David Sedaris will work for tips
Story by Lisa Bruce
For best-selling author David Sedaris, the tip jar changed everything.
On a book tour, Sedaris’ ATM card stopped working. He decided to put out a tip jar. Not that he really needed the money, but everyone has a tip jar these days.
“Then I got greedy and almost ruined everything,” Sedaris said, reading from a piece he’s been working on for a literary festival in Italy. The theme? The seven deadly sins. Sedaris chose greed.
Sedaris made $292 in Las Vegas and $394 in Anchorage. In another town, he claims, a 10-year-old girl brought him a jar of change — her life’s savings — for a tip. Sedaris says he sent her to the bookstore counter to have the coins turned to paper currency.
Tips, rather than the crowd, became the measure of success. “Cities I used to enjoy visiting I now considered cheap,” said Sedaris.
David Sedaris always wanted to be an author — to tour, meet fans and sign books. And the best-selling humorist spent hours in the rotunda of Jesse Hall, before and after his sold-out performance on Wednesday night, signing his books. It’s one of his trademarks.
Sedaris — a slight man in a striped shirt, pink tie and slacks — held a pencil in his right hand while he spoke. He later told an audience member he marks passages where the audience laughs.
And the audience did laugh — at stories of an Australian waiter talking to a kookaburra “the way you would talk to a child with a switchblade in his hand” and of a pretentious American houseguest (Sedaris and his partner live in France) who didn’t like that Sedaris had named the wild rabbits in his yard French words that meant “tile” and “unemployment.” (The name he chose for another rabbit, inspired by the houseguest, is unprintable.) Sedaris confessed to the audience that he and his partner, Hugh, have a division of labor: “He replaces plaster in the attic. I take dried-up bees and dress them armored suits of tinfoil.”
As the evening drew to an end, Sedaris took questions from the audience. One member asked whether he embellished real life for his stories — in particular the little girl with her coin offering for a tip. Sedaris intimated that he’d told the truth, but it’s hard to know for sure.
Any best-selling author willing to sit for hours signing books and meeting people can’t be that greedy, can he?
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