0.14 Revelation

I was sitting in David Brewster’s office one morning in 1995, during a Weekly editorial meeting, watching Brewster gnaw on his favorite bone: How to get at Seattle’s identity. He had been exploring that issue in his paper for nearly 20 years now, and seemed no closer to an answer than when he first asked the question. He turned to his youngest staffer, Mike Romano, A maddening officemate, Romano always— always —explained to people he reached by telephone for the first time that his name was spelled “like the cheese.” When anyone within earshot in the Weekly office heard him on the phone—and it was impossible not to—he or she would sit, hopelessly distracted, waiting to hear that phrase. who had moved to Seattle from the east coast immediately after finishing college, taken an internship at the Weekly , and parlayed it into a staff writing position. “Mike, why did you come to Seattle in the first place?” he asked.

“Because it’s cool,” Romano answered dismissively, as if the answer were obvious.

“That’s so fascinating ! I came here to save it!”

There was something shocking about hearing Seattle described as “cool,” even after all that had happened by 1995. It made me wonder about my perception of the national perception of the city. I felt like I’d lived through Seattle’s transition from Brewster’s backwater to Romano’s Rome without noticing it was taking place. All along, I had been regarding the rather stunning number of Seattle successes as aberrations—successes, like that of the grunge musicians, of Seattleites in spite of their Seattleness. Aside from the occasional lapse into pretension, the city—my version of it, at any rate—remained resolutely devoid of glamour, resistant to attention, disdainful of ambition, happily obscure, wise enough to understand that its happy condition, bestowed on it by Nature and a function of its remoteness from civilization, was far more valuable, sustaining and satisfying than the shallow, showy, short-lived thrills afforded by ambition and celebrity.

Romano’s statement, though, delivered with that unspoken “Duh!,” made me wonder how a Seattle like that could be so attractive—so cool —in the eyes of a nation where nothing mattered so much as glamour, celebrity, hype and promotion. Romano’s very presence signaled that Seattle in 1995 projected an image opposite that of times past. Chronically anxious, constantly restless, disgruntled, always angling for ways to promote his byline, Romano was by far the most nakedly And unrealistically. ambitious employee in the history of the Weekly . He pitched every story idea in every editorial meeting with the arm-waving earnestness of a kid convinced he’d found the short cut to a Pulitzer. When not trying to sell his editors on grandiose ideas—exposing various Microsoft crimes, bringing what he insisted was grunge’s racism to light, accusing a prominent family-values Republican congressperson of having had an illicit love affair—he was entering every journalism-award competition he could find and pitching stories to the New Yorker and the New York Times , often leaving copies of his query letters in the office printer or copier for his co-workers to find. His ceaseless pursuits made him the object of considerable mirth and derision at the Weekly , largely because they were so wackily out of scale, so silly in a Seattleite. As far as anyone at the Weekly knew, Romano was the only person in the city who came to Seattle to make his mark on the world; generally, people came here to avoid being scarred by it.