Around 2:30 I was given ten minutes to address the assemblage and try to convince them my book What We Found in the Sofa and How It Saved the World is the greatest children’s book since Edward Gorey’s The Deranged Cousins, which turned out to be easy since most of the attendees had never heard of The Deranged Cousins, but things still went off on a possibly unfortunate tangent when I tried to justify the length of my book’s title by explaining that I grew up at a time when there was a fad for long titles and you could go to the movies and see Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb or attend a Broadway play called The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade, or see an off Broadway play called Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Momma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feeling So Sad or even take a flashlight under the covers with you and read Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask, which might have been giving out too much information about myself, and may have been the reason I noticed eyes starting to glaze over so I tried to get back to my prepared speech but discovered I had completely forgotten it, so I waded out into the audience and read the bumps on their heads instead, having been a phrenologist in a previous life.
The meet-and-greet later was easy, since everybody kept their distance.