Quail Ridge Reading

We are just returning from a remarkable evening in Raleigh at Quail Ridge Books And Music. It was my sixth public reading from Biodiesel Power, and by far the most rewarding.

Raleigh is Tami's stomping ground, which meant her family showed up. That meant a kiss from Aunt Joyce during the book signing part of the evening. Melissa gets a point for filling a corner of the room with her cohorts.

The place was packed. They originally set out chairs for 20, and ended up seating sixty.
Some of the crowd was from my past lives. Ed, my former chess rival sat in the back row. I couldn't tell if he cared about biodiesel or not, but it was clear he was still pondering the Sicilian defense I pulled at Artsplosure three years ago-when we battled on the chess board for hours in front of a live audience.

The staff of Quail Ridge were remarkable. They had done their homework. And they had flexed their marketing muscle. Their efforts, combined with Tami's, packed the place. They were delighted with the evening and sent me away beaming.

There were folks from the Unitarian Fellowship of Raleigh present. I was once active there. And perhaps best of all, there were members of Piedmont Biofuels there. I was so glad to have Patrick in the audience that I tossed more than one car-expert question to him. One fellow flashed his membership card, and told me that he was a regular at the Durham pump. Tobin was there. She is our Clean Cities Coordinator. Having her in the audience raised the bar, and she helped out with some of the questions which followed.

Bob, the algae guy from the Grassroots conference was there. He helped answer questions. It was nice having him in the front row.

I spent the day on the chainsaw, dropping dead mimosa trees in the garden. It was a high stakes affair that I intended to hire an arborist to do. They are little trees-and they cut like hardwood although I am sure they are not. They are a funny kind of wood. The danger was that their dead limbs sprawled over artwork, and not all of them read in my favor.

Setting down the saw, I came in to prepare for the reading. I knew it had to be "Tami-centric" for this crowd. I was so taken by the quotations in Jay's review from Brevard Biodiesel that I wrote them in the book and read them aloud. Girl Mark called. She's in town, doing her frenetic pre-workshop dance. I invited her, which raised the stakes considerably.

Wardrobe remains a problem. Most of my clothes are now tattered, grease stained, wrinkled and unfit for a bookstore reading. I put on the tweed jacket Tarus gave me back when I was teaching Energy Class. It has leather elbow patches, and I believe he offered it up as a joke. I took it off thinking it was too pretentious. Tami insisted that I wear it.

"It's Raleigh," she said, "You can be as pretentious as you like..."

The strange mix of audience meant the questions were all over the map. They came fast and furious and lasted a long time. Fortunately six readings, blogosphere immersion, and many Sunday tours have prepared me for almost everything this group could throw out.

One that stumped me after the crowd had thinned was, "What is the embodied energy of my 1980 Volvo?"

Um. It only gets 21 miles to the gallon. But the guy works at home, seldom drives, and what are the energetic implications of him shedding it to get a new TDI? Um.

We poured into the parking lot and hit the Whole Foods next door. Tami and I were in the afterglow of a wonderful evening. I walked across the parking lot to the Silver Ghost with Zafer and Arlo.

"What did you think of the evening, Z?"
"Boring."
"I thought it was boring too, Dad," chimed in Arlo, then turning to his brother he added, "I transformed a King on level 3 of Super Mario,"

That was news to both of us. It was news to Zafer since he had never seen that particular transformation. And it was news to me since I had expressly requested that Arlo not bring his Game Boy into the bookstore...

Posted by Lyle at January 19, 2006 10:41 PM