Daniel Handler book signing

Down to business--the handsome guy I was hoping would be at the signing was not there. I asked my friend Lisa who works with Colin about him, and in a nutshell she said he was an assistant manager who had adopted the management style of the store manager, i.e., a disrespectful jerk. Eeeeek!

The book signing was really fun. I was worried I was going to be late, but the crowd was fairly miniscule. Who is Daniel Handler? I guess not many people know. The author Lemony Snicket who wrote A Series of Unfortunate Events? Oh, yeah, people know him! Well, they are the same person. Lisa said they weren't allowed to advertise that Daniel Handler is Lemony Snicket (I assume his choice).

There were about two people when I arrived. I took a seat in the front row. Did you know that's the best place to be able to see the author? And that you'll probably get your book signed quickly? I think so.

A little old man in a wheelchair cornered me and asked me about the signing, and what I did, and my religious affiliation, and I chatted with him while I knit.

My friend Lisa sat next to me with her boyfriend, Caleb, who is the bookseller who wrote a funny proposal to Daniel Handler and got him to Nashville in the first place.

Daniel Handler came out and had a spinning wheel on a smallish wood block. After his introduction, he explained he hated going to book signings where the author reads a good part of the book and then you read the book and what the author read was the only good part of the book. So, to show his confidence in the quality of the whole book, he had a wheel with all the chapter names. "I'll ask a volunteer to come up here and spin in a minute, and if you volunteer you will get a prize. But if you land on this place, 'Give author one dollar,' you have to give me a dollar. I'm sorry. That's the rules."

Ooooh! I wanted the prize! Now, I have been a painfully shy person many times in my life, but today was not one of them. When he asked for a volunteer, I whipped up my hand. "You!" he said. I popped up. As you can imagine, I was wearing my attractive outfit in case Colin was there. I felt dressy like a magician's assistant indeed. "Now, just to be clear," Daniel said, "we have never met before. This is not some scheme."

I spun the arrow. It barely moved and landed on "Skip a turn." I asked, "Now what do we do?" Daniel said, "I don't know. This has never happened before." He hummed a little and rolled his eyes around like he was waiting out a turn, then told me to go again. I spun better this time. "That was a better spin," we both muttered at about the same time. It landed on "Soundly." "Ooh, that's a sad one," Daniel told the audience, "Get out your hankies. And you get a prize!" I had forgotten about the prize in the excitement of spinning.

"This is a Buddha Machine. You don't know what it is. I don't know what it is either. And you have no choice in color. I don't mean that because you didn't pick out this prize, I mean when you buy them in a box, you don't know what color it is."

He read the book, and rather than forming a line, just let people come up as they volunteered. A woman who went to high school with Daniel Handler came over with her three young children. She said her five-year-old son had read all the Lemony Snicket books. "So tell me," he asked the boy, "is your mom terrible to you? It's OK, you can tell me. She was a ravishing, reckless woman when I knew her." Children do not really get tongue-in-cheek humor, so the boy shook his head no, she was nice. Daniel said, "Well, you have to say that, she's right here! If she's really mean, give me a secret signal. Blink." The boy tried not to blink. Some time passes and we the audience are all holding our breath. Daniel shouts triumphantly, "You blinked! I knew it!!"

The high school classmate's little one-and-a-half-year-old propped herself up in the stroller to get a good look at him and loudly said, "Da da da da da da da da!" He nodded as he signed, "Mmhm. I have always thought so." If you've read the Lemony Snicket books, or seen the movie, you'll know that the youngest main character is a toddler who speaks in gibberish that the author is able to translate into English for readers. It was a magical moment. What a funny guy.

He signed my copy of his new book Adverbs, which is written for adults and has these chapters: Immediately, Obviously, Arguably, Particularly, Briefly, Soundly, Frigidly, Collectively, Symbolically, Clearly, Naturally, Wrongly, Truly, Not Particularly, Often, Barely, Judgmentally.

I have one Lemony Snicket book, which he used an embosser on that says, "From the Library of Lemony Snicket," and wrote, "with all due respect."

So what is a Buddha Machine? It is not shaped like Buddha. It looks like a little speaker, came with batteries, and the color of mine is bright, UT orange. It makes kind of ambient music. Dodger was intrigued and a little perturbed by it. Are you supposed to meditate to the sounds? I'll have to do more research into it!

Photos top-bottom: a heavier Daniel Handler, the mysterious Lemony Snicket, the book cover, a Buddha Machine