Author Dave Barry visited The Drive yesterday while promoting his new book, “A Florida Man Defends His Homeland: Best State Ever.”
Steve opens by reading a quote from Dave Barry’s website www.davebarry.com which begins, “Dave Barry has been a professional humorist ever since he discovered that professional humor was a lot easier than working,” and adds, “Amen to that, brother!”
Dave Barry and Steve Jaxon
Steve notes that he and Carl Hiassen are both southern Floridians and Dave says, “Carl is a good friend of mine. We both worked for the Miami Herald. So we are sitting on the mother lode of weirdness.” Dave remembers the Gore-Bush presidential election in 2000 as “a disaster” for Florida and says that, “Florida has lived up to its official state motto, “Florida: you can’t spell it without ‘da.’ We’ve been a punching bag for the rest of the nation for the last fifteen or sixteen years, so I decided to write a defense. I will admit that a lot of weirdness exists in the state of Florida. We have only six percent of the nation’s population and we produce fifty-seven percent of the nation’s weirdness. That’s a fact, that’s a statistical fact, and it’s on the radio now so it must be true.”
“My argument is… a lot of the people doing weird things in the state of Florida are from other states. (…) It’s not our fault, we’re like the Ellis Island for weird, stupid people.”
The Story of International Talk Like a Pirate Day
Steve then says, “One of the columns that you wrote back in the day was largely responsible for the movement to observe International Talk Like a Pirate Day and I’ve got to tell you, Dave, I’m never going to forgive you for that.”
Dave replies, “That is correct. It’s one of those things. When you write a weekly column, I wrote hundreds and hundreds of them, you never know what the results of the column are going to be. Usually nothing. But in this case, I wrote this column; these two guys wrote me a letter saying ‘hey we think everyone should talk like a pirate on September 19, that being one of their ex-wives birthdays. That’s why they chose that date! And I said, oh yeah, sure, I’ll write a column about it, you know, I’m looking for a concept. And I forgot about it. And it comes, that first September 19, and I, this is back in the days of answering machines. And I come into my office and punch the button on my answering machine and I had like forty-eight messages that all went, ‘Arrr!’ People were talking like pirates! And now, for some reason it caught on, it’s celebrated internationally, actually all these bars and restaurants celebrate it. Dunkin’ Donuts gives away donuts that day. I don’t know why! People felt this need to talk like pirates even though the truth is, nobody really knows, once they get past ‘Arrr’ and ‘Ahoy matey’ they run out of pirate language. I know that 100 years from now, nobody will have the faintest idea who I was, but I think that September 19, people will still be talking like pirates.”
Weird Things About Florida
Steve asks about the new book and reads this quote, “Sure, there was the 2000 election, people also seem to take their pants off for no reason, it has flying insects the size of Le Bron James, but it’s a great state… from the earliest history to the fun fair of weirdness and gunfire, and the motto of Florida now according to Dave is, ‘Come back, we weren’t firing at you!’ ”
Dave continues, “A lot of the book is like a travelogue. There are a lot of weird places in Florida that people don’t know about. People, when they come to the state of Florida, a lot of tourists come straight to Orlando… then they’re gone. They’ve kind of missed a lot of the state. So I drove around the state, went to a lot of places that people don’t ordinarily get to or aren’t as familiar with, like Weeki Wachee, a mermaid spring where you can sit in an underwater theater and watch women wearing rubber tails swim around underwater… These old tourist attractions are kind of losing traction and I kind of celebrate them in this book.”
The Rock Bottom Remainders
Steve then asks, “You were part of that band, The Rock Bottom Remainders, with Stephen King, Amy Tam… are you guys still doing anything from time to time?” Dave replies, “…about every two years we get together and play. We played last year in Miami. What we don’t do is rehearse… I’ve been told that there are bands who practice the songs first and then they play them. What we do is we play the songs and then we go, ‘man, we should have rehearsed.’ That’s the key to our sound, that’s why we call it Hard Listening music.”
Steve asks Dave to tell what a Rock Bottom Remainder is. “It’s all authors, almost all authors. A remainder is a book that doesn’t sell. When you go to a bookstore and there is a whole stack of books that are $2, $3, and they were originally $27 hardbacks, those are called remainders. They’re kind of leftover books. So we call ourselves The Rock Bottom Remainders and we like to think that because we mean it ironically but in fact a lot of us have had remainders, so it’s not as funny as it might be for some of us.”
“Tell me again how that came about, it was quite a while ago,” asks Steve. “Yeah, it was back in 1992, when we started. A woman named Kathy Goldmark who lived in San Francisco, was a media escort, which means, when you’re an author on book tour, as I am now, somebody picks you up at the airport and takes you to your various interviews and makes sure you get to the signing in time, makes sure you get to the airport on time, that person is called a media escort. And Kathy did that but she also played in rock bands, she was into the San Francisco music scene. And over the years she found that a lot of the authors who came around either had been in bands, or liked to go listen to bands. And she had this idea in 1992, wouldn’t it be cool to get a bunch of authors with musical talent together, and for one night have a benefit concert to raise money for literacy. The flaw in that plan is that none of us have any musical talent. Actually some of us have minimal… but we’re not a good band. But we have so much fun, as Amy Tan put it one time, ‘I would do this to kill the whales!’ So we kept on playing. And here it is going on 25 years later and we still sometimes get together and play. But we haven’t gotten any better.
“Good, that’s the way we like it. I’ve seen you guys on some videos and it’s really cool,” says Steve, and Dave replies, “It’s a shame, we don’t want, we tried to destroy the videos, but…” and Steve says, “You didn’t get them all.”