But last month, when I saw an ad for a Colson Whitehead event, I was intrigued. I heard him speak at the AWP in Portland, and he's one of the more dynamic authors I've ever heard speak. The event was held at the Adrienne Arsht Center in downtown Miami, which is a much more upscale setting for a book event than I'm used to. It had a ticket price of $35, but that did come with the hardback book. It started at 8, but it was a Friday night, so that could be doable.
The first book that my Once in a Blue Moon Book Club read together was Whitehead's The Underground Railroad, so I wrote to the members to see if they'd be interested. They were! Last night, we went.
We got down there very early--between Miami traffic and the Jennifer Lopez concert nearby, it was good to get where we were going. We had easy parking (but expensive! $20 for the night), and from there, we walked to find dinner.
We never did find the Argentinian wine bar that was supposed to be nearby, but we found a GREAT restaurant that had wonderful salads and amazing desserts, The Daily Creative Food Company. When we walked in, music by U2 was blaring, and the music continued to be many of my favorites. I did reflect that much of the music was created before the staff was born, and I thought, well, I'm old now.
Of course, many of the ads that Facebook sends me remind me that some algorithm out there thinks that I'm REALLY old.
By the end of our dinner, the sountrack had switched. There was a Johnny Cash song, "God's Gonna Cut You Down" and a version of "Wagon Wheel." I didn't object to that music either, but I did think it was an interesting diversity.
We walked back to the Arsht Center and stood in line to get our autographed book. We watched all the people mingling. We had an usher take our picture:
I am standing in an odd way because I am so much taller and bigger than the other two. Here's a close up, the selfie that convinced us to ask an usher to help:
I am impressed by the level of glamorous that my friends (who are sisters) can pull off on a Friday evening. And we were holding our books rightside up so I'm not sure why the camera reversed it.
We had an interesting talk with one of the ushers, who said they were only expecting 300 people. Three hundred people? For a book event? In Miami? Amazing! The usher seemed to think there should be more, and indeed, even though the event was in one of the smaller concert halls, there were still plenty of empty seats.
Whitehead was amazing, as I knew he would be. He had lots of great talk about the historical roots of this current book, about history in general, about his writing process, about our current time period.
We also saw Judy Blume in the audience--yes, that Judy Blume. We waited to say thank you to her, as did many grown women. She looked a bit overwhelmed, which I understand. But I was happy to have a chance to say thank you to one of my favorite writers from childhood.
I did get home fairly late for me: 11:00 p.m. I couldn't do this every night, but I'm glad I did it last night. We moved down here in 1998 in the hope of having access to more cultural events, and I haven't taken part in as many of them as I envisioned. It's good to push myself, to remember how nourishing these events are to me.
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