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Articles
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| Not just a wisenheimer |
VOICE writes, "By Joshua Gray
“You’ll recognize me from the column,” says Gene Weingarten, chuckling, as we set up our interview. “I look just like the drawing, only fatter.”
With a thicket of mostly dark hair, wire-rimmed glasses, his signature bushy mustache, and just the suggestion of a paunch, he’s easy to pick out. Slouched over an espresso at Port City Java, he was just around the corner from his Eastern Market home.
For thousands of readers, The Washington Post columnist Weingarten is a familiar voice, even if they don’t connect it with his face. Weingarten’s nationally syndicated humor column “Below The Beltway” is the first stop for many readers of Sunday’s Post. But Weingarten takes off the jester’s cap two or three times a year, scripting longer features on more serious subjects.
Last spring, his article “Pearls Before Breakfast” chronicled eminent classical musician Joshua Bell performing in a Metrorail station during rush hour. No mere stunt, it was a serious meditation on the scant space we leave for art in our busy, metropolitan lives. Accompanied by video and broadcast on The Post Web site, the article took on a life of its own, transcending the local angle. On April 7, Weingarten was rewarded with a Pulitzer Prize.
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Weingarten is reflexively matter of fact about the story that garnered journalism’s highest award.
“It was sort of a perfect storm,” he insists. “The story became global almost immediately, and there was compelling video that was literally embedded. None of this had to do with whether the story was well done or not. I got lucky.”
Weingarten was born in the Bronx and transplanted to suburban Yonkers, N.Y. in the early ‘60s. He set his path early, dropping out of New York University to pursue a story in 1972. He had just three credits left to graduate. That story -- “hanging out with a Puerto Rican street gang in Brooklyn” -- became a cover piece for New York Magazine.
“I lucked into it at the age of 20 and sort of never looked back,” Weingarten recalls.
He’s worked at many places, ranging from The Knickerbocker News in upstate New York to the Miami Herald. He came to The Post in 1990, though it wasn’t an entirely smooth transition. “I got hired as an editor for the Style section,” he says. “It was a job I was no damn good at. I didn’t care about celebrities.” Then Weingarten throws a curve ball:
“I got a really great career break in 1991. I got diagnosed with a fatal disease,” he says. “It allowed me to say, ‘Hey, can I create a Sunday Style section?’ I was a dying man -- what could they say?”
Ultimately, Weingarten foxed the doctors by surviving, wrote the book, “The Hypochondriac’s Guide to Life and Death,” and used the Sunday Style section as a springboard for “Beyond The Beltway,” which he began writing in 2000.
Writing humor is a delicate job, and Weingarten’s column nods to classic writers like James Thurber and Robert Benchley, with just a hint of vintage Steve Allen. It’s an artful balance, engaging readers in relating to his life, while maintaining enough distance to have some privacy. Like all good writers, Weingarten is first a storyteller.
An inveterate urbanite, Weingarten has lived on the Hill since 2001, and he’s happy to call it “by far the coolest place I’ve ever lived.”
“We have a far greater sense of neighborhood,” he reflects. “You know everybody … . The night Eastern Market burned down, like all the neighbors here, I was out at 3 in the morning. You looked around, and there were people crying. What a deeply moving experience. What a sense of community.”
Then, though his espresso is long finished, Weingarten launches into another story.
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Posted on Apr 25, 2008 20:39pm.
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