I drove from Charlottesville down to North Carolina, through winding, rolling hills of horse country to go visit my aunt Beverly and uncle Hugh in a wonderful, nearly magical retirement community on the outskirts of Chapel Hill, where Beverly taught for a long time and Hugh is a New England transplant, and contender for loveliest man on earth. Thanks to Beverly for the photos, including this one of the fantastic large reading glasses at her local bookstore, McIntyre's:
Beverly is an emeritus distinguished professor who doubles as an eerily compelling PR. Her background is in performance and so she knows how to drum up a crowd. Also, communities of retired people seem to have time for ideas. Fearrington Village, and Galloway Ridge in particular, is a seriously competitive bridge-playing zone.
I arrived the eve of the reading, and walking to dinner, Beverly explained to literally every person we saw that I was reading the next day at the bookstore. The next day, waves of people filled up the reading room at McIntyre’s Books. Candy and Steve. . .
Candy, Beverly’s friend who teaches science and once gave me (upon request) a Periodic Table of the Elements t-shirt, helped me plug in the video camera to record the talk.
Carol, a retired professor of journalism, was an early arriver:
Clara Golay Bradford later introduced me to lovely people at the Greenville Museum of Art in South Carolina:
I don't have enough pictures here. My friend Katy’s parents, Peter and Carolyn Thomas (Canon Thomas had been a priest at our church growing up), came back early from a trip to be there. Many others joined -- too many to properly name, but I was grateful to everyone for responding to Beverly's Jedi inducement to join.
I read an entire chapter. Word for word, no paragraphs skipped.
It is possible that it took twenty minutes longer than I thought it did. Every time I looked up at my aunt, she was beaming with attention and quiet assurance. I had once seen her be part of a two-person audience for a one-woman Edith Wharton show, and I realized I was the beneficiary of all of her experience.
One of the most curious questions in the Q&A came from an unidentified man in the back row who asked, “Why don’t they make you pay to leave museums?” I thought but didn't say that it was sort of like the the fact that you only pay tolls in one direction on the Holland Tunnel, going to New York, but being from Alabama it is cliche to make New Jersey jokes.
Afterwards, a woman came up to me and asked, “Do you know who I am?” It took me a minute to realize she was Ann Hull, who had worked with my dad all through the eighties. She said she had seen my name in the paper, wondered if it was the same person she had once known--she put an arm out to her chest to show the height I had been--and thought she would drive over to see. Then she (re)introduced me to her husband, Wendell, who was the unidentified man from the back row.
Beverly--having a talent in celebration, as well as publicity and active listening--hosted a champagne party with Hugh afterwards. Ann and her husband came. As did Vera, the first person to come to a reading who is also in the book (in the long riff on stories vs. numbers in the chapter Exhibitionism and Appreciation, p. 132 "lively brown saucer eyes glowing from ten feet away"). Here is Vera with the book:
I gave Vera a ride home after the party, and she, more than most people I know, truly lives with art --walls covered with lively drawings and bright water colors, things she loves, each one with a story she knows by heart.
In only my third city stop, I might have already had two lobster moments but also one magical retirement community reading.
Here is a picture of Vera at her surprise birthday party a couple of weeks later:
With Beverly above and Hugh below.
Postscript
Later in my visit, Beverly and I talked about practicing reading, and she said something that stuck: First, people underestimate the importance of practice. It is so important. But then, secondarily, people think that practice itself is repeating something over and over to learn it by rote. Rehearsal is something very different. It is where things happen, it is the creative space--the canvas--of performance. It is where you try things out, learn things, develop things. Practice is going in and coming out with the same thing, just stamped down and memorized. In rehearsal, you don't know at the beginning exactly what you are going to get a the end.
In the interest of traffic safety, I bypassed the suggestion to print out the manuscript really large so that I could rehearse in the car as I drove.
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