Friday, December 3, 2004
Page 15
AT THE SIDEBAR (Column)
In Search of Lemony Snicket
By J’AMY PACHECO
If you are hoping for a column with a happy ending, read no further. In fact, you should probably put this newspaper down and run all the way to the hinterlands, a phrase which here means, “Count Olaf is coming, and there’s no escape.”
If you’ve never heard of Count Olaf, you clearly don’t watch enough television and thus haven’t been bombarded with advertisements for the soon-to-be-released film, “A Series of Unfortunate Events.” And if none of what I’ve written makes a lick of sense, you obviously haven’t read Lemony Snicket’s series of books of the same title in which three orphans undergo trial after tribulation while trying to keep Count Olaf’s hands off the enormous inheritance they themselves can’t touch.
Lemony Snicket is the pen name of a mysterious man whose real name I can never remember. His books have taken the third grade at my daughter’s elementary school by storm, and my daughter even hosted a Halloween party dressed of one of the series’ characters, Violet Baudelaire.
So enamored is she of these books that when I learned Mr. Snicket would do a single California signing, I resolved to drive my daughter the 100-plus miles so she could meet him.
On the telephone days before, a bookstore employee advised that the event might be crowded, and said we should “come a little early.” So my pal Laura and I piled our children into the back of my Toyota, arriving at the bookstore about an hour before the scheduled events.
An around-the-building line let us know we’d underestimated the meaning of “a little early.” We soon learned that the store had started handing out color-coded wristbands at 9 a.m. that day, and calculated, based upon our color, that there were at least 900 people in front of us in line.
“It’s going to be a good two or three hours,” store employees told us. Now, as loyal readers of the series, you would think one of us would have recognized the beginning of a series of unfortunate events.
We didn’t.
While Laura and the three children waited in line outside, I ventured into the store in search of the Lemony Snicket journals we wanted to buy. An employee pointed me to the back of the store.
I found no journals there, but I did get yelled at by an employee who was preparing for Mr. Snicket’s reading and who said I shouldn’t be in that section — despite the fact that his co-worker had sent me there.
I was sent to another section, where I was finally advised there were no journals to be had. So I bought “The Pessimistic Posters” and an extra copy of “The Grim Grotto,” and joined my party outside.
Now, I don’t have the luxury of 13 chapters in which to recount my tale of woe. So here are just a few highlights of our night at the bookstore:
•We forced the three children to wolf down a fast food dinner and hurried them back to the store, only to learn we STILL had 900 people in front of us;
•The bookstore employees, apparently not expecting an audience of over 1,000, treated us like they wished we’d all just go away;
•We lost Jake, the seven-year-old boy with us around 9, when he couldn’t keep his eyes open and his daddy had to pick him up;
•A kid who was apparently as sick of waiting as we were threw up on the carpeting right in front of us;
•The security guards who threatened to not allow us back into the store if we went out to move our car to a safer spot allowed a potential psycho back in — a psycho who cut in front of us in line and made Laura and I verrry nervous;
•We ended up waiting more than 10 hours in the bookstore to get our minute and a half with Lemony Snicket and his pen.
At 2:30 a.m. the morning after we initially got in line, we finally met the mysterious Mr. Snicket, who joked with our little girls about marriage.
We got our books signed, took some pictures and left the store — insisting on a security guard escort in case the psycho was still outside. We took the exhausted little girls to a hotel, fed them a nutritious snack of Chips Ahoy cookies and generic root beer, and tucked them into bed.
While our quest for Mr. Snicket did lead to a series of unfortunate events, it had a happy ending.
And so, come to think of it, does this column, which is now complete — a word which here means, “The End.”
Copyright 2004, Metropolitan News Company