Famous People #78: Remembering how to read
Kaitlyn: On Wednesday night, I decided to walk the four miles to my first “reading” in something like 30 months so that I could listen to the two-part episode of Heavyweight everyone was talking about on Twitter and in Slack. (This is a podcast.) The story was about family drama—secrets and betrayal and forgiveness, etc. Finding meaning in life’s randomness. Connecting on Facebook. Becoming whole against all odds. Learning to appreciate every moment in which the Lord grants you a glimpse of the sublime. And so on. I have to admit that, by the end, I wasn’t sure whether I was crying out of empathy or because I associate the long walk to Red Hook with lonelier times in my life. Aren’t you just always looking back at your slightly-younger self so tenderly? (Red (Taylor’s Version) TM) I ghosted my therapist last week! I never want to speak to her again!
Nathan met me at San Pedro Inn, a beloved Mexican restaurant and bar on Pioneer Street, after I’d already been there for about 15 minutes drinking rum and simple syrup (?) and reading part of a novel narrated by a lady Catholic priest. You could say I was ready to go absolutely wild.
We were headed down the street to the Pioneer Works art complex to listen to a “cold reading” of portions of Gary Indiana’s 2003 novel Do Everything in the Dark, which neither of us had ever read. I did read Depraved Indifference (2001) during the pandemic, finding it pleasantly insane but the characters thinly-drawn… Not to pose as an intellectual when candidly we did spend our first half-hour at the event talking about a reality TV personality’s potentially dangerous weight-loss and getting “toasted” by the fire in the backyard—I took my $12 mulled wine back up to the bartender and said “I think this is cider?” and she looked at me like I was too stupid to live—which was surrounded by people in better pants and with quieter speaking voices. (I wish Lizzie had been with us, but she’s going to a different event at Pioneer Works in a few days. You can’t be crossing Brooklyn on a weeknight just all the time.)
Why were we there? Well, we like Red Hook. And the book had a good title. And maybe we’re self-conscious about the ways in which we’ve been spending our time—playing euchre, watching Halloween Kills, tweeting about Kyle Richards (me only). I thought it would be good to sit in a folding chair and feel a little bit uncomfortable and zoned-out, but also as if I were doing something good for my soul and community. (The reading was free, so I’m not sure how much I contributed on that last point.) I thought I could look elegant if I tried, and Nathan got me a plastic cup of red wine to sip during the reading because I was too embarrassed to interact with the bar staff again. After we picked out our seats, some publicist types walked Gary Indiana in through the side door directly in front of us, and my thought was “my outfit?” (Target button-down, black jeans, Sandy Liang denim trench-coat I got second-hand on The Real Real but still paid $275 for; it is shocking to me that I did that), which just goes to show how even the slightest amount of fame is a huge responsibility, and how the existence of celebrity is mortifying for us all. Gary Indiana didn’t care about my outfit. And as I said, I’m not even a huge fan of Gary Indiana’s. I’m not proud of feeling instinctively fluttery when he was near us. I felt the same when I saw Busy Phillips crossing the street near Union Square last week in a maxi dress that was totally inappropriate for the season. What do I even care about her? Yet, I felt like I should text someone.
(Certainly “Gary Indiana” is a pen name. If I did have to make conversation with him… maybe I would talk about how some woman from Tumblr has become obsessed with the notion that “Kaitlyn Tiffany” is a pseudonym, like when girls go by their first name and their middle name on Facebook, and has been emailing all of my colleagues to demand my real identity.)
I sat still. After another half an hour of everyone sitting around, a group of five or six literary personalities were introduced as the night’s readers. I gasped aloud when one of the names was read, since I hadn’t brought my glasses and hadn’t actually been able to tell who anyone was by sight. Nathan said “Who is that?” So, I had to explain one of my parasocial relationships to him, quickly and inadequately. I whispered because I didn’t want anyone around us to notice. I know if I ever overheard somebody else saying “Oh! And she goes to Lucien,” I would mime falling down dead on the floor from second-hand embarrassment.
The reading was nice. There was a lot of talk about dinners and relationship dynamics. It was kind of boring, like all readings are. Nathan laughed so loud at a line about having sex with someone while they’re asleep. It was my fault—he was laughing because a crude thing that one of the husbands on the Real Housewives of Salt Lake City announced recently at “boys’ night” was “Meredith says we can have sex whenever I want, as long as I don’t wake her up,” and we’d discussed how insane that comment was for a while, because it was so insane. I’d done a very hammy impression of Seth (the husband) saying this to his boys. While Nathan was laughing he was like, “We were just talking about that,” and again I was like, I pray no one around us cares what we are saying. Of course, while I was a little stressed about this laugh, I still thought he looked amazing while doing it! (He was wearing a sweatshirt my mom bought him that says “Conesus Lake.”)
Another reader pronounced “indefatigable” in a way that was unfamiliar to me and made me decide I had been saying it incorrectly always. I shared this with Nathan and he was like, no… I think that guy was wrong. But he wasn’t sure. When it was nearly over, I realized that each reader had been doing one specific character from the novel and had not been reciting totally random paragraphs. Honestly, it was exhilarating just to be back in a public environment where one can have really no idea what’s going on and can fear being judged!
I bought the book. (In paperback.) In part because it was about New York and Santa Fe which are my two favorite places in America—I’m no original. But mostly because I’d perked up and made a note in my phone at the point where I’d heard one of the readers say “famous people,” and I thought it would be nice to reference that in this newsletter as if there had been some connection. If I could find the sentence, it would be a nice way to wrap things up.
The next morning, when I searched the phrase in the Amazon sample of the book—which obviously, in the light of day, was easier than reading the whole thing in search of two words—it didn’t come up. Page 26 had a lot of repeated uses of “people” though, which seemed promising. Unfortunately, page 25 wasn’t included in the sample.
Finally… I consulted the physical text.
I got this:
Nice.
I actually read a lot, usually!! Just not right now.