When Amy Fisher, or excuse me, the Long Island Lolita, was paroled in 1999 after seven years of hard time, Judge Ira Wexner made the following pronouncement, which he sincerely hoped would be prophetic:
"You are still a young woman and could be a productive member of society if you channel your energies."
With this week's announcement that Fisher will soon begin writing a regular newspaper column, of course, all hope has been abandoned.
The column begins July 1 in the New Island Ear, a biweekly news and entertainment paper on Long Island. But for those Islanders who couldn't wait for Fisher to break into journalism, her first effort was delivered this week with what the Ear's Page 1 pitched as "My Story -- Amy Fisher." And yes, it was "An Exclusive!"
How even Amy can deliver an "exclusive" when her story has been told, sold, tabled, cabled, cashed, trashed, compacted, overacted, and continuously and shamelessly forced through the multimedia wringer for going on a decade is anybody's guess.
Not to be critical.
It was 1992, after all, when Amy went to the door of the Buttafuoco home in Massapequa and tried to kill Mrs. Buttafuoco, who'd had the temerity to be married to the guy Amy was having sex with at the time. She was 16.
Of course, that's all blood over the threshold now.
My concern is Amy's column and its potential impact on the overall quality of the column-writing art, uh, science, uh discipline, or well, OK, not discipline. Something.
It's too bad Amy won't become a columnist until July, too late to join the National Society of Newspaper Columnists at its annual convention concluding in Pittsburgh this weekend. We'd certainly love to have had her, which we mean not at all in the way Joey Buttafuoco once did. I mean we'd like to have exposed her to some of the issues and methodology of the column-writing, uh, thing.
The fact is, Amy came to the column writing gig the way many of us did: shot her lover's wife in the head, pulled out of a Celebrity Boxing match against Tonya Harding on the advice of her parole officer, and started spraying opinions through some misguided management spasm. Pretty standard really.
Oh, once in a great while you'll bump into somebody at these columnists conventions who was educated at a prestigious journalism program at a top American university, traveled abroad, interned at The Wall Street Journal, took a job covering environmental law at The New York Times, switched to crime reporting long enough to win the Pulitzer Prize for public service, and was eventually awarded a column as a recognition of his or her strong voice and uncommon perspective.
But when it comes to firing a handgun through a screen door, what good are they?
Now and again you'll come across a columnist who started as a clerk at a small paper, worked a decade or two at some thankless suburban beat assignment that he or she covered like an avalanche and learned to write crackling prose that caught the attention of a city editor somewhere, who brought him or her aboard at an at-long-last livable wage and groomed him or her toward a column that would eventually serve as the open conscience of a community of thinkers.
But who'd offer them a chance to slap Tonya Harding on TV?
It's not that I'm unfamiliar with the concept of the celebrity columnist. In fact, I was once the ghostwriter for a "column" under the signature head of All-Star shortstop Larry Bowa, now the manager of the Philadelphia Phillies, which ran weekly during the baseball season in the Philadelphia Journal. And I had no problem whatever working for a publication that not only employed journalistic jock giants such as Darryl Dawkins and Bobby Clarke as "columnists," but the estimable social critic Gorilla Monsoon in the same capacity.
Amy Fisher's column, however, might be beyond satire. She shot a woman in the head, lied about being raped in prison, lied about being romanced by her 57-year-old defense attorney to wrangle a new trial, hoisted the spectacle of Joey Buttafuoco into the margins of national celebrity, so obviously, right, let's give her a column.
It could be worse. There are Amy Fisher fan clubs on the Internet.
Gene Collier's e-mail address is gcollier@post-gazette.com.
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