You can't go home again when you're already there

I love appearing at this book group. The women reared their children along with my mother as she reared me and my siblings. (When their housekeepers weren't doing the heavy emotional lifting.) I'm trying to live in the present, seeing them as what my mother might be if she hadn't died in what I like to think was a freak accident on a tour of the Baltic that my sister never should have dragged her on to begin with.

But I digress.

I was invited to talk about A Little Bit Ruined. That was good. They would buy it, and a handful might read it and pass the word along to their offspring out of town. I profit from purchases of that book.  I've given away my portion of revenues from New Orleans Noir, and while I'd like to see it generate funds for good causes, I'm not going to stand alone in front of a crowd just for that book. And yet I had a sense we'd talk a little about it after I did a nice literary presentation about my novel.

And then, and then...

As an introduction my bio was read off lickety-split, and one of the women, Mrs. A., got up to do a little personal sidebar about my short story, in New Orleans Noir, all about the mean girls at Newman School, where of course most of them had sent their kids. Patty, she said, had been a fat girl, picked on by the mean girls, and that was what prompted the story. Yes, I had been fat. Everybody there probably remembered me as a fat kid. But I'd told Mrs. A. beforehand that I hadn't been picked on. I'd been ignored. I didn't bother to explain that I'd found a small circle of cerebral non-Jewish girls with whom I watched the shenanigans of the mean girls from the sidelines. Mrs. A. wasnt aware of my circle. Her daughter knew only the Jewish girls and, to her credit, was never mean. She was nice to me.

So what was I to do? I got up there and talked first about A Little Bit Ruined, and I flat-out said that part of the inspiration for it came from having had a very attractive plastic surgeon before Katrina who'd done some liposuction on me. I figured, Hey, you've seen me since I grew up. You know I didn't get 30 pounds sucked away. But I'll let you pretend I did!

Fat Patty was free! Fat Patty got up there and named names! I said that as long as they could get any Newman School directory and see who was in my class, I'd just rattle off who the girls were on whom I'd based the story. And I did it. Took all the gossip out of them. Those women in the story are still mean girls, still walking around New Orleans.  Who cares?

Unfortunately for me, I had to go from that performance straight to New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts to do a master class for creative writing students. I was still bursting with candor. So I kept on naming names. I came right out with the name of the plastic surgeon I said was "really hot," and then one girl burst out with, "Hey, he's my best friend's dad!"

This is a terribly small town.

Comments

[rebbetzin]

ah, patty!!! love it!!!!

[unknown]

You and Jimmy Carter, not holding back.

[hardbread]

Continue to be a truthspeaker, Patty. The world needs more emperor-has-no-clothes folk. Convention's applecart needs to be upset, full as it is of rotten fruit.

[Miriam Hirsch]

Tis good to pull the rug out from under people. Falling on their respective asses is a good learning experience for those types, they usually never get the priviledge.

[Missy mcCroskey]

Please let me treat you to lunch! I am a, how do you spell it , shicksa (gentile) who went to NewmN k-12, class of 1959. I just moved back to NOLA two years ago to discover who I would have been had I not run away from home at age 20 somehow I think you and I would connect. What say you?