smile more, suffer less on We Heart It. http://weheartit.com/entry/5498739

For Tomorrow(ish): Meeting Dave Eggers

My favorite stuff from watching Pat Conroy:

• He apparently met Anne Rice when they when both young and unfamous…kayaking out on Biscayne Bay (Do we believe this?)
• His parents had 7 kids and six marriages, and his sister called the Six “the lucky ones”…so that line from Prince of Tides…not just a line. Wow.
• Describing his father as a 6’4 godzilla, dragging his knuckles on the floor and killing small rodents and turtles in his wake: (This was the man behind the art, The Great Santani)
• On perspective: How was he to know that every father didn’t line his kids up every night when he came home, asking who knew every step they made and every thought they had?  “The problem with childhood is you only get one- so that, forevermore, is what’s normal…” (slight paraphrase)
• Conroy’s first published work, a poem, was in his father’s eyes “an open admission that [he] was gay.
• Since his name was so plain, and he was in his F. Scott Fitzgerald-worshiping stage, Conroy published this first line as “D. Patrick Conroy”
• So while being assumed gay, it was also, D. Patrick, would you please pass the salt? D. Patrick, would you please enlighten us on…?  Etc.  “I was Pat Conroy ever since,” he concluded.

For tomorrow: Being ten feet away from Pat Conroy.

Dave Barry interviewing Nora Ephron at the Miami Book Fair.

Monday, November 15th:

I managed to park in one of the worst possible spots, hobble eight downtown Miami blocks in heels, get lost trying to find the correct building and (why does this happen so much to me?) finally get escorted to the thing by a pitying security guard. So I was in the second to the back row and twenty minutes late.

Husband (who was haplessly trying to direct me via Google maps and his cell phone): Don’t worry, it’ll start late. First of all, it’s Miami, and secondly, all true artists are late.

Answer (from Universe): No, no, they’re not. Just the ones hobbling through the dark wearing earrings from two different pairs. (And no, no it was not on purpose.)

Still, it was an awesome experience. The woman is freaking hilarious, and I got the distinct impression Dave Barry (who’s pretty damned funny himself, but not, apparently, while seated next to Nora Ephron) was a little intimidated.

My favorite Ephron lines (some slightly paraphrased) from Monday night:

“It’s embarrassing what actually does end up sticking to the Velcro.” (The Velcro being long-term memory, the memoir she’s promoting of course, entitled I Remember Nothing.)

“Yes, I did say my cleavage looks remarkably like a peach pit.”

About her unilateral, ideological opposition to egg-white omelets, “Yes, that’s true. I feel about as strongly against them as I did about the war in Iraq.”  (She throws out these hated egg whites, or in more magnanimous moods, mails them to people in California.)

About Tom Friedman, who she apparently blasts in said memoir I cannot afford: (utter paraphrasing here, never did take shorthand. I think it officially became extinct when I was about four):

‘He’s one of those careerist, traveling panelists that give you their innovative, brilliant sounding opinion of the word while you sit and nod in the audience, ah-hah, yes, that is just it, word = flat, etc….And it takes you until you’re in the car on the way home to suddenly realize, No it’s not!!’

Anyway, there was a lot more of these funny, seemingly impromptu little witticisms and one-liners, but I’m at the point that I feel like if this were a real blog that people actually read and even gave a shit about, I’d be borderline in trouble with this whole liberal paraphrasing/sloppy quoting thing I have going here.

And I always try to abide by the theoretical rules of my theoretical (novel, poem, short story, documentary—you get the idea) that actually people read and also give a shit about. (Act as if!)

Bottom-line, the biggest insight I take away form Monday night is that Nora Ephron is not just someone blessed with wit and the amazing ability to take all in life lightly—but the product of alcoholic parents who wouldn’t let their kids tell any kind of story at the dinner table (heartbreak, tragedy, hurt feelings-Bleh!) until they’d turned it into something that amused them.

Also, “Nora E” did a lot more stuff, literary and cinematic merit wise, than Sleeping in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail, only a fraction of which I was previously aware of.  Thumbs up to peach pit cleavage- I can only hope my own aging process will be more like fermenting into stronger, “punch”-ier humor than marked by having succumbed by the rot mentioned heretofore (yes, heretofore is supposed to be a subtly ironic example of anachronistic staleness/fungus +mold)