Next appearance: McIntyre's Books, Fearrington, NC, Sunday, May 25th at 2:00

Now, about this whole Martha Stewart thing:

The short version is that on Thursday, May 15th, I taped a segment for "Martha's Favorite Books." (Here's the evidence.) It will air sometime before Father's Day.

The long version may or may not tell you a lot more. While Kelly and I were in Rome, we visited an internet cafe and I checked my e-mail. Paul Dry had sent me a note to tell me that a producer from Martha Stewart Living Television had contacted him. The producer had read The Verb and given it to Martha, who had liked it and wanted to use it for a segment of MFB. Would I be interested in coming to Connecticut to tape a five-to-ten-minute segment?

Kelly, reading over my shoulder, actually sat down hard on the floor of the cafe.

What she, Paul, and I understood very clearly is that this is the sort of promotional godsend first-time authors and small publishing houses rarely receive. When an Emmy-winning nationally syndicated TV show offers to promote your book for you, the only logical answer is "yes." I sent Paul a note to that affect and told him I'd get in touch with the producer as soon as I returned to the U.S.

Of course, anyone who's met me for more than fifteen seconds will recognize the other thing that Kelly, Paul, and I understood very clearly: that Martha Stewart and Peter Cashwell go together like braised calf livers en croute and Milk Duds. There would seem to be little connection between us, other than the usual carbon-based/bilaterally symmetrical/opposable thumbs kind of similarities. For all intents and purposes, I don't watch television, mainly because we live in the Broadcast Hole of Virginia, where only one channel is reasonably clear (and that's only when the weather's good). I've never paid any real attention to Martha's magazine because I don't decorate, garden, cook, do crafts, arrange flowers, or own a home, and these seem to be the primary interests of her readership. Heck, there isn't even a K-Mart nearby for me to scour for Martha's product line. In short, if I'd been asked to predict which TV show would be likely to contact me about an appearance, I would have guessed something on Animal Planet or the Discovery Channel--heck, I'd have guessed "Space Ghost: Coast to Coast" or "Pardon the Interruption"--before I'd have guessed "Martha Stewart Living."

But a gift horse is a gift horse even when one doesn't know a stirrup from a riding crop, so I contacted the producer and arranged to drive up to Martha's studio near Westport, around seven hours' drive from Woodberry. The show is taped in a large building set back from the road in the midst of a wooded residential area; it actually reminded me of my old neighborhood in Chapel Hill, with winding, curbless roads threading through the trees, but with property values that were probably significantly higher than those of the professors' houses where I grew up.

Mark, the producer, met me at the entrance and took me to get a cappuccino at the commissary while we discussed my segment. He and I had previously discussed it on the phone, and based on my comments he'd written a short script outline for the interview--not quite two pages--giving a basic sense of the questions he wanted asked and answered. He made it clear that Martha might not follow the script--in fact, he said that she would probably listen to my answers and take the discussion elsewhere based on her own ideas about what I said. For Mark's purposes, he could edit the segment more easily if I tried to gently guide our chat in the direction he'd laid out, but giving Martha the answers she asked for would be the first priority.

In short, this was the perfect assignment for a teacher with improv theater experience.

I didn't get much face time with Martha, who on that day was in the middle of taping two and a half shows. I sat in the production room for about forty minutes, looking in on the taping by the internal monitors, which were shown on an enormous screen around which were shelved five Emmy awards. (I'd never seen an Emmy before, naturally, and was intrigued by the differences in coloration from year to year; some appear much yellower than others.) Onscreen, Martha appeared very poised; she moved smoothly from question to question, when she had to say a pre-commercial blurb a second time, she wasn't fazed by the need for a repetition. She did grimace once while arranging some roses, noting that something in the bundle didn't smell at all right, and she did use "murky" as a verb once, but otherwise she seemed on top of things the whole time. The segment before mine involved a man who whittles duck decoys, and he showed Martha how to cut a stump of pine down into a Bufflehead duck. She put penknife to wood with skill, and seemed very enthusiastic about the efficiency of his draw knife.

How did my segment go? I don't exactly know. I think it went well, but the proof of that pudding will be in the broadcast, which should come sometime in the next three weeks. Martha did a couple of on-air blurbs praising the book as "a great Father's Day gift," a sentiment I wholeheartedly endorse, and I read the section of Chapter Four in which my bird feeder is stolen by squirrels, but the rest of the segment will be our interplay, and that's hard to judge from the inside, so to speak. I learned one thing about her in the course of our chat: she knows a lot more about birds than I had expected. I also learned that her commissary makes a good cup of cappuccino and a solid reuben sandwich. The rest I think you'll be able to see for yourself.
8:07 AM

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