We\u2019re in Savannah, Georgia, for this weekend\u2019s Savannah Book Festival. It\u2019s not an actual book tour\u2014sort of a mini one\u2014but enough so that we don\u2019t always remember the right room number when it comes time to assign restaurant receipts to our room. Hey, after a while, all those room numbers start to sound the same.<\/p>\n
We\u2019re traveling; sleeping in strange beds; operating on different time zones, so it\u2019s no wonder that my sleep might be filled with odd dreams\u2014including one about being at a book festival.<\/p>\n
In the dream, who should show up as a fellow author but Carol Burnett. I know she wrote at least one book about losing her daughter. She may have written more, but in my dream she showed up at this unnamed book festival with cartons and cartons of her newest children\u2019s book. In my dream, I had an important message to give her, and I did.<\/p>\n
My memories about Carol Burnett begin with one of her earliest national appearances\u2014the one on Ed Sullivan\u2019s \u201creally big shew!\u201d\u2014where she sang \u201cI\u2019m In Love With John Foster Dulles.\u201d At the time I was a teenager, and to me John Foster Dulles looked entirely unloveable. As far as his family was concerned, I\u2019m sure that wasn\u2019t the case, but from my point of view, the song was hilarious.<\/p>\n
For years I watched Carol Burnett on the Garry Moore Show. I saw the televised production with her as the princess in Once Upon A Mattress, and loved all those seasons of the Carol Burnett Show. Of course my two favorite sketches are the one from Gone with the Wind and the one with Harvey Korman as the hapless patient to Tim Conway\u2019s bumbling dentist. I can laugh out loud just thinking about that one.<\/p>\n
Over the years, I noticed Carol\u2019s ear-tugging greeting to her grandmother, the woman who raised her, and I loved the fact that she showed that connection during every appearance.<\/p>\n
So yes, on the one hand, what I wanted to do in my dream meeting with Carol Burnett was to thank her for giving me years of comedic entertainment, but more than that, I wanted to thank her for the gift of that ear-tugging gesture.<\/p>\n
Every book signing venue has the potential for having at least one nutcase in attendance, and once authors are seated at signing tables, they become natural targets. A notable exception to that was the Grand Reopening of the Smokey Point Safeway which had three nutcases rather than only one. The first was a guy who didn\u2019t read anything but non-fiction. The second asked my opinion about another local mystery author. When I replied with a wavy hand motion that said not so much one way or another, he berated me by saying he would never read anything by someone who slammed the competition. Since when is a wavy hand motion slamming?<\/p>\n
But then came the third guy. He waltzed up to the table and asked, \u201cAre you the lady who writes mysteries?\u201d When I said yes, he told me, \u201cI\u2019ve just been acquitted of murdering seven people. Do you want to write my book?\u201d<\/p>\n
The short answer to that, of course, was N-O!!! But he was there to chat. I told him I didn\u2019t do non-fiction and maybe he should talk to Ann Rule. (By the way, Ann was not amused and she wasn\u2019t interested, either. The guy really had done it, but he had gotten off on a technicality.)<\/p>\n
Fortunately, Bill was there with me. He came up, engaged the guy in conversation, and eased him away from the table by asking focused questions. That was when Bill and I adopted Carol Burnett\u2019s ear-tug as a signal. When I\u2019m doing a signing, that\u2019s a cry for help to whoever is minding Miss Daisy on the road. It\u2019s a notification that whoever\u2019s there at the table with me is a problem and needs to be encouraged to move along.<\/p>\n
So that\u2019s what I told Carol Burnett in my dream\u2014thank you for that invaluable assistance. With any kind of luck, there won\u2019t be any ear-tugging needed at the Savannah Book Festival.<\/p>\n
People who have attended one of my speaking engagements may have heard this story before, but there\u2019s a reason I\u2019m writing about it today. There really are six-degrees of separation in this world. Maybe someone out there in my blog world knows someone who knows someone who knows Carol Burnett and can pass along my message to her.<\/p>\n
If they do, that will make my book festival dreaming dream come true.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We\u2019re in Savannah, Georgia, for this weekend\u2019s Savannah Book Festival. It\u2019s not an actual book tour\u2014sort of a mini one\u2014but enough so that we don\u2019t always remember the right room number when it comes time to assign restaurant receipts to our room. Hey, after a while, all those room numbers start to sound the same. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[8,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1545","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-festivals","category-tour-2"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3nsBA-oV","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1545","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1545"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1545\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1546,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1545\/revisions\/1546"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1545"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1545"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1545"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}