Marjorie Suddard
Hi. Welcome to my bio page. (Please note that I find the very fact that you're reading this extremely weird, but then I, too, have found myself online and very bored with a lot of time on my hands).
Couple things: the photo doesn't look like me. Doesn't matter which one they actually post up here; none of them do. Instead, anyone who points a camera at me seems to come away with a photograph of what the guys in the office affectionately call Steve, the Twelve-Year-Old Intern. (Okay, maybe not so affectionately.) Pictorially, I never seem to age or cross into my own gender; I just get more tired-looking as the decades accumulate. It's a gift I'm glad to bring to the World Wide Web. In reality, I'm hot.
I also sound exactly like Noelle on the phone. This is a very handy talent, since I just tell people I'm her if I don't want to talk to them. It would be a more effective ruse if not for the fact that one of my jobs here at the roots of grass is to call people and ask them to pay their bills, so most people don't really want to talk to me anyway. It works great for people selling long-distance and office products, though.
Other things I do here include a bunch of things you probably never knew went into making a magazine, including rewriting and copy editing. Basically, I'm the one who puts in the semicolons. Or takes them out. It's my job to make sure the stories are in English, as well as add introductions and endings where the authors mysteriously choose not to. I also write some stories, but they tell me I'd get to write more if I were more prompt about deadlines.
I hate deadlines, by the way. I never turned in a paper in school that was finished more than four hours before I turned it in, and that's accounting for those classes that were at the end of the day. We're right on deadline even as I write this piece, in fact, and I know you can just feel the love coursing through my fingers.
I also run the business end of the business, which involves a thing called double-entry accounting. This enables me to produce more things called Financial Statements, which the government uses to extract money from me. If you get a check from Grassroots, I wrote it. If you don't, you call me. And I pretend to be Noelle.
If you do actually talk to me in person, don't ask me if I know about cars, too. I've worked at a car magazine for 18 years, for God's sake. If you do, be glad that girls are even less likely to punch you in the nuts than they are to know about the subject of their lifelong employment.
Facts:
- Birthplace: Ashland, Ky.
- Bats: No, but I'm thinking about putting up a birdhouse
- Throws: Only when provoked
- Favorite Authors: Jane Austen, Anne Tyler, Willa Cather, Carl Hiassen, those wacky guys and gals at The New Yorker
- Last Book Read: The Nanny Diaries
- Favorite Music: Billie Holliday, Nirvana, J.S. Bach
- Favorite Movies: Trading Places, Dr. Zhivago, The Graduate (which gets even better as I get older)
- Favorite TV Shows: Law & Order, Frasier, The Sopranos, Sex and the City
- Favorite Web Sites: http://epicurious.com (any recipe in the world) and http://theonion.com (funny stuff)
- Favorite Foods: Fried Chicken, Asian, anything you can eat in bed with a book
- Favorite Non-car Activities: Reading, playing with my kids, cooking, gardening
- First Car Owned: 1981 Alfa Romeo Spider Veloce
- Favorite Car Owned: 1973 Porsche 914 (it's not finished yet, but I'm characteristically optimistic)
- Daily Driver: 2002 Honda Odyssey