On Tuesday night, I attended an event called “An Evening With Harry, Carrie & Garp” at Radio City Music Hall, which was a benefit reading by J.K. Rowling (Harry), Stephen King (Carrie), and John Irving (Garp).  The event was put on to benefit The Haven Foundation and Doctors Without Borders. 

I was up in the cheap seats; in fact, I was just about as far away from the stage as you can be and still be inside Radio City (there was one row behind me).  Stephen King read his story “The Revenge of Lard Ass Hogan” (which is itself part of the story “The Body,” which was filmed as Stand By Me).  If you saw the movie, you might remember it: it’s the story about the fat kid at the pie eating contest.  It’s a great story to read live, because of all the groans (because it’s gross) and laughs (because gross can be funny) it provokes from the audience.

J.K. Rowling read a bit from the latest Potter book; the section she read had Harry going back in time to witness Tom Riddle’s acceptance into Hogwarts.  John Irving read part of his novel A Prayer for Owen Meany.  Rowling did a great job with her reading; she was very natural and confident, and the portion she read worked fine for me, even though I haven’t read the books, so it was a good selection.  Irving’s reading was good as well, though it was a bit awkward hearing him do a falsetto voice for Owen Meaney; it was really necessary considering Owen’s character, but Irving didn’t quite pull it off — it was a bit too hammy for my liking.  The excerpt he read was entertaining, but slight; I know the book’s much more profound than the bit he read, but I guess he wanted to go with something more light and amusing. 

Whoopi Goldberg did the primary introduction to the event, and a bunch of other “surprise guest” presenters introduced the authors themselves.  Whoopi was pretty lame; it was clear she hadn’t even read the script before getting up to the podium.  She was reading it off the teleprompter, but kept stumbling over her lines, and even mocked the script at one point after reading something clunky (and immediately afterward, she proceeded to skip ahead a bit).  Whoopi claimed to have read every one of the authors’ books, so I guess that’s why she was there.

Kathy Bates was there to introduce Stephen King, appropriate since she’s his “#1 Fan.”  Andre Braugher introduced John Irving; why, I don’t know.  I guess they couldn’t get someone from one of his movies?  Jon Stewart introduced J.K. Rowling, which also didn’t make much sense, but he was funny and charming, even if he did recycle a joke about Mel Gibson’s drunken anti-Semitic rant from the previous night’s The Daily Show.

After the readings were done, there was a brief Q&A period, MCed by Soledad O’Brian.  Rowling got some good questions by detail-obsessed fans, but King’s and Irving’s questions were all pretty stock.  King’s in particular were lame.  He got “What scares you?” and “How do you write those crazy stories (without being demented yourself)?”  Yeah, like Stephen King has never heard *those* questions before.  Soledad claimed that they had received over 1000 questions for the panel (asked in advance, via email by ticketholders); if those were the best they got, I’d hate to see what the other ones were like. 

My only real complaint about the event though was the sound; maybe it was just because I was sitting so freaking far away, but I had a hard time hearing some of the authors and presenters at times.  There wasn’t much amplification going on, it seemed.  Oh, and I wished that the authors had read something new or unpublished–something from a forthcoming work, rather than stuff already in print. 

But, overall, a fun event, for a worthy cause.  And as Stephen King pointed out: it’s pretty cool to have filled Radio City Music Hall not with the promise of guitars, but with the promise of words.

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David Louis Edelman’s recent blog post about speed limits reminded me to blog about my own recent experience with speed limits which was not at all happy-making.

Some time in May, I was driving my grandfather’s car because mine was in the shop. I get pulled over for speeding: 45 in a 25. But the best part was, my grandfather’s registration somehow expired, so I got a ticket for that too, plus the cop towed the car. He was a real ball-buster, this guy. For instance, if he had written me up for 19 mph over the limit, my ticket would have been $95 less. But because he wrote it for 20, the ticket is $200. Cops like this guy are why even law-abiding citizens hate cops sometimes.

Luckily, it didn’t cause a major transportation issue–I was actually working at the time, going to the post office to pick up the mail. So Gordon just came and picked me up, then gave me a ride home later, and I picked up my own car from the shop.

I didn’t even realize that stretch of road had a 25 mph limit; I didn’t even realize I was speeding. Here’s where Edelman’s a national database of speed limit information would have come in handy.

So far, all of this sucked pretty majorly, but there’s more. In the end, this turned out to be like a eight hundred dollar ticket. It was $200 for speeding, $54 for the expired registration. And I didn’t realize that they towing company was charging $35 per day for “storage,” so the car was sitting there a couple days. By the time I pick it up, it cost me $310 to get it out. And then I had to have them tow it all the way from Union City to Perth Amboy (home, 27 miles, another $175) because I couldn’t get the registration sorted out right away, and I figured by the time I waded through the red tape, it would be cheaper just to have them tow it here, rather than leave it there at $35 a day. (See, because you can’t just drive it out of the lot unless you get the registration fixed; it’s illegal for them to release it to you without a valid registration, and you can’t park an unregistered car on the street either, so I couldn’t get them to tow it to a parking space.)

And then there’s tow truck place itself. It was like a scene out of a horror novel. The bathroom was broken, and it REEKED of piss and god knows what. The driver was this giantic behemoth who looked like he didn’t even need a tow truck–he could just pull the cars with his bare hands. Kind of a scary dude. Plus he starts jabbering away in some strange language. It was Russian or some Eastern European language, I guess. His last name was something -vich. His demeanor was softened somewhat by the fact that his five-year-old kid was wandering around the office. If it wasn’t for the kid, there would have been no witnesses, and the guy could have just murdered me and took my cash and no one would have known. See, he only takes cash, and he knew I had to bring him like $500. Would have been an easy set up for a mugging.

But anyway, first, I talked to the guy on the phone, told him I’d be there in an hour. I’m there right on time, and he’s not there. No one is there. I call him; he’s out on a job. Says I should have called before I came over. I said I did call. So I have to wait like a half hour for him to come down there and take all my money. Then, he couldn’t tow it right then. He said he’d do it later that night, or the next day. So he didn’t do it that night, so I had to rearrange my work schedule so that I could be home when the tow arrived. And it took all day for them to get it over here.

So, a pretty wretched adventure all around, wouldn’t you say?

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And speaking of Camera Obscura… I got my first piece of reviewer fan mail the other day. Well, not so much fan mail, as mail to point out a misconception on my part. You can read it (and other letters) at IGMS’s Letters to the Editor column. Do feel free to drop them a line to say how wonderful I am.

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