We log onto Zoom and start talking right away. Nate offers to use his since the school he teaches at offers an institutional account that doesn’t kick you off after forty minutes.

We talk about many things including his new book, which I’d recently read and was going to write about. We have an easy rapport. Our first conversation went an hour and a half but felt a lot shorter.

We talk about comedy, the literary scene, the pains of being edited, and the reviewing racket. He tells me he and his ten year old son watched Modern Times the night before and the kid had enjoyed it. How when he was a kid he was mostly allowed to watch westerns. How he and his son watch John Wayne movies together. I tell him how I can’t stomach John Ford’s sentimentality. He suggests Howard Hawks’ Monkey Business if I need a laugh and I promise I’ll watch it that night.

We talk about what it would take to feel like a success. I say if they threw a parade in my honor down Michigan Avenue I wouldn’t go. He says if they threw him one he’d go. When his wife asked him what he expects when his book comes out, he told her he wants to be carried aloft through the streets.

It’s a good time just as the first one had been. We’re at about two hours when he says he has to go pick up his kid from school. I thank him for his time and ask him to send me the recording. That’s when we realize there isn’t one. We both assumed the other had hit the button. But it’s his invite so it’s on him. Still, this isn’t my first rodeo, so I might’ve noticed. We have a laugh about it and schedule an encore. I joke that we’ll reproduce the first one verbatim.

We talk again two days later. There’s a recording of it but the link Nate sends is password-protected, accessible only to students and teachers of the Tennessee college he teaches at. Perhaps he’ll send me a password sometime. then I’ll share it with you. It’s a good one so far as I remember.

*update* here it is!

Made a page of (mostly recent) posters and another of the 45 RPM record sleeves I decorated for menu holders at Charis Listening Bar.