An Evening With David Sedaris

Was hanging out with David Sedaris last night in downtown Richmond.

Well, he was talking from the stage at the Landmark Theater in downtown Richmond, while I was about as far as you could be from the stage and still be in the building. But we were in the same room for an hour and a half....

For those of you who don't know, David Sedaris is a writer. In my opinion, a great writer who primarily writes some very humorous essays. Some are memoir, and many just capture the normally unnoticed details of ordinary people's personalities and lives. Often he and his characters are in normal situations where they react badly, or they are in impossible situations and do the best they can. Either way, its always a great read. In addition to his books, he is a frequent contributor to the radio show "This American Life" on NPR.

My sister Carla took me to the show last night for my birthday. I didn't even know he was going to be in town, but she has seen him a few times and wouldn't miss it. We ended up going with a few of Carla's friends and it was a fun group. The crowd at the show was really great and although we were really in the nosebleed section, there isn't a bad seat at the Landmark.

When David Sedaris walked out, the first thing I noticed was how short he is. Carla warned me ahead of time about this. But he carried a simple green folder out to a podium and pulled a pencil out of his shirt pocket. "What's the pencil for?", I wondered. Then he opened the show with a funny talk about what it is like to be out on a book tour, nearly going blind from having his picture taken all the time, and what it is like to sit at a book signing table at a Costco in Canada for two hours. He didn't sign or sell a single book, people just walked by looking at him funny, and he had a large sign off to the side of him which said, "Please Do Not Take Pictures".

The majority of his show was spent reading to us. He read some things he was working on and some things he had written but hadn't published or used on the NPR show. It was all funny. The pencil he carried, I found, was to write notes on his material after he read it. He explained later that he often tried out different things in his essays at different shows to try and settle on what would work best. I would guess that is a pretty good way to improve on your material.

He concluded his last reading by bringing the house lights up and fielding questions from the audience. There were some great questions. One of the best was the question, "What do you think of politically when you hear the word, Change?" He simply said the only real change that he paid attention to was the change he got when he paid for something, and that he would like to reverse his current trend of getting less back. He was recently in Europe and said many people there are of the opinion that Americans are not ready to elect a black man as president. He said he corrected them as saying that was true, but that apparently half of America is ready to elect a half-black man.

I bought his latest book, "When You Are Engulfed in Flames", after the show and am already a quarter of the way through. I was hoping to get it signed but the line was way too long. He said he often has a special category of people he lets cut to the front of the line. One time it was men under 5'6" and women with braces on their teeth. Last night it was people who are fluent in German which wasn't me. So we left and headed over to Mojo's for some drinks and late night snacks. It was funny to be around all these people who are avid NPR listeners. I mentioned that when he started reading his first essay, I closed my eyes as I am just used to hearing him on the radio, and everyone else in the group admitted they did the same.

In the end, there was only bad part of the entire evening and that occurred at Mojo's, where I actually met someone who loved NPR, but didn't like A Prairie Home Companion. How is that possible?.............