Well, I just spent the last 4.5 hours doing all the line edits for the novel. I think there was a disconnect of getting up at 4 a.m. and then doing something brainless. So, now, when I get up, my goal is to fix the overall book, remove some of the middle, move some character stuff around, and fix the ending. Or, rather, put the ending in there that, in the last read-through, I was surprised I hadn’t written yet.

I think having something that demands mental energy and a more positive, challenging task is a better fit with the time at which I’m doing my work. It’s better to wake up to a puzzle and get invested in solving it than just “On page 34, there is an extraneous that. OK, that’s removed… On page 36…”

It took a while to do it, but there is a clear crossover as the book goes on. The front of the book has more line edits and less pink FIX THIS sections, but the end of the book has more pink and far less line edits. That’s not to say there weren’t line edits that could have been made, just that… well, if you’re going to be gutting while sections, why bother fixing sentences that are in mortal danger anyway?

Yesterday was fun, since I got to experience a rare live performance. I do appreciate performers who do matinees much more on this schedule, so I got to see Bill Cosby for the first time in person. Strangely enough, Bill Cosby may have been one of my first celebrity autographs ever. I remember being alone in NYC, so I had to be somewhat older, and saw a group of people standing at a stage door. I want to say it was Radio City Music Hall, and it very well may have been.

I didn’t see him perform, but the people were there hoping to get his autograph after his show. I didn’t even see his show, but hung out to get one, as well, as I was a big fan of The Cosby Show. But as it got later, and no Cosby, it was getting close to when my bus was departing from Port Authority. So, I went into a stationary store, and bought a pack of however many index cards were in a pack and a stamp. I put a stamp on one index card, filled out my own address, and gave it to one of the people at the very front of the line that I’d talked to earlier, telling her I had to leave, but could she get him to sign in. A few days later, it showed up in the mail. I have no clue if I still have that anywhere.

Seeing him for the first time was nice. It’s just amazing how easy he makes it all seem, but that discounts his 50 years doing it onstage at this point (He’s 71 now). He told more than two hours of stories, and is just as smooth and as funny as you can imagine. It will certainly make my next trip to a comedy club different, showing how green they are, how anxious, how unwilling to let a joke build, and grow, and wait, and when the payoff finally hits, just sit there because you know it’s funny.

Definitely worth seeing. He comes out with a bottle of water that he barely touched the whole time, a box of tissues mainly used for a visual, and no other notes or anything else. One thing that puzzled me was over his chair (oh yeah, at 71, he’s not exactly a stand-up comic anymore), before he came out, there was a T-shirt draped over it that said “Hello Friend,” which seemed a sweet, low-rent way to greet the audience. Then, he came out wearing a sweatshirt that also had “Hello Friend” in block letters across the front.

I kept wondering what Hello Friend meant, but poking around online, you can quickly discover that “Hello Friend” was the typical greeting of his son Ennis, who was murdered a while back. Cosby and his wife also started a foundation called Hello Friend that gives money to learning disabilities, which is the career Ennis was studying to enter when he was killed.

It was a somber coda to the event to read all that, but in a way reinforced how amazing Bill is. I especially liked how he did an extended bit on the Garden of Eden, dissecting a lot of the inconsistencies in the story. He really should be putting out more comedy CDs. As near as I can tell, his last stand-up release in audio or video was Bill Cosby Himself in 1983!

But yeah, definitely worth seeing a master at the top of his game and seeming to be having such a good time this many decades in.

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