My Heart Is an Idiot: Essays by Rothbart Davy

Author:Rothbart, Davy [Rothbart, Davy]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
ISBN: 9780374280840
Amazon: 0374280843
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2012-09-03T22:00:00+00:00

NIBBLE, LICK, SUCK, AND FEAST

In May of 2004, a New York publisher put out a book I’d put together called Found, based on the annual magazine I produce, which collects love letters, to-do lists, journal entries, photos, and other personal notes and ephemera that folks around the country have plucked off the ground or the street. To help spread the word I bought a van on eBay and hit the road with my little brother for an 8-month, 50-state, 136-city tour. The publisher’s publicity team managed to get me booked on local morning TV shows in most of these cities. How it worked, I’d show up at the station around 6:30 a.m., a producer would clip a little microphone on me, and somewhere between weather and sports, one of the morning-show anchors and I would talk about the book for two to three minutes.

Early on in the tour, I took these gigs pretty seriously. After all, the publicists and TV stations were clearly doing me a huge favor by pimping the book. In Philadelphia, Boston, and New York, I made sure to arrive plenty early, act energized, and be prepared with cool Found notes to share. But by the third week of the trip, I was starting to wonder who exactly, if anyone, was watching the local news at 7:00 a.m.? Also, while a couple of the hosts of these shows were real cool and genuinely enthusiastic about the book, most of them didn’t get me, or the whole idea behind Found—yet this only increased their chipperness and jaunty dawn enthusiasm. “Those pants are so fun!” they’d say, looking me up and down. “Plaid pants! You’re fun, huh?”

What kept me excited about these TV gigs was getting to meet and hang out with the other folks who were my fellow guests on the morning shows. These were local chefs with recipes-of-the-week, mayoral candidates, a team of Irish dancers, a kid with an eighty-pound pumpkin. In Baltimore, on FOX 5’s Good Morning Baltimore, I did my little Found song and dance, and then the anchor asked me to stay on her couch while she brought on the next guest—Baltimore’s Best Mom. This was right before Mother’s Day. Baltimore’s Best Mom turned out to be an eighty-seven-year-old woman named Darnelda Cole. She sat next to me on the couch, and on the far side of her sat her fifty-year-old son, Dice. Darnelda had no idea why she’d been asked to come on TV; they’d plotted this as a surprise. The anchor asked Dice Cole to read the letter he’d written nominating his mother for the prize. Darnelda grew weepy. At last, the anchor declared Darnelda Baltimore’s Best Mom and produced an oversized plaque from somewhere and presented it to her, at which point Darnelda fell sobbing into my arms; I gave her a wild bear hug, caught up in the moment. The anchorwoman quickly joined our embrace. Dice, meanwhile, had lit up a cigarette, which an alarmed producer raced over and doused with a splash of sparkling water.

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