After some signing and chatting, Andy and I pushed our way out of the the bookstore. There he was, chewing gum and awkwardly dodging fans. There I was, apologetically smiling at the forlorn hippies. And there was a little ventriloquists dummy, poking his head out of Andy's brown paper bag, grinning like he just heard a good holocaust joke.
When we made it outside, Andy invited some WFMU DJs to join us by getting all their names wrong. I think he called all the guys "Dave." Ken, of course, kindly repeated their real names to Andy, but it was too late. I'm starting to understand why Andy was voted off the staff over there...
Inside the bar, Andy dropped the bag with the ventriloquist dummy in a corner, and the three of us sat down. We had a great chat. Andy asked me if I was dating anyone who I'd met on the world wide web (nope!), and then he went on to tell me and Ken his own tale of how he met Beth online. Apparently, in his early days of online dating, he would only search for widows. There's a logic to this, albeit twisted. You'll have to ask him about it sometime.
Long story made shorter, during Andy's adventures as a single man, he apparently left quite the impression on one widow named Amy. She ended up alluding to a certain "comedy writer" in a novel she wrote years later.
Manless in Montclair: How a Happily Married Woman Became a Widow Looking for Love in the Wilds of Suburbiaby Amy Holman Edelman
"Isabel's adventures in husband-hunting gyrate happily between soap opera and sitcom..."
Here's the book on Amazon. If you track down a copy, be sure to e-mail me some relevant passages!