Wallflower at the Orgy by Nora Ephron

Author:Nora Ephron [Ephron, Nora]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780307796936
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-05-25T07:00:00+00:00

It is a well-dressed, well-behaved group, this crowd of young men and women, lots of young women, who are waiting patiently in Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., for the concert to begin. You won’t see any of your freaks here, no sir, any of your tie-dye people, any of your long-haired kids in jeans lighting joints. This is middle America. The couples are holding hands, nuzzling, sitting still, waiting like well-brought-up young people are supposed to, and here he is, the man they’ve been waiting for, Rod McKuen. Let’s have a nice but polite round of applause for Rod, in his Levi’s and black sneakers. You won’t see any of your crazy groupies here, squealing and jumping onstage and trying for a grab at the performer’s parts. No sir. Here they are not groupies but fans, and they carry Instamatics with flash attachments and line up afterward with every one of Rod’s books for him to autograph. The kids you never hear about. They love the Beatles, they love Dylan, but they also love Rod. “He’s so sensitive,” one young man explains. “I just hope that he reads a lot of his poetry tonight.”

They want to hear the poetry. They gasp in expectation when he picks up a book and flips it open in preparation. And onstage, about to give them what they want in his gravelly voice (“It sounds like I gargle with Dutch Cleanser,” he says), is America’s leading poet and Random House’s leading author. “I’ve sold five million books of poetry since 1967,” says Rod, “but who’s counting?” As a matter of fact, Random House is counting and places the figure at three million. Nevertheless, it is a staggering figure—and the poetry is only the beginning. There are records of Rod reciting his poetry, records of Rod’s music, records of Rod singing Rod’s lyrics to Rod’s music, records of Rod’s friends singing Rod’s songs—much of this on records produced by Rod’s record company. There are the concerts, television specials, film sound tracks and a movie company formed with Rock Hudson. There are the Stanyan Books, a special line of thirty-one books Rod publishes and Random House distributes, with Caught in the Quiet its biggest seller, followed by God’s Greatest Hits, compiled from the moments He speaks in the Bible. McKuen’s income can be conservatively estimated at $3,000,000 a year.

That literary critics and poets think nothing whatsoever of McKuen’s talent as a poet matters not a bit to his followers, who are willing to be as unabashedly soppy as their bard and are not, in any event, at all rigid in their distinctions between song lyrics and poetry. “I’m often hit by critics and accused of being overly sentimental,” Rod is saying to his concert audience. “To those critics I say tough. Because I write about boys and girls and men and women and summer and spring and winter and fall and love and hate. If you don’t write about those things there isn’t much to write about.” And now Rod will read a poem.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.