...but I'm *finally* home. We had the second event in our Bryan Series tonight, a lecture by Isabel Allende. I didn't stay for the whole thing, having gotten to speak with her this afternoon during the student session. I knew she'd be fabulous, and she was. She's also about three-and-a-half feet tall, and quite possibly the most beautiful woman I've ever met in person.
This was technically my first Bryan Series event, seeing as how I didn't make it too far into the first one. Yep, I spent the evening getting steroid shots and cursing the catering staff at the Coliseum for not labeling the peanut sauce. (Seriously, in this day and age, you'd think that would be a no-brainer...) And apparently the word got out, because I had no fewer than four dozen people either ask me if I were okay or warn me not to eat the brownies - which is nice, but it's not the obvious, apparent nuts that bother me. But it's nice to be known for something, I guess!
Even one of the wait staff remembered me. When I was going through the buffet line, I noticed the exact same chicken entree that nearly killed me last time. She leaned across the table and said, "It's okay, it's a different sauce this time." Nice, but I skipped it anyway.
My main responsibility for the evening was to gather the cards with audience-member questions, cull the dopey ones and pass them off to the Q&A moderator. Simple, right? Except that, as of about five minutes into her lecture, we still only had maybe four or five questions. I'd been told to mix in a few "ringers" - questions I wrote myself - if necessary, which I really didn't want to do, since a) it struck me as a trifle unethical, and b) I've never actually read any of Allende's books (though I did have the Antonio Banderas-featuring movie poster from "House of the Spirits" on my wall back in the day).
If all people wanted to hear about was the 1973 military coup against Allende's uncle Salvador, then the socialist (but democratically elected) president of Chile, I could've popped out the Q's all night. I might've even managed to write one about why Latin America produces so many writers in the magical realism genre (is it cultural, or is it simply that those are the authors that get published? Isn't there a Chilean Sebastian Junger or Anne Rice or Elmore Leonard out there?) - but alas, someone beat me to it.
I was beginning to mildly freak out about this, when an usher who'd apparently been hoarding a stash of audience cards found me in the lobby. Whew! I handed them off to the moderator, and I was out of there.
So now I'm home, sipping a Rolling Rock, checking MySpace for the first time in days and fuming about that high-handed SOB Henry Kissinger, U2's "Mothers of the Disappeared" running through my head. (Great song, by the way.) There's no way I'm going to be able to stay up for "Nip/Tuck" later tonight, and that's probably a good thing - I don't think I could handle the cognitive dissonance right now.
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