Meeting Marc Acito

Last night, I forced Carl to drive me out to San Francisco to meet Marc Acito. I shall reference my last blog because he would be the person who wrote "Attack of the Theater People", so for those of you that have not read the blog, he is one of my favorites writers. Carl drove like a bat-outta-heck (this is a family blog, so the language has to be nice), and we managed to make it from Sac to SF in under 1.5 hours. I really wanted to make it to this reading. Kana met up with us, since she was the first person I had ever recommend Marc's first novel to. Marc was hilarious, personable and very sweet. The reading was great, and it included two musical pieces sung acapella (not sure if that is spelled right) by him with some commentary and jokes thrown in. We found out that his copy editor was a bitch and changed some of his wording around, which really tripped him up as he was reading. In case you read this Marc, I agree with you and not the copy editor. After the reading, he took questions and spoke about why he was not writing screenplays instead of novels. We had a lovely person walk in off the street and give us a charming rendition of Johnny Cash's "Boy Named Sue". Downtown SF, I do love you! I explained to Marc that I would be moving to Salem and he gave me a list of things I have to check out in Portland so that I can find my people once I get there. He does have a play debuting in Portland titled "Holidazed" which I cannot wait to drag Carl, Jesse and Melissa to. He was fabulous to meet and I cannot wait to check him out again when he is in Portland. Here is a photo of us from the evening. There was a better photo of me, but Carl and Kana had their eyes closed, so just ignore me.

Carl, Kana and I grabbed some dinner at Lori's Diner afterward and had a great time. I just love a good Thursday night in The City!

Summer Reading, Why Do I Love You So?

I still live in that childhood idea that summer is my time and no one can take that away from me. It does not belong to my teachers, coaches or my homework. There was a time when I was not a slave to the clock, but I had to grow up at some point and get a job. One of these days I will find out that I am an heiress, and will not have to worry but until then, my summer vacation will take place after 5pm on weeknights and all day Saturday and Sunday. Summer is when I do all of my reading. I will read about a book a month through the rest of the year, but summer is when I knock out 8-10 books. Nothing too serious because that is better left to the winter months in my mind, but nothing so light as to feel stupid. The very first book for my summer reading will be Marc Acito's, Attack of the Theater People, the follow up to How I Paid For College: A Novel of Sex, Theft, Friendship and Musical Theater. Attack has been on the shelf for 3 days, magically it came out on Earth Day, and I have yet to get a copy into my hot little hands. I am dragging Carl and Kana to a book reading and meet and greet next Thursday in SF, but that has very little to do with the book. His first book was easily one of the funniest books I have read, and it was very affordable at $9.95. If anyone would like to borrow said book, please let me know. I buy them in bulk because I give them as gifts and they tend to not come back if I loan them out. Strange, yes, upsetting, no.

Next on my list would be David Sedaris' When You Are Engulfed in Flames. My mother used to tell me about this book she was reading titled Me Talk Pretty One Day and it made no sense to me. Why did she think this guy that was referred to as "The Rooster" was so funny when all he did was swear? We were not allowed to swear, so I could not believe that my mother would think this was a funny trait in anyone else. I never gave the book or author another thought until the first semester of my sophomore year in college, when the teacher assigned us Naked and very cheesily I say this: it changed my life. I immediately collected every single book he had ever contributed to. I download all the NPR segments he had done, my favorite being the first short story he ever read on NPR about his days as a Macy's Christmas Elf. I have since recommend his books to anyone that would listen to me ramble on about how creative, witty, funny and touching his work is. I wrote a paper on a short story about the death of his mother, which happened to be one of the best papers I ever wrote. The only time I wrote better was my Anthropology papers, but those are numbers and scientific evidence, not interpret what the author was meaning when they gave you the formula to find out the approximate age of a set of bones based on the length of a femur. His next book will be out on shelves June 3, so I will be making a trip out to the bookstore that day because I will have two weeks off before I start my next project for work and I am going to cram as much reading into those days as possible. See you in the stacks!