bout de papier, Vol. 4, No. 4 (1986) — Winter 1986 // Hiver 1986, p. 28
Ambassador to the United States, has written wittily about the ignominious fate of Washington wives who, however talented in their own right, become known simply as appendages of their illustrious husbands — “wife of” the Senator from, the Ambassador to, the Secretary of, or just the Supreme Court Justice.
But, amongst PAFSO members these days, the shoe is sometimes on the other foot.
Out in the Philippines, for example, Ben Pflanz arrived with family in 1981 happy with his appointment as Counsellor at the Canadian Embassy in Manila. In short order, he became known simply as “husband of” Connie, the fleetest woman in the Philippines.
Just before the Philippines First International Marathon was to be held in Manila, the Foreign Office asked embassy people to do a short run to publicize the great event. Connie Pflanz, a mother of four from Calgary and in her ’40’s, turned out and caught the bug. During her four years in Manila, she placed first for women in the Third World Marathon at 3:16:30 and, only two weeks later with an even better 3:10:36 she ran the Philippines International Marathon. She won, or was up front, in dozens of other 10-20 kilometre events during her stay, all of them run in un-Canadian mid- ’90’s temperatures. As a housewife back home in Calgary, Connie’s physical fitness consisted mainly in shovelling snow, cutting the grass, tending the garden and walking to the grocery store.
All this put Connie constantly on national TV and radio and on the front pages of the newspapers and she became a national figure not only for winning marathons: she single-handedly popularized running amongst Philippine women. She was invited twice to the Presidential Palace by Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos. Connie must surely be the only PAFSO spouse who, if attending a reception after a marathon, had a painful struggle to get high-heeled shoes on her swollen runner’s feet.
And Ben? He became simply “husband of” the champ. It took an official visit by Prime Minister Trudeau to get him invited to the Marcos Palace. When the Pflanz family departed the Philippines, Ben noticed that the newspapers read by fellow-passengers in their plane all front-paged fond farewells
– to Connie. This pathetic scene shifts to the other side of the world, to Norway, where Ed Skrabec arrived in 1981 to serve as Counsellor of the Canadian Embassy in Oslo, with his wife Iris. For their first Christmas Eve, they invited 125 diplomatic and local Canadian guests for a buffet dinner. For this affair Iris, from Gimli, Man., planned to serve, inter alia, a 15 pound cold salmon. And how does a Manitoba housewife manage to prepare a large salmon in a modest kitchen, every facility of which would be strained to turn out hams, turkeys, trimmings, cakes and pies?
Back in Gimli, all Iris ever knew about salmon was to empty it out of a can. But the Ambassador’s wife, Mrs. Kenneth Wardropper, had passed on a tip – don’t boil a salmon but steam it, and the best way to do that is to wrap it in foil, place it in the electric dishwasher and just turn the washer on, not just for one cycle but for three or four. Iris’ steamed whole salmon was the talk of the party and by Christmas Day had become the talk of Oslo.
Now in Norway, salmon figures large in the national consciousness, like beef in Argentina and snails and truffles in France. Any gimmick to improve the preparing or conserving of salmon takes on national importance.
Iris was asked to dishwasher-steam salmon on national television, and for newspaper and magazine writers. She found herself greeted by complete strangers in buses and supermarkets. By New Year’s Day, Iris and her dishwasher salmon had become famous throughout Norway, and in the great salmony Scandinavian beyond.
After that Christmas Eve dinner, and with his nose to the Embassy grindstone, Ed Skrabec became just one more Canadian “husband of”
Around the Parliamentary Press Gallery in Ottawa, Sean Brady is well known as Joe Clark’s spokesman. But while serving at the Canadian Embassy in Bangkok, where he married a Thai beauty, he found he was just “husband of” Thailand’s leading lady of the stage, Patravadee Sritriratana, known across the nation as Lek – not only outstanding actress but also playwright, stage and film director, singer and dancer.
And what about Canada’s ebullient Ambassador and Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Stephen Lewis? That indeed is how he is known around the U.N. building in New York. But to Globe and Mail mail readers across Canada, is he becoming simply “husband of” that paper’s excellent Saturday morning columnist, Michele Landsberg?
If these trends continue, men in the Canadian Foreign Service may soon start to push for some kind of affirmative action program. Any way you look at it, Sondra Gotlieb’s creation, viz. the ignominious “wife of” the masculine movers and shakers of this world, may yet end up as one more endangered species.
bout de papier readers will be familiar with Sidney Freifeld’s vignettes about the amusing and sometimes bizarre things that can happen to us or to our colleagues while working in the Canadian foreign service. Sidney would welcome any accounts from bout readers which might serve as a basis for future vignettes to be published in bout and possibly in the Toronto Globe and Mail or Montreal Gazette for which he writes. These can be addressed to him c/o bout de papier, Suite 1002-130 Albert St. Ottawa, Ontario K1P 5G4.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 4, No. 4 (1986) — Winter 1986 // Hiver 1986, p. 28. Read the rest of this issue →
