I told Linda I had a surprise for her last night while we were eating supper. Nothing big, I said, loading a DVD into the machine. When she saw what I had recorded, she decided to give up the Antique Road Show and a couple of make-over shows to watch it. I had taped Barbara Kingsolver’s appearance at Cooper Union in Manhattan, which was shown (in rerun) on BookTV late Sunday night. Linda’s a fan of Kingsolver’s novels and though the book Kingsolver was on tour for — Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life — is nonfiction, I knew she’s want to see it. Why? Because we saw Kingsolver in person, giving the same talk/reading/slide-show presentation in Cambridge two months ago. But it had started at 6:00 and we didn’t get there until 6:20, when Kingsolver was already into her presentation. The idea behind the BookTV taping was to see the part we missed.
It turned out we’d missed only a couple of minutes (and slides). But we decided to watch the whole thing again. Interesting, though, to compare the two audiences — the one on the Lower East Side and the one in Harvard Square. The New Yorkers were fewer in absolute numbers (and there were lots of empty seats) and seemed to be less responsive to Kingsolver’s humor (though that may have been the fault of the microphone placements). First Church in Cambridge was packed. We had to sit in a side balcony (back row), with a decidedly “obstructed view.” (Not as bad as the columns in the Cooper Union hall, but still.) And the response to Kingsolver’s humor was lively and spontaneous. On the other hand, the mayor of Cambridge hadn’t proclaimed the day of her appearance as “Barbara Kingsolver Day,” as the mayor of New York did. She received a framed copy of the proclamation onstage.
