After quickly finishing our dinner yesterday evening, Paul and I set off to the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium to see David Sedaris at 7:30 pm. By the time we arrived, we saw big crowds and an endless queue in front of the auditorium. To our amazement, the fast-moving queue was by no means shortened but augmented by more ticket holders behind us. Once seated in our designated seats, we saw the auditorium all but empty. Where did the people ahead of us go? Before long our question was answered. Right before the opening time, the lobby became quieter but the auditorium was instantly filled up around, above and below us. Two sections of folding chairs down in the center were also filled.
To celebrate the closing night of Sedaris's national tour, the whole population of Santa Cruz seemed to show up for the evening event. After a lifetime of practice, David Sedaris has turned his book reading into an art of live performance. While flipping through a stack of cards from his articles, notebooks or diaries, he transported his audience effortlessly to his airport adventures, African safari with his open jeep surrounded by seven lionesses, literary festivals in Pakistan, small talk in the elevator of his tall luxury apartment building in New York City, and the most poignant of all, his loss or betrayal of friendship by his introduction of Pattie to Dan, a better-off childhood neighbor and friend in North Carolina.
While performing his art, Sedaris has managed to inserts his viewpoints on world politics, and society. His satires on fashionable cultural appropriation, and prevailing pronoun requirements were not lost on his audience, or his humor on foreign language learning programs, Doulingo vs. Pimsleur. His satirical view of dogs, particularly those "rescue" ones and their self-righteous owners, brought waves of laughter from the audience. Sedaris is a master to open our eyes to a world outside our mundane existence, by combining simplicity with complexity, writings with entertainment, and personal life with political and cultural commentaries. No wonder so many people in Santa Cruz came to be entertained by him this evening, including a large percentage of the elderly and sickly on walkers!
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