I get a lot of awesome emails. I wish I could share them all. No way I could keep this one to myself.
Email subject:Eerie in its accuracy
Your scene in Shift set in Kramer Books between Donald and Sen. Thurman is eerie in how closely it parallels an experience I had thirty years ago. I had gone into Kramer Books to browse the biography section when I realized there were fewer and fewer people around. I noticed suited men at the end of each isle preventing new shoppers from entering the stacks. Then I saw the curly wires of their earpieces. A gentleman, the only other person in the stacks by then, browsed my way and asked me if I was going to read the book I had in my hand (the 3rd volume of George Kennan’s memoirs), and I told him I thought I would. We continued talking and after a while it dawned on me I was talking to Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. I stifled my disgust and remained polite and he eventually picked a biography and a history book and, as you described, handed them to one of the secret service agents to take to checkout. So, yeah, the scene seemed real enough to me!
Best regards,
Brad
Follow-up email:
It was 1977, when Pinochet came to Washington for the ceremony to sign the Panama Canal Treaty during Carter’s presidency.
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