From today’s WSJ, a review of the new memoir How Starbucks Saved My Life. Author Michael Gates Gill, son of longtime New Yorker staff writer/bon vivant Brendan Gill, has written about how his upper-crust upbringing and rapid ascent in the New York advertising world came crashing to a halt, and he ended up working at Starbucks on the Upper West Side.
As reviewer Barbara D. Phillips notes, Gill would climb on Metro North in Bronxville each day, then hop two “packed” subways. All told, it was 1 1/2 hours each way–to work at Starbucks!
Hard to imagine this “former Master of the Universe,” as Phillips puts it, would schlep three hours each day for, what, $10 an hour.
Then again, if I suspected I might have a book contract and ensuing film deal at the end of the rainbow (Tom Hanks will play Gill in the movie), I’d probably give it a whirl.
Whipped cream on that Macchiato?