Wonder Boy and I had a fun-filled weekend that began with belly dancers and ended with NASCAR. Can it get any better?
On Saturday night we headed downtown to watch Ira Glass, host of This American Life on NPR, speak as the keynote speaker for Cincinnati Writer’s Weekend. He spoke in a beautiful old hall and the place was packed with liberal public radio listeners. I have never seen so many black glasses frames!
Ira was good, as we knew he would be. He got me fired up about writing and being creative and reminded me why I do what I do. He explained his process for making This American Life such a popular, well-listened to show and how you could apply it to other things. But mainly he showed how you can take the process of being a good creative writer and radio host and apply that to giving an excellent speech.
Wonder Boy and were fired up with Ira Goodness so we headed back to my place (I had to change out of the newly purchased f-me shoes into something a little more practical) and headed up to a neighborhood bar. Now to explain, Wonder Boy and I recently bought a house in a college town. We live surrounded by students, and I like it. Students are funny and young and creative and unmarred by the realities that adults just accept as normal. They are also heavy drinkers, bad drunks and horrible parallel parkers.
At the bar on Saturday night, where they carded Wonder Boy and I to make us feel good, we sat at the bar next to people in various stages of drunk. A slurring-ly drunk girl and her friend approached three of the gentlemen at the bar explaining their mission to find a boy to take the one girl’s V card. (This same V card had been the cause of a break up the night before and what better way to snub you ex-boyfriend than to lose your virginity one night later in a night of random, drunken sex?) Of the three men at the bar, they didn’t approach the obvious, slutty chap, nor the semi-decent looking guy. No, they approached the nastiest of them. His reaction time, hindered by an evening of drinking, was slow and he was too busy being slack-jawed to say that he would, of course, deflower the drunken girl. This pause lost him the score and I am pretty sure, based on the water I saw her drinking later, that the girl kept her V card in tact for another night.
Now really, Ira and watching drunk college students. Does it get better?
Danny
It wasn’t that I couldn’t get the words out! I was actually choking on a potato skin and fighting to move air into my lungs. It’s hard to play it cool when you’re almost unconscious.
DAMN YOU, potato skins, for costing me a virgin.
Anonymous
Ira Glass. What a twit. You know his real name’s Ira Lucite. He just thinks Glass sounds better for the PRI audience.
Is he still taking credit for “discovering” David Sedaris? I hear David slapped the crap out of him one afternoon because David wanted to use the word ‘noodle’ in a segment. Ira insisted on ‘patcutanni,’ an obscure piece of pasta from the middle Roman Empire that originated in Stapucci – a small incidental village on the western coast. Better for the audience, he said. It pissed David off so much that he slapped him and called him a whore.
I can’t believe Ira still takes credit for his discovery.