Clareified

WHEN THE MAN’S RIGHT, THE MAN’S RIGHT

I stumbled into the Bleat today and was greeted with the following opening paragraph:

“Loud rumble overhead; the planes are taking off over the house tonight. . That was quite possibly the flight my wife was on. She’s been doing contract work for a firm, and they got hit with a document dump – so she’s off to another town for three days of peering over blurry photocopies in a windowless room. Such is the life of a lawyer. I wonder what people who watched “The Practice” or other such shows in high school will think a few years hence when they find themselves admitted to the bar – hey, where’s the smoldering hunky lawyers, the brilliant glib lawyers with a passionate sense of justice, the slinky stick-thin lawyers who sleep with every partner AND client AND the opposing counsel? What is this? And how come nothing has that dim, sultry, flattering light all the TV law offices have? And why am I at my desk at 10 PM singing a lullaby over to the phone to my child while eating microwaved Chinese? How did this happen?”

I wanted to become a lawyer because of the Cosby Show.
I loved that they owned a house, weren’t on welfare, dressed well, spoke well and were rich.
I figured if I was a doctor or a lawyer I could have that.
One mangled, er, dissected frog later — lawyer it was, and I never looked back.
Thankfully, the Cosby Show never delved deeply into Claire’s work. Sure, there was the occasional courtroom scene when she’s suing a shady mechanic to get her daughter’s money back or the “conferences in D.C.,” but nothing really so sexy that now I look back with bitterness.

But the legal shows on TV now are different. I think law schools are underwriting them to entice more and more kids to plunk down $100,000 either from the family coffers or by mortgaging their future, with the hope that they will be juggling murder cases and asylum applications, all the while stylishly dressed and living in polished quarters.
Not to mention all the clubbing, drinking and partying every night.
Man, I should have just become an archeologist, Indiana Jones and Lara Croft have so many exciting adventures.

This entry was posted by Dawn Summers on Thursday, January 22nd, 2004 at 12:53 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.