Ginger Kid Quotes

“Beth,” who nurtured my love for storytelling and stayed up late with me on summer nights pretending to be sportscasters, actors, directors, and other things I’ve gotten to be. “David,” who hit baseballs over my head until I was old enough to do the same for him and who lobbed jokes over my head (and continues to do so). “Leah,” who is more like me than I care to admit, and not just because we both have red hair. My mother, whom I love very much, despite how many times I joke about her in this book, and whom I will be taking out to a very nice dinner sometime soon. My father, whom I miss very much. Every time I do something that I know he’d have been proud of, I get a little sad knowing I can’t show it to him. Thank you to Russell Best, Jane Dystel, and the entire team over at Abrams/Amulet who worked to publish and design the book. Your tireless creativity is what made this a reality. Without your help, this book”
― Steve Hofstetter, Ginger Kid: Mostly True Tales from a Former Nerd

“AND NOW FOR THE ACKNOWLEDGMENTS”
― Steve Hofstetter, Ginger Kid: Mostly True Tales from a Former Nerd

“Aren’t you afraid of people judging you?” “No,” I laughed. “I went to high school.”
― Steve Hofstetter, Ginger Kid: Mostly True Tales from a Former Nerd

“Micky wouldn’t win, so”
― Steve Hofstetter, Ginger Kid: Mostly True Tales from a Former Nerd

“anything if you just set your mind to it, surround yourself with the”
― Steve Hofstetter, Ginger Kid: Mostly True Tales from a Former Nerd

“wanted to go to a Knicks game. Of course I did—I’d only ever been to one Knicks game in my life; tickets were both expensive and difficult to come by. After I said yes, I thought of the awkwardness of sitting there for a whole game with a boss almost four times my age. Maybe we could pass the time by talking about the game. Or ferrets. Before I could even finish worrying, Kenneth left me instructions on where to pick up my press pass. Whoa. Hold the rotary, wall-mounted phone. I was going as press? I was going as press. By myself. At seventeen, I was technically too young to get a credential. But Kenneth had been working with Madison Square Garden so long, that rule didn’t even matter. The Knicks’s media department assumed I was eighteen, and when I got to the Garden, there was a credential waiting for me with my correctly spelled name on it. It could have said Dave Hoffmeyer; I’d have been just as excited. If I thought the lobby of the NHL was impressive, you can imagine how I felt the first time I stepped into a professional locker room. I took copious notes during the game and stuck my recorder in the face of anyone who was talking. And, feeling bold, I even interviewed a few people who weren’t talking until I asked them to. While waiting for the players to finish showering and come out for interviews, I approached two celebrity fans. They were standing in the interview area, so I figured they were interested in being interviewed. The first fan was New York Jets wide receiver and number one–overall draft pick Keyshawn Johnson. Johnson flatly (and rudely) turned me down, even going as far as to call me kid. And not in the endearing way that Superman said it to Jimmy Olsen. Hurt but not broken, I walked over to Hanging with Mr. Cooper star Mark Curry, who couldn’t have been”
― Steve Hofstetter, Ginger Kid: Mostly True Tales from a Former Nerd

“door. Thankfully, I was the only one in the office, so Kenneth didn’t see me chasing two ferrets around a four-bedroom apartment. If the ferrets pooped before I caught them, at least there was newspaper everywhere. I got used to the ferret smell after a while and got down to work, but I screwed up during my first week (and not just because I almost lost the ferrets). Before Kenneth left to cover a game, he told me to finish researching for a story he was working on. So I did and then headed home. What I didn’t do is tell him where on the computer I had stored the completed files. While I was away for the weekend, visiting family and unreachable, Kenneth had to redo all of my work from the week because he couldn’t find what I’d already done. I learned an important lesson about communication that day, as well as how to stare at the floor when your boss is yelling at you. I spent most of the next week on ferret duty. Yes, the pun is intentional. Over the next few weeks, I got better at completing my job, and I started enjoying it, too. I mainly did research for Kenneth’s books, but there were perks. One day, I had to go to the NHL’s offices to pick up a packet of media clips that Kenneth needed for a story. Beaming with pride, I walked into the NHL’s office and picked up an envelope—a job any bicycle courier would have found boring. But this was the office of a professional sports league. To me, that manila envelope was magic. Kenneth began trusting me more and more and even let me contribute a few quips for a column he wrote for a newspaper in upstate New York. His column always ended with one-liner observations about sports (and occasionally about music for old people). Kenneth’s one-liners were usually spot-on but fairly dry, so I started writing jokes. After the first few weeks of Kenneth using some of my work, he gave me space in his column, referring to me as his intrepid young reporter or other such terms usually found in Superman comics from the”
― Steve Hofstetter, Ginger Kid: Mostly True Tales from a Former Nerd

“Kenneth seemed like a busy man who had hired many interns in the past and didn’t want to waste time. He offered me the job without meeting me in person and demanded I make a decision while we were still on the phone. I said yes and told him that I would have to tell the other places I was interviewing that I was no longer available. I planned on telling them both that, if they ever called back. On my first day working for Kenneth, I quickly learned why I didn’t have an in-person interview. If I’d had an in-person interview, I may not have taken the job. Kenneth’s office was in his home, in a creaky, prewar apartment building. Which war, I couldn’t say for certain. Probably World War I. Possibly the Civil War. Maybe even the Hundred Years’ War. Parts of the office were exceedingly impressive. Kenneth had a collection of hockey media guides that dated back to before most teams were in the league. He also had walls and walls of books, many of which he had written. And newspapers. He had so many newspapers. The size of the apartment was also impressive—a four-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side was not cheap. Though it was pretty easy to figure out that he’d been living there since the time that a four-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side had been cheap. You could tell that just by reading the dates on the newspapers. The least impressive thing about the office, other than the dust, was the ferret cage. Kenneth had two pet ferrets and part of the job of his interns was to clean up after them. Ferrets can be cute if you’re looking at pictures of them. If you’re cleaning their cages, ferrets are smelly weasels with a tendency to bite. I’d imagine it’s hard to conduct a successful in-person interview when the whole office smells of ferret. The first time I had to clean the ferret cage, I made the rookie mistake of thinking the ferrets”
― Steve Hofstetter, Ginger Kid: Mostly True Tales from a Former Nerd

“asked. “I don’t want to push in on your date.” They laughed; they’d been dating for a while at that point and to them this was just a regular Saturday night, only with more formal attire. “Besides,” Jacob said, “You think Katie is eating alone? I bet she’s with Amalia right now, being consoled about how she missed her chance to dance with you.” I laughed at the nonsensical thought of Katie even caring about us dancing together, and the three of us went to one of those little all-night delis with upstairs seating somewhere in midtown. Jacob teased me about how naïve I was to expect a senior to date me, as his senior girlfriend playfully punched him in the arm. After we ate, we walked around Manhattan for hours, just talking and laughing about how everything had unfolded. It wasn’t until that night that I learned the full lesson from my heart-to-heart with Mason. I didn’t need to work on making more friends, and I certainly didn’t need to work on any more dates. I needed to spend time with”
― Steve Hofstetter, Ginger Kid: Mostly True Tales from a Former Nerd

“be, I may as well have been Beyoncé. You know what? Still a strange sentence to write. I danced and I danced and I danced. And as the crowd started chanting “Go Steve!”, two senior girls I didn’t know jumped in the circle to dance with me. I went from humiliation and regret to dancing with two other people’s dates in the length of one song. As the song finished, everyone cheered, and the two seniors hugged me. Well, not everyone cheered. I saw Scarlet fuming. I caught her eye, smiled, mouthed thank you, and started dancing to the next song. Rejection is an odd thing—it only matters if you give it the power to matter. If you’ve ever called into a radio contest or played the lottery, you know that rejection without consequences exists. Why don’t we get upset when we’re not the ninety-ninth caller? Why don’t we cry when we scratch off a ticket to find it doesn’t have our numbers? Because we’ve already accepted those things as possibilities before we extended ourselves. And relationships are no different. “Most people,” my brother had said years earlier, pointing at the middle of three lines, “live their life here. They don’t go far down, but they don’t go far up either. The further you go toward this top line, the further you will also go toward this bottom line. You decide if that’s worth it. I’ve never been a fan of the middle.” Ever since then, I’d been taking more and more risks. I’d been stepping further toward both the top and bottom lines. And, overall, I’d been happier. I resigned myself to never live my life in the middle again. Unless it was the middle of a circle of people chanting “Go Steve!” At the end of the night, I was exhausted from all the dancing and was about to grab some food and take the long subway ride home. Jacob and his girlfriend invited”
― Steve Hofstetter, Ginger Kid: Mostly True Tales from a Former Nerd

“her finger tips were on my shoulders. Had a casting director been there, Katie would have been given the lead in any zombie movie she wanted. What we did was as much dancing as sleeping is strenuous exercise. After our non-dance, it was pretty obvious that Katie had just used me as an entry point to the party. So I did what anyone should have done in that situation. I danced by myself. I didn’t intend to dance by myself. The sting of my zombie realization was too fresh for me to do anything fun. But dancing was my only choice. There are very few situations where someone has no choice but to dance. Maybe someone is shooting at their feet in an old western, yelling “dance, monkey, dance!” Perhaps they’re in a coming-of-age movie where dance is the only way for those young whippersnappers to express themselves. Or, in my case, they are shoved into the middle of a circle and have to choose between fight or flight. I’d been to enough USY events to understand that most high school dances consist of circles of half a dozen to a dozen students dancing not too close to each other. Sometimes, the circle becomes an opportunity for a student to show off, or for a couple to try to demonstrate just how in love they are by grinding their pelvises against each other’s knees. Or the circle can become one more place for Scarlet Daly to try to embarrass you. What Scarlet didn’t realize when she pushed me into the middle of that circle was that I was not the same meek kid who had tried to defend myself by quoting Gone with the Wind. I had spent the last three years in USY as part of dance circles—just not in front of anyone who went to Hunter. So as the music played, I danced. Whether I was an objectively good dancer or not didn’t matter.”
― Steve Hofstetter, Ginger Kid: Mostly True Tales from a Former Nerd

“prom was less a prom and more a fancy dance. There were no limos or corsages or tuxedos. The guys who owned suits would be wearing them, but half the students would probably be in a blazer and khakis. And it wasn’t like prom where dates showed up together. The long-term couples did, sure, but most of the dates just met each other there. Armed with the knowledge of what to expect, I met Katie there. Sort of. I showed up, and she showed up, but it became pretty clear that we weren’t really there together. What happened between Katie’s immediate yes and her arrival to turn us so utterly platonic? Did Katie not understand I had asked her as a date? I specifically didn’t say as friends—she had to have known the difference. She was a worldly senior, after all. Then it hit me. Katie was a senior, and she couldn’t go to junior prom unless a junior asked her. And she wanted to go to junior prom with her best friend. It didn’t matter that Amalia thought Katie and I made a cute couple. Katie didn’t agree, and her opinion on the matter was way more influential. I gave my theory one final test. A slow song came on, and I approached Katie from across the room. Because that’s where she was hanging out—completely across the room. “Let’s dance,” I said, with the courage of a man who had nothing to lose. Not “Would you like to dance?” or “I was just thinking, maybe we should dance?” But a confident, assured, “Let’s dance.” That was the kind of thing that a boyfriend would say to a girlfriend if she was his date at the junior prom. So why couldn’t I say it to my date? Katie took my hand and we walked to the dance floor, and we danced. If you could call what we did dancing. We stood as far apart as we could while still technically touching and took small steps from side to side. My hands did their best”
― Steve Hofstetter, Ginger Kid: Mostly True Tales from a Former Nerd

“going to ask Katie.” Amalia practically burst through the phone. I was sure that part of Amalia’s excitement was having a friend that might be going to the party with her. But she also went on and on about how she had always thought that Katie and I would make such a cute couple and it was a wonderful idea and she was rooting for me and several other encouraging statements. Amalia also said that I’d better ask Katie soon, since it was going to be hard to keep that a secret. I called Katie right after I hung up. I didn’t have the guts to get rejected in person, but Amalia’s excitement had excited me. Katie and I talked about the latest assignment, a modern satire of a great work. I was planning on writing a version of “The Raven” about high school, an idea that Katie seemed to like. After all, she was writing a high-school version of Macbeth. We were in sync in many ways. And then, I just said it. “Do you want to go to the junior prom with me?” Katie said yes immediately. There was no time to blabber about how I thought it made sense for her to go because Amalia was going or to add in an as friends. Katie had said yes. I didn’t know what to expect from junior prom when I got there. The last school dance I’d been to was the first school dance I was able to go to. I was so excited for that one—Hunter had a few dances each year, and when the first dance came around, I put on my best ugly shirt (I wasn’t fashion forward enough to know that orange shirts are a bad idea for a redhead) and stood there awkwardly while everyone ignored me. From then on, school dances weren’t my thing. I had spent the previous three years at USY dances though, so I wasn’t intimidated by junior prom. I just wanted to know what I was in for. Jacob Corry’s girlfriend was a senior, so she became my Obi-Wan.”
― Steve Hofstetter, Ginger Kid: Mostly True Tales from a Former Nerd

“because I was so busy worrying about what people thought about me that I hadn’t taken the time to ever think about them. It wasn’t enough to get people to like me. I also had to afford them the same courtesy.”
― Steve Hofstetter, Ginger Kid: Mostly True Tales from a Former Nerd

“fought me, but she fought me. My idea prevailed, the change worked,”
― Steve Hofstetter, Ginger Kid: Mostly True Tales from a Former Nerd