G-L-O-R-I-A…
Hearne asked me to review Gloria Squitiro‘s new book “May Cause Drowsiness and Blurred Vision.”
It’s the first volume of the memoirs by the wife of Mark Funkhauser (hereinafter “Funk”), the Mayor of Kansas City, Missouri from 2007 to 2011.
Gloria-like Cher, Beyoncé, Madonna and other superstars-needs no last name.
She is, after all, famous for two things: 1) a flamboyant, outsize personality and 2) being barred from going to her husband’s office in City Hall because she freely expressed said personality while serving as a unpaid adviser and chief-of-staff to said husband.
The first volume of a projected series, however, is almost entirely taken up with her account of a nine week European vacation Gloria took with her family in 2006, before her husband’s election.
The trip was complicated by two factors going in.
It was paid for by a teaching fellowship from the Institute of Internal Auditors. (Funk was the long time city Auditor.)
This meant Gloria’s husband had to leave Gloria and their teenage children to periodically go teach auditing techniques in Europe, away from where his family was staying.
The other complication was that Gloria’s elderly father was suffering from Alzheimer’s and his health was declining rapidly at the time plans for the trip were being finalized.
Gloria and her mother and siblings had agreed among themselves that if anything happened to her father while she was on her trip she was not expected to ruin the vacation of a lifetime by rushing home.
Gloria and Funk had an understanding that they would have to be apart at times during their European sojourn so he could pay for the extended stay by his teaching gigs. (The trip ended up costing $90,000.00)
Guess what?
Her father did die and her family withheld it from her until several weeks after the funeral. She learned of his death while she and her children were staying in France and Funk was teaching in Sweden.
This precipitated an outburst of coruscating rage, at her family for withholding the word of her father’s death and at her husband for not being there to comfort her at the time she learned of it. Never mind that she’d agreed that both these eventualities might well happen and decided to go on the trip anyhow.
Fully half of the book is devoted to this paradoxical angsting.
The rest of the book is largely taken up with Ms. Squitiro’s quarrels with other people during her trip. These include landlords, neighbors, trades people, cab drivers, waiters, restaurant owners, fellow passengers on a cruise ship, and the parents of her children’s’ friends -in short, with every species of humanity she encountered on the trip in addition to every member of her own extended family.
I realize many people find the spectacle of bitter discord wacky/amusing.
Color me WASP but I find it exhausting.
I won’t even comment on some of the more shocking disclosures in the book.
To give you just one example, though, we’re told that because Funk was quite a bit older than Gloria at the time of their marriage, he was worried that she might resent his greater breadth of sexual experience.
Therefore, she related, he encouraged her to go out and have an affair with someone else before their wedding so she would not feel she’d missed out on anything.
In the book, Gloria uses language that would make a stevedore blush, as well as every sort of sexual insult and innuendo.
Perhaps in the next volume of her memoirs we will hear about her decision to celebrate her teenage daughter’s ritual deflowering, setting up a tent in the backyard with a bed inside and a pathway to the tent made from rose petals for their little girl’s special evening.
“Tonight’s the night!” (the foregoing was related to me by a reliable neighbor eyewitness in Brookside years ago!)
And yet. . . . .and yet. . . . . amidst all the sturm und drang,amidst all the desperate crys for attention and attempts to shock, Ms. Squitiro’s book tells one great truth about Our Town’s political leaders, to wit:
“They were intelligent enough; they just didn’t want residents enlightened because that would’ve put the Kibosh on their reckless spending.
And they had to spend. It was how they guaranteed re-election.
Leaders in name only, they were puppets for the wealthy, anonymous players who really ran the city.
The rich got richer by throwing money at elections, and then had their bought-and-paid-for council use municipal funds to their advantage.
The latest had them pulling $10 million a year from the city’s budget to build a Disney-like-village-Power and Light-to be filled with bars and restaurants, from which they would profit.
It didn’t faze the Council that this expense would be borne of ordinary tax payers who would now be forced to do without basic services for little things, like cops, for instance.” pp. 73-74
Gloria was like the little child in the fairy tale, “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” For daring to speak this truth (which applies on both sides of the state line) she has been cast into Outer Darkness.
Recall that the Establishment first played the race card against her husband. His was because some minor mayoral appointment to a commission had a connection to a right wing militia group.
Never mind that the appointee’s critics had ties to a left-wing black separatist group even more out there on the other extreme. Remember, being liberal means “never having to say you’re sorry.” (Because you’re not asked to apologize in the first place!)
When that didn’t work, the powers-that-be focused on Funk’s wife.
It was the foregoing skepticism about pork barrel spending that was the real cause of her downfall though, after all, past experience shows that rape, murder, and incest are treated, at worst, as embarrassing faux pas’s but will not get you expelled from the ranks of the K.C. Oligarchy.
The only thing that gets you kicked out is costing other people money.
Funk posed at least a theoretical threat to the Iron Triangle of developers,investment bankers, and development lawyers (the ‘anonymous wealthy’ in Gloria’s apt phrase). Funk’s wife’s colorful language and abrasive persona were simply pretexts.
After seven decades in the Belly of the Beast, I know what I’m talking about.
When I was approached by Mark Funkhouser to read an advanced proof copy of his wife’s new book, May Cause Drowsiness and Blurred Vision, I told him that I would be more than happy to. Now that I have read the book, I am upholding my promise to write this review.
If you say you live in Kansas City and have never heard of Gloria Squitiro then you have to be a recent transplant to this area. Gloria became famous in a negative way as the first wife of a Kansas City Mayor that was banned from her husband’s office. I heard all the stories along with some inside gossip from people that were friends of the Funkhousers during this time Mark was in office. But I pushed all that out of my mind as I dove into this book to quickly find out some of the stories that I questioned from the past may have had a lot more truth to them that even I would like to admit.
Gloria has a very in-your-face style of writing and nothing, I mean nothing, appears to be taboo in sharing with us. You do have to give Gloria an A+ for at least being honest in explaining her feelings, her trials and tribulations, as she in great detail lays out her life along with the whole family in the first volume of her memoirs.
Gloria’s first volume briefly covers her and Mark’s conversation on him running for Mayor of Kansas City and looking for an office to be his campaign headquarters. The rest of the book goes in to greater detail, in a “Dear Diary” kind of way covering the Funkhouser family European vacation. When I say that the book is a dear diary sort of format, it is exactly just that. You will read about things that a majority of the public would never ever share with anyone outside of a very, very, close friend. Very little shocks me at times, but I have to admit there were times I read things that shocked me in this book. I will not give those incidents away, I will leave that up to you the reader to find out for yourself all the things that I thought were just a little too TMI.
I have seen some comments of people saying they thought the book was humorous and funny and I’m not sure I agree with that, but I also think that this is a book the female side of the human race will probably enjoy reading more than the male side. But either way, if you followed the escapades of Mayor Funkhouser’s time in office and all the media hoopla that took place during that time, I have to suggest you do read this book. It may give you a clearer understanding of life in the Funkhouser family which I’m not saying is bad, but one needs to form their own opinion. To each their own is my motto and as long as you’re not breaking any real hard-core laws, all’s fair as I see it.
Out of a five star rating I will give this book a three. I think the book is very well written, very easy to read, but in total honesty, not really my kind of reading. But that does not make it a book you don’t want to read, it’s just not my forte. I’m sure many people will think this is a five star book and I will not argue against that, this is just one of those books you have to read for yourself and then decide on your own, where you stand.
Seven decades…nice work, I would have guessed five!
So…………, I read the review and Dave’s comment, took a shower and still feel dirty.
It sounds like Hiz Honor was on her all the time.
I would like to read it, but I am gonna wait. Maybe William Barr can go through it first and redact the parts that I am sure, Dwight and Dave are still struggling with. You know, the parts where visuals just won’t go away and you find yourself up all night, trying to think about anything but Gloria and the Funk In Flagrante Delicto.
It’s another late night after reading Gloria’s auto biographical hagiography, you drift aimlessly through the house, eventually find yourself staring into the bathroom mirror, horrified to see your face frozen into a Bell’s Palsy mask and realize that it’s been that way since you finished that one chapter that dealt with what could and must be called what it is…, instructions for fuck’s sake on just how she likes it.
It’s gotta be like waking up in bed with Chaz Bono.
Maybe I will read it next year for Lent, or, maybe I will forget.
Dwight, in my opinion, Hearne should buy you a new car for reading that book.
A nice car.
Not a fuckin Fiat, a nice car, make him get you a Porsche.
Thanks a lot, Chuck…
Hey, my Fiat days are mostly behind me now, but…
I could certainly outfit the Dwightster with a nice Bimmer!
How about we chip in for a down payment and take turns on the monthly payments?
NO!!!!
🙂
I try to buy all my electrical at Sutherlands, YOU buy him the Bimmer!
🙂
Yes sir, mr. Lowe!
Who cares.
See you at the book signing Saturday, Guy!
(insert obligatory rimshot here)
This sounds so bad and devoid of taste, I will now be forced to read it.
Careful what you wish for…
Wait till you get to the dirty details of her quest to have a pre marriage fling!!!
It can’t be worse than the mental image of her spanking the Funk.
Don’t do it Paul!! Fight the power!!
OK, Amazon dropped the book on my door step. Got half way through in one setting and am finding it hilarious! I’ll wrap it up before the weekend and read the rest when they come out!