You can call me Deep Throat. A...
You can call me Deep Throat. A better name, though, might be Moonlit Right Earlobe. That’s all you could see of me in “All the President’s Men” when I lurked in a shadowy Washington parking structure and gave Bob Woodward (or was it Robert Redford?) the inside skinny on Watergate.
But suppose I hadn’t shown up? Suppose I’d thrown my back out playing squash with other Capitol mavens, or gotten mugged in that same garage? Would the course of American history have been altered? Would Carl and Bob have blown their chances for a Pulitzer?
As I’d have told them if that point in time had been this one: “You need more sources of information than just ol’ Throaty here. You need to attend Info Quest ’92 on Saturday at the Holiday Inn-Bayview Plaza, 530 Pico Blvd., Santa Monica, and learn ‘How to Find Facts About Anyone or Anything.’ ”
Indeed, one of the themes of the all-day conference, sponsored by Independent Writers of Southern California and the Los Angeles County Bar, is “Forget Deep Throat.” In an age when big, mysterious organizations know a lot about you and you don’t know much about them, you need to hear Don Ray tell you about sources you never knew existed, Tim Redmond clue you in to the Freedom of Information Act, Joseph L. Galloway show you how to use “human networks” and a panel describe all the loot that can be mined from government archives.
Admission, including lunch, is $75 for IWOSC members, $100 for non-members and $80 for students. Information: (310) 558-4090.
Listen to these testimonials from previous attendees:
* Janice Windrush, romance novelist: “People think we write fluff, but we’re really sticklers for historical accuracy. One of the big issues in writing bodice-rippers is the tensile strength of the bodice. Are we dealing with homemade fabric here, or with cotton woven in the mills that the Industrial Revolution brought to England around 1750? Info Quest helped me cleave to the truth.”
* Joe Popoff, attorney: “When I started losing hair, I didn’t get a transplant. I started digging, using techniques I learned at Info Quest. I found a classified report showing that fallout from atmospheric nuclear tests in Nevada in the 1950s was carried by Santa Ana winds and dumped right on my block in Bel-Air. The next step--hoo boy!--is a class-action lawsuit. We’ll win enough dough to buy enough hair to re-sod the Coliseum.”
* Jimmy Buffeted, age 8: “My third-grade teacher says Ronald Reagan was President in 1984, when I was born, but I had a funny dream that it was some guy named Spiro Agnew. I went to Info Quest, but nobody had ever heard of him.”
A little caveat, as we Capitol mavens used to say. Don’t forget about Deep Throat too much--or that’s just what might have been.