Friday, April 17, 2009

I spent the night with another man...

It was David Sedaris! I had such a good time getting together with Tiffany for an evening with David Sedaris. I've read two of his books When You Are Engulfed in Flames and Me Talk Pretty One Day and loved them both. Tiffany is an equally ardent fan. Lucky Tiffany lives outside of Atlanta where things like this happen. Me, I live on the coast of South Carolina where nothing much happens unless you really like golf. I drove to Atlanta to meet Tiffany and the five hour trip was almost the perfect length to relisten to When You Are Engulfed in Flames - I got through 6 of the 8 CD's. I expected when we heard him read, that he would be reading essays from it since that is his most recent book. I was surprised and delighted to discover that he had entirely new material to share with us. The first essay had me a little worried - it was more political then anything of his that I have read and I thought, "Oh no, I didn't come to be lectured, I want to have fun!" But it quickly got better. I had another "uh-oh" moment later when he said, "Are there any Catholic girls here?". Tiffany and I looked at each other mouthing, "oh shit" and he did proceed with some irreverent material. It was the kind of joke that non-Catholics make and usually truly don't understand how offensive it is. We must not have been the only Catholics in the row as I heard a lady one seat over remark to her husband, "Oh yeah, he's going straight to hell for that one." As soon as she giggled, Tiffany was planning her trip to confession. Since confession for me is more of a semi-annual event, I let the little sins like this slide and just pony up to the big ones. Lusting after David Sedaris will make my list, giggling at an irreverent joke won't.

I still have two of his other books on my wish list - Holidays on Ice and Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. My wish list takes forever to materialize since I have this frugal streak that wants to acquire all my books for a quarter at thrift sales. But considering that I just drove ten hours and spent close to a hundred dollars on a pair of tickets, maybe I should go check and see if there are used copies on Amazon that I could buy! In the meantime, I found this series of youtube videos from a commencement address he gave. I've only listened to part of the first two questions but it made me laugh enough to know I want to hear the rest. So I decided to post them here and then whenever I want a David fix, I can just click here instead of having to search youtube.

So with warnings about language and content and every other way he might offend, I present David Sedaris.....














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