O Meu Diário de Coimbra

The Devil Wears Pedemeia

This will be the last regularly scheduled O Meu Diário de Coimbra until January 7th. I could say I’m taking a well-deserved or -needed vacation, but I have more or less been on vacation since the late 80s. I’m returning to America this week to reintroduce myself to Melissa, eat lunches and salt bagels with dear friends, have a book signing on December 10th at B’nai Emunah Synagogue (and, Christ, am I behind on my membership dues), and sit at my table at “Owl Head” and pay respects to my father, whose ashes are in a 1950-circa Sweet’n Low can on a shelf. For the next few Sundays, then, after today, I’ll be culling the archives from the past year for the better missives, so those who joined these proceedings late can catch up, while those who have been with me since the beginning can once again ask themselves, “Why the hell am I paying for this dreck?”

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On December 31st, 1999, I was in Reno, Nevada, working at Catch a Rising Star at the Silver Legacy Hotel and Casino. When I was offered the gig the previous summer, I thought, “Do I really want to spend the millennium in Northern Nevada?”

Pergunta Idiota.

Of course I did. The thought of being in the familiar confines of a familiar comedy club in a casino that had hotdogs and tacos in the Sportsbook, cigarette girls with flashing earrings, necklaces, and rings, schlepping big black trays of casino-affiliated tchotchke, and an Asian coffee shop where the manager, also Asian, a palm reader, once looked at the lines on hand and said, “You no work hard” seemed a great place to bring in the next thousand years. It was also in Reno, I met Gilbert Gottfried, whom I found to be wonderful and funny and soft spoken.

Off the subject, he wrote this essay nine years ago on comedy, performative outrage, and selective indignation and it still may be the best thing I’ve ever read on the subject. I thought of excerpting it, but it’s really better whole.