YOU’VE READ all about our supposedly significant daily newspaper strike, perhaps in the skeleton-crewed official editions or in the samizdat, Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild-produced Union Record. (Surely you wouldn’t turn to TV or the Internet for your news, would you?) Regardless, what’s missing is the actual color and feel of the front lines, where those intrepid deadline poets—ink coursing through their veins!–continue their standoff with miserly management. To get a sense of our fellow scribes’ commitment, we wandered over to Fairview to sample opinions on the subject. How better to report on the strike than to let the strikers speak so eloquently in their own words? Readers can judge for themselves what they’re missing.

“I haven’t been this psyched since Moby Grape played the Fillmore East in ’67,” enthused senior music writer Patrick MacDonald. “Or perhaps not since Benny Goodman at the Stork Club in ’43. Or maybe not since the 1913 debut of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring—man, that was a show! Too much absinthe, you know what I mean?”

“Walking the picket lines here on Fairview sure has made it easier to spot wacky vanity license plates,” Jean Godden mused. “Already, I’ve gathered enough material for the next six months of my column. After this strike is settled, I’m going to Maui and phoning it in.”

“Well, it’s certainly a chance to try out my new Gore-Tex parka,” said outdoors columnist Ron C. Judd. “Now if the strike drags on long enough and if it actually starts to snow, I’m thinking book deal. All we need is a few strikers to freeze to death so I can spin an Outside article into a best-seller. I’d say Hartl, Godden, and MacDonald will be the first to go.”

“It’s kind of like Norma Rae meets Potemkin,” opined film critic John Hartl. “Or maybe like Matewan meets American Dream or like Hoffa meets Blue Collar. Or like On the Waterfront meets Brassed Off, only without Ewan McGregor. What were we talking about again?”

Surprisingly absent from the well-trod pavement was columnist Nicole Brodeur, who’s rumored to be spreading the message of labor solidarity among the shop, spa, and boutique workers of Bellevue Square. Another no-show was sportswriter Steve Kelley, who was said to be nursing a groin pull at home.

“They didn’t teach us anything about this in journalism school,” said veteran columnist Erik Lacitis. “Back then, it was multiple-sourcing, the four W’s, and the AP stylebook,” he reflected nostalgically before adding his r鳵m頴o the already thick stack we’d collected from his colleagues.