North Tonawanda was a mean place. It was mean and ugly. The local newspaper had a column, “Sound Off,” where you could call and anonymously berate your neighbor. If you had a grievance, you’d just unload, for an answering machine, and then your comments would get transcribed in the paper, without a signature. (Years later, at a school were I worked, it was suggested that teachers could critique one another via unsigned Post-It slips, in a kind of hat. I had traumatic flashbacks.) One day, the paper ran a critical piece about funding for the local community theater, and the semi-closeted married man who ran the theater was affronted. And so he wrote an editorial--this was signed, I think; it wasn’t “Sound Off”--and he attacked his critic. At one point, he accused her of hypocrisy, and he said her behavior was like “the tub calling the kettle black.” He used “tub,” not “kettle," because he wanted to get in a subtextual dig regarding this person’s excessive weight. North Tonawand...