doodledee

Jeannine and I went over to the University of Minnesota Bookstore last night to see David Sedaris get his read on. He's in town promoting his newest book Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. His talk consisted of reading one of the stories from the book, test-driving some material from his "diary", and engaging in a little Q&A with the audience. It was way better than it sounds.

The place was packed. We got there a smidge late and ended up standing way the hell back by the 35MM film display, where we perched hopelessly on tippy-toes in an effort to see the lectern. At least we did for the first 2 minutes. After that we - and the rest of the overflow crowd around us - gave up and just stood there listening, trying to avoid making eye contact with each other and bitching about how effing hot it was getting. Seriously, it was like pizza oven in there.

It actually worked out pretty mint being in the back, though. The other people around us were obviously fans - or they wouldn't be standing there sweating and staring at their shoes with their ears cocked to the PA speakers in the ceiling, hanging on every low-fidelity word that came out - but they weren't the kind of rabid fans who show up 2 hours early wearing NPR t-shirts and toting dog eared annotated copies of Me Talk Pretty One Day. The mood was mellow and happy. People sat on the floor next to the iPod Mini display laughing at jokes about the Upper East Side that I'm not sure any of us even really got. It was fun. Kinda like being on the lawn at Alpine only less steep and the laser show wasn't as good.

After the 'formal' portion of the program, a capital 'e' NOURMOUS line formed to get books signed. And lordy was it slow moving. I think in 10 minutes we maybe moved one shuffle. Screwing that, I made "friends" with a couple of the people around us and managed to convince one lady - Mary Beth the Family Lawyer - to hold our spot in line while we went downstairs to Goldy's Game Room and went bowling. I shot a 96, my best score ever. Jeannine shot like a 65. She now owes me a dip cone from the Dairy Queen.

We got back and found MB the FL almost at the front of the line. 50 minutes later we were at the table, taking pictures and signing books, and 2 minutes after that we were in the car heading home. Night.over().

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim [amazon]
Goldy's Game Room [umn]
Dairy Queen Location Finder [dairyqueen]