Wednesday night I stop by Book Soup on Sunset Blvd for the first stop of the New Texture literary tour with authors Wyatt Doyle, Josh Alan Friedman and Chris Desjardins.
Josh Alan’s new book, Black Cracker, has seven glowing reviews on Amazon.com.
Josh Alan Friedman, a talented Dallas writer and musician, spent his early years in New York, where he was the only white kid attending the last segregated black school on Long Island. Now he’s written an “autobiographical novel” about the experience called Black Cracker. So last night Dawn Rizos, owner of The Lodge gentlemen’s club, hosted a dinner and book-signing there for Friedman and 75 or so of his friends, plus assorted media types like the Dallas Observer’s Robert Wilonsky (that’s Big Bob just below Friedman’s left arm in this photo by Scott Mankoff) and Alan Peppard of The Dallas Morning News.
When Josh spots me, he says, “You look like a Hasidic rabbi!”
I think my beard has grown two inches since he saw me last summer.
During his reading, a young black man in his twenties gets very unhappy. “How are people allowed to write this way?” he protests. “I believe in freedom of speech and everything but this is too much.”
He yells and wave his arms around and then goes out on to Sunset Blvd and keeps yelling about Black Cracker.
Scott Huffines posts to my Facebook: “I’m about halfway through “Black Cracker” – hilarious book and his Jewish childhood wasn’t a whole lot different than my redneck Baltimore childhood.”
