Sold a “Lollipop” to a fellow (contractor/author) with whom I’d played pick-up basketball for months and months on Saturday afternoons, before, between games, we got past first names and learned we’d overlapped for one year at Brandx without being aware of each other’s presence. (“Enjoying hell out of your book,” he says.)
Sold a “Cheesesteak” and a “Schiz” to a second cousin (grandmother/fine artist), now from Boca Raton, originally from Alliance, NJ, where our families had settled when they came over from Kiev in the late 19th century. We may have met at a Cousins’ Club picnic in the summer of 1960 from which I recall jumping off a tire-swing into a creek.
In other news…
1.) “Lollipop” took some ribbing from the fellow whose memoir I’d edited due to my having asked him to identify Silky Sullivan for his readers, while in my first couple chapters I’d baffled him with Preston Sturges, Saul Alinsky, and The Rule in Shelley’s Case. “Who is better known?” he demanded. “Saul Alinsky or Silky Sullivan?” Are your readers expected to bring along an encylopedia?
Google, I answered.
2.) “Are these books free?” a visitor to my table asked. She had shouler-length, uncombed, sparse white hair. She wore a baggy black zipper jacket and baggy black pants. She wore teardrop earrings and had small, piercing black eyes.
“They’re for sale,” I said. “Ten, fifteen, ten, twenty.”
She looked more closely. “I’ve never heard of any of them.”
“That’s why they’re for sale. I f people had heard of them, I wouldn’t be sitting here.” I smiled and handed her my card. “Now you can learn more about them and me.”
She absorbed the content – and said, “Zei gezunt.”
So many Bob Levins on the Internet; I'm the Bob Levin who writes.