The next time I play two truths and a lie, I have one of the truths sorted out: I have spoken on a panel with a man who wrote a book about the mystery of Jesus Christ's missing foreskin. Not just a book, apparently a very good one.
On March 9th, Mediabistro, the professional organization for writers, hosted its first "book group" and I was lucky to be selected for the line-up of four speakers.
Sort of fantastically, we met at an Irish sports bar in Gramercy Park. St Patrick’s Day decorations already in full force:
They turned off the large sports screen overhead of the panelists –which was sort of disappointing. I always like to see art and sport close together.
The bar filled up with literary hopefuls, friends of the panelists generally and, at the last minute, friendly faces in the form of Kari Elassal, former colleague, and Matt Alsdorf, college friend (we spent a year together as advisers in a freshman dorm).
The din of sports still carried from the front of the bar, causing one to have to project in a way that would have made my communications studies aunt proud.
We were all asked to read a two-minute excerpt from our respective books, and harkening back to a deep seated kindergarten feeling, I seemed to have been the only person who followed these directions, lending my non-artistic interpretation of our brief an unintentionally radical cast. The author of the foreskin book went first and read “the one bad review” he got. His book was accidentally assigned to a religion writer somewhere in Minnesota who was offended but also gave a good plot summary.
The mystery writer, author of Cemetery Road, read a longer excerpt, as it's a bit hard to get the arc and characters of a mystery introduced without a bit more time. The third speaker, who had written a novel about the college admissions process read a summary of a scene, which she had written expressly for this event.
I literally read the first page and a half of Museum Legs. I had timed myself to exactly two minutes on the walk over, which was a good thing as it was a hard to drown the noise for any great length of time and you didn't want to still be speaking when a team scored.
The next day, I flew to Telluride, Colorado, to visit my old college friend Cornelia. (She was a freshman dorm adviser the floor above Matt and me, and is also originally from Williamstown.)
Cornelia had recently left graduate school when her mother had become ill and, after her mother died, come to Telluride for the winter. Telluride is a town full of interesting people -- a place, as one of her friends said, "people come either to escape or to heal." Points if you can surmise where or how Cornelia got this hat:
I arrived the 10th, in anticipation of celebrating her birthday on the 12th. The timing was lucky, as I proceeded to spend the first two days with terrible altitude sickness, only really returning to the land of the living on the birthday morning. As someone who loves her sleep, I have no developed coping skills for insomnia, which, as you will read on the internet as you have ample time to do while having insomnia, is a key symptom of altitude sickness, along with feeling like you have the flu--with a racing heart--and a profound feeling that your body is not working and might break completely at any moment. Cornelia, bless her, got me a lot of saltines, soup, and ginger ale. A gallon of gatorade and some of the most delicious saltines I've ever tasted later, I was well enough to ski on her birthday.
We started the day with breakfast at the New Sheridan, the anchor, old-school hotel in town. Cornelia noticed that the artist whose work was on the walls, Roger Mason, was from Chatham, near Williamstown.
The clerk heard us and said, “He’s actually right outside.” Cornelia asked a guy on a bench, “Are you Roger Mason.” Just as he was saying, “No, I’m so and so” in a near perfect deadpan, our gaze adjusted behind him to a man (a) standing in the middle of the street, (b) with paintbrush and easel.
He is a man who seems to find synchronicity, smallworld-ness, and lack of surprise in this sort of run-in. He let me put paint on his canvas. He may or may not have flirted with Cornelia. Or he may be one of those people who is in a constant state of flirtation with life – he had fantastic stories. He said that whenever he has to come up with a title for a show, he asks a comedy writer friend. My favorite: Roger Mason: Light and Astigmatism. Here is the series of him and Cornelia in the street:
Here's a close-up of one of his paintings from a hallway at the New Sheridan. I love them because of the color and light. It's like he actually loves to paint, and it shows.
He let me (cheerfully insisted that I!) paint part of the snowy white at the top of one of the mountains of his work in progress mid-street.
We spent most of the rest of the day going cross country skiing – which Cornelia is gifted at and I tried gamely to do, feeling like I was doing a robot-man dance, since, as compared to downhill skiing, the motion is very much on a grid, not in the slightest curvy. Cornelia glides.
Telluride is an old Western town nestled in the box canyon (read: one way in, and one way out) that forms the mountain basin. Some local color:
The fabulous bookstore, where you can (a) happen to run into Kati Martin, the well known writer, bouncing in to sign books, or (b) sit in the back amidst "Ski. Sleep. Read." t-shirts having a coffee, or (c) browse for a vacation read and inadvertently end up with a Tom Wolfe tome (I Am Charlotte Simmons) that lodges in the brain with the same weight and staying power as its doorstop-like physical format.
The local bakery, a magical realm of cupcakes and sandwich boards and wild salmon and nice people and bright sun:
Odds and ends around town:
Super-local color of Cornelia and her dogs:
My favorite piece of local color was the "Eric Corff. . . What a Douchebag" campaign.
When I first arrived in town, I heard the story that two guys were escalating pranks and this was one.
Later the story turned into a version of "Eric Corff stole my girlfriend, not even in an inventive or chivalric way, ergo. . . ." You have to admire the simplicity, pervasiveness, and, well, message:
Telluride connects via a gondola to a more recently constructed ski town called Mountain Village, which is modeled on a European ski village. You could write a whole book about conversations that happen on the gondola – everyone has a story and the sheer slice of life angle is compelling. On the gondola over to get lift tickets sorted and sign up for the next day’s ski class, I road with two incredibly polite 10-year-old-ish boys. Them to me: “blah, blah, blah, half-pipe, broken collarbone.” Five minutes later, me to them: “Er, I have to be honest, I didn’t totally understand what you meant!” Further explanation ensued, bringing me up to a 25% comprehension.
At birthday dinner with Cornelia and her friend Kate – from high school, coincidentally lives there – we sat by chance next to the kids and their parents and grandparents. Small town. A certain breed of exceedingly polite, naturally athletic kids who ski with the ease I have walking.
We spent the late afternoon celebrating Corn's birthday with some of her friends, at a place that serves the "pizza dough meets donut" equivalent of a fried dough ball called "Beer Nuggets." Cornelia tries to call them "Beer Pods."
Telluride being a special town, you can meet all kind of people at the local bar (reference Cornelia's earlier hat photo). That night out, after Cornelia and I, surrounded by twenty three (and possibly sub-twenty-one year olds) got approached by the two oldest men in the bar, both demonstrably, objectively too old, ended up meeting a whole group of Croatian and Slovakian heli-skiers. Well, they had been heli-skiing that day and were recovering. (For people with ski knowledge like my own – it’s where a helicopter drops you at the top of a mountain so you can ski in untracked powder. But in a geologically unstable terrain like Telluride’s, they literally blast the mountain with dynamite before you can ski. If that causes an avalanche, you don’t ski. If nothing really moves, you are okay.)
The next day, I spent the morning in a group ski lesson that everyone but me no-showed, leaving me a de facto private lesson with the Zen ski master, Spike. Then Corn and I headed out for the day, joined by Alex of the heli-skiiers who was only able to stay remotely in range of my own skiing because he was "taking it easy" and on telemarks, instead of his regular snowboard. It was a little overcast, but you get a sense of the terrain:
The next day, we were joined by the assembled heli-skiiers, en masse. There was fresh powder and so, after a few practice runs, they headed up to the high chair lift. I don't mean to sell my own skiing short -- I love to ski and, for someone who grew up in Alabama, am intuitive and unafraid. I just don't do sheer cliff faces, or even garden variety moguls, and I adore the meandering, high-up-the-mountain greens and blues that are wide open with trees you can weave in and out of, the rhythm of distance running. It stresses me out to ski with people who are so fast and fearless I think I am making them wait all the time. Cornelia loyally stayed with me on the lower trails.
We met up with the heli-skiiers again later and their first question was about Karen. How did they know who Karen was? They were reading the sample chapter of Museum Legs on the high chair lift on somebody's phone. I think it's safe to say this is the most extreme athletic situation in which my (or maybe any) museum book has ever been read--even including the Grammercy sports bar. Alex's friend Branyo later explained, kindly and matter of factly, that he absolutely could not comprehend my style of writing. All the words made sense, but not the order.
A couple of days later -- after all the skiing, and the nice meals and festive mojitos at the bar, and time out on the town with Cornelia's friend Gena, and dog walks, and apres ski hot chocolate, and even a spot of shopping at "The Toggery" -- I headed back. We meandered on the drive out of the box canyon, stopping a couple of times to take pictures. Here is Ralph Lauren's local museum, when he's at the ranch:
And a few other things I stopped to photograph across the street:
We stopped to photograph because I hadn't called ahead to know that my flight had been cancelled. So, I arrived at the gargantuan (and unpatriotic) Montrose airport, to be told that I was a bit SOL and would likely get in the next day.
With some real luck and initiative on the part of the gate agent ("look I totally understand, but I actually do have a work meeting. . . "), I crammed one bag into another to make the carry-on limit, sacrificed a couple of full-sized beauty products at the x-ray machine, and--having come full circle from the earlier altitude sickness--absolutely legged it, sprinting across the tarmac and just barely making a flight that connected through Chicago. By coincidence, the same family with small children who had been on the flight there were on the flight back. Landed in New York late, late, and made it into the office the next day.
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