David Sedaris is a bestselling author of books like Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim & Me Talk Pretty One Day. Raised up Southen in Raleigh, N.C., David has made a cottage industry of telling tales about growing up gay in a straight world. He is a regular contributor to National Public Radio.

So when I discovered he was coming to Bend, Oregon, I bought tickets to hear him. As you might imagine, Hermiston isn't exactly Grand Central for the literary world. We don't even have a bookstore. When I first moved to Eastern Oregon and asked a local English teacher if there was a good writing group around, she said yes. That they meet every Thursday down at the rodeo grounds. She assumed I said, "Riding" group. The only reading they do in these parts concerns numbers -- sports scores and the price of wheat or beef.

When my friend Pam Steele, a very fine poet, decided she was going to move back to Eastern Oregon after living in Kentucky, I asked if she was crazy or what. Why would you leave the Southeast? I implored. It's got such a long literary history, fine bookstores, and a community of poets and writers. I'm convinced that Eastern Oregon is where all the people from Tennessee and Kentucky, who loathed reading, relocated. They pulled their wagon trains over in places like Pendleton and Hermiston because somebody stuck a flyer on the reins of their wagons, promising free moonshine to the first 50 settlers. They couldn't really read the flyer, but they recognized the drawing of the jug.

Anyway, when I want to dabble my feet back in literary waters, I have to drive someplace far, far away -- like Bend, or Seattle or Portland. I learned last night that I could have just driven up to Yakima, Wash, only an hour-and-half from my home. But it never occurred to me that David Sedaris would be in Yakima. Home of Legends Casino, and the town with the highest murder rate in the state of Washington. Nine murders this year, already. Most all gang related. So, even if I'd know Sedaris was going to be in Yakima, I'd have to weigh the risks before actually going there. Yakima is the kind of town I drive through -- usually wearing full metal jacket & helmet.

So I came to Bend to hear Sedaris, along with 1,200 other folks who plopped down $30 a ticket to hear him. Or was it $40? I can't remember. Sedaris has sold like 2 millilon copies of his books. Me? I don't even think I've hit the 2,000 mark yet. David Sedaris makes me feel like a complete and utter failure as a writer. He's Elvis, I'm the impersonator playing to smoky VFW halls.

Mr. Sedaris began the evening with a hilarous piece about the way certain academic types lord their knowledge over students by capitalizing on their ability to speak in foreign languages.Specifically, he mentioned a professor that loved to say "Latino" and "Nicarauga". For emphasis Sedaris rolled his rs and os. It's a piece that works best when told because Sedaris is a sardonic mimic. 

Eight years ago, Sedaris and his partner, Hugh, moved to Normandy, because as Sedaris said, he really was the only American to keep his promise to move out of the US if Bush got elected. So what began as a piece about a professor evolved into a story about a houseguest who insisted on speaking French while visiting Sedaris. The only two languages I speak are hillbilly and English, so I have no idea what it must be like to have a tourist correct my French, but I know how annoyed I get listening to My Name is Earl where a bunch of folks who aren't Southern, or white trash, try to pretend that they are. Apparently, Sedaris and his houseguest really came to blows over the naming of the rabbits that populate the Normandy cottage. Sedaris gives the rabbits French names like Tile & Screened-In Front Porch, which sounds much better in French than English. His houseguest insisted that Sedaris had to give the rabbits better names than Tile. But the rabbits belong to Sedaris so he figures he can name them whatever he wants. So after his guest left, he named one after him: Thank God He's Gone.

From there Sedaris told a moving tale of his former neighbor in New York. An elderly woman named Helen, who had hair dyed the color of a penny and wore the same nasty sweats that Rocky wore. Helen was not your Sunday School version of a lady, but more your crazy auntie that drank too much, swore too much and complained incessantly. Oh, yeah, she was racist too. Sedaris took the tales from Helen's life and, altho recounting them in an unforgiving way, managed to make his audience care about Helen, who ended up dying after falling from a chair, trying to paint pee stains on the ceiling with white shoe polish. The upstairs tenant had a dog that Helen was convinced was being trained to pee indoors. It was a bittersweet story and one that made you want to hear more Helen tales.

Sedaris had the audience eating out of his hands, when he changed midstream, and decided to read a story about returning to North Carolina one Christmas break and scoring some pot with his brother. The story filled every My Name is Earl stereotype. There was the trailer. The aritifical tree. The lethargic girlfriend with the remote control that she referred to as her "nigger." On and on, Sedaris went with the tale, till I was winicing & squirming in my seat. It was not funny. He followed that with some of the most pornographic humor. I've heard outside NYC. It wasn't even shocking as much as it was just plain sad.

Aware, I think, that he was spiraling out-of-control, Sedaris opened up the event to questons from the floor. There weren't many. He finally ended the evening with a tale of meeting a 9-year old boy in Yakima, Wash, at the YMCA, where Sedaris was doing laps in the pool. The boy offered to race him. Most 50-year-olds would let the boy win, but not Sedaris, he whipped the kid. To which the youngster asked, "Do you believe in God?" Sedaris said, No, he didn't, but asked the boy why? And the youth said God had allowed the old man to win, but touching him from above and pushing him along the laps. Annoyed with this rationale, Sedaris suggested to the boy that maybe God had made the boy lose by reaching out and slowing him down. On and on they argued, until, the boy, frustrated, told Sedaris that he was going to hell. Who says so? Sedaris asked. My pastor, the boy replied. What church do you go to? Sedaris asked. A godly one, the boy answered before swimming off.

I'm not sure how much of that story is true. One can never be too sure with writers. (You might want to check the facts of this blog.) But I am certain that the reason Sedaris told the story was to take a pot shot at believers of all faiths.

I left Bend High School with an overwhelming feeling of sadness that one doesn't expect to have when paying good money to hear a humorist. Maybe the title for David Sedaris's next book ought to be "Me Talk Dirty One Day."