It would be less than honest to say I’m not simply giddy with the prospect of the promotional tour of my book. Having been satisfied with its performance as an ebook, the decision has been made to bring my literary effort out in a soft-cover version, complete with a fully scheduled summer of both radio and television appearances.
When I was touring non-stop as a stand-up comic, flying in the night before a weekend gig somewhere, I was obliged to be met in the hotel lobby the following morning at 5:30 a.m. in order to make the rounds on several different radio shows to plug my performance. The pressure was always on to be tremendously funny to the captive audience, bleary eyed and stuck in traffic on their morning workday commute.
But now as an ‘author’ (and, really, that must be said with full pretension, don’t you think? With the long ‘a’ that’s terribly affected?), I can make my promotional appearances in a far more relaxed manner with a tweed jacket and Meerschaum pipe and perhaps even a walking stick to aid an injury suffered in the Korean War…yes, wrong decade, I know, not to mention wrong sex, but that’s what comes to mind when I think of an ‘author’: confident, erudite, and, most of all, distinguished.
Ah, well, there’s the rub. Particularly the distinguished part. When the title of ones book is “I Love Me A Turkey Butt Samwich,” you can throw the jacket and pipe right out the window. I’ll never be Rod McKuen (wasn’t he just the end-all in his day?), strolling along the beach, quoting Turkey Butt lines to his latest love or Jacqueline Susanne, stirring a pitcher of martinis for her cocktail guests and chirping, “Have you heard? Turkey Butt’s been optioned by Hollywood! It’s going to be a film!” And you certainly could never imagine Thomas Hardy muse, “It was Turkey Butt which later gave me the confidence to write ‘Tess,’”
Nope, as Popeye opined, “I yam what I yam and that’s all I am.