Lights, Camera, Lobster

OK, I did The Joy Behar Show last week, and I didn’t embarrass myself, at least not entirely. Yes, I wore a Ferragamo scarf that made me look like I had a peach-colored tablecloth around my neck.

This was unfortunate since it gave me the unnerving appearance of having my head on a platter. All I really needed to be an appropriate entrée at a fine French restaurant was an apple in my mouth. Never mind.

Why do I begin by telling you what I was wearing? Because—and I know this is a shock—how a person looks is the most important part of being on TV. Once I wore a brightly colored suit on a show, and even the people who meant to be supportive of me declared that I looked as if I were dressed as a giant lobster, albeit a lobster with curly hair.

I like Behar and respect her work as a comic; I actually interviewed her for my first book on women and humor in 1991 when she was still doing stand-up. Rather pathetically, I hoped she might remember me. She didn’t really, although she was polite enough when I was trying to jog her memory two seconds before we started taping. That was my mistake. She meets 765,300 people a week.

Still, you know, it’s daunting and humbling when you’re shaking somebody’s hands and smiling into their eyes and it dawns on you that, although they have loomed large in your imagination, they have no idea who the hell you are.

BUT—and this is the real reason I was there—they showed the cover of the paperback of It’s Not That I’m Bitter, or How I Stopped Worrying About Visible Panty Lines and Conquered the World. And that is what really matters, head-as-entree aside.

The fact that the book is coming out in paperback—the official pub date for the release of the paperback is tomorrow—is terrific. I’m excited about it, even if it makes my stomach churn.

Because writers can no longer take for granted the fact that a book will be released in paperback more or less automatically, it’s especially important to sort of nurture the baby paperback when it enters the world.

You have to help it cross the street, and not let it be bullied by the larger blockbuster paperbacks that might try to kick sand in its tiny little pages. Doing any kind of promotional event is the equivalent to attending the little book’s parent-teacher conferences or trimming the crust of its sandwiches.

Sadly, the analogy of children stops here because the book never learns to do anything for itself. If you don’t get it to move around, it’ll end up sitting on the shelf, then in the warehouse, and then in your basement. At least that’s the case for most books. This doesn’t apply to textbooks. Textbooks can come out in multiple editions, not just reprints, but altered, edited editions. This is why textbook writers are so happy. They’re the only ones that can go back and fix their mistakes. The rest of us have to live with our grammatical errors, poorly written sentences, and really bad ideas.

And that’s why I did The Joy Behar Show, why I’m doing a lot of local radio stations, why I’m talking at a bunch of libraries, and why I wrote a piece on books I won’t be reading this summer for The Huffington Post.

Let me tell you, doing all this stuff is a humbling experience. Humble, humble, humble.

My students think that this would be a fun thing to do, and certainly I am enormously grateful for the privilege to be able to do it. But it’s also really weird. It’s not like you get to hang out and talk about ideas with the host or the other guests. It’s more like this: You walk into the studio, you sit down for five minutes, you try to make a good impression, you try not to look like an idiot—which is harder than you might think when you’re doing live TV, because of course you never get to explain what you really mean, especially when you’re competing for time with other guests during a short segment, as I was, and you leave, wondering what happened.

It would be a little bit like doing an oral exam if: 1. An oral exam lasted 11 minutes, 2. Two other people were taking the exam and trying to shout out their answers at the same time as yours, and 3. Being asked back to do the exam again was your reward for having performed well.

Nothing makes me appreciate being an academic more than being outside the academic world for a while. It does wonders for your perspective. Even if your students are making fun of your “weird-ass mannerisms,” “the peach fuzz on your upper lip,” and your tendency to repeat outfits, they are easier to please than either your family and friends (“Wow, the camera adds 20 pounds, not 10″; “Oh, I missed it—I was watching one of my favorite Law and Order episodes”). And you know that what you’re doing actually matters.

I’m happy to be a stand-up academic with a two-book minimum, as opposed to a two-drink minimum.

I prefer the fluorescent lights of a classroom to the spotlight of the stage. And wonder of wonders, I’d rather be writing books than selling them.

Who knew?