Meeting Neil Gaiman
So on Friday afternoon, angledge and I go to Borders' book store in southern Manhattan where Neil Gaiman is doing a book signing and reading. Cool. For those of you who insist on depriving yourselves of things that rule, Neil Gaiman writes some incredible works of modern fantasy, and is responsible for arguably one of the best comic book series ever, Sandman.
He read from his newest children's book, Wolves In The Walls. He has a good reading voice, augmented of course by his British accent, and it made the reading a lot of fun. He then answered questions (highlight: "What is your favorite font?" - "Oh, now we're getting desperate. I mean, how am I going to answer this? 'Well, I think Arial is quite pretty, but Courier is still very traditional and formal.'"), and then the signing began.
The signing order was very well-arranged by Borders- as each person entered the store for the signing, they were given a page off a page-a-day calendar. In this fashion, they could announce "January can go up the signing booth now." - "February can go up now." - and so on. Quite clever. The hordes of fans were directed to proceed by the gayest man on the face of planet Earth. Now, I am in no way homophobic- some of my closest friends are gay. I'm simply saying that this man was the amalgam of EVERY gay male stereotype ever. When this guy used the word "super" in a sentence the same way South Park's Big Gay Al would use the word "super", I about lost my shit.
So, we have our calendar pages. In a bizarre twist of fate, my page was 5 May. Yes, my birthday. How's that for impressive? In any event, that also told us that we had about 120 people ahead of us, which gave us time to go out and eat and wander. We went to Ground Zero, circled it for a while, studied the remnants of WTC7, and searched for our friend Brian's apartment that had been WAY too close to the blast zone. So we spent some time relaxing, and finally got back to the store just in time for May to be called. We wait, meet Neil, get autographs and pictures, and off we go.
All in all, a good Friday afternoon.
EDIT (3 Feb 2017): Look, a picture!
He read from his newest children's book, Wolves In The Walls. He has a good reading voice, augmented of course by his British accent, and it made the reading a lot of fun. He then answered questions (highlight: "What is your favorite font?" - "Oh, now we're getting desperate. I mean, how am I going to answer this? 'Well, I think Arial is quite pretty, but Courier is still very traditional and formal.'"), and then the signing began.
The signing order was very well-arranged by Borders- as each person entered the store for the signing, they were given a page off a page-a-day calendar. In this fashion, they could announce "January can go up the signing booth now." - "February can go up now." - and so on. Quite clever. The hordes of fans were directed to proceed by the gayest man on the face of planet Earth. Now, I am in no way homophobic- some of my closest friends are gay. I'm simply saying that this man was the amalgam of EVERY gay male stereotype ever. When this guy used the word "super" in a sentence the same way South Park's Big Gay Al would use the word "super", I about lost my shit.
So, we have our calendar pages. In a bizarre twist of fate, my page was 5 May. Yes, my birthday. How's that for impressive? In any event, that also told us that we had about 120 people ahead of us, which gave us time to go out and eat and wander. We went to Ground Zero, circled it for a while, studied the remnants of WTC7, and searched for our friend Brian's apartment that had been WAY too close to the blast zone. So we spent some time relaxing, and finally got back to the store just in time for May to be called. We wait, meet Neil, get autographs and pictures, and off we go.
All in all, a good Friday afternoon.
EDIT (3 Feb 2017): Look, a picture!