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GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE APRIL 4, 1997
Gay Paris
With the Definitive Guide to France's Gayest City
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Gay Paris
THIE DEFINITIVE GUIDE FO, FRANCE N GAVENE CITY
Full-color hotel and restaurant review section
■ Sightseeing vignettes of gay interest
■ Honest evaluations of hotels, restaurants, gay scene
■ Historical insights on famous gay and lesbian Parisians
■ Author is Paris-based, awardwinning travel writer
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David Sedaris shows his own private parts
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David Sedaris
Naked
by David Sedaris Little, Brown, $21.95 hardcover
Reviewed by Bob Boone
Most of us have run into an unusual character or two and thought to ourselves what a story we could write about that oddball. David Sedaris, on the other hand, is a virtual magnet for these characters, no shortage of which are members of his own family. Fortunately, Sedaris has chosen to delightfully transform the oddballs he encounters into the protagonists of the short stories that comprise his second hilarious book.
A collection of autobiographical essays, Naked begins with Sedaris as a young boy, one of six children in a Greek family living in North Carolina. The initial stories are outrageous tales with grand characterizations of the members of his family, including Sedaris himself.
"A Plague of Tics" recounts the author's obsessive-compulsive behavior as a boy. The story induces a joyfully uncomfortable laughter as it exposes the calmly paranoid perspective of a boy who cannot stop licking light switches and tapping doors with his elbows. It leaves the reader with the sense of someone who is being tickled too much, enjoying the laughter while unnerved by what is provoking it.
Sedaris describes his rituals upon arriving home from school: "Inside the house there were switches and doorknobs to be acknowledged. My bedroom was right there off the hallway, but first I had business to tend to. After kissing the fourth, eighth, and twelfth carpeted stair, I wiped the cat hair off my lips and proceeded to the kitchen, where I was commanded to stroke the burners of the stove, press my nose against the refrigerator door, and arrange the percolator, toaster, and blender into a straight row. After making my rounds of the living room, it was time to kneel beside the banister and blindly jab a butter knife in the direction of my favorite electrical socket."
As the book continues and Sedaris grows up, the exaggerated characters at the beginning of the book slowly come down to earth, but never lose their humor. In "I Like Boys," Sedaris is suddenly just a boy who realizes he
GAN PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE
is gay in a conservative Southern junior high school where teachers routinely make fun of gay people.
He recalls the impersonation of a gay man as performed by his seventh-period math teacher.
"Snatching a purse off the back of a student's chair, he would prance about the room, batting his eyes and blowing kisses at the boys in the front row. 'So fairy nice to meet you,' he'd say."
In this story it is especially clear that Sedaris never goes for the easy jab. His comments are funny because he has so skillfully developed a character or a situation that deserves to be laughed at. He criticizes by merely pointing out what is worthy of ridicule and not by clubbing his targets over the head with insults.
Other stories have Sedaris relating tales from his days of hitchhiking across the country, or his early and disappointing infatuation with theater, or his encounter with a man who carves maps of Oregon out of jade. In each one, even as we are laughing, we absorb a little more about Sedaris or one of his family members. In "Dinah, the Christmas Whore," we see the first spark of admiration Sedaris holds for his sister Lisa, when she brings a battered prostitute to the safety of the Sedaris home on Christmas.
Having performed as a member of the Second City comedy troupe, another sister, Amy Sedaris, helped her brother prepare a selection from his first book, Barrel Fever, for a well-received off-Broadway run last fall. Santaland Diaries, one of the funniest stories ever to find its way onto paper and then onto stage, was the tale of Sedaris's Christmas season working at Macy's in New York as Crumpet the Elf.
It was that same story, which Sedaris read on National Public Radio on December 23, 1992, that earned him national recognition. Overheard by the likes of publishing executives and TV producers, that first NPR spot won Sedaris offers of book contracts and writing position on Seinfeld.
Having chosen to turn down the TV and Hollywood script offers at least for now, Sedaris continues as a regular commentator on NPR Hopefully, the diary excerpts which he shares in those spots will someday comprise yet another hysterical and insightful book.✔
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