Dr. Ink has oft expressed his romantic attraction to copy editors, a strange fetish if ever there was one. Now if Doc were Tony Soprano, he would just visit his shrink to explore the sources of his weird affection. Doc guesses that his odd yearning can be traced to a childhood trauma.
When Doc was a Little Inky, about 10, growing up in a New York suburb, he began to feel the first tremors of emerging manhood. These feelings reverberated most powerfully in the presence of a local teenage girl whose nickname was “Angel Face.” She even wore a leather jacket with that name embroidered across the back.
Truth be told, she did have the face of a 1950s style teen angel (not the dead one from the song). Bright blue eyes were framed by a pixie hairdo, a button nose, a little bow of a mouth painted bright red. Along with the leather jacket, Doc remembers that she wore “pedal pushers,” an ultra-tight forerunner of Capri pants.
Each day Angel Face would walk down the hill past Doc’s house, and the little Inkster would spot her, like a bird watcher, through the picture window.
Now Doc’s first copy editor must have been his sainted Mama Ink because, one day, she snuck up behind him and pierced the bubble of his fantasy with this crack:
“Huh. There goes old Angle Face.”
“You mean Angel Face,” Doc retorted.
“Take another look, Buddy Boy, that stupid little juvenile delinquent misspelled her name on her jacket.”
And so it was. Angel Face was really Angle Face, and Doc could never look at her the same way again, even when she wore her red pedal pushers.
The deeper psychological issues of Oedipal angst and transference are left for another time and place. But since that day, more than 40 years ago, Dr. Ink always preferred the company of those angels on the copy desk who have winged to his rescue, even when he was playing the angles.
