Russell Baker's Famous Wog Essay

Russell Baker's Sunday column in the New York Times Magazine had mythic popularity in our household when I was growing up.  Last week I had lunch with some of my favorite 80 year olds, one of whom had a wog during lunch.  Being wonderful people, they demanded an explanation.  At their request, I found the original essay.  Here it is for your reading pleasure.

Sunday Observer

By Russell Baker

Egg on the Face

While lunching with an extremely vital man some years ago, I was dismayed during the fish course to notice that he had a wog on his chin.  For people who have never been in this predicament, I should explain that a wog is a tiny piece of food that has somehow escaped the eater’s mouth and lodged itself on his face.

The chin and the cheeks are where wogs usually settle.  The difficulty with them is that the person with a wog on his face can’t see it, but everybody else can.  As a result any train of thought that has been running across the table gets derailed as soon as the wog appears.

This is what happened during that lunch.  The extremely vital man was talking profound talk – “We live in an age when implications are profound” or something like that – and I was trying to look grave and deep when I noticed the wog on his chin.

Oblivious to the wog, he went on talking deep.  It became harder and harder to look him in the eye.  My glance kept dropping to his chin.  It became terribly important to know what kind of wog it was.  If it was a bread wog it might drop away, ending the crisis without a fuss.  Bread wogs often do that.  So do cake wogs.

This, however, was a fish wog, one of the worst kind.  Like egg wogs and oily lettuce-leaf wogs, a fish wog seems to get glued on and nothing removes it but a swipe of the napkin.  Now, my question is to the well-mannered public is:  What do you do in this situation?

Do you reach across the table and swipe his chin with a napkin?  If so, you have to be prepared to say, “Sorry about that, but sometimes my reflexes go haywire.”  In which case, he puts you down as an eccentric and never has you to lunch again.

On the other hand you can hardly butt in while he is warning you about the profundity of the implications and say, “Pardon me, but you’ve got a fish wog on your chin.” Or so it seemed to me that day.  “Why do you keep staring at my chin?” he asked.

Quick as a whip, I said, “I have never seen a chin with such profound implications.

He was flattered by that and the meal dragged on .  Leaving the restaurant he paused at the washroom and came out white with humiliation.  “How could you let me sit through an entire meal with a fish wog on my chin?” he whimpered.

The answer is that he was so vital that he awed me.  There are some people you can interrupt with “Brush the wog off your chin” without being at all self-conscious, but these are only the dearest of relatives.  When social disparity is greater, a wog presents one of society’s gravest problems.

Suppose, for example, that you and a couple of friends – say Kermit and Katz—are invited to eat with the President and the President is talking about the thread to civilization, and suddenly all three of you notice a wog on his cheek.

You and Kermit and Katz – are not going to get much out of the President’s conversation from that moment on, are you?  All three of you are going to be too busy thinking, “My God, the President’s got a wog on his cheek?  Why doesn’t somebody do something about it?”

Of course, now that I have had long experience with the wog problem, I know you have to deal with each one according to your reading of the victim’s personality.  With President Reagan it would probably be easy to say, “Speaking of the threat to civilization, Mr. President, you’ve got a little wog there on your left cheek.”

Ronald Reagan gives you the feeling he would just chuckled and tell you an anecdote about a time when all the Warner brothers attended an Academy Awards show with blintz wogs on their cheeks.

It is more serious if the President is someone like Richard Nixon or Lyndon Johnson.  Presidents of their disposition, so uneasy about their personal appearances, might become so irritated they would order the Pentagon to give the wog a whiff of the grape.

In such cases, I’ve had good results from relying on the science of sympathetic body language or, in plainer terms, the monkey-see, monkey-do principle.  If the wog victim is someone easily irritated – like Secretary of State Haig, for example -- I do not call verbal attention to the wog. Instead, after noting its location, I look the victim hard in the eye without blinking, then with great deliberation bring my hand to my chin or cheek, matching it to the wog’s location on the victim’s face, and rub it back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.

The great man, wishing to woo you with body language as well as his verbal charms, will in nine case out of 10 raise his own hand subconsciously to the identical spot on his dynamic face and rub the wog away.  In most cases he will not even notice it.

If he does, the trick is to begin rubbing other parts – your ear lobes, throat, forehead – parts, which on the victim are wog free.  Gingerly, he will test his ear lobes, throat and forehead for more wogs and, finding none, assume that you were not signaling him about his embarrassing wog, but merely suffer from a disgusting compulsion to rub yourself at the table.  This will probably improve his day by making him feel superior.