During my last semester of college, I was introduced to the work of David Sedaris
in a Creative Non-Fiction class. While it was a writing course, we read
several books in order to give us an idea of the different memoir
styles out there and integrate techniques employed by the writers into
our own work. Of all the writers I encountered in college for the first
time, Sedaris is one of my favorites. While some of his essays get
pretty off-color, there’s just something so irresistible about his
pointed observations about the absurdities of how people interact with
each other. Much of what he says rings very true to my ordinary
experience, while some of his more outlandish stories make me wonder how
he ever survived his 20s. He’s a riveting storyteller.
However,
my experience of Sedaris is almost entirely limited to the page. I’m
not much for audiobooks and I’ve rarely caught him on National Public
Radio, where he often reads essays, but those who have listened to him
more than read him have insisted that his work is far more entertaining
when he reads it himself. Thus, when my brother Nathan told me that
Sedaris would be giving a reading at Mercyhurst College, it didn’t take a
lot of persuading to convince me to go too. Also attending were his
girlfriend Morgan and my mom, whose exposure to Sedaris was very
limited. I wasn’t sure what she would make of him, but while some of his
discussion topics made her squirm a bit, she mostly found him very
funny and astute.
We bought our tickets in late August, and by
the time of the reading on October 22, the theatre, which accommodates
several hundred, was sold out. It got started a bit late, allowing time
for stragglers to make their way in from the lobby, and lasted just over
an hour and a half, with Sedaris reading four full-length stories,
followed by excerpts from his diary. He also took a little time out for
questions from the audience at the end.
His first selection was The Squirrel and the Chipmunk,
the story from which the cover illustration of his latest book is
taken. This collection of animal fables is a departure for him, as he
mostly writes of his own experiences. However, the tales here certainly
have applicability to people, and that’s especially true of this story,
which deals with prejudice, peer pressure and fear of the unknown
getting in the way of a relationship. It’s a bittersweet story, yet it
is not simply a case of a perfect relationship being ruined by
disapproving relatives. It also demonstrates how much better things tend
to look in hindsight, especially when they have been, to some extent,
forcibly taken away.
The longest and most riotous of the stories was the second, Easy, Tiger, a New Yorker
piece in which Sedaris discusses the oddities of the Pimsleur language
instruction tapes that he has used to help him navigate other countries.
In it, he shares several actual conversations used on these tapes,
commenting on the uselessness of some of the banter and what the
differences in dialogue between languages reveals about the countries in
which they are spoken. For this, he played us samples of actual
Pimsleur tapes and also demonstrated his skills in Japanese, Italian and
German. The impact of his expressive voice, whose timbre is remarkably
like that of John Fiedler, who played Piglet for about four decades in
various Disney projects, is amplified by his impeccable comic timing.
While this essay was mostly funny, it also posed some interesting
questions about how and why we learn foreign languages and whether, as
more and more people around the world learn English, Americans will
cease to bother trying to bridge the communication gap themselves.
Atta Boy,
which comments on today’s tendency toward over-indulgent parenting as
compared with the brutal but effective tactics employed by his father
and, to a lesser extent, mother, resonated strongly with many in the
audience. Looking around, I could see a lot of people nodding in
agreement with his disgust over the parents who threaten to sic the
police on a man who lays a hand on their son to apprehend him after
catching him at spray-painting a mailbox. His description of his own
parents is howlingly funny, particularly his aggressive dad who hoards
after-work snacks, threatens to pummel neighborhood smart-alecks and
removes his pants during dinner – and, when the doorbell interrupts the
meal, insists on answering the door himself. I think a lot of people
felt pretty grateful for their families after hearing this essay.
The
final essay focused on Sedaris’s experiences with various doctors,
including one whose response to medical issues is too lackadaisical for
his liking and another who subjects him to bizarre travel shows on mute
while he is poking around in his mouth. This was the essay that inspired
my brother, who recently graduated from college with a Fine Arts
degree, to draw a mouse on a skewer for him as a gift in exchange for
his autograph. It was as funny as the others, and we got to hear him
speak French, but I was glad when it was over because all that medical
talk was getting rather icky.
The diary entries were taken from
the last two years and mostly commented on individuals who struck him as
unusual or related jokes that people had told him at readings. These
were invariably crude, as was a quip about a quiz show that most of the
audience didn’t get, and it kind of worries me that I did. The funniest
bit was probably his baffled description of the Occupy Wall Street
protesters he encountered in the organic hipster wonderland of
Burlington, Vermont. Most of these were very short, sometimes only a
couple of sentences, and it was fun to get these quick laughs after the
much longer stories.
The question and answer period wasn’t all
that illuminating, especially since one of the questions was
incomprehensible, but his recollection of the crummy Bangor, Maine motel
where he stayed during this tour was hilarious. On the more serious
side, he encouraged everyone to go out into the lobby and buy a copy of
Peter Kessler’s River Town, a piece of immersion journalism about life among Chinese schoolchildren that particularly impressed Sedaris.
After
the reading, the audience had three options: leave, head for the book
table or line up for the signing. I’d brought a book, so I got in the
signing line, though it took me a while to get there, especially since
we bumped into a friend on the way out of the theater, and as a result,
Mom and I wound up near the back of the line, which barely seemed to
move at all in the first half hour. Nathan and Morgan opted to lounge
around the lobby, where they had a good view of the signing table where
Sedaris was engaging each person who came up to him in conversation.
After more than an hour of waiting, Mom got Nathan to take her place in
line while she found a bench, and I gave him the pen and notepad for him
to draw his skewered mouse while we waited. As we drew closer, we
caught snatches of his conversation with other attendees. I especially
liked his request to the 13-year-old pianist ahead of us to, after his
concert the next day, “Go out and do something autumnal. Rake some
leaves, do something with an apple… I don’t know. Just go outside and be
autumnal!”
When we finally made it to the table, I presented my book, the copy of Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk
that Nathan had bought me for Christmas, and I mentioned that I had
bought it for Nathan as well and that we’d snapped a picture of us
holding up our identical books. He made a comment about the dangers of
that happening in a family at Christmas and how he and his sister had
bought each other the same CD or DVD on occasion. He signed the book “To
Erin with friendly friendship” and handed it back… and then he noticed
my “purse.” “I’m sorry, is that your purse?” he asked. I replied that it
had started out as a camera bag and I ended up just carrying it around
everywhere. It’s a clunky red and black thing, not ladylike in any sense
of the word but certainly utilitarian. “I just have to say,” he
persisted, “that is the most ungainly handbag I have ever seen. I mean,
if there was a contest for ugly purses, that would take first prize!”
Well,
what can I say? I’ve never claimed to fashion-conscious. I just sort of
smiled and shrugged, and he shook his head and laughed, and then he
noticed the button on the side. He asked what it said, and I explained
that I’d picked it up in Salem, Massachussetts
– the trip, incidentally, which made me decide to switch from raggedy
ten-year-old purse to hardy compact camera bag – and that it read, “Do
not meddle in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and good with
ketchup.” Of course, he informed me that the dragon button just made the
ensemble all that much worse, and then he fixed his eye on my green
VeggieTales bracelet and asked if that was to go with the button, and I
told him that it was a bracelet tied in with the kids’ video series
VeggieTales. At this point, he was looking at me a bit like I was some
sort of intergalactic visitor, and he laughed again and said, “You are
absolutely adorable.”
Nathan should have gone first because I’d already introduced him as my brother, so the signature he got in his copy of Holidays on Ice
was “Think Celine,” who Sedaris informed him is a designer of upscale
handbags whose work he insisted Nathan track down so he could get me a
less mortifying purse for Christmas. However, he seemed delighted with
Nathan’s detailed doodle – “Oh! It’s a mouse on a skewer! Well, look at
that!” – and then the two of them spent a few minutes discussing their
favorite artists, so I think that Nathan probably managed to demonstrate
that his visual tastes are a little more refined than his sister’s. We
each selected a twisted postcard to tote home with us; I was hoping to
snag the one cheerily chirping, “Let’s explore diabetes with owls!” but
that was gone by the time I got there, so I had to satisfy myself with
the Pekingese skull.
It was closing in on midnight by the time
we left, so it was a full evening, and not only did I have the pleasure
of listening to him share his keen insights with that wonderful
delivery, I think I also got a taste for what it must feel like to be an
inadequate American Idol contestant in front of Simon Cowell. Or Ugly Betty. But hey, at least I’m adorable!
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