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Laughing MATTERS THE ONE ABOUT BEING A WRITER By Ryan G. Van Cleave | Illustrations by Darcy Kelly-Laviolette
S
o, an investment banker, a corporate lawyer, and a writer all walk into a bar. . .
With a setup like that, you sort of expect a zinger punchline, right? But I’m the writer in this equation, and the other two folks are my pals Mike and Dave (no, not the ones in the movie who desperately need wedding dates). And this setup is no joke at all, but rather what happened last Thursday at a Main Street drinkery in the almost-wee hours of night. You might also think (cue the Sesame Street “One of these things is not the other/one of these things just doesn’t belong” song) this month’s column is about the likely income disparity between us. Nope, that’s not the story here, though in all likelihood, both of them carry more 20s in their wallets than I do singles. We order our drinks (Patron, Grey Goose, and my Coors Light), and then Mike gives me the stink eye. “You’re doing it,” he says. I say, “Huh? What?” To which he replies: “Writing.”
He’s correct—I’m thinking about how to use a sandy-haired, middle-aged investment banker in my new YA thriller. But I lie, saying, “Nuh-uh.” Dave chimes in with, “You’ve got that I’m-writing-a-novel look. It’s the same look Alfie [his Yorkipoo] gives me when I crack open a can of Purina One. Only with less drooling.” I consider fighting them on this, but why bother? They’re right. I’m a bit like James Thurber, I guess, the cartoonist, humorist, and writer for The New Yorker, who famously said: “I never quite know when I’m not writing. Sometimes my wife comes up to me at a party and says, ‘Dammit, Thurber, stop writing.’ She usually catches me in the middle of a paragraph.” So, I stare at my buddies and proudly say, “Yes, I’m a writer. What’s YOUR superpower?” Then I’m reaching for my omnipresent notebook to jot down ideas on how to market that phrase on a t-shirt to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars of profit. They burst into laughter.
JUNE 2019 | SARASOTA SCENE
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