{"id":35290,"date":"2011-03-16T19:32:57","date_gmt":"2011-03-16T23:32:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=35290"},"modified":"2011-11-14T10:00:37","modified_gmt":"2011-11-14T15:00:37","slug":"a-meeting-of-the-minds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=35290","title":{"rendered":"A Meeting of the Minds"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last night I joined The Self-Styled Siren<\/a> and James Wolcott<\/a> for drinks at the bar made famous (at least in part) by the marvelous writer (known as Scribbler) at Behind the Stick<\/a>. I have been reading Scribbler’s site for a couple of years now (and if you aren’t – then check him out immediately!), and he’s commented here a couple of times, and I was very excited to meet him finally. I had never met Wolcott either, although he’s linked to me on occasion (sadly, the first time he linked to me, I happened to be going OFF on someone – Peter Manso, if you must know – and I used rather colorful language. As a matter of fact, I believe the phrase, “Don’t be a whiny bitch about it” was involved. Mortification.) But I’ve been reading Wolcott for years, so it was such a pleasure to put a face to the well-known name. The Siren, of course, I’ve met a couple of times socially, so it was a great pow-wow. Scribbler set us up at one end of the bar, and we drank and ate and talked and soaked up the atmosphere for a couple of glorious hours. We talked about Woody Allen, and politics and political bloggers (“I’ve had an Instalanche in my day,” I said, “although I can’t stand that term. Nerds.”), our own writing, mutual friends, our various stresses and joys, people we know, people we don’t know – there was a lot of laughter, and a lot of listening going on, and it was so much fun. I was in the presence of one person (Siren) I am getting to know personally (after reading her voraciously for a couple of years), and like so much<\/i>, and two people I have gotten to know only through their writing – and there’s nothing quite like that feeling of putting faces to names and online personae. I’ve had a lot of that in my years of writing, and, in general, it’s always been a pleasure. The people whose personalities match the personae they have created … there is no fakery going on, no trickery … You meet the person whose writing you love, and it’s the same person. I am sure the opposite is often the case, but I have been very fortunate. I felt shy going into the night, I won’t lie. But the second I walked in, and Scribbler, behind the bar, said to me, “Sheila?” and I walked over to him and he kissed my hand … all was well. It was a lovely evening. Siren and I shared a cab afterwards, and the conversation continued. I am sure it will continue on and on and on. These are good people. New York glittered for me last night. It truly glittered<\/i>. Not just because of the Chrysler Building and the evening streetlamps lit up the avenues, but because of the company.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last night I joined The Self-Styled Siren and James Wolcott for drinks at the bar made famous (at least in part) by the marvelous writer (known as Scribbler) at Behind the Stick. I have been reading Scribbler’s site for a … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[600],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35290"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35290"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35290\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43879,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35290\/revisions\/43879"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35290"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35290"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35290"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}