PublicDomain

Uncredited: The American Dilemma of Service and Excellence

If you too are steamed over high-paid, poor performing execs complaining over their new piddly salaries of half-a-million, have I got an analogy for you! I was just watching two iconic American movies, The Goodbye Girl and Night and Day (with Cary Grant, about Cole Porter).

Talk about uncredited! The Goodbye Girl features Marsha Mason, who plays a 30-something dancer in New York, which is to say, a former dancer. In Night and Day, there are so many unbelievably talented, manic dancers in scene after scene. For me, The Goodbye Girl was a reminder of how physically brutal and short a dancer's career is, much like a pro football player, but even shorter. Unrelenting. Then watch "Night and Day" -- the dancing is incredible! Go to the internet and look up Night and Day's cast and -- you get "Specialty Dancer -- uncredited. Specialty Singer -- uncredited." Were some of these performers black? Yes. Some were white and Latino, ditto ... but one thing is for sure -- they all performed. So much so, that 60 years on, one is still trying to figure out who they were. But they were, as so many of us doing service and performance day in and day out, uncredited. As in, now -- we have no credit.

Fast Forward to today, when non-performing multi-millionaires and billionaires are whining because, if they want OUR money, they need to "restrain" themselves to half a million a year... Folks, it's time THEY were "uncredited." Unlike those performers of old, these guys never broke a sweat or pulled a muscle. Nor did they serve their clients or their audience. They didn't even meet their own piss-poor expectations. Were they judged as the rest of us, they would not have made the first cut in the cattle call.