Kimberly Emerson

Continuing my weekend of three very different kinds of shows, we come to:

FRIDAY

Friday night turned several degrees closer to the sun than Thursday had been.  I picked up Ann and we headed to Pasadena for a reading by David Sedaris.

David Sedaris, author of Me Talk Pretty One Day, When You Are Engulfed in Flames, and Let’s Talk Diabetes with Owls, among others. Not my photo – I would’ve forced him to smile.

I fell in love with Mr. Sedaris’ writing a year or so ago, when I stumbled across one of his books on the library’s audio download website.  You just have to love a man who quit smoking by moving to Japan for six months.  (I’ve never been, but from what I understand, it’s akin to deciding to lose weight by moving into a bakery.)  His riff on the differences between Japanese and American breakfasts is my favorite.  He imagined a mother in Japan telling her child, “Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.  You’re not going anywhere until you finish all those pickles and at least half those fish heads.”  I think this line tickles me because I can just see a Japanese person cracking up at the thought of an American parent saying, “Oh, no!  You are not leaving this house until you’ve eaten all that sugar-laden cereal with the ingredients I can’t pronounce.”  To each his own crazy, that’s my motto.

After fighting through more fun traffic and over-paying for valet parking (I wanted time for a real dinner tonight, and it seemed the only way), we sat in the Pasadena Civic Auditorium and basked in Mr. Sedaris’ wit.  I admit, the Synchronized Seating Ballet that went on for the first thirty minutes distracted me.  Why the ushers chose to allow over a hundred people (I am not exaggerating) to be seated after the show started, I don’t know.  At one point, they brought the house lights up halfway, I suppose so that all the latecomers wouldn’t hurt themselves finding their chairs.  I could understand this if there’d been a huge fire nearby or perhaps a riot downtown, but if there was anything more exciting than maybe $5 margarita night at Chili’s, no one told me.

Breathe, Kimberly.  Breathe.

I laughed so hard at Mr. Sedaris’ commentary that I worried the quiet woman to the right might smack me, but the evening was not all giggles.  The youngest sister of the Sedaris clan, Tiffany, committed suicide this past spring.  Mr. Sedaris read an essay that he’d written about the experience, as he and his family tried to navigate the worlds of loss and guilt.  I know from experience that depression is not someone else’s fault, but it’s hard to understand that from the outside.

“Why do you think she did it?” I asked as we stepped back into the sunlight. For that’s all any of us were thinking, had been thinking since we got the news. Mustn’t Tiffany have hoped that whatever pills she’d taken wouldn’t be strong enough, and that her failed attempt would lead her back into our fold? How could anyone purposefully leave us, us, of all people? This is how I thought of it, for though I’ve often lost faith in myself, I’ve never lost it in my family, in my certainty that we are fundamentally better than everyone else. It’s an archaic belief, one that I haven’t seriously reconsidered since my late teens, but still I hold it. Ours is the only club I’d ever wanted to be a member of, so I couldn’t imagine quitting. Backing off for a year or two was understandable, but to want out so badly that you’d take your own life?

“I don’t know that it had anything to do with us,” my father said. But how could it have not?  Doesn’t the blood of every suicide splash back on our faces?

Davis Sedaris, Now We Are Five (New Yorker)

Sometimes it’s hard to remember it from the inside, too.  You may have painful circumstances, but the trap doesn’t spring until your own mind turns on you.  That’s what makes it so overwhelming and scary.  As it was explained to me years ago by a therapist, there’s a certain chemical that floods the brain when you’re under stress.  When you’re through the worst of it, the brain sends out a garbage collector to pick up that chemical, as it isn’t needed anymore.  My brain releases the chemical on cue, but then sends out the garbage collector right away. (That’s me, wanting to be tidy on the inside, too.)  This chemical efficiency leaves me, a reasonably capable woman, unequipped to deal with extreme distress.    All of this is why you should never hesitate to get help from a good therapist.

I find it interesting, in a sadistic kind of way, how our society treats mental health.  We scorn Christian Scientists or any other sect that believes in healing of physical ailments without the medical profession, but bring up depression and most people think that you should be able to handle this on your own.  Stop feeling sorry for yourself already.  I’m here to tell you, folks, having clinical depression and telling yourself to snap out of it is every bit as useless as putting down your crutches, taking off your cast, and informing your broken leg that it’s ready for that marathon, you just need to do some extra stretching.

After exposing this raw wound to a packed house of NPR junkies, Mr. Sedaris moved on to his own personal book review of Barbara Demick’s Nothing to Envy, about life in North Korea.  He told us to buy her book instead of his own from the bookseller out in the lobby, and managed to help all of us find a human connection with people suffering on the other side of the world.  Evidently, some North Koreans have horrible in-laws, too, just like Americans do.

After the show, Ann and I waited two and a half hours to get books signed, and spent a pleasant minute and a half in conversation with the author before finding out that that the valets were long gone.  I ended up having to sneak back in to the theater to pester an usher into radioing someone for the location of my car (and the keys).

Totally worth it.

Kimberly needs to download another Sedaris audiobook for her Thanksgiving drive.  When you’re sitting in traffic for eight hours, you need all the laughs you can get.

Tags: Barbara Demick, David Sedaris, depression, essays, mental health, North Korea, NPR, Pasadena Civic Auditorium, reading, suicide, traffic