Stage Talk with Rick Koster
Where every show has something to say.
Candle advice — and more — from David Sedaris
In 2018, I did a phone interview with the brilliant and bestselling humorist David Sedaris, who returns for a reading at the Garde on April 11 in anticipation of his upcoming book, The Land and Its People.
Anyone familiar with Sedaris’s work or who has seen his public appearances are allowed to wonder: Is there a scenario, no matter how dark or mundane, that he can’t turn it into Funny?
In our conversation, which was theoretically focused on his then-latest collection, Calypso, about a beach house he bought to entertain family and loved ones in North Carolina, we didn’t actually talk much about the beach house or the essays it inspired.
There was a tone of melancholy to the book — at least to the extent that Sedaris can be wistful or longing about anything without the therapeutic impulse to find something that causes the reader to erupt in sustained laughter — and somehow the thread of our conversation turned to … a scented candle I had burning at my desk while we talked. Huh?
As I remember, the candle in question was of cheap provenance — a Yankee Candle wannabe branded as something along the lines of “Moonlight Cherry Blossoms” but in fact smelled like someone had set fire to a dollar store cough drop.
When our allotted interview time was up, I knew a lot more about scented candles but felt I’d ruined my chance to get “good stuff” from one of the wisest and wittiest people in the world. And yet I instinctively realized Sedaris probably has similar personal interactions with every journalist or, frankly, anyone he meets.
We’re all fascinating to him, and not just as chance-encounter specimens who might provide Everyman material for a future essay. It’s also obvious and part of his magic that a robust and kind heart beats beneath that veneer of delicious snark.
Oh: and if it seems I’m making more out of the “candle aspect” of the interview than really happened, take a look below at the hilarious postcard Sedaris sent me a few days later.
That’s the dude you’ll be laughing and marveling at when he takes the Garde stage.
