Dear [Director of Admissions] –
The following letter of recommendation, in support of Kaye Sarahson’s candidacy for admission to L'Université des Arts Culinaires, comes from an admittedly strange perspective. I have been her friend for about 12 years and also her coworker for about 2.5 of those. I will try to depict some aspects of this long relationship that I, as a writer and law student, imagine relevant to your appraisal of candidates, including her longstanding interest in and passion for cooking and feeding her friends and her ability to manage a staff striving to accomplish complex tasks in chaotic circumstances. In brief, Kaye is smart, a good manager, effective and reliable under pressure; she is also avidly and actively cultivating her knowledge, skill, repertoire and apparent talent for culinary arts. I hope you will bear with my somewhat rambling review, and thank you in advance for reading this letter and considering my friend’s application.
Since we met through a mutual high school friend, I've known Kaye as a college student, as a traveling companion, as many different kinds of employee — waitress, researcher, reporter, editor, manager, and miserable clerical lackey — and as a pillar among a core group of friends, these twelve years. She's taken my order in restaurants and served me my meal. She has ever since represented unique sympathy with and understanding for restaurant staff among the core of people with whom we've dined in the many restaurants over the many years, and she also tends to be the one who knows how the place should be run. She got me a great job once by recommending me to her boss. I started as a reporter while she was already an entrenched star, so she was critical to my learning that role. Later as an editor, she both published and opted not to run stories my weekly contributed to her daily publication, and assisted reporters in preparing those stories.
On "Net News Daily" she managed a staff of Capitol Hill reporters (who, from their continuing presence at her dinners and parties, must not have chafed under her management too much), and often also reporters elsewhere, while selecting and editing submissions from a handful of parallel publications, and formatting it all according to style and brand, headlines, captions, masthead and all. In fact, she managed that publication through a critical phase in the company's development, during which all of the company's print publications transitioned to being primarily electronic products: corporate intranet desktops, site-licenses and pay-per-view agreements are the call words of the revolution in publishing affairs. Kaye managed "Net News Daily" through this transformation as the company tested, and committed to, and implemented, (and then debugged, and rebugged, and, slower, debugged again), the new publishing schema in pilot on her daily publication.
I believe the company did it thus because, as the company's most compact and flexible publication, "Net News Daily" simply made the most logistical sense as the testing ground. I also believe that they made her managing editor of that publication just before this transformation because they knew that Kaye could negotiate the tensions, stresses and frustrations that inviting consultants and internet developers and contractors into mission-critical parts of one’s business to change the product and thus therefore also the processes of its production must inevitably cause, and still manage the aforementioned staff and tasks to pack value into her daily news product.
She did this. Kaye drove the many different “Rube Goldberg” contraptions that were jury rigged together out of a variety of complex and interlaced information systems, codes, publishing traditions, superstitions, business conventions and prayer, day after day, guaranteeing her subscribers’ familiar news and branded formatting, although according to processes likely to change radically as from day to day reliability and integration of those systems fluctuated. Kaye taught her reporters to do this; she showed the company that it could do this, and she showed the other publications’ editors that they need not fear: They too could survive the transformation, and, if they had their act together, they could publish by 5:30 and go home. She steered that paper – and led the company – through turbulent times.
I'm pretty sure, for all the excitement, that the fruits of her prodigious production efforts – the daily papers themselves, as well as the successful roll-out of the company's dynamic and flexible new publishing platform – were bland and dry upon her palate.
I've traveled with Kaye several times. I'm a bit of a control freak, so I usually drive. She's somewhat of a control freak too, and so is an excellent and attentive navigator. A proactive participant in all the organizational movie and restaurant picking, hers is a critical energetic gravity that keeps this group of friends cohesive and enjoying it.
Kaye likes restaurants! Although she'll meet me at the Tastee Diner occasionally, she likes nice restaurants, the kind you might read about in epicurean literature. She reads Gourmet magazine, participates in discussion of “good restaurants” in the area, and knows that you can't mix skim milk with butter in order to restore enough fat to the milk so that it can be whipped into cream, which, it turns out, some people don't.
[The here-described "some people" now make gourmet cheese; I haven't had any yet, but hear that it is very good. -ed.]
In short, Kaye is bound to be a dynamic asset to any organization or team, particularly if she's actually turned on by what that organization or team is doing. So she's brilliant and can manage productive teams; so what?
The happiest I have ever seen Kaye is when she's been feeding me and the other members of this core group over the years. Specifically, when she has been learning new recipes and, through following them, learning about the ingredients and their combinations, and, when the product of thus following and learning several recipes simultaneously satisfies her palate and sense of production in a full fledged fancy meal, giving her the triple pleasure of hearing her friends' appreciation of her dishes as they plow through serving after serving, the satisfaction of knowing that she has provided these friends sustenance for another day while tickling their tastes, and the pleasure of eating the fine fancy meal with friends, itself. I'm often amazed at the complex menus and delicious meals she regularly delights in preparing, for, although she lives near a Fresh Fields, her kitchen is very small. Nevertheless, she bakes and makes stew; she does more than make do; when chili's on the menu she makes at least two, so those who don't appreciate the chili pepper can enjoy it too!
What more could you want in an applicant or a student? I don't know much about culinary education; I simply eat. So, in the interest of eating the result of her homework, and of her successful completion of your curriculum, I strongly urge you to enroll her.
Thank you for your time and your consideration of my friend's application. Best wishes in your screening of applicants,
Sincerely,
Oomph Cavilrest
[Dear Reader, as you are surely perched on the edge of your seat, take heart:
Kaye gained admission, successfully changed careers, and now is . . .