March 3, 2009
Geez, did you see that launch week for Entertaining Disasters: A Novel (with Recipes) and its aftermath? Wasn’t that opera cake and lemon pound cake that Europane’s Sumi Chang made just for me and you and the book amazing? And oh, how the prosecco flowed, and I promise not to breath a word about Mom’s Garlic Cream Cheese Dip (God’s gift to ruffled potato chips) because if I did, you’d know I had more than my fair share! And those parties – can you believe Entertainment Tonight sent a camera crew to Culver City’s L.A. Contemporary Gallery just to ask me who I thought should play the unnamed foodwriter narrator in the movie? I said Scarlet Johansen would be old enough by the time the movie got made (if ever – HARVEY, did you finally get through the coverage or were you sidetracked by the dip?) Then someone suggested Sandra Bullock and I thought, hmmm, she WOULD be interesting, so, hey, either of you gals, call Harvey and tell him to get on it!
Then it was onto Doug Dutton’s Lawn (catch the great L.A. Times article by Irene Lacher posted herewith), which I suggested should become The Dutton, Studio City, a regular SoCal cultural center on par with The Getty, Brentwood and The Hammer, Westwood.
He’s thinking it over.
Then there were all those readings, first at Vroman’s, Pasadena, then at Village Books, Pacific Palisades (I fear I made the place smell like Gilroy), all with amazing turnouts of SoCal friends (you know who you are, and some of you know twice and at least two of you know three times!)
My Self-Guided-Author’s Tour of Northern California was a real homecoming. I read at Books Inc in San Francisco’s Laurel Village, where the audience included my high school counselor, Natalie Van Tassel, the young woman who arrived in Berkeley in the fall of 1968, fresh from her native Michigan, to shepherd my freshman class at Castro Valley’s Canyon High School, her first as a counselor, through four tumultuous years. She is the woman responsible for getting me into college. She stayed with the school district until retiring just a few years ago. Thank You Natalie, for getting me into college, coming to my reading AND letting me be your Facebook Friend! You really should be writing a book.
We’ll talk.
That Friday night I read at Book Passage, Corte Madera. The crowd was full of familiar faces and some new friends and one elderly gentleman who asked the evening’s last question — “What is the meaning of your book?” I paused for a second, then said “To enjoy life.” Which it is, but I should have said, “read the book and you tell me!” I don’t think he bought a copy and I wonder now if he goes to all the readings in Corte Madera and asks the same question and what answer would prompt him to buy a book?
A riddle for the ages.
After the reading, my husband Tom and I dined with Jack Shoemaker, editorial director of Counterpoint Press, and his wife, Jane Vandenburgh, editor of Entertaining Disasters and author of the wonderful and just published memoir, A Pocket History of Sex in the Twentieth Century.
The next day, after jogging from our Larkspur Landing hotel along the beautiful bay front to the gates of San Quentin and back, we drove up to Napa where I did 20 minutes on West Coast Live with Sedge Thompson. He read the book, enjoyed it, was funny, smart and serious and the sizable paying audience, in my estimation, got their money’s worth. You decide–there’s a link posted under Media to the You Tube video of our interview. Or there will be very shortly, as soon as Somebody reads the iMovie manual.
Then, lest we forget, I did a reading at Warwick’s in LaJolla, where the warmth of the solid turnout of locals and loyal Warwick’s supporters made up for the chilly weather. And I made another batch of Mom’s garlic cream cheese dip for Evan Kleiman and the gang at KCRW when she recently interviewed me for Good Food.
Looking ahead, I am to be at The Grove in San Diego this Sunday afternoon (March 8), 3 p.m., for a food-oriented authors’ (there will be dip!) event sponsored by San Diego Writers Ink, and Tuesday I will be at the Brandeis University National Womens Committee Author Luncheon in Camarillo, then there’s the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books AND the classes I’ll be teaching for UCLA Extension’s Writers’ Program. Saturday, March 21, will be The Writer’s Banquet, a one day workshop on food, memory and writing, and Saturday, April 18, is the first of six Saturdays for Words and Pictures: Drawing Literature from Art, a lively adventure to include two field trips, one to The Getty, Brentwood, and another to The Hammer, Westwood, exploring visual art as inspiration for fiction, memoir and essay.
So far, no plans to take in The Dutton, Studio City, but we’ll be thinking of you Doug!
