Why I “hate” the Tattered Cover
By Mary Crawford
I hate reading at the Tattered Cover Book Store in Denver, Colorado, not because it’s a bad book store or an unpleasant city to visit. On the contrary, it’s quite a friendly book store (there are actually three book stores, but I’ve only ever visited the downtown location) and Denver is a beautiful city (it’s so clean).
No, I hate reading at the Tattered Cover because I’m mostly on my own. Jane usually deserts me the minute we walk through the doors to go wandering through the store rather than standing at my side where she’s supposed to be feeding me lines.
This is how our schtick is supposed to work when we do a reading: She’s the ventriloquist and I’m the dummy. She’s supposed to tell me what to say because she’s the one who’s researched the city and the store we’re visiting and she’s the one who wrote the book. After all, people don’t want to hear my opinion; they want to hear hers. Of course I’m able, should we be disconnected (once the battery on my terminal died in the middle of a reading) to improvise. When we’re on tour, Jane and I are together pretty much 24/7 and I know her like a sister. So if Jane’s temporarily absent and someone asks me if I’ve changed my opinion of Princess Caroline (wife of the Prince Regent; she hasn’t, not really), I can fairly accurately speak on her behalf. I know her speech patterns by now and have even occasionally delivered a bon mot that I think is worthy of her.
But I’m only supposed to wing it when something goes wrong and whenever we visit the Tattered Cover, something always goes wrong. First, they have all these AfterNet hotspots scattered throughout the store and I guess they’re crazy strong, plus they have a lot of location-based discussion groups throughout the store: in other words, if you want to talk to one group of disembodied people on a particular topic, you have to be in a specific part of the store. So if Jane starts talking to someone on the first floor of the store, she has to leave them once we go to the reading room on the second floor. Jane loves this, says it makes it like attending an actual party.
Second, Jane just seems to get silly at altitude. I know there’s no real reason being a mile high should make the disembodied silly—the AfterNet headquarters are in Denver after all—but without a doubt, when we get to Denver, she gets very silly and very much so the first time we visited (we’ve been to Denver three times).
That first time she checked out while I was actually reading, which isn’t uncommon. She’s usually checking her email, tweeting, updating her blog, et cetera, during the reading, but she’s nearby, waiting for the Q&A. But I saw the terminal readout indicate she wasn’t connected at all, so my guess is she ran back to one of the discussion groups.
As I said, this isn’t too uncommon but she she still hadn’t come back once the Q&A had started. I had a packed room and I could tell it was a pretty knowledgeable crowd. I kept worrying someone would ask a tough Janeite question, but instead someone asked, “How is writing different now that you’re disembodied, ignoring things like technology?”
That was a good question and one we’ve been asked before, but this time I had to answer it on my own and I was flailing. I worried that I was losing the audience and then my earbud beeped to tell me Jane had reconnected. Instead of helping me out, however, Jane started prattling on about someone she’d met who claimed to have also lived during the reign of George III, but in America. And she would not stop talking while I was trying to answer the question. Finally I had to mute her.
Later on it dawned on me that on this occasion, Jane was a little scatterbrained because it was the day before the anniversary of her death in 1817. Since she’d met her friend and agent Melody Kramer, they had celebrated that day almost like a second birthday, but this time Melody was in L.A. representing Jane. We had planned to do something special the next day, but I think Jane was missing Melody.
Fortunately I was able to finally answer the question a little more eloquently by just making stuff up. I hope I wasn’t too over the top. Of course our other two visits, that didn’t occur in July, were similarly loopy, but at least I’d learned to insist that we arrive many hours before the event, to give Jane a chance to indulge in the perpetual cocktail party that is the Tattered Cover.
She’s still pretty silly though and puts Lydia to shame. It must be that the cosmic rays are stronger at a mile high.
