I'm Finally on the Bestseller List!

Thank you, Dave Barry...

Hello, hungry people!

I’m delighted to announce that after publishing five modestly successful novels and a slew of non-fiction books, I’ve finally cracked the bestseller list.

Disclaimer: This might be a slight exaggeration.

I am not the author of “Class Clown: The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass,” by Dave Barry. However, I was the inspiration for the book.

Another disclaimer: This might be an outright lie.

But Dave did see fit to mention me in the book, along with a couple of hundred other people, so that’s close enough for me.

Which brings me to the point of today’s post: Go buy “Class Clown,” by Dave Barry.

It’s the kind of book that makes you forget you're supposed to be reading words instead of just making loud snorting noises. Yes, you’ll laugh a lot. That’s a good thing.

***

Dave and I go way back, to the 1980s, when we were both newspaper columnists, Dave at the Miami Herald, me at the Orlando Sentinel. It was a great time to be a columnist. Newspapers had plenty of money back then. Heck, they even had readers. And when presidential election years rolled around, the newspapers we worked for thought readers would enjoy dispatches from the campaign trail and the conventions from clueless politically astute humor columnists such as ourselves.

The Orlando Sentinel was so flush in those days that it even rented an elephant (the proud symbol of the Republican party) for a couple of hours so they could put me on its back and promote the fact that I would soon be attending the 1988 Republican convention.

The elephant owner, however, neglected to bring along an elephant saddle or whatever you use to ride a goddam elephant, so I had to ride it bareback. That meant digging my fingernails into the elephant’s ears and the elephant trying to swat me off, connecting a couple of times with the side of my head. Does it look like I was having fun?

I never wore those pants again.

***

Dave and I worked hard at those conventions. We hit the ground running the moment we arrived by conducting exhaustive journalistic investigations into a subject that was tragically overlooked by the rest of the media — what dive bar would be the best place for a blowout party after the convention was finally over and we could still put it on our expense accounts?

The most memorable place was in New Orleans (of course) during the aforementioned Republican convention — Nicholas G. Castrogiovanni’s Original Big Train Bar. It was on Tulane Avenue, right across from the Dixie Brewing Company, and got its name from the fact that after Prohibition ended, while other bars were tiptoeing back into business, Mr. Castrogiovanni ordered liquor by the trainload.

Here’s the other thing that set the Big Train Bar apart: Cocktails were served out of miniature plastic toilet bowls and the house specials, which were made out of grain alcohol, had names like “12 Italian Virgins in the Back Seat of a Volkswagen,” “My Date is a Moose” and “Wild Night at the Capri Motel” (which was located next door).

Sadly, the Big Train Bar is gone now. As are millions of brain cells once belonging to members of the media who attended the party there.

If there’s been a decline in American journalism since then, Dave and I take full responsibility.

***

So after you buy “Class Clown” turn immediately to page 157.

This, to me, is the most important part of the book and the reason why it is on the bestseller list. Because it’s where I am mentioned. It’s the story of the infamous demonstration by “People with Boxes on Their Heads” that took place at the 1988 Democratic convention in Atlanta.

The convention was really boring. The ticket — Michael Dukakis and Lloyd Bentsen (big yawn) — was a foregone conclusion. Serious journalists were trying really hard to find something to write about in order to justify their expense accounts and many of them started writing long, thoughtful stories about groups in the “designated protest zone.”

It was Dave’s idea (of course) that he, Erik Lacitis, of the Seattle Times, and I should put cardboard boxes on our heads, stand in the protest zone and see how long it took for journalists to show up and start interviewing us.

Dave writes about it funnier than I do (of course), so I’ll turn it over to him (as excerpted from Dave’s column in the Herald the day after the Boxhead demonstration):

“It took seven seconds for the first newspaper photographer to take our picture. Within minutes — I am not making any of this up — we were surrounded by TV people, radio people and various other media people wanting to conduct interviews, which generally went like this:

“MEDIA PERSON: Who are you?

“DEMONSTRATOR: We’re an organization called People with Boxes on Their Heads.

“MEDIA PERSON: Why do you wear boxes on your heads?

“DEMONSTRATOR: Basically because that’s the name of our organization. People with Boxes on Their Heads.

“ANOTHER DEMONSTRATOR (helpfully): It’s an organization of people with boxes on their heads.

“And so on. We gave several dozen interviews and were photographed hundreds of times. I don’t know how many interviews got broadcast, but our pictures were in at least two Georgia newspapers and the Baltimore Sun, and were included with a nice write-up about the rally that went out nationwide on the Associated Press wire.”

***

“This was true,” Dave writes in “Class Clown.” ‘The People with Boxes on Their Heads’ was the lead item in the AP roundup of convention protests. There was also a widely circulated photo of the three of us in our little triangle, surrounded by a mob of media people with cameras and photographs.”

That’s Dave in the middle, me on the left and Erik on the right.

OK, so maybe you can’t see the media mob in the photograph, but they were there.

The other thing you can’t see are the details of the official press credentials hanging from my neck. The credentials were issued by the Democratic National Committee and you had to display them in order to gain entrance to the convention floor. Thing is, I lost my credentials the first day I was in Atlanta. But not to worry! I took the “Do Not Disturb” sign hanging from the door of my hotel room and stuck it inside the laminated plastic thingie. Did it work? Of course, not. I got kicked out. But that was OK. It was too crowded on the convention floor and nothing interesting was going on there anyway.

***

Now, back to Dave:

“Erik and Bob also wrote columns about our experiment, so by the next day we’d received a lot of publicity. Not everybody was amused. I got phone calls in the press center from maybe a dozen newspaper people. Some of them, the ones from papers that had printed the boxhead-protest story, were pretty angry; they wanted to know how come we had hoaxed the media. My position was: We didn’t hoax anybody. We had boxes on our heads, and we said we had boxes on our heads. You’re the ones who decided this was a national news story.

“Was I wrong? Had we, in fact, crossed an ethical line? Were we making a mockery of the press, an institution vital to our democracy?

“Maybe! But it was pretty funny.”

***

So I think it’s obvious that the reason why “Class Clown” is on the bestseller list and making Dave lots of money, even more money now that I have pimped it here, is because of me. And maybe Erik Lacitis, too.

Which brings us, as it so often does, to Today’s Poll.

Thanks for dropping by Bob’s Diner. See you back here soon. I wish I could tell you exactly when, but it’s not as if I’m organized enough to plan these things.

And should you be feeling generous, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. It works out to about $4.10/month on a yearly basis. I promise to spend it foolishly.