Last night, I drove to the Brielle Public Library to do a reading/signing. When I walked up to the front doors, I saw the poster they’d created for me.
You might notice a slight problem with the poster. I walked through the doors laughing my head off — I don’t know why, but I just found the badly pixelated photo of J. Robert Lennon and his expression hilarious. One of the librarians explained they don’t do the posters themselves, headquarters does, and for some reason, they used the photo I’d taken at Cornell, and for some even more inexplicable reason, they used Lennon’s picture instead of mine. I don’t know…maybe he looks more like me than I do.
In any case, I got there and set up in their magazine room.
That’s what the room looked like at 6:15pm. We’d get started at 6:30pm. This is what the room looked like at 6:45pm.
I spent the time reading Ladies Home Journal, an interview featuring Nora Ephron, Meryl Streep, and Amy Adams, about their new film Julie & Julia (it was basically a fluff piece, but great photos). At five to seven, I realized that I was going to experience my first bagel. Not bad, I suppose; I’d done over twenty events before this one and had avoided it thus far.
As I was just about to pack up, an old friend showed up. Saved! And in a big way, because we ended up talking for a good hour about books and movies and everything else we used to talk about when we worked together many years ago. I had an audience of one, but it turned out just fine in the end.
