Week 8's Blog on Sedaris

I've still never seen a mime. I guess that means I was raised in a small town! Which is true, but trust me--it wasn't the smallest town in the state. It was one of the biggest. Sedaris's mother sounds awful at the beginning of the piece: one of those parents who doesn't accept her children for the way they are. I like how he alludes to the end of T.S. Eliot's poem, The Hollow Men (This is the way the world ends/ Not with a bang but a whimper), with his line "I did as I was told, ending my career in mime with a whimper rather than the silent bang I had hoped for."

His giant paragraph on Elizabethan English cracked me up--especially the scarcely disguised insults he directed at his mother! I think she deserved it! I also love the part where, right after he says this to her, she looks at him strangely and then searches his drawers for drugs without telling him (but he knows), and he uses a mix of regular and Elizabethan English to show his funny anger: "My mother had been granted forgiveness on several previous occasions, but mess with mine drawers and ye have just made thyself an enemy for life."

Later on, when Sedaris reveals his mother's conclusion that he'd been bit by 'the drama bug,' I laughed when he said she expected him to get over the bug, just like he'd gotten over "the guitar and [his] private detective agency." This reminds me of my childhood! I always wanted to have a secret detective agency and solve mysteries day in and day out. I searched endlessly for a good mystery, but never found one.

Sedaris is full of humorous lines, but he uses fresh imagery, too:"A person could wrench more emotion out of a sneeze than all my dialogue put together"is one I've never heard before! Sedaris reveals many insights in this essay, but the biggest one I got was don't follow people--don't let them be your idols. People you idolize are actors, and when they're stripped down, they're far below what you thought they were. Stay true to yourself and to what you want out of life. In the end, Sedaris's mother actually wasn't so bad (even though she missed his scene in his very first performance)--I wonder what she thinks of her son now. Is he a clown? In a way, but it's deeper than that. In this story I felt bad for him because the mime/Hamlet/director completely ignored him, and David had worshipped this man. I think something like this happens to everyone, though, and eventually everyone realizes who really supports them and who will tell them good, encouraging things at the end of the day.


--Laura Strawn Ojeda