When I’m far removed from my present life, I think I’ll be amused to know what it was like back then, coming home from five hours spent at a book signing, exhausted from the heat, sipping Gatorade from a half-empty bottle retrieved from the fridge, shirtless and sockless in front of my computer, following the Yankees game on the West Coast, gathering thoughts on the day to blog about. What a weird thing to do. It’s not that weird, I guess, right now, but it seems like it’ll be strange to me not too long from now.
Not to confuse anyone, but I was an audience member at the signing, not the honored guest. That was the one and only David Sedaris, and Aimee, Paula, Josh, and I were some of the lucky few with tickets to hear him read “Baby Einstein” from Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, as well as a number of diary entries from around the world over the last two years or so. He was, of course, hilarious, shameless, incisive, and dry, and his incredible voice delivered his work more effectively than could be imagined. He took what were uniformly good, unobtrusive questions (no QADS here) for awhile as well, and was charming and pleasant to the crowd, rather than seeming put upon and weary, as he could very well have been. When the small group session in the basement was done, he then embarked on the great booksigning marathon of 2004. He’s done this at every stop on the tour, I guess – nearly five hours in New York – but was pleasant and interested and obliging. It helped that for an hour and a half, we stepped out and had dinner at the Coolidge Corner Clubhouse down the street, and then came back to wait another hour in line. It was actually pretty mindboggling, just how many people were waiting, and just how slowly the line moved.
But, there are much worse places to wait than a well air-conditioned and discerning bookstore. Some of the many volumes I perused: two books by David Rees, the head-achingly funniest of which was the brilliant My New Filing Technique is Unstoppable. Read this story of how he first printed (or should I say, traded beer for free photocopies from a Harvard Square copy shop) his first book. If only the surely doomed American version of The Office could capture the absurdity of his work;
The Great Indie Discography, which is fascinating and appealing but a little less so in the days when information can be updated without the words “second printing” entering into it;
The Insiders’ Guide to Portland, Oregon, whose introduction I read, which captured a lot of interesting and tempting thoughts about the place;
The terrifically titled Robert Young Pelton’s The World’s Most Dangerous Places : 5th Edition, which gave different trouble spots in the world star ratings (1 means it’s got a bad rep but isn’t that dangerous, like Lebanon, 5 is for “Apocalypse Wow,” like Liberia) but manages to spell “Lebensraum” “Liebensraum,” which I’m pretty sure has a whole different meaning, and is not meant to be ironic.
At the end of our wait, we met a somewhat ashen-looking David Sedaris, who was happy to sign our books and tickets, and who chatted with us about a couple of things before proceeding to sign his eight hundredth book of the day.
