Category: Short Work

13 events in 15 days. Here we go. Berkeley Barnes & Noble, we kick off on a lovely sun-drenched Saturday afternoon, followed by a manic 14 hour, 850 mile road race up the 5 in our Rav 4 to Eagle Harbor Bookstore on Bainbridge Island, north of Seattle, where a the drenching turns from sun to rain, a fine mist hanging thick amidst the autumn ruby reds, canary yellows, orange oranges, and of course, the emerald green, green, everywhere green.

We were greeted with a glow of warmth by Mary Gleystein, who immediately made us a cup of tea. Never underestimate the power of a cup of tea after a 14 hour, 850 mile road race up the 5. By the time we started our event, the place was packed, every seat taken, and excitement buzzed in the damp Northwestern air. When we were done, the applause seemed enthusiastic. Either that or they were very nice and really good at faking it. Then there were, as there always are, lots and lots of questions. One guy said, “I have a stupid question.” David said, “There are no stupid questions.” He said, “You haven’t heard my question yet.” He got a big laugh. Turns out it wasn’t a stupid question at all. It was a smart question. In fact these people asked lots of smart questions. They brought up stuff we hadn’t thought of. Stuff we later included our event. Then we signed lots of Satchel Sez: The Wit Wisdom and World of Leroy Satchel Paige-s and Pride & Promiscuity: The Lost Sex Scenes of Jane Austin –s. People thanked us profusely, chatted nicely, and bought books. In short, it was a real gas.

Next Stop: Port Townsend, Washington, where we were wined and dined on garlic chicken and blackberry pie you could plotz dead away from, treated like royalty by the lovely and talented Gillards, parents of Jessica (more on her later). And O my, it was so spectacular there, big huge trees, glorious vistas of Pacific Ocean blue, Monet painting fall colors, surrounded by more green than you’ve ever seen. Arielle immediately wanted to move there. So David, a veteran of the Pacific Northwest who wants no part of living there ever again, craftily took her out golfing the next day and by the time they were done with nine, they were a couple of drowned rats pouring rain out of their shoes. So much for moving to the Pacific Northwest.

Next Stop: Vancouver, Washington, just over the river from Portland, 200 miles later. By the time we started our event, Rebecca at the Barnes & Noble was scouring the place frantically for more chairs, cuz there were already fifty of them filled, and people were still showing up. The highlight of this event was during the Q&A when a tall thin handsome fellow stood, and in a thick German accent, and said, “I am very nice to work vith, unt full of joy, unt I vant to know if Arielle vill be mine agent.” Brought the house down. Again we signed many books, again we were thanked profusely, and again we had a solid solid gas.

Next Stop: Bend, Oregon, 150 miles south of Portland. 6:30 AM, Kristy Miller, perky hostess of “Good Morning Central Oregon”, welcomes us on-air, and interviews us for 7 minutes. She was charming and sweet and we were thrilled and honored to be in all seven homes in Central Oregon who were watching the show that morning.

Next Stop: Bellevue, just outside Seattle, 350 miles later, and 12 hours later, Alison at Barnes & Noble gets David a heavily caffeinated beverage. At that night’s event, a woman told a story about an industrious young man who wanted to get hired by a captain of industry. This industrious young man found out that the captain of industry loved pizza with pineapple, Canadian bacon, and triple cheese. Well, the industrious young man had a pineapple, Canadian bacon and triple cheese pizza from the finest pizzeria in town delivered to the captain of industry. He taped his query letter and resume to the inside of the pizza box, so when the captain of industry opened it, he was staring right at it. The industrious young man was hired that very day. We will subsequently tell this story at every subsequent event.

Next Stop: Downtown Seattle, Northwest Book Fest. For an hour and a half we pressed flesh, made introductions, pitched our books, and met a big bunch of Northwest book buyers.

Next Stop: Paulina Springs, Sisters, Oregon, just west of Bend, 5 hours of hard driving and 350 miles later. By now we had memorized every inch of road between Seattle and Central Oregon. Luckily it’s beautiful country to memorize. Driving south from Portland to Bend, with Mt. Hood posing like a picture postcard through the windshield, and beauty growing thick all around us, we were intoxicated again and again by the gorgeousity of it all.

911 said the sign at the edge of town as we pulled into town. We weren’t sure if that was the population, or a cry for help. This was the only store where we were doing an event solely based around Satchel Sez. This was at the insistence of Kate Cerino, who greeted us as we walked into the store at 4:40 for our 5:00 event. Apart from Kate, none of the 911 Sisterites were there. Our expectations, extremely low to begin with, plummeted as we spied the 30 empty seats sadly facing one lone chair, which was staring off self-consciously.

As we strolled around Sisters, we noticed that all the shops were closed, and no one was around. It was like a Twilight Zone episode. We began to wonder if there really were 911 people in Sisters, or if we were going to be abducted by author-starved aliens who would make us write books day and night for the rest of eternity.

Well, imagine our surprise at 5:00 when we returned to find Paulina Springs Bookstore packed with 35 of its 911 occupants. 3% of the population. If this was LA there would’ve been 300,000 people there. Our jaws hit the floor. Those melancholy chairs were now full and happy, brimming with Sisters bottoms, all waiting for us to say something intelligent, insightful and witty about Satchel Paige.

I scanned the crowd, and it suddenly hit me: there were only two people under the age of sixty in the audience. Talk about your target audience. Afterwards, the crowd shared their own Satchel Paige stories. It was America at its best, oral history flying all around us, right there in Paulina Springs Bookstore, Sisters, Oregon, population 911. Turns out almost everyone there had seen Satchel pitch, which is not as strange as it might seem, since he barnstormed North America from Moosejaw to Miami.

Towards the end of the event the Oldest-Man-in-the-Room raised his hand. In a voice weathered with age but still going gangbusters, he said, “I was the batboy on Satchel Paige’s team. My uncle was his manager. I used to ride in his car with him. He was fast. He would have made a great race car driver, Ol’ Satch.” He stole the whole show in about twenty seconds.

After the event, the Oldest-Man-In-the-Room approached David. He had several hundred thousand miles on him, but his smile was wide, his mind was tack-sharp, and he had incredible posture. Made us stop slouching just looking at him. He thanked us for writing the book. Then he told David that he had one of Satchel’s old gloves. David said he would love to buy it from him. The man said, “No, sir, I want you to have it. Give me your address and I’ll mail it to you.” David insisted on paying for it, but the old man wouldn’t hear of it. He gave David his pen, and David wrote down the address. The Oldest-Main-in-the-Room carefully folded the paper and put it in his pocket. Then he stuck out his hand and David took it. It was old and thin, but the grip was strong, with a nice pump at the end. “I hope I’m shaking hands as well as that when I’m 80,” thought David. After he and the Oldest-Main-in-the-Room said their heartfelt farewells, David was distracted by someone asking him to sign a book, and this led to another signature, then another. As David signed the books, he was so happy that the buyers asked him to make the inscriptions out to their grand-sons and grand-daughters. Then it hit him: this is why he wanted to write the book in the first place, so the next generation would know about Satchel and his 6 Rules for Staying Young. As David signed, he felt a tug on my sleeve. It was the Oldest-Main-in-the-Room. David smiled to myself. He figured the old man probably forgot something. “Sonny, you got my pen.” David cracked up, handed him the pen, and smiled as he watched the Oldest-Main-in-the-Room walk away slow but steady, overjoyed at 44 to be called Sonny.

We thanked Kate, she thanked us, then we all patted each other on the back for quite some time. We promised her we’d be back when David’s memoir Chicken comes out in February, and she said she was looking forward to it.

We sold more books at this event than at any other. And had the most solid of gases. Again proving: You just never know.

Next Stop: Bend, Oregon. David had another highly caffeinated beverage. The highlight of this event was meeting a children’s author who lives off the grid with her husband and her animals, and sometimes gets snowed in for two months in the winter. She was so cool.

Next Stop: Kah Nee Tah Indian Reservation, 75 miles north, home of Warm Springs Tribe, in the High Desert country, eating huckleberry pancakes with huckleberry sause and huckleberries with huckleberry cream looking out over ancient red clay and wild horses that sniff at the laughing wind and the crying sky.

Next Stop: Portland, Oregon, 75 miles north, Reed College, David’s alma mater, where our lovely and talented intern Jessica (who is a current Reedy) sent up a smashing event. Again, by the time we started, the chairs were all full, and students had to sit on the floor. And they just kept coming. About twenty minutes in David felt someone behind him, and there were 3 students sitting there. David was shocked at the turn-out on a Tuesday night. “I woulda never gone to something like this when I was at Reed, I was way too busy hanging out.”

Next Stops: Seattle University Village Barnes & Noble on Friday, 200 miles later, Portland’s Annie Blooms on Saturday, 200 miles later, Seattle’s Elliot Bay on Sunday, 200 miles later, and finally Beaverton’s Border’s, 200 miles later.

As we motored home, we were tired, but it was that good kind of tired. We felt like we did something really hard, but we did it as best we could, and we learned so much about books, ourselves, and life. We loved seeing the country, meeting the people, hanging out with David’s mom and sister, watching their friend Margit dance, feeling the magic, and falling ever-deeper in love. And it was glorious pulling up our driveway, 4,000 miles later, so nice to be home sweet home.

Plus we wrote our next book. It’s called Putting Your Passion Into Print.

State of Satchel: 11/1/01
We’ve just returned from our Northwest 2001 Tour, so we thought we’d take this moment to review what we’ve achieved so far, and what we plan for the future.

Book store Events
Barnes & Noble Colma: South San Francisco
Next Chapter Books: Davis, California
B & N: Fremont, Ca
B & N: Walnut Creek, Ca
SF Public Library:
With a Clean Well Lighted Place for Books, and
The Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Foundation)
B & N: Berkeley
Eagle Harbor Books: Bainbridge Island, Washington
B & N: Vancouver, Washington
B & N: Bellevue, Washington
Paulina Springs: Sisters, Oregon
B & N: Bend, Oregon
Reed College: Portland, Oregon
B & N: University of Washington Village, Seattle, Washington
Annie Bloom’s: Portland, Oregon
Elliot Bay Books: Seattle, Washington
Borders: Beaverton, Oregon
Borders: San Rafael

Back home again home again, after six weeks on the road: Portland, Eugene, Olympia, Portland again, San Francisco, Palo Alto a half dozen times, Portland once more, New York City, then Belgium: Antwerp, Gent, Brussels, Sint Niklaas, Mechelen, Aalst, Roeselare, Hasselt, Turnhout, Knokke, and Leuven, more NY, then Surfer’s Paradise on the Gold Coast of Australia.

And the one thing everyone has in common overseas is that they are horrified by and scared shitless of Junior Bush, they urged me as an American to make sure he doesn’t get to be emperor for another four years.

The Sex Worker Art Show was half a gas and half a horror. I did the first four shows with them, and I had a blast, met all manner of fascinating human, played to packed houses. Left the tour in SF, then taught at Stanford for the next month. The first night of class we asked who among the 33 students had an advanced degree, master, or Phd., EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM RAISED THEIR HAND. Me and Arielle were the least educated people in the class. The students were so smart and dedicated and they all had great book ideas, we all liked it so much we’re doing another five weeks in April.

Then on to NYC, where I rejoined the Sex Worker Art Show, with the intention of continuing on to the conclusion, only to be blindsided brutally (story soon to follow).

Then on to Belgium, Arielle met me at the Newark Airport and we flew over together. We had no idea what to expect. Imagine our delight when we were picked up and swept away to a five star hotel in the ancient sacred heart of olde Antwerpen, the diamond/fashion center of Europe, where waffles waft their magic aroma from street corners, and chocolates croon your name from sweet boutiques. Turns out I was on the Saint Amour tour, bringing together 10 of the greatest writers from Belgium and Holland. And me. I felt like one of those: What’s Wrong With This Picture things. What am I doing here? Well, the whole tour was about love, so I suppose I was somewhat qualified. Strapping Viking poet babes, and dark brooding novelists, a string quartet doing Bach so beautiful it made your balls weep, three glorious gorgeous female singers who do these ancient sounding songs in Polish Dutch and French, they are food for the ears and the eyes. And the grand old man of Belgian literature, Hugo Claus, this guy was once married to the softporn star Sylvia Kristel, of Emmanuel fame, he’s Arthur Miller, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald all rolled into one.

And me. One of these things is not like the other, one of these things just doesn’t belong. What am I doing here? With me is the other token American Jonathan Ames, a fine fellow performing a story entitled, Bald, Impotent and Depressed. He and I fell in together like peas in pods. Every day we got fed breakfast at the hotel, we talked about writing and art and sex and love and getting rid of Bush, who as I mentioned, they’re all utterly disgusted by and terrified of, then we would wander the city, and at about five we loaded into the van, drive an hour, unload into some gorgeous 500 year old multi-tiered cake of a theater that has acoustics so perfect you can whisper into the mike and it will travel to every ear in the place and back again.

At seven we were fed a fabulous gourmet meal. People drank a lot of alcohol. Everyone except me and Jonathan the two sober American freaks. The shows started at eightish. The music is beautiful the singers like angels who tasted a touch of hell. The emcee is a delightfully droll old school intellectual with deep gravel and fine beer in his voice. The terrible thing is everyone reads in Dutch, so I can’t understand a word of it. Eleven nights in a row, hearing what I can only assume are these most beautiful words, and I can’t understand a word of it. In the show I’m last. Jonathan is second to last. Then me. They project the text to Jonathan’s reading, and to mine, on a 20 foot screen behind us in Dutch. The screen consists of 150 antique woman slips sewed together. So every night my Dutch words are projected onto old lady slips behind me while I act them out in English.

I closed the whole show with 12 minutes of the Rainbow hippiechick chapter of Chicken, which climaxes with a cork-popping rip-roaring Tantric climax, and that’s how the Saint Amour show ends, with me orgasming my way across Belgium. A little known fact: writers are treated much more like god/rockstars in Europe than in America, and as a writer I have to say, I like that. I came this close to trashing my hotel room, that’s how much of a rockstar I felt like. One night out for drinks the great man motioned me over. Hugo Claus wants to talk to me. He’s all white mane and old lion skin, magic eyes dancing inside sagging skin, and ancient scarred voice. I ask him what his poems are about. He nods knowingly and says, “Oh you know, love and war and sex and women and money and ice cream and dogs, things like that.” He’s dry on dry, and got the big laugh outta me. Then he says that I remind him of vaudeville, of burlesque. He tells me in his rich voice thick with age that he once saw the exotic dancer Tempest Storm. She was one of the great burlesque entertainers of the 20th century. Hugo told me about the time he watched her stand perfectly still, and make her breasts swing back and forth, higher and higher, and it was like a beautiful poem, Hugo said, watching her beautiful breasts dance all on their own. He was a gorgeous man, Hugo Claus. We saw five hundred year old cathedrals where holy and unholy ghosts fly around the huge ceiling with all that stained light firing through the windows where angels and saints and devils and saviors act out cryptic religious scenarios. We learned the glorious aroma of waffle wiffling around a corner, grabbing you inside your nostril and towing you into the waffle winkle (Belgium for store), and the astonishing warming quality of a sweet hot waffle on a cold European day. I was so sad to leave Belgium, I could have gone on the St. Amour tour forever. Hanging with those mind-boggling writers, eating that damn-that’s-good food, performing in front of all those rapt and appreciative Belgians in those monumentally exquisite theaters, and actually getting paid for it. A slice of heaven. But Australia was calling. 12 hours back to SF. 30 hours later, it’s 16 hours to Brisbane, DownUnder. Luckily the movies “Love Actually”, and the great Dutch soccer documentary about the two worst teams in the world were playing. G’Day! I was whisked off to Surfer’s Paradise, where I was performing in the Gold Coast Art Festival. The ocean the surf the sand immense and exquisite, of course it’s summer Down Under, so it was balmy breezy, easy on the senses. The Aussies were everything they were advertised to be. Warm, sweet, bawdy, affectionate, open, inclusive, generous, curious, sexy, and fun. The first night of my show was a deluge of Biblical proportions, 50 mile an hour winds, lashings of hard rain like the goddesses were whipping the earth in an S&M frenzy. The phones in the theater rang off hooks, and I kept hearing people saying, “No, the shows are going. No, they ARE going on.” As I prepared backstage for my Australian debut, I was interrupted when I stepped into a large puddle where the torrential, relentless rain had pounded its way in. As I dried my feet, and I listened to the tsunami crash down on the Gold Coast, I tried not to take it personally. Was the universe trying to tell me something? Have I offended the gods and goddesses in some way. But somehow people did manage to show up. I did three nights, we had great crowds, and they were lovely. I met more performers, I met people from all over the Gold Coast, and again I was quite sad to go home. Back of course overjoyed to be back in the U S of A. My time on the road and overseas was mind expanding and soul growing. It made me realize how much I want Junior Bush out of office, and that I have to do something about it. At this point America is s a dirty word in some parts of the world. I now prefer when I’m overseas to say I’m from California. But even this is tainted, as now we are tarred with the legacy of the Terminator Governor. This has got to change. In the rest of the world, you really feel like you’re part of the rest of the world. There’s none of that love-it-or-leave-it shit in Europe. They have Euros in Europe. I was also most happy to see that on three different continents, people understood and responded to my very American though apparently universal story of a boy on his own trying to get by. From grrrrrrrrrls in clubs, bourgeois literarti in Europe, dating couples Down Under, queers in bars, UK grannies, SF trannies, tattooed students, mothers and brothers and sisters and husbands and sons and wives. And I met people who have become a part of me, amazing people who made me laugh and marvel and brought great joy into my world, which has become so much bigger. For this, and for all of it, I am so grateful. The HBO deal is being hammered out by lawyers, hammering being the operative word. Me and Arielle will now finish the book Putting Your Passion Into Print. We teach PYPIP again at Stanford. I’m finishing up my a novel, a memoir about my time at Chippendale’s, and I’m polishing up a young adult novel. Then in late April, Xaviera Hollander is bringing me to Amsterdam for about 10 shows. Then to the Brighton Theatre Fest, then three more dates in England. In Philadelphia in June. But here now, it’s great to be home with Milo and Arielle.

April 24, 25 the Gallery Donkersloot – Leidsegracht 76, Amsterdam 8 pm
April 26, 27 gallery Treehouse , Voetboogstraat 11,Amsterdam 8 pm
April 28 – Polanen theater, Polanenstraat 174, Amsterdam 8 pm
April 29 gallery treehouse Voetboogstraat 11,Amsterdam 8 pm
May 1 – Polanen theater, Polanenstraat 174, Amsterdam 8 pm
May 2 – Concordia theater, Hoge zand 42, Den Haag – 4 pm
May 3 – Concordia theater, Hoge zand 42, Den Haag , 8 pm
www.xavierahollander.com/hbtheatre.htm

Wed 5th May – 21 South St Theatre, Reading
Thur, Fri, Sat 6th – Sat. 8th Komedia Theatre – Brighton Theatre Festival
Sun 9th – MAC – Birmingham Cannon Hill Park
Thur 13th – The Point – Eastleigh Town Hall Centre, Leigh Road, Hants

Blue Sky (215-627-1144) Philadelphia – www.blueskyarts.org
Thu-Sat June 10, 11 – Performance and Q&A; Sat, June 12 – Solo Performance Workshop, Performance and Q&A

Thanks. xxox d