I love unsung cities, immigrant neighborhoods, ethnic festivals.
So Friday I e-mailed several magazines proposing a story on Buffalo's Dyngus Day. I learned of the celebration only last year, when I met a woman from Buffalo at a conference, though I recognized the name from Poland, where the Monday after Easter is referred to as Smigus Dyngus, the day when, traditionally, boys chased girls and doused them with water.
Buffalo, with its large Polish population, has turned Dyngus into a kind of post-Lenten Mardi Gras, with parades, parties, dinners, tours and water pistol fights. I suggested a story about Buffalo's historic Polish community as told through the activities of its most colorful festival.
Saturday morning I found an e-mail from the editor of a major travel magazine:
"I'm sorry, Tom. Sounds like a cute item but hardly a feature for us. More like fodder for a newspaper column. May have been a while since you've seen the magazine—just designed—but you would know that we wouldn't devote a feature to an obscure festival that few readers would practically attend."
The e-mail had a familiar tone: testy and condescending. Though the grammar was interesting. I pondered for a while the phrase "practically attend." Did that mean showing up in sensible shoes?
I do see the magazine - "see" being an accurate description - and I knew my proposal was a long shot. But I keep hoping that travel editors will discover the value of the offbeat. (I did.) If you reject the obscure you end up relying on the obvious. You keep saying the same old things about the same old places, and you wind up with people who see rather than read your publication. Most travel magazines are not written for readers, or even for travelers, but for a particular type of unadventurous, unoriginal, and usually wealthy vacationer. They are the journalistic equivalent of Willie Sutton, going only where the money is.
