Not Gonna Lie: Nothing Cooler Will Ever Happen to Me in My Life, That's a Wrap, The End!

I won’t lie you guys. Nothing cooler has ever happened to me in my life than what happened in the span of 8 hours yesterday afternoon. Aside from giving birth to my kids, I mean, which is a whole other adventure and not necessarily as fun and painless as this was. 

The writer David Sedaris was in Juneau on his book tour. He was here a few years ago too, but due to a family medical emergency, I had to give away my tickets. This time I had a ticket to the show and was looking forward to a girls' night out, listening to his readings at the Juneau Douglas High School Auditorium after watching my daughter perform in a jazz concert elsewhere downtown.

The afternoon of the show, a friend of mine who works for the radio station that was sponsoring the event called me. She was David's—can I call him David? Mr. Sedaris? DS? I don't even know—anyway, she was his local tour guide, as she’d been several years earlier, and she asked if I wanted to join them for lunch in an hour. "I just think you guys would hit it off," she said.

"Hmm. Let me think about that. Do I want a private audience with one of my all-time literary idols? Whose work I read religiously and whom I have modeled my writing after for years and could only hope to be half as good as? Um, yes please." 

Play it cool, BE CHILL. I thought to myself. Conduct yourself like Steve in the Tao of Steve. Be excellent. Be desireless. Be gone. In other words: don't be thirsty. I can do this, I thought. I was fan-girling hard and I hadn't even left my chair; at this point I was just grateful I'd dressed up for work that day. I knew this was the opportunity of a lifetime--to meet someone whose work I’d admired for so long. How was I going to act normal? 

I had to be myself. “Self,” I told myself, “be you.”

We went to lunch at a local restaurant with a nice view of the water and, as I tend to do when I'm nervous, I just kept talking. 

I'm a nervous talker. I don't sit well with silence when I'm nervous. I just talk and talk and talk. I talked about Alaska and Twitter (which he is not on). I talked about politics and my lawsuit. I talked about relationships and parenting. I talked about books and fitbits and garbage bears and the zombie apocalypse. 

My friend--and his friend who was traveling with him--did their level best to get a word or two in edgewise. But I just kept talking. He did a bunch of talking too, but in my head, I was thinking, as I always do, "you're talking too much. Stop talking." But he was smiling in his warm, affable way--even taking out a notepad to scribble things down—THINGS THAT I WAS SAYING, APPARENTLY?!—every now and then. So I was encouraged (or at least not discouraged) to continue running my mouth; before I knew it, two hours had passed.

My friend and I both had to leave to pick up our kids at school. Their group walked in one direction and I went in the other. "Wait wait wait--Libby!" I heard him say, and he turned around and walked back toward me. I turned around and started walking back toward him. "Would you like to open my show tonight?"

Well. WEEEEELLLLLL.

I don't need to tell you that I almost dropped dead of shock and excitement right then and there, which of course he must have known, because who wouldn't feel that way in my position. Nonetheless, I tried to react modestly BUT/AND ALSO like a literary luminary asking me to open the last stop on his book tour with my random blog posts that he hadn’t seen and only learned existed an hour ago happens to me every other Wednesday.

“Um ... really? Ok?" I said. "Yeah, just read a few things, maybe 10 minutes or so?" My brain was racing as I tried to digest this mind-blowing invitation and then I pivoted quickly to OMG SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT WHAT AM I GOING TO READ?!

I raced back to my laptop and started scouring my blog for posts that I thought would work as an opener for an event like this. "You think you can hang with David Sedaris," I muttered to myself. "You better find some material that proves it—and FAST." 

It was 3:00 p.m. and the show was at 7:00. I had to be there at 6:00. I dug around in some promising labels on my blog and came up with these three posts: Old Sturbridge Village Failed to Make the Desired Impact on Me, You'll Never Guess What I Learned on My First Whale Watching Trip, and The Accidental I Love You: I sent them to a few friends who green-lighted them for topic, tone, and length. 

PHEW. Ok. I am ready for this!

I went to my daughter's band concert and then over to the auditorium for the show. Alone in the student drama room, I found a wrapped Lifestyles condom on the floor and mused with relief that at least These Kids Today (TM) are practicing safe sex. I looked myself over in the mirror and again congratulated my 8:00 a.m. self for dressing up and wearing makeup. 

David Sedaris asked me how to pronounce my last name, and this is what he said to introduce me — (Wait … HE is going to introduce ME? First?!) He said:

“I had lunch with someone today and I was just so enchanted by her. I can’t remember the last time I met somebody and laughed that hard. And I know that she writes, so I said ‘Please open for me. Please come and read a little something?’ And so, I don’t know, on two hours notice or something she said, ‘um, Okay.’  So here she is, Libby Bakalar.” 

He said ENCHANTED. I made him laugh harder than he could remember laughing! I DIIED. I really and truly and fully DIIIIEEEEED.

But I got up there and read my three blog posts. I tried to read slowly but stick to my time. People seemed receptive; I got some laughs. I sat backstage and listened to the show and marveled at his genius. He talked about David Foster Wallace, one of his idols and an undisputed genius also. I thought about how everyone has their idols and how modesty and authentic self-deprecation are underrated. 

After the show he asked me to repeat a few things I’d said so I handed him the printouts of my reading. CBS 60 Minutes was recording the show, so no other recording was allowed. Thus, my 9 minutes and 58 seconds of fame remain undocumented for posterity.

I thanked him for an amazing opportunity and he commented that I seemed comfortable with public speaking, and that the audience seemed to know me already. “Yeah …” I said. “It’s Juneau, and I’m a loudmouth lawyer. So that explains that!” 

I asked him if it was tiring for him to be “on” for so long and sign so many books. He said no, and also he’s been on the other side of the table plenty of times. I said “it’s hard, you know, because these are really special, once-in-a-lifetime interactions for people, and for you it’s kind of just another day in the office. Kind of like when you go into the hospital to have a baby, and it’s the doctor’s fifth delivery of the week, but for you it’s only ever going to happen once or at most, a few times.” 

Ugh. I was talking too much again, I could feel it.

But here stood a person who is just so open and genuine. Who obviously knew, that despite all my efforts to act nonchalant, I was over the moon about this. During his reading, he plugged and read from a novel by a young woman author named Patricia Lockwood; her book, “Nobody is Talking About This,” was already on my Goodreads list to order and read. He spoke so lovingly about his relationships and animals. He was, as ever, hilarious and self-effacing. Best of all, he was quietly, naturally, and un-ostentatiously using his fame and platform to uplift others. 

Sometimes our idols disappoint us. I’ve known many occasions where someone meets a musician, a writer, an actor they admire—and they just feel snubbed and rejected and terrible. This was the complete opposite of that. I’d always told myself that I’d get along with David Sedaris if I just got to meet him—and DAYENU as we say at Passover— that would have been enough!

The fact that I got to perform with him was truly next level. This is one lunch I’ll be dining out on for the rest of my life.

Crisis of Competence

I don't want to survive the Zombie Apocalypse, which is one of the reasons I don't have a disaster prep kit. I've written about this before, but I'd like to go out with the first wave. I was born in the age of Costco guacamole, and if I can't drive to Costco and buy a six-pack of mini guacamoles, then I don't want to live. It's that simple. 

Some people shoot their own hot dogs and grow (?) their own sourdough starter, but I'm going to starve in the end, and I am fine with that. Except that my level of incompetence is embarrassing and demoralizing, made worse by decades of living in Alaska where everyone seems to know intuitively how to not just survive, but THRIVE, for ten days in a snowbank with nothing but a scrap of fur and a matchstick.

But think of the children! What about your kids? Fortunately, they're growing up in Alaska and already know how to do a lot more useful things than I ever will.

I can't even sew a button onto a peacoat or fix a windshield wiper. Last week I called a friend to come to my office and help me with this button. My mom taught me how to sew, mind you; but rather than sew things, I would just walk around with loose buttons and holes in my clothes until they were too damaged to be of use any longer. Both my friend and I are former east coasters raised by striving academic Jews who, just a generation or two removed from Ellis Island, believed that the secret to conquering the American Dream was memorizing Latin declensions and Shakespeare sonnets and deriving equations in AP calculus. Between our two Ivy League degrees, we could barely sew a fucking button. My friend is also half blind, so we just sat there on the floor, huddled over my coat and laughing uproariously at our own ineptitude as I thread the needle and she tried to sew this button onto my coat.

Today one of my windshield wipers was acting kind of wonky after I'd had my car serviced. After inspecting the wipers for 15 minutes, I concluded that a piece was missing and went back to the service station to ask about it. The mechanic pushed the blade back up into the plastic housing of the wiper and looked at me like I was the biggest moron on earth and like . . . I FELT that, as the kids say.

I have an expensive education that I worked hard for and that I like to think I've used and continue to use for the greater good somehow. And I'm proud to say that I've never been voluntarily unemployed for a day in my life since age 17. But my lack of practical skills is really demoralizing and embarrassing. For numerous reasons that are too painful and private to get into right now, I'm going be jumping feet first into learning how to do a lot more practical things for myself, and while I welcome the opportunity to learn new things, I hate being terrible at stuff and I hate the embarrassment of incompetence.

Fortunately there'sYouTube and Google, which go a long way, but I still have a very long way to go even from there. It's kind of a shame spiral: I lack confidence in myself when it comes to things like basic car and house repair; home economics; computer and tech issues; pre-fab furniture assembly; etc. etc. Then the more confidence I lack, the more my neuroses kick in: I'm a bad feminist because I always count on some man to rescue me from a flat tire or a dead battery. I'm a spoiled princess because I was never made to learn these things. All my friends in Alaska--women!--know how to do this stuff. How can I STILL not know how to do this? I grew up in a city. I've never really mowed a lawn. I don't know how to garden and I can't tell lettuce from poison ivy. I resent myself and the adults who deprived me of these important skill sets. I resent myself for not forcing myself to learn them.

Recently I read a book called Breath by James Nestor. The subtitle was "The New Science of a Lost Art," but it might as well have been "Here's Another Thing You're Doing Wrong." The book was all about how regulating our breath is basically the secret to eternal health, mouth breathing is worse for you than smoking, and our teeth are all fucked up because of the soft foods we eat and the amount of snoring we do at night. 

But what I took away from the book was that here's one more thing I'm doing wrong that I need to fix. Something that I had heretofore thought was completely automatic turns out not to be automatic at all, but rather yet another thing that I can and should consciously change immediately, or otherwise court an early death. 

I'm sure eventually, if I just keep at it, fixing a dead car battery or troubleshooting a boiler will feel as automatic as breathing -- which is to say, something I've been doing wrong all along and will probably never learn how to do right.