But Enough About Me Read Online Free PDF Page A

faithfully once a year. It was kind of like visiting relatives.
    â€œLet’s go see the bums! Time for the bums!” we would chorus. Then my father would pilot our light blue Buick LeSabre downtown to the Bowery, which in the eighties was an open-air asylum, not the hipster carnival it is now. There we would park, and silently, reflectively watch the homeless men swill their Mad Dog 20/20. This was supposed to be a character-building, there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I exercise, but for us kids, it was better than a matinee of Cats.
    â€œI want you girls to think about how lucky you have it,” my father would say as two muttering, shabby men broke out in a drunken fistfight.
    â€œJesus, Jay, lock the doors,” my mother said, frowning anxiously.
    Both of the men weakly put up their dukes, landing a few tepid body blows but basically just making a wobbly circle around each other. Nearby, a guy with a World’s Greatest Grandma T-shirt was settling into a refrigerator box next to a jar half-filled with urine. As he gathered some newspaperaround him, he squinted wearily up at us, a suburban family of five, staring wide-eyed at him from the car.
    â€œIt’s easy to take things for granted,” continued my father as Dinah nudged me. Prostitute, she mouthed. I craned my neck.
    â€œâ€”Simple things like a roof over your head. Electricity. A decent education—”
    I raised my eyebrows at my sisters and jerked my head to the left. Two rats were in a fight to the death over what looked from the car to be part of a pastrami sandwich. Ugh, look at their long, pink tails. The bigger one started to gain ground. Whoops, now the little one is on top. Scrappy, that one.
    â€œâ€”valuable lesson for you about gratitude,” he concluded.
    We nodded meekly. Then my dad threw the Buick in reverse, and we headed to the Holland Tunnel, and back to New Jersey. The day was always exciting, but we all felt a little relieved when we pulled onto the Turnpike.

The Setting: Why the Chilcotin Plateau of Central British Columbia Is a Capital Idea
    If it is at all possible, avoid setting up your interview in New York or Los Angeles, because your famous person will invariably be overscheduled and distracted. In a different era, celebrities would occasionally grant a “personality profile” when they didn’t have a movie or a TV show or an album to plug, but these days, they are told by their handlers that to give an interview without something to sell just looks needy and sad. So when it is time to push a product, the public relations team usually loads up their star with multiple interviews per day over the course of a week or two.
    The deadliest occur in an airless conference room of the movie company at their Los Angeles or New York headquarters. If this happens, all you can hope is that the chat takes place in the morning, when the star is freshest, rather than at the end of the day, when the star is deranged from answering the same five questions about gaining weight for a role or “what it was like” to work with various costars. It can be especially awkward when a movie was made years ago and was shelved or delayed (this happens a lot). The star will have trouble unearthing the obligatory anecdotes from the set because he or she will have made three films in the meantime, and will end up repeating the same two stories for each visitor, and you are left with nothing.
    With musicians, it’s always wise to pick a tour stop where there are no media for miles. Often publicists will try to combine a photo shoot and an interview to get it over with, but the subject is always being pulled in different directions, so you must grab five frantic minutes as they get changed, or have their makeup done, or you shout questions over the noise of the hair dryer. If a star is uncomfortable or too distracted to come up with a clever answer to your question, she’ll get her entourage to