The Metaxu Mixer

Well THAT was fun. Lauren Cerand and Bud Parr organized a mixer at Verlaine last night. After a very long day home with a sick-ish child baking cookies for some distant relatives too ill to cook their own, a little selfish literary bacchanal was just what the doctor ordered.

I had never met another blogger before, which seemed weird for about two seconds. Then, we were talking about which was our favorite Mr. Darcy (I can’t remember any actors’ names, so I’m useless), preferring Rosalind over Viola (or the other way around), nightmares about bad book covers, bad agents, bad copyediting… And the cocktails: potent and delicious. I didn't get to meet all but had great conversations with all whom I met. I confess to having been a little star struck--very, very happy to put faces and audible voices to the voices I know so well on-screen. It was really fun.

I was happy to meet Marcy Dermansky, who had read Twins alongside Bill Gordon at Mo Pitkins’: a reading I had all but gone too and had been sorry to miss. She reminded me that we had had a little blogging communion (fitting word for Catholic novels) over our mutual love of Antonia White’s May Sinclair and, at the end of the night, when I found myself without a business card, she whipped a copy of Twins out of her bag and gave it to me.

She said, with a certain tone in her voice (pique?), “This was supposed to be for Cate Blanchett. But here, you can have it.”

I’m a goofball, I know, but in the context of an evening meeting publicists, publishers, bloggers, and writers, I couldn’t think who Cate Blanchett was. A really important editor? A blogger too fancy to go to the Lower East Side? I was fully five blocks west before I realized whom she’d meant.

Cate Blanchett. Oh. Wow. I have Cate Blanchett’s copy of Twins.

I’m only ten pages in, but it’s really good. Cate will have to buy her own copy.