For Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show, you knew you'd arrived when you got your picture "on the cover of Rolling Stone".
I don't desire fame... *but*... as a writer, if I *were* to want that sort of thing someday, the only 15 minutes (well, more like an hour) I'd want is to have Terry Gross ask me to be a guest on Fresh Air. (Okay, amend that... Nicole and I at the same time, because in this ideal world, she would be starring in the screenplay I will have written for her.)
I love Fresh Air, so I couldn't wait to pick up this book. It's a selection of interview excerpts from the show over the years, many of which I'd heard and really liked (the two with Isabella Rosellini and Uta Hagen being my favorites), but some I'd never heard before.
The bit that I want to share comes from the last interview in the book, "A Fradulent Angel", with children's book author and illustrator Maurice Sendak. Gross had commented about something Sendak had said the last time she had interviewed him, eight years previously, that when he was a child, all the "monsters" were just adults... old relatives with large moles and excessive nose hair. And she asked if Sendak, now that he was getting older, felt that, in some ways, he is a monster to kids. The following exchange occurs...
Sendak: Of course I am. I see it in their eyes when I'm autographing books, which I don't like to do much anymore. Children are shoved at me. They have no idea why they're on the line. They'd much rather be in the bathroom. They're standing on line, and they're being told somthing which is so frightening and confusing, which they're told by Mom or Dad. "This is the man you like so much, honey. This is the man who did your favorite book." They clutch their book even closer, because that really means he's going to take it away, because if this is the man's favorite book, then he's going to take your book. The look of alarm and the tears--and they stare at me with pure hatred. Who is this elderly short man sitting behind a desk who's going to take their book away? On top of that, the parents say, "Now, give him your book, honey. He wants to write something in it." Well, they've been told, "Don't write in a book." Okay, then why is it all right for a perfect stranger to write in their book? It's horrible for them. I become horrible. Unwittingly, I make children cry.
Gross: They cry?
Sendak: They cry when they meet me because they don't know what I'm doing. There's only one child who ever had the courage, when his father was urging him forward, urging him forward. I can see the hesitation. I felt so bad for the kid, I put my hand on the book to help draw it away from him. He literally screamed and said, "Don't crap up my book!" It was the bravest cry I've ever heard. I nearly wept.
Gross: What did you do?
Sendak: Well, I took the father aside, because I think the father was going to kill the kid because he'd embarrassed him and made everybody laugh. I had to sit down and say how great I thought his kid was and not to be angry with him, because the child didn't understand what this whole nonsense--this social nonsense of autographing--was all about.
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