I picked up “The Book of Vice,” by Peter Sagal last night. It’s one of those geeky-writer-explores-the-seamy-underside-of-American-life things, but very well done, often laugh-out-loud funny. In a chapter on “Swinging” (subtitled “Dinner Parties Gone Horribly Wrong”), the author describes his evening at a swinger’s party, at which he and his wife are shunned after they make it clear to everyone who approaches them that they are there as observers, not participants.
I don’t blame them: this April night was the last party at the Swinger’s Shack, maybe for the summer, maybe for the year, maybe forever. There was no time to waste with people like me. But still: in a lifetime in which I’ve been to all kinds of sexual marketplaces — bars, parties — this was the first time that I was going to get ignored because I wouldn’t put out.
Sagal is the host of the weekend NPR show “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me,” which I was actually on once, several years back, in the segment where a “celebrity” (and we use the term loosely here) is quizzed about the week’s news. (I’d run into Roy Blount the day before at some event and he’d asked me to fill in for a last-minute cancellation.) Unfortunately I was less familiar with the show then, and I think I might have been coming down with a cold. In fact, let’s just say I was coming down with a cold, because it makes the memory somewhat easier to bear. I’ve done a lot of radio over the years but I didn’t exactly distinguish myself that morning: the high point, as I recall it, was when I told a long pointless anecdote on live national radio about an apartment I had once lived in — it pains me to finish this sentence — which became infested with ants.
Oh yes, I was on fire.
(In fairness, the question which led to that moment did have something to do with, you know, ants. But still.)
Anyway in the intervening years I’ve become a big fan of the show. If they ever invite me back on — and oddly, they haven’t so far — I vow to be much, much funnier than last time. Which shouldn’t be too hard, considering.