FUSILLI, YOU CRAZY BASTARD!

Good in Bed 27

The whole idea of this substack, of course, was to show my collection of nearly 200 books, all inscribed to me some variation on “For Brian, you were great in bed.”  Of course I am salacious, that’s bedrock, but I want to be not just salacious. I love the books and the authors who wrote them, all, and though we never got into bed together, mostly, I have gotten into bed with their books. So I write these little paeons to my bed partners, hoping they’ll inspire you to pick up the books, and take them to bed, because they’re good in bed.

That said, I want to be the first in your life to tell you about a brand new book by one of my great friends, Larry Wood.  I’ve known Larry since the late 90s when he started dating my best friend from college, Gwenan.  Reader, he married her, and I’ve watched the two of them raise three lovely daughters.  Larry is an excellent guy, a lawyer for Legal Aid Chicago, where he protects people from slumlords and other hazards of housing in the big bad city. He teaches Poverty Law, and became my hero when Justice Antonin Scalia called him out by name claiming Poverty Law to be  “a waste of time”.  I’m proud to be his friend.

Here he is on the cover of Legal Aid Foundation’s 2016 Annual Report, in his natural habitat, his natural state.

Larry is a raconteur, and it comes to him naturally.  He has participated in Moth storytelling sessions and won.  He is the guy you want at your dinner party, always.  But his greatest claim to fame is that he is the guy who has been a finalist in the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest 15 times, and has won it 8 times.

This week, his book on the subject is being published, Your Caption Has Been Selected: More than Anyone Could Possibly Want to Know about the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest, and I hope you’ll grab a copy.  It gives you tips on how to win the contest, it has a history of the contest and the behind-the-scenes methodology for judging, and best of all, it has lots and lots of New Yorker cartoons.  “Fusilli, you crazy bastard! How are you!” is one of my favorite New Yorker cartoon captions, along with, “Anubith? You find thomething humorouth?”  What is your all-time favorite New Yorker caption?

OMG YOU GUYS WAIT! I forgot the best story about Larry. When Larry and Gwenan got married, friends used shoe polish or something equally corrosive to smear out on the side panel of their 1993 Ford Contour or whatever, the marital mobile bed that drove them away, “JUST LARRY’D!” and they didn’t wash it off for a while and then when they did, they realized that JUST LARRY’D! had eaten through the paint, and a few years later, they sold that heap to me for a buck when I moved back to Chicago and everywhere I drove between 2001 and 2002, people let me into traffic or waved ‘congratulations!’ and I banked that until the day the muffler fell off and Dan Chaon, novelist, was in the car with me and that was the end of the Ford Whatever and also, and to this day, I am not comfortable owning an auto.

Larry, you were great in bed, especially when we all piled into your marital billet and watched The West Wing in the early noughties and you kept yelling, “Shh, no talking!”