Shortly after we arrived at the Collins “housewarming” party at The Modern last night, Gillian Blake came over to introduce us to one of her authors, Ben Ryder Howe, and started to pitch the story of his memoir, My Korean Deli, about how he and his wife pooled money with her parents to buy, yep, a Korean deli—moving in with them as well because they had no savings left for their own place—”and then ran it into the ground,” she concluded. “But you’re still married, right?” we asked Howe, not realizing until we’d popped the question: Oh, geez, this could get awkward. “Just barely,” he told us, though not as morosely as that could’ve sounded. “We’ve moved out of her parent’s house, though.” Shortly after, another of Blake’s authors, Asha Bandele, came over, and we started talking about her forthcoming memoir, Something Like Beautiful, except that she had a confession to make. Bandele considered herself a typical New Yorker—nothing fazes her—but then “I walked in here, and there’s James Bond!”
Sure enough, Sir Roger Moore, whose memoir, My Word Is My Bond, had just come out, was standing not two feet from us. And when our conversation with Bandele was over, and after Moore had finished chatting with Ed Harris, we introduced ourselves and asked if he had a favorite movie that he wished more people knew about. “The Man Who Haunted Himself,” he said immediately, a 1970 psychological horror film we had never even heard of before that, he said, had everything going for it: a great script, a brilliant director… “but it was entirely uncommercial,” he lamented. (Although it’s on DVD, so an email to Netflix may be in order.) His eyes lit up when we told him that our favorite film of his was ffolkes; “oh, ffolkes was great fun!” he told us, and began to tell us about how the production had come together until we were interrupted by a clamor up front, as publisher/president Steve Ross began the formal portion of the evening…
(Actually, meeting them all was a very nice experience; if anything, we would have said it left us stirred, not shaken, but… aw, heck, we’re overexplaining the joke again.)