Well, I knew David Sedaris was big, I just didn’t know how big. This whole time I’ve been sitting around talking about icing and cupcakes and Amy Sedaris, I’ve also been sitting around not knowing how big David Sedaris is.

I was smug, so smug like a mug, walking up to the bookshop around six, a full hour before the reading was scheduled to start. Somewhere on the escalator heading upstairs, surrounded by hordes of young people all checked shirts and halter tops and plastic spectacles, and me just another one of them, I had the faint, growing understanding that I was about to be very, very wrong.

The seating section on the fourth floor was packed, packed like a pack, and I was herded into the standing-room-only area, where I stood, and marveled, and began to realize how big David Sedaris is. Some guy behind me was on his cellphone to a friend, and he said: “Yeah, I’m here but I’m willing to ditch this and meet you-all somewhere, it’s just not worth it, there are so many people here, it is almost like the other night at Tori Amos.” So apparently David Sedaris is almost as big as Tori Amos.

But one hour before the reading is scheduled to start is early days yet; one hour before the reading means there is one hour more for the masses to come teeming in. They came teeming in, then, and they were sitting on the floor to wait, and I didn’t know if I wanted to sit,
because—

and I don’t mean to be a diva about this—if you know something about me, it is perhaps that I am often quite eager to sprawl on the floor in an indecorous manner, but said floor is generally the floor of a good Chinese household where one doesn’t wear shoes indoors—

I didn’t know if I wanted to sit, because (a) I was in a white dress and (b) sitting would have meant sitting on the germ-trapping carpet of a very large Barnes & Noble, and who knows how many people had stepped in dog poo in the park first before coming in to look at New Hardcover Fiction.

So there I was, standing in the middle of a crowd of people sitting cross-legged on the floor, me a gangly stalk—one of those round, white, fragile blooms you can pick up in order to blow the pollen every which way in the wind—

me a gangly stalk in the middle of a newly shorn lawn—I am a hundred and fifty-seven centimeters tall, so this is not a feeling that is common for me, unless truly I am standing in a newly shorn lawn, then, okay, I am taller than grass—

I was standing there, and I looked over in a two o’clock direction, and I saw one other person standing, one other gangly stalk in the field. And this other gangly stalk looked, from the side, almost exactly like the ex: dark blond hair just so, tweed jacket and khakis just so, reading with his brow furrowed just so. And I thought fondly of the ex and his lawyerly exactitude, his preppy neuroses, and then I thought, Wait, am I just like him after all? And the almost-affinity with this non-ex, with this approximate-ex, was enough to make me want to promptly plop down on the floor, germs be damned, just to remind myself how opposite we were in the end...

And right then a store guy got on the mic to ask that everyone seated on the floor stand up to make more space for more people filing in, because David Sedaris is so big, approaching the bigness of Tori Amos, maybe even, by this point—twenty minutes before the scheduled start of the reading—exceeding the bigness of Tori Amos. “Will the people in the standing-room area stand up, please?” he said. “It is, um—” and then, here, with emphasis, “—Standing Room.” And then the head of he who was not the ex disappeared in the crowd.

Amy Sedaris was nowhere in sight, at least not in sight to me, but Lurlene pointed out, when I phoned her later, that Amy Sedaris likes to put on a disguise. So maybe Amy Sedaris was that large woman in a neck brace I passed on the way to the restroom, but I guess I’ll never know.

David Sedaris, eventually, spotted sporadically in the space between some girl’s dark, curly ’do and the curve of another woman’s neck, was small, in blue, and smiling. David Sedaris likes: monkeys, crossword puzzles, Richard Yates, and books on tape. He says “innerduction” for “introduction,” and the Southernness of his accent is charming on him where on a Texas State Trooper it is not so much.

Later, at dinner with Kat, I remembered that I’d thought, If David Sedaris and Amy Sedaris ask me out to dinner, I will have to ditch Kat, I will just have to do it. I suppose it was lucky for all that Kat and I kept our dinner date, because, at the end of it all—

I just want to interrupt and say that in the middle of it all, the sushi chefs at the bar yelled “hello” to someone, the way they will at these Japanese joints, and I jumped, I couldn’t help it, I was startled, and the sushi chefs chortled, oh, how they shook and chortled, and then one of them said to me: “Do not be afraid.” And now I return you to your regular programming, for at the end of it all—

at the end of it all, there was the surprising tastiness of a coconut tempura cheesecake.