My Heart Is an Idiot by Davy Rothbart

Author:Davy Rothbart
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Romance, Non-Fiction, Humour, Biography, Writing
Publisher: MacMillan Audio
Published: 2012-09-04T05:00:00+00:00

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. Th

e 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 micro-

phone 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 Philadel-

phia, 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

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and genuinely enthusiastic about the book, most of them didn’t

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MY HEART IS AN IDIOT

get me, or the whole idea behind Found— yet this only increased their chipperness and jaunty dawn enthusiasm. “Th

ose 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. Th

ese 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. Th

is 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 fi fty- year- old son, Dice. Darnelda had no idea why she’d been asked to come on

TV; they’d plotted this as a surprise. Th

e 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 Dar-

nelda Baltimore’s Best Mom and produced an oversized plaque

from somewhere and presented it to her, at which point Dar-

nelda fell sobbing into my arms; I gave her a wild bear hug,

caught up in the moment. Th

e anchorwoman quickly joined our

embrace. Dice, meanwhile, had lit up a cigarette, which an

alarmed producer raced over and doused with a splash of spar-

kling water. Darnelda took this in and began hollering at her son

and whacking him with her new plaque—“Dice, you can’t smoke

in here.

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