A review of the David Sedaris reading - South Bend events | Examiner.

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A review of the David Sedaris reading

By Jessica Peri Ch..., South Bend Events Examiner
Related articles David Sedaris at the Morris Performing Arts Center this coming Monday

Last Monday, the 19th of April, Sedaris, a small man with a startlingly high voice sat before an almost-full auditorium on the stage of the Morris Center for Performing Arts. We were happy to see him in the flesh,

the fact that he was having to call on people without seeing who they were. He waved a vague hand towards the voices with questions. This part of the evenings entertainment was, maybe as a result, less than satisfying, as April Lidinsky also pointed out in her comments on the preview. At any rate, we were mostly content just to listen to The Sedaris, as we have come to think of him, considering his immense and growing reputation with readers and NPR listeners everywhere. We were content, as well, to see that, though he was at the tail end of what must have been an

leave open the possibility of being seen by them or, at least, if you are the kind who prefers to disappear into the dark of an auditorium, to see this person seeing others among you. We discovered that there was a wall of light between us and the man on the stage only during the question-and-answer period that followed the reading, when Sedaris joked awkwardly about

although eventually it became clear that, because of a spotlight directed right in his eyes, he couldnt quite see us -- which was disappointing for those of us who like the idea that a person on stage might inadvertently catch our eye, acknowledge our attention. As nice as it is to see a celebrity and watch them do their thing, its also nice to

exhausting 34-day tour of 34 cities, he was not too tired to read to yet another crowd of readers and admirers. After the introduction, he dove right into the reading, speaking calmly into the microphone as if he was talking to us from his living room couch or in some other more intimate place. He was admirably comfortable in front of us, as if, in some way, he knew us already as, in a sense, he already did. Without seeing us, he undoubtedly

knew that we would be mostly friendly, having laid out the necessary $30-$60. Friendly we were, though, looking around during the reading from the vantage of an orchestra seat, it was obvious that there were a few people, some of the more well-heeled customers in those more expensive seats, who hadnt known exactly what they were getting into when they purchased their tickets or had had them purchased for them. Only mildly amused, it seemed, was the mayor of South Bend since 1997, Steve Luecke, who was seated several rows ahead though perhaps his demeanor merely reflected the mask of public officialdom rather than any commentary on the entertainment before him.

We were, as a whole, an NPR crowd, with all the left-leaning and indie-movie-watching that the term implies. Although, as any performer can tell you, every audience is somewhat different from others, there are also definitive audience types. We were (and knew we were) an audience type and

the majority of us could, Sedaris knew, be counted on to laugh at most of the same places in his text as they did in all the other 33 cities on his tour. That predictability was probably noted by S. with some relief when there was mention of his boyfriend, Hugh -- a constant, unemphasized presence in the later stories and a kind of Alice B. Toklas figure to his Gertrude. When mentioned, the audience did not hiss, as surely S. considered might happen, considering this is a predominantly red and even red-necked kind of state. Instead, the audience responded with a laugh flavored by a

A review of the David Sedaris reading - South Bend events | Examiner.com

into bad-boy dialect on that one syllable, it reminded us of S.s beginnings as a performer of his own stories and how important that fact is to understanding his work. He is that thing that television was thought to have killed: a radio star. Hes a writer, but as much as he writes, he performs. Hes a vocal performer who got his start as a reader rather than writer. If Wikipedia is to be trusted, S. was discovered by NPR's Ira Glass while reading his stories at an open mike, launching his subsequent career in the deadpan world of This American Life and only then as a published author of many books. In the airport anecdote, a woman also standing on line commented negatively on the guy with the Motha Fokka shirt, and Sedaris recounted how he

hesitated before joining in, worrying about the womans motivation. Was the criticizer coming from a conservative position, he wondered, by which standards she would judge anybody who posed a challenge to the status quo? Getting the biggest laugh, S. claimed that he would join in the crit-fest gladly, but only if it was to be merely a snarky indulgence, a brief minor meanness that could be directed at many. That, he said, he could really

enjoy. The message, something like youve got to be careful when laughing with strangers, was more than a joke. It was a telling autobiographical bit about the job of a humorist like S., who depends for his livelihood on parsing out differences between kinds of laughter and the meanness that often provokes it. Meanness is easy, as the popularity of a show like ABCs Americas Funniest Home Videos attests, and, it seems, S. has started to reflect a bit on his own. Sedaris has actually come far since his early, more peevish days when his stories were often funny merely because they described bad behavior, including his own. The story of one relationships end comes to mind. Sedaris had a friend, a drinking buddy, who finally decided to quit and find help. The story describes Sedariss poor reception of his pals decision, his attempts to sabotage the guys sobriety and the way the guy finally ended the friendship. Sedaris, who also writes in passing about having quit drugs and alcohol himself in other, later stories, does not offer up his own behavior as a model of any kind. He does not, either, make any comment on the morality of his stance. Like the hilariously callous characters on Seinfeld, his unmasked selfishness is fascinating because it is not masked, in the usual way, behind a false display of good intentions. If anything, there is humility in his willingness to make an unabashed display of what everybody else keeps hidden.

A change was evident, though the stories Sedaris read on Monday were not moralistic. They were not teaching tales or tales with messages in any conventional sense. They did, however, seem to have a more highly developed moral sense behind them than the earlier stories, which in a way also makes them less funny. In one, a lengthy story about Australia (which, he remarked with a bit of the old snark, is a country like Canada, but with a

thong), S. spoke about a woman who compared the parts of life to the four burners on a stove. You have to shut off some of the burners in order to be successful, he reported she had said, telling him how she had decided at an early age to turn off the burner of family. He came back to this stove-top theory of success at the end -- endings being the proper place for such perorations -- saying that, without his family, his own success would not have been possible and would not even be meaningful today. Maybe its that the story was published in the New Yorker, a more well-heeled publication with readers expecting uplift as well as observation. Or maybe its simply part of growing up. S.s stories have so often involved the doings of his wacky family, whose charm is ever outweighed by their inability to show up. In one story, the alcoholic mom locks her kids out of the house so she can drink in peace. The glibness of the story does not render the story less poignant. In another story, the voluble dad toys with the

family, saying hes going to buy them a vacation house that, once seen, seems to answer all the needs and longings of each family member. He doesnt end up buying it, and S. doesnt dwell long on the disappointment of everyone in the story, but anybody wanting to make psychological sense of the callousness of his humor might do well to look at these early frustrations. The maturation of the man and the writer is inevitably also a product of their loosening hold.