To My Esteemed Professional Contacts

freedom
free enterprise
free-fall
free-floating
free-for-all
free-form
free-hand
freehold
freelance – a) a knight or roaming soldier available for hire by a state or commander b) one who acts independently without regard to party lines or deference to authority c) one who pursues a profession without long-term commitments to any one employer
free-living
freeload
free love
free lunch

Esteemed Colleagues and Contacts (e.g. the woman at the box office of the theater that regularly pisses me off anyway and the city official in charge of the 3,184th annual street fair of blahdeeblah, you know who you are):

I did mention, didn’t I, that it was my HOME number I gave you, right? And that might suggest that perhaps I work AT HOME, right? And if you know anything about the state of affairs of our print media, you might suspect that that also suggested I am a freelancer, right? Which could mean – I’m just hypothesizing here – that I have a life outside of my job and could even, though I know it’s a bit hard to swallow, keep irregular hours…right?

So why when you get the answering machine with the three-year-old roaring like a dinosaur would you assume you have the wrong number? And honestly, don’t you find it a bit silly that just a wee little roar could send you scrambling in every direction to find my “real” number – frantic emails to my editor, repeated hang-ups on my machine, pleas for the number to the cell phone I never get to in time and that I consistently forget to charge?

How little it takes to rattle you. How narrow your imagination, that you can’t envision your local arts writer also mother to a prehistoric beast such as this.

In case you are ever interested, in case you might want to ask me a question or two, my larger reality can be reached at 555-ROAR.