URGENT UPDATE:
Will the nice man who brought me, Wendy and Mark the “infidel” hats pictured here please get in touch with me again? Wendy is getting lots of requests for them!
***
I got to the Bay Bloor Indigo a little after six and was delighted to see that the front entrance was free of the usual “Heather Reisman is a JOOOOO” slo-mo Kristallnact pro-Palestinian protestors (Wendy posits that it was raining heavily, so they were afraid of getting clean…)
The area set up for the Mark Steyn interview/book signing was already packed. Wendy scored a seat but I insisted on wandering around saying hi to people I’d promised to say hi to.
By the time I’d finished it was SRO, so I ended up rather far from the stage. Then again, so did Tarek Fatah, so…
Rick McGinnis sidled up to me with my birthday gift, a book about the Hollywood Breen code. We remarked on the heavy police presence, and I wondered if we might be in for some sort of pathetic “Mark Steyn is a HATER!!” outburst.
Reisman and Steyn took the stage to loud applause.
Can I just say that I still have stomach cramps from having to endure Reisman’s painful performance as interviewer? She. Does. Not. Get. It. She struggled to phrase her questions about demographics and radical Islam, because being a liberal, she can’t speak clearly without running every potential sentence through some kind of P.C. filter.
One low point:Steyn related a particularly colourful example of cultural suicide on the West’s part, to which Heather responded, repeatedly: “Now, that didn’t REALLY happen! You’re just making that up!!”
Luckily the book Rick gave me was hard cover, so I was able to bang my head with it to relieve the agony somewhat.
When the book signing portion of the program began, I managed to squeeze myself between a couple of bookcases to get into the cordoned off seating/dais area.
Wendy informed me that she and I were to hang around until after the book signing because Steyn wanted to say hi. Since the line was extraordinarily long, this hanging around went on for a very long time, but terrific people kept coming up to me and saying nice things, like that they read my blog every day, wanted to wish me luck with the lawsuit and wow, I was nowhere near as fat as I used to be.
So I collected donations to my legal fund while dispensing diet tips. It was old home week for some of us, running into people we hadn’t seen in years who’d also made the trip from Left to Right and couldn’t miss the rare opportunity to be in the same room with other Toronto right wingers for a few hours.
Finally the last book was signed, Steyn stepped off the dais, and those of us still loitering got to hear about his green room adventures on TVO the previous night.
And yes: Pete Vere and I are writing a book about the abuses of the Human Rights Commissions. Since Mark has agreed to write the introduction, the three of us posed for a photo (not my favorite activity, but business is business…)
We closed the joint down, and continued our talk out on the street until Steyn had to run off to write a three columns or somesuch. The rest of us squeezed into Hemingways for non-alcoholic nightcaps, and by the time I got home, Arnie was fast asleep.
I’m still half asleep myself but just wanted to say “nice to meet you” again to everyone I got to meet last night. A special thanks for the cheques you pressed into my hand.
Oh, and it’s called Slimquick.
