Well, it was an interesting old day down at Kepler’s Books. We had Candace Bushnell, the author of Sex and the City, reading in the store today. It was the largest event I’ve worked during yet, which I suppose is a good dry run to the David Sedaris event on Sunday that everyone is terrified of (God knows what will happen if we get Clinton).
The Bushnell audience was an interesting bunch; not our usual clientele. Lots of pink. Lots of high schoolers who I suspect were trying for a sophisticated and sexy look, but, well, yeah. Some things a sixteen-year-old just can’t do. A fair number of dumpy, testy-looking women, which I’m not sure how to interpret.
And as the owner observed, everybody was on their cell phone.
Bushnell herself was an interesting character, though I suspect she’s a better writer than a reader. Her voice sounds at least fifteen to twenty years younger than she must be, given that she was writing magazine articles in the eighties. She had some entertaining anecdotes about people having sex in cedar closets, but her Argentinean accent is poor.
I had a pair of customers in a row who I feel were iconic of something: first, the perky Jewish blonde teenager in a pink tank top who bought Bushnell’s book with a hundred-dollar bill, and second, the exotic henna-fingered brunette teenager in a gray tank top who tried to buy a Sedaris book with a credit card that was declined and had no other means of paying.
Then, alas, the low point of the evening. I had to sell someone one of the Acorna books. With the frickin’ sacred temple cats. There is no God.