Saving Fish from Drowning - Heal Burma

SAVING FISH FROM DROWNING
amplify their compassion. She was utterly involved, financially and
morally. I knew this because Mary Ellen was a friend of mine—yes, I
believe I can call her that, for we chaired a fair number of events to­
gether. And she was quite the compulsive organizer, one who at­
tended every boring planning meeting. I’m afraid I had a rather
embarrassing habit of dozing at some of those. Mary Ellen was all
about details; she knew if the proposed dates for events conflicted
with the social calendars of the big money-givers. And because of
her social web, she could line up celebrities to generate “publicity
heat,” identifying the singers, movie stars, or athletes who could be
inveigled on the basis of their family background of genetic disease,
mental illness, addiction, cancer, murder, sexual abuse, senseless
tragedy, and other sorts of unhappinesses that fuel causes and then
galas for causes. She also kept a meticulous record of those black-tie
events for which she had bought tables at the highest level, and
whose event chair might then be vulnerable to the unspoken but well-
understood system of payback. It was all based on connections and
intimate gossip, don’t you see. In any case, I knew I could always
count on Mary Ellen to contribute yearly to Self-Help for the Elderly
by pointing out that it served those with Alzheimer’s, the illness to
which her first husband had succumbed; he was, by the way, the one
who practically invented PVC pipes and made a huge fortune dis­
tributing them. Ernie Brookhyser. Perhaps you’ve heard of him. One
of the many benefits Mary Ellen had attended was for the Asian Art
Museum. During the live auction, she was high bidder for the Burma
Road trip—paid thrice the value, I was pleased to see. She then gave
the trip for two to Wendy as a birthday present.
Wendy had first thought to refuse the trip and also rebuke her po­
litically unconscious mother for thinking her daughter might holiday
in a country run by a repressive regime. She had fumed about this
over lunch with a former Berkeley housemate, Phil Gutman, the di­
rector of Free to Speak International. Phil thought the all-expenses­
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