Review: I Shudder: And Other Reactions to Life, Death and New Jersey by Paul Rudnick

Paul Rudnick is one of those names that I was complete unfamiliar with, until I read his book. As he told his stories, I kept thinking “oh! I remember Sister Act!” “I’ve heard of Allan Carr!” “He wrote The Addams Family? I never knew that!” It was part discovery, part reunion, full of funny bits, a little gossip, and some entirely fictional chapters that were, perhaps, my favorite parts. It is wickedly funny, even — maybe especially — when recounting the worst stories. All in all, it was a pleasure to read.

I Shudder isn’t exactly a memoir, although it’s full of funny stories about his family, his Hollywood contacts, the plays he’s written and the people he’s met. Between these stories, there is also a (hopefully) fictional memoir, “An Excerpt from the Most Deeply Intimate and Personal Diary of One Elyot Vionnet.” Elyot is a bizarre character, a semi-retired substitute teacher living in a perfect studio apartment that almost overlooks Gramercy Park. One worries about what he might be teaching those impressionable young minds:

As this is my most deeply intimate and personal diary, I am assuming that it will one day be introduced into evidence at my trial.

Surely I can’t be the only one who goes to the movies but never remembers the name of the screenwriter. Paul Rudnick was involved with some very funny movies, but I had never heard his name. Frankly, even if I had, it might not have helped. There is a long chapter devoted to his involvement with Sister Act, but his name does not appear when I check my source for all things movie-related,IMDb.com. Still, he tells great stories about bringing the original treatment of Sister Act to producer Scott Rudin and how they originally met with Disney, and snagged Bette Midler in the lead role. A host of meetings later, this nice Jewish boy was on his way to a convent in rural Connecticut for some hands-on research.

In the end, Bette Midler didn’t star, Whoopi Goldberg was very funny as Deloris, but Rudnick has never been able to bring himself to watch it.

Renting a wonderful Gothic apartment that was once the retreat of John Barrymore inspired a play, I Hate Hamlet, about a young actor living in the same apartment, working on the role of Hamlet and being visited by the ghost of John Barrymore. The downfall of the entire play is choosing Nicol Williamson – an unfamiliar name but a very familiar face — to play Barrymore. Rudnick makes Williamson’s utter disintegration both funny and tragic. He gives Allan Carr much the same treatment — Carr is a flamboyant, extravagant character, and Rudnick knows him in both high times and hard times.

In between chapters full of stories so funny you wonder if they’re fiction, you’ll find some actual fiction. The story of Elyot Vionnet is the very best sort of dark, sarcastic humor. His campaign to make Hallie Tesler stop talking on her cell phone is utterly ruthless — and it does not have quite the intended effect. His stint as Mr. Christmas (and his various holiday visitations) require a certain sense of style:

I instantly donned my tuxedo, a garment which still appears sleek and fresh, although it has been passed down through over eighty generations of Vionnet men, and, of course, Great Aunt Vestra Vionnet, who wore the family tux to bewitch half the women of Bucharest. No, Vestra was not Europe’s first lesbian postmistress, but she was the first one to get it right.

In I Shudder, the fiction and non-fiction go well together. The stories are great — his mother and her crazy sisters, his partner John, his time at the Chelsea Hotel. Chapters sped by and I laughed often enough (and loudly enough) that people at the airport asked what I was reading. I always think that’s a good sign.

My copy of I Shudder: and Other Reactions to Life, Death and New Jersey by Paul Rudnick was an Advanced Reader Copy, provided free of charge.

Review: Population: 485, Meeting Your Neighbors One Siren at a Time

Finally, someone who comes from an even smaller hometown than mine! Michael Perry tells the story of coming back to his hometown (New Auburn, WI) and working as an EMT and volunteer fireman in Population: 485, Meeting Your Neighbors One Siren at a Time. As a small town girl myself, I could relate to a lot of the stories Perry told: the gossip, the feuds and alliances that go back generations, the small town pleasures and the particular lack of privacy you have when everyone in town knows you, your parents, your car, your house and your date for the Junior Prom.

Michael Perry went away to college, got a degree in nursing and became an EMT, working in several Wisconsin towns. When he finally came home to New Auburn, joining the volunteer fire department was more than a part-time job; it was a way to reconnect with his neighbors. It gave him a point of entry, and even for a hometown boy, that's important. Small towns can be closed systems and if you've been away long enough, it can be harder than you'd imagine to get back in the loop.

The book is full of characters. There is a whole chapter is devoted to Beagle, the most senior member of the VFD. He's cross-eyed, with one kidney, a fu manchu mustache, a big plug of chewing tobacco and two ex-wives, both of whom work at the town's only gas station. His brothers, his mother, the other volunteers, it seems like everybody in town makes an appearance. Some of the stories are funny, some are tragic, but they are all told with love and respect for the people involved. It's a book about what it is like to work with - and sometimes on - your friends and neighbors.

I'm a small town girl myself, from Mantua, Ohio, population 1,050. We have one stoplight in the center of town, and the McDonald's is still pretty new. Reading this was interesting: I was spending a couple of weeks at one of my company's labs, in Pico Rivera, CA. The edge of Los Angeles - very urban, lots of concrete, smog and traffic. Thank heavens my hotel was on the edge of a golf course; I would have gone into withdrawal without some greenery. Trading stories with my colleagues, many of them from the LA area, had made me a little more conscious of my smalltowness than usual. These stories reminded me of the ones I had so recently told my co-workers.

Being an EMT is not for the squeamish. Blood, broken bones, vomit - better get used to them; as Perry says, "Puke is the great constant." We do not tend to be at our best when we need their services. And it is definitely different in a small town. You are almost certain to run into the guy who had to perform CPR on your mother at the next fire department Turkey Shoot. You can't help but wonder what stories they could (and possibly do) tell about you and your neighbors. There is a certain intimacy to working on your old football coach, the minister who baptized you or the woman who owns the laundromat. Perry does a good job of capturing that awkwardness and the fierce protectiveness that comes with this job.

I've read a number of memoirs like this, and Population: 485 falls into a common pattern. Perry works hard to prove that he's authentic - just check out the author photo on the back cover, unshaven, complete with flannel shirt and hunting cap. But he doesn't want us to forget he's a writer, so he pulls out some fancy vocabulary that doesn't ring quite true, the descriptions get a little too flowery, or the obscure quotes come out. It's okay, really; it seems to happen in all of these memoirs, whether the subject is EMTs, tattoo parlors or gourmet dining. It's a tough balancing act, but it doesn't detract in any major way from the story. Anymore, it just makes me chuckle.

I enjoyed these stories immensely. They were reminiscent of my own stories about my childhood home. You can check out more of Michael Perry's writing at his blog, SneezingCow.com. Population: 485 is an older book; in the newest, he is married and has a baby on the way, so I guess I've got some catching up to do. If I were you, I'd order the book right through Perry's website, but it is also available on Amazon.com.

Review: Tattoo Machine: Tall Tales, True Stories and My Life in Ink by Jeff Johnson

I live in a college town and we have our fair share of tattoo parlors. There are 2 shops almost next door to each other on the main drag through town and a tattoo and body piercing place down at the end of a row of bars, near where I turn onto my street. That one has an interesting crew that hangs around outside — both people and animals — and Tattoo Machine made me want to stop in and hang out with these guys a little. It’s full of great stories (and you know a busy, urban tattoo shop has to have a million of them), inside jokes, and even some talk about the art of tattoos. Johnson makes it a wild and entertaining ride.

Johnson is at his best telling stories — and believe me, he has got some great stories. Lots of the stories involve drugs and, fortunately, some of the stories are about Johnson getting himself cleaned up. But when a story starts out…

I’m racing toward the Oregon border in some kind of bright red Japanese sports car. I have no shoes and no driver’s license, and I’ve been smoking gooey Mexican heroin and snorting piles of coke off a switchblade for three days straight.

…you know things are about to get interesting. If you’ve watched any of TLC’s reality shows on tattoo artists, Miami Ink and its spinoff, LA Ink, then you’ve got an idea what to expect, but Tattoo Machine is the wild, uncensored, NC-17 version. There are stories about the assorted ways that he made a mess of his life, the crazy people he worked with and the crazy people he worked on. I found the stories about the people he tattooed especially interesting; as he says in the book, there is no distancing yourself when you’re working on someone’s skin. He gets his introduction to working with oddities at the Sea Tramp Tattoo Company, when a woman comes in and wants a tattoo of her husband’s name and a heart on her flipper. Now, that’s not the sort of thing I see everyday at my office and I probably would have failed that test, as Johnson did the first time around. He was working with veterans, though, and he learned from his early mistakes. It’s apparently not uncommon for folks to want to decorate the very thing that you’d expect them to hide.

An obese woman came in years ago and got a portrait of herself as a little girl on her pale, bulging stomach. She insisted that there be no mouth in the portrait. She lumbered out with a tattoo of a young, pigtailed girl with smiling eyes and a flat expanse below the nose, a harrowing image when seated in its context. Every artist there that day had nightmares for months…

His stories are part of what I find fascinating about memoirs: they are a glimpse into a secret world. Whether the topic is tatoo parlors or politics or Arctic exploration, these worlds have their own language, their own traditions, and their own legends. After reading the chapter on Shop Talk, I will know that if a guy with a tattoo gun calls me a Swamp Panther, it’s meant as a compliment. I will also be able to snicker like an insider if I hear the guys talk about a Time Fighter that just pulled up in a Pee Pee Truck, who will probably turn out to be a Bonus Hole, with their luck. I’ve spent some time Googling the names that Johnson tosses out periodically, like they are people I should be familiar with…and I suppose that in his business, they are familiar names. Artists who laid the groundwork, like Bert Grimm, as well as those who are carrying the art form forward, like Guy Aitchison. And I have decided that if I ever want my worst nightmare tattooed somewhere on my flesh, I’m calling Paul Booth. Whoa.

Now - a little tattoo trivia! You know I like to put something special in the comments (feedback is love, after all), so here's a little something about tattoo inks. Did your grandfather have an old Army or Navy tattoo? Mine did, and by the time I was old enough to check it out, it looked pretty bad. The red had faded away and the black was an odd dark green color. There's a reason that tattoo looked green and it has to do with pelicans, the war, and Lucky Strike cigarettes. Want to know more? Check out the comments...

I won’t spoil the stories for you by telling too many of them here; I don’t want this to be like a movie trailer that shows you all the funny stuff before you get to the theater. (But I admit to a terrible curiousity about the story the test readers made him take out of the book.) Definitely check out the story of The Collector — that’s an episode of “Criminal Minds” in the making. Johnson’s introspective bits were less effective for me, but he is obviously a guy who has thought a lot about what he does for a living and a little philosophy and history never hurt anyone. Tattoo Machine: Tall Tales, True Stories, and My Life In Ink is scheduled for release on July 14th, but you can pre-order your copy at Amazon.com.

Review: Don't Call Me a Crook! by Bob Moore

I really wanted to like this book. After all, "A Scotsman's Tale of World Travel, Whiskey and Crime" sounds right up my alley. I love colorful memoirs, adventure stories, all that, and I thought I would really enjoy this one.

I didn't even make it through 100 pages.

There are a lot of reasons I was disappointed in the book. First off, the writing is clunky. It sounds much like you would expect a Scotsman to sound, sitting in a pub, telling you a story after a couple of pints. I didn't, in this case, find that charming.

Second, I don't care what the title says, he's a crook. Here's his explanation, given very early on:

"Though really, I am not a crook at all, because a crook is a man who steals things from people, but I have only swiped things when I needed them or when it would be wasteful to let slip an opportunity. Because I think it is very wrong for a man to waste his opportunities."

So, he's not a crook because he "swiped" things, instead of stealing them. That's perfectly logical, right? And what about his train trip to Chicago? He started drinking with a married woman, got her drunk, seduced her, asked her to spend a week in Chicago with him. When they arrived, he didn't want his friends to see her, so he convinced her to wait at the station while he went to pawn her engagement ring. He did come back for her - a week later. I suppose she was just an "opportunity" that he didn't want to "let slip." That's a load of crap, if you ask me.

Now, I don't require that every book be a morality play, but maybe I've just had enough corruption and rationalization lately. I just didn't find this charming; I found it insulting. Someone who was perfectly willing to take advantage of you if he got the chance, so as not to let an opportunity slip, is not an adventurer, he's a criminal. The rationalization just makes it worse.

There were a couple of things about this edition of the book that bothered me. First off, the cover. Looks like a dashing fellow, right? Well, it's not Bob Moore, the author. I don't know who it is - it's just some guy that the publisher and cover designer thought "conveyed the book's cheekiness and rougishness." What? I honestly can't say why that bothered me as much as it did. I was also unhapy with the editing. I understand adding footnotes to clarify certain points, but editor Pat Spry apparently thinks readers are unfamiliar with modern language, as well as Moore's more antiquated expressions. I do not need footnote definitions of fathoms, galley, fortnight, winch, squall or subway. Come on! There may be expressions that are less common today - such as "on the floor," which mean impoverished - but defining what should be basic vocabulary words was just annoying.

I think I am more annoyed by this book because I wanted so much to enjoy it. If I had no expectations, I still don't think I would have finished it, but I certainly wouldn't have been angry about it.

Review: The Mighty Queens of Freeville by Amy Dickinson

Five years ago, Amy Dickinson was tapped to replace the late Ann Landers as advice columnist for the Chicago Tribune. (Ann Landers had taken over the job from Chicago nurse Ruth Crowley.) Her syndicated column appears daily in more than 150 newspaper and is read by more than 22 million people. You would expect a woman who gives advice to so many to have something thoughtful to say about living and growing up, and in the Mighty Queens of Freeville: A Mother, A Daughter and the People Who Raised Them, she talks about her life, her daughter and her family.

The book is very pleasant reading. Her stories about college and marriage and career were funny and charming. She talks about her habit of "failing up" - basically stumbling into a good opportunity just in the knick of time. She has lead an interesting life and her travels have always brought her home, to her mother, her aunts and the women in her family who have given her strength.

That is a theme in the book: the women in her family. Dickinson says that romance has not often gone well for the women around her. Her father walked out on the family when she was 12. Her husband deserted her for another woman when their daughter was just a toddler. She basically gave up on dating until her daughter was in college. She takes this all in stride and talks about the strength of the women in her family, the marvelous relationship she forged with her daughter, and the things that she accomplished on her own.

The book is nice; that's the word that kept coming back to me. Nice stories about nice people. She seems like a genuinely nice woman and she keeps her pleasant demeanour even in the face of tragedy. But where is the anger? Maybe she is more enlightened than I will ever be, but if my husband showed up for our appointment with the marriage counselor, fresh from a European vacation with his new girlfriend, he wouldn't become my ex-husband. He would likely become my late husband. Her father walks out on the family, they lose the farm and she has to watch a fellow high school student auction off the family goods, but the only grudge she carries is over the way he sold off the cows. She maintains a pleasant relationship, seeing him when he has a few minutes in his life for one of his children, with never an angry outburst. She lets her ex-husband get away with the same sort of occasional relationship with her daughter (the first thing he does after the divorce is move to Russia). I would be heartbroken about the marriage but furious about the cheating and the abandonment. She seems unruffled.

Maybe that ability to take things in stride, to let go and move on is what makes her a great advice columnist, but I found myself unaccountably irritated with the book. Setbacks and tragedies are whisked under the rug by the need to get on with your life, but it made everything seem very on-the-surface to me. It is full of charming stories about much the sort of small town I grew up in, but the introspection doesn't go very deep. Still, a very pleasant afternoon read - pick up your copy of The Mighty Queens of Freeville at Amazon.com.

Review: Anything Goes by John Barrowman

A comfy corner of a good friend's couch, the other party guests are long gone but a few of you are lingering with vodka tonics and party snacks, dishing gossip, telling old stories and laughing your arses off. That's exactly the atmosphere of Anything Goes, John Barrowman's autobiography.

Dr. Who fans will recognize John from his role as Captain Jack Harkness, and from the spinoff series, Torchwood, which I adore. He is also a star of musical theater in the US and UK (there are too many shows to name here - check out the list on his website). So even though he's still a young man (just about a year younger than yours truly, so obviously a young man), he's got a lot of material to work with.

The book is really fabulous fun. The chapters are named after songs from various musicals ("I Hope I Get It", "Love Changes Everything", "The First Man You Remember" ) and it is full of photos. (Wanna see what an honest to goodness Scotsman wears under his kilt? Check out the photos after page 128.) If there were a Writer's Guild prize for best use of footnotes, this book would win, hands down; they're full of snarky little asides that had me laughing, page after page. Best of all, the book is not chronological. Memoirs that start "I was born in a small town" are usually tedious. No one is interesting in junior high school. Anything Goes avoids that pitfall by talking about John's early years (and after this book, I feel like he and I should be on a first-name basis) in flashbacks, stories and recollections tied to more current events. It keeps the story moving quickly and dulls the urge to skim and skip.

The book is also full of celebrities. David Tennant, Jack Lemmon, Victoria Principal, Kevin Spacey, Ian McKellen, Uma Thurman...the list goes on and on, but manages not to seem gratuitous. After all, with a resume full of muscials, theater, television and movies, you would expect him to know a few famous names. And honestly - you don't buy a celebrity memoir to read about coffee and donuts with Dave the gaffer and Molly the make-up artist. I want to hear about working with Carol Burnett, about meeting Bob Mackie (more on that later) and about vacationing on a yacht with Claudia Schiffer.

Before I gush too much, there are a couple of things about the book that left me wondering. First, although I love the non-chronological nature of the story, it does make it a little hard to follow at times. A little more attention to supplying ages, years, etc, would help a reader line up the various events and stories in their proper order. The second thing bothered me a bit more. John Barrowman is openly gay, but with the exception of one minor incident with a television producer, there is no mention of any sort of backlash. No hate mail, no protestors, no losing out on a prime role because of concerns about casting a gay leading man. Now, perhaps he was fortunate enough not to experience any of that. I hope that he was. But that seems unlikely and since it's not really addressed in the book, I leave with a feeling that some of the bad stuff has been glossed over. The third thing? Well now, that involves a story he told about a dinner party and a certain conclusion I drew. Maybe someday I'll buy the man a cocktail and ask him about it.
Now, here's the part to file under weird coincidences: John was born in Scotland and moved to Illinois as a child. His family still lives in the Midwest. As I've said before, I travel a lot on business and my company happens to have a lab just outside Milwaukee. I was there when I was reading this book, which led to the bizarre experience of lying in bed in my hotel in Brookfield, Wisconsin, reading about how John's parents have a winter home in Florida but spend their summers in...Brookfield, Wisconsin. Makes you look over your shoulder at breakfast.

I've recommended this book to a number of friends, but I won't be giving away my copy! You'll have to buy your own copy at Amazon.com.

Now, a little trivia for you: Remember I mentioned John meeting Bob Mackie? Well, he also asked the designer to autograph a few things from his personal collection. I bet you'll never guess what! Answer, as always, is in the comments.