Sedaris

Last night I spent four hours waiting in a line of well-read, dry-humored people, fending my ever-impatient mother off by either telling her that it would only be ten minutes more or that I would owe her a kidney should she ever need one. She agreed at the end of the night, as we tried to find our way home from deep in the heart of Los Angeles at 11:36, that, yes, I would definitely owe her a kidney.

As I waited, I spoke with many brilliant and equally interesting people. One older woman talked to me about her own troubles with learning French (Like Sedaris) as she had bought a house in France in the first hour that she had arrived in the country with her husband. I thought this was a little Diane Laine but said nothing but "Wow."
David Sedaris, in hopes of keeping his fans pleased, I imagine, read essays and then passages from his own diary. Many were about Breast Milk- the theme of his tour, as he told us- all were hysterical.

"Ladies," He read from his diary in a passage about a fake Weight Watchers meeting, "You cannot tell me that you've never turned your own breast milk into butter and then slathered that butter on fudge and pressed pecans into it, because I know you have. If you denied that, you wouldn't be just big and fat, you'd be big, fat liars." The crowd nearly wet their pants.

When I finally got up to see David Sedaris, right after I a rousing discussion with Sedaris' publicist's assistant (sweet lady) about changing my name to Bianc-O thanks to the odd way that the man who wrote out my name for Sedaris makes his A's, he turned out to be (despite some awful things that he writes about himself in his books, that we all secretly enjoy) an incredibly sweet, humble, hungry man. And funny. But that goes without saying.

I had just made a new friend, Vanessa, (Or Vaness-O, depending on who you ask) and she agreed to go up and talk to David with me, so neither of us would have to be alone. David Sedaris snatched up my books (In an completely non-rude way, of course) and began to doodle a turtle with Abraham Lincoln's face (or an Abraham Lincoln with a turtle body, depending on how one looks at it, I suppose) in my copy of When You Are Engulfed In Flames. At the same time, he aptly stuffed lettuce leaves in his mouth from his delicious looking (I hadn't eaten since lunch and lunch had been watermelon and popcorn) salad. He looked at me apologetically when I said hello, because of his current speech incapabilities.

"Don't worry," I said, "I'm glad to see you're eating, we worry, sometimes, about whether famous people get enough to eat." I was speaking for Vanessa and myself.

"You worry about me?" Asked David Sedaris through a mouthful of leaves (his mouth closed, of course, making his voice sound muffled but sentimental).

"Yes, of course," I said, "Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and think to myself 'I hope David Sedaris got enough to eat today'."

He dismissed my made-up-on-the-spot fears by telling Vanessa and I just how much he ate when he was on tour, and how much he gained at these times. "When Hugh and I go back to Normandy," he confided, "I call it camp Pugslington."

After a few moments of discussion about the cat he had drawn in Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim ("It's a cat that got in a fight." He declared quite seriously, to which I replied, jokingly, of course, "Sometimes I wish my cat could get in a fight and not make it out alive.") I finally pounced on my last chance to ask him my main question, the one I had mulled over for hours.

"Are you still afraid?" I asked. "Of the zombies? I'm terrified every time I pass a graveyard, are you still afraid of them?"

"I think about them all the time."