As a kid in the ‘80s, we’d occasionally open the front door or come home from school to find a surprise, weatherproof-wrapped tome, resting on our porch, not really all unlike the Amazon packages of today, and we would get so excited.
Dad taught us what to do. We’d pick it up and shout, “The new phonebook’s here! The new phonebook’s here!”
I miss that ritual. Not the least of which because as we got older, we’d add, “Millions of people look at this everyday! This is the kind of spontaneous publicity – your name in print – that MAKES people!”
And of course, the real killer line we grew into, that we’d trot out any time we our names written anywhere, including church bulletins, camp rosters, and year books, with additional bonus points up for grabs if you said it to anybody else finding their name in print (you know, to make sure you captured the true weight of the moment, in our family’s love language, aka said as sarcastically as possible), “I’m in print!” Then you pause, because you have to say this part maddeningly seriously, “Things are going to start happening to me now.”
We learned the moves, we learned the tones, we learned to study Steve Martin in “The Jerk” first from censored TV editions, then from VHS copies of censored TV editions, and later from Blockbuster-rented-and-dubbed uncensored VHS copies like it was a prayer at church we were expected to know or a social studies test we actually wanted to pass.
All that preamble is for me to admit I had an actual “The new phonebook’s here” moment last week, when Jared Dillian’s new book showed up in a non-descript package on my front porch, and I opened it like a little kid to see this:
