coughing – and I awoke at 4 AM on Sunday, November 11 with throbbing feet, wishing I could roll right over and go back to sleep. Instead, I drove to Kellee’s house, and together we drove to meet Kristi at Papago Park to begin our one-day adventure.
If your name is Jeffro, now is when you can click on the link below to read the “jump” so you can finish the story (rather than wait for the never-arriving cliffhanger). If you’re a normal reader, you know that if you want to continue reading, you can just click on the link below…

Continue reading Team Limoncello Scales Seven Summits… Sort of →