I am the worst blogger in the world, I know.

But I return with some news and an exciting event to pimp, er, promote: I’ll be moderating a discussion with original MTV veejays Nina Blackwood and Mark Goodman at the Gaithersburg Book Festival on Saturday, May 18, at 2:15 p.m. Nina and Mark are promoting their new memoir (co-written with Alan Hunter and Martha Quinn), VJ: The Unplugged Adventures of MTV’s First Wave. I will be peppering them with questions and opening it up to the audience for more.

I couldn’t be more thrilled; I worshiped these people from just about the beginning. When MTV started in 1981, I would only babysit for people who had cable. Our street got cable in 1982 just as I started high school and, well, look at me now. (Hey, you know what? I’ve written about all this more than once. Here’s a piece I did when MTV turned 25, back in 2006.)

So I welcome the veejays with, as Journey would have said, open arms – and I hope to see you all there. Come on out, it’s free.

(Hey, teen Okies of the ’80s: Who remembers when Alan Hunter came to the  Sound Warehouse on May Avenue in 1983 or so for some sort of contest with … was it John Cougar? ZZ Top? What was the deal? I only remember waiting for hours and then giving up and going to the mall instead — it was a rabid mob. Or did I hallucinate the entire thing?)

Time for another Tonsil blog book giveaway. This one is a real jackpot — the first three responders will get a package of three new books written by friends o’ mine. You’re not competing for individual titles; winners will get all three. (You don’t want all three? Look, these aren’t lima beans I’m servin’ here. You’ll get three delicious books — and perhaps the pleasure of re-gifting one or two of them out to a wider, literate world.) See instructions below. To win, you must send an email, not leave a comment to this blog post.

First up: Jujitsu Rabbi and the Godless Blonde, a funny and smartly written young-woman-in-the-big-city memoir by Rebecca Dana.

It’s the story of how Rebecca moved to the big city, reached for all the brass rings, and after a time ran smack into her own hubris. Loveless and roofless, she answers a roommate ad and moves in with Cosmo, an Orthodox rabbi who’s also on the verge of a life change. This book has been featured on the “Today” show and everyhere-elsewhere, and look, here’s Rebecca talking about it to VanityFair.com.

Clearly Rebecca (a former star intern of the Style section, many moons ago) doesn’t need my help at all in the PR department, but two other writers very near and dear to me DO, and that’s why I’ve bundled their books with Rebecca’s, in hopes of just a tiny bit of SEO mojo. The next two books are self-published, which used to be a pejorative description, and now, well, who can say what the best way is to reach the most readers? It’s no longer about putting the horse before the cart. It’s about driving a car there instead.

* * *

So, next up: A former editor of mine from Austin days, Anne Rodgers, with Dr. Maureen Whelihan, has come out with a landmark survey of the sexual history of everyday women. The book is called Kiss and Tell: Secrets of Sexual Desire from Women 15 to 97.

Culled from surveys of 1,300 of Dr. Whelihan’s patients in Florida, the women featured in these in-depth interviews (who’ve been granted pseudonymity) represent every decade, starting with teens, and on up through the 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s … all the way up the 90s.

What turned them on? How did they learn about sex? What have they figured out about it? What do they enjoy? What do they regret?

Here’s what novelist Sarah Bird says about Kiss and Tell, in a blurb for the book:

“Kiss and Tell does what no other book on the subject of sex has done; it sits you down at the kitchen table with real women of all ages as they tell you their stories — of their first times, their secret desires, what they wish their partners would do, or not do, or do again. …”

And here’s just some of what Tinsel author Hank Stuever had to say about it:

“As a journalist and writer obsessed by everyday American lifestyles, I’ve always wanted to know more about the two biggies you’re never supposed to ask about: money and sex. … [Kiss and Tell has] uncorked fascinating anecdotes from the epic, lifelong story of female sexual experiences. [It's] a surprising, heartfelt and valuable book. …”

What I didn’t say in my blurb: Kiss and Tell is exactly the sort of book I always hoped to run into when I used to babysit in people’s houses as a teenager and do some lite snooping. What better endorsement is there than that?

* * *

And last and so totally not least, we have Spike Gillespie’s The Maine Event, a travelogue/memoir of Spike and her partner Warren’s trip to Maine. This book is a delightful little madcap adventure.

But, Spike being Spike, it’s so much more than that. This is a book for people who seek the calm and the Zen in all situations and yet always find themselves needing to speak to a supervisor, if you know what I mean. One of the pleasures of knowing (and reading) Spike all these years is to follow her journey back and forth from hilarious hothead to Earth mother.

I loved The Maine Event weeks before I read it, when Spike launched a Kickstarter drive to fund the book. I wonder if that’s really the new publishing model? Pitch a book to us and if we’re dying to read it, we’ll pony up.

So, now you know. I of course urge you to seek out these books and spread the word. And BUY them. But, as an enticement, here’s how to win these three very different but excellent books absolutely FREE: E-mail me at hank [at] this website [dot] com. First three responders get the whole enchilada, mailed to you via the U.S. Postal Service. Go for it. UPDATE — 2/19/13, 6:45 p.m. EST: ALL GONE!

Actual proof that I still exist: National Journal‘s Hotline came knocking the other day, with lighthearted questions for their Friday Feature Q&A. The what? The hunh? National Journal is a D.C. publication that is so essential to the Beltway power/media structure that it costs, like, hundreds (thousands?) of dollars to subscribe. Otherwise I would link you to the feature. But now that it’s been out a f ew days, I’m just going to “borrow” it, with a friendly shout-out to the writer, Amanda Munoz-Temple, who I guess bangs these things out every week! Enjoy…

Hank Stuever is an award-winning pop culture writer for the Washington Post‘s Style section, where he … [bio, blahblah, Hank snipped] … today he’s our Friday Feature!

Where’s your hometown? And what was it like growing up there?

Oklahoma City. Windy.

What were you like in high school?

If there was another 15-year-old boy in Oklahoma City who asked for a subscription to the Village Voice for Christmas 1983, I never met him.

What’s your most embarrassing on-the-job moment? (Or as embarrassing as you’d like to reveal?)

In my first job, I used to have to go sit in my car in the parking lot and have a short cry once in a while. I didn’t think anybody knew I did that, but apparently most of the newsroom knew. Sorta Holly Hunter.

What is the most memorable critique/commentary received from a superior?

Once I was trying to save a beautiful (I thought) section of a very long story from getting cut. I told the editor to tell me a good reason why she wanted to cut it. “It’s aggravating,” she finally said. That was a revelation that has stuck with me – when prose gets aggravating.

What is your guilty pleasure song of the moment?
“Booty Bounce” by Dev. (Really awful wonderful.) [Here's the video.]

What’s your favorite TV program, current and past?

This question is an icebreaker for most people and a job hazard for me, but officially I’m loving “Shameless,” starring William H. Macy on Showtime and “In the Bedroom,” a sex-therapy show on OWN. Growing up, I got spanked punished [UPDATE: The facts are in dispute, as usual in this family. See comment from "Mother" below.] for trying to get my family to hurry up at dinner at a Pizza Hut so we could get home in time for “The Bionic Woman.” I loved her.

If your life was turned into a movie, which current movie would it be and who would play you?

My workplace is feeling very “Black Swan” these days, and I hope I’m not the Natalie Portman of it.

If you could have one super power to aid you in your job, what would it be?

The magic golden lasso of truth.

If you could take a road trip with any pop culture personality, who would it be and where will you be going?

Tina Fey said she loves nothing more than pushing a cart through a big, exurban Target while sipping a 44-oz. fountain soda. If she’d have me along, that would be a dream.

If you could have an endless supply of any food, what would you get?

And nothing else? (An endless supply?) Although tempted to answer Chinese or New Mexico-style Mexican food, I think my lower intestine is going to vote for variety packs of breakfast cereal.

In one sentence, your best advice to young, fresh out-of-college journalists.

Read all the time and keep up with everything.

Finish this sentence: Today I …

Watched gobs of British television.

• • •

Now that we’ve been properly reintroduced, I’m sorry to have abandoned the blog for so many weeks.

I kept meaning to come back and tell you (if you’re there) of some fun adventures that came with the Tinsel paperback release:

Harwelden Mansion, Book Smart Tulsa, Dec. 14, 2010. (Photo: Adam Wisneski)

Such as …

>A good ol’ time at the Texas Book Festival! And a victory at Austin’s Literary Death Match!

>A great big lecture (given, not received!) at Washington College in lovely Chestertown, Md.!

>A wonderful trip to Oklahoma to read for Book Smart Tulsa’s Christmas event, captured very beautifully in the photo above by Adam Wisneski, a very talented multi-platform journalist at the Tulsa World. I met a lot of interesting people in those 36 hours in Tulsa, a town I never spent enough time in when I was growing up in Oklahoma City — blame it on the cultural 405/918 divide. When the weather gets nicer, I’d like to go back and really explore. (By the way, the crowd in Adam’s picture goes on several more rows past the first row you see here. In my imaginative memory, it of course goes on many more rows than that!)

>And don’t forget the Loyola alumni Christmas party in D.C., at which the newish dean of the college of the music held a roomful of people hostage with an endless, rambling speech about nothing, which went on for 25 minutes. I set the crowd free by doing about five minutes worth of Tinsel.

And now I’ve set myself free, too.

Here, at last, we come to the book’s final stage:

The giving tree eventually gets pulped and life goes on. February is here and I promise to do a little better at keeping this blog alive — returning soon with some long overdue thoughts from the One-Man Book Club!

Til then…

I found this picture online of Bea and Helen's book club, 1952. They look like some smart readers.

Courtesy of the marketing elves at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt/Mariner Books, here is a useful (I think) Readers’ Discussion Guide.

If your book club is reading Tinsel, please know that I’m always open to answering your questions by e-mail. If you live in the D.C. area, I’m also happy to come visit your group for a discussion, as long as it won’t inhibit frank talk about the book. (Trust me, I can take criticism!) If you live farther away and want to try something via Skype, I’m open to that, too.

Here’s the guide. For more images of the people written about in Tinsel and Christmas in Frisco, click here. Enjoy!

Tinsel by Hank Stuever
Reading Group Guide

Discussion Questions

•    How did reading Tinsel cause you to reevaluate how you celebrate the holidays (if at all)? Which topics or characters did you relate to most, in both positive and negative ways? Will you make any changes this holiday season because of the book?

Another Black Friday at Target

•    In the past few years, how has the state of the economy changed how you celebrate Christmas? Have you exchanged fewer (or more) gifts? Have you decorated more or less?

•    In the Prologue, Stuever writes, “I wanted this story to be about Christmas but also everything else: our weird economy, our modern sense of home, our oft-broken hearts, and our notions of God” (page 5). Do you think he achieved this? What is this book about really?

•    What has been your best Christmas ever, and your worst Christmas ever? What made each so good or so bad?

•    On page 7, Caroll “wonders if maybe this is how memories are made now. Maybe the shopping is the memory itself.” Discuss what it is you like or dislike so much about Christmas. Is it the shopping, the decorating, the parties, the gifts, or the people that can make or break a Christmas season? When you remember Christmases past, what are the memories that stand out?

•    Why do you think Stuever chose to write about Frisco, Texas? How is Frisco emblematic of the American experience? Thinking about Stuever as a character in the book, what were his personal reasons for choosing Frisco? How does he feel about Christmas and how does that feeling change over the course of the book?

Tammie ... and friends

•    “The still-intact Victorian conventions of Christmas have Father worrying about money and security, and Mother saddled with making everything look and feel right—whether she has the holiday spirit or not” (page 23). Discuss the traditional gender roles associated with the holidays and how they play out in your own family. Why do you think these delineations have persevered over the years?

•    Every year Tammie helps at least one family during the holidays, which is attributed to her Christian nature (page 30). How do you balance that with the extreme materialism she also participates in when she decorates others’ homes? Later in the book, Stuever talks about listening to the KLTY Christmas Wish radio segments with Tammie and notes that the “powerful currency in the anecdotal” at Christmastime often prompts our charitable natures (page 132). Do you think we give so much at Christmas in part to make up for how much we consume? Why or why not?

•    “Is it possible, Bridgette wonders, that there’s some bottomless need here that people have? For Christmas lights?” (page 46). Why are Christmas lights so popular? Why do they make us feel so good? What is behind the inevitable competition to do more, be brighter, go bigger than our neighbors?

Jeff and Bridgette's house

•    What is your Christmas baggage, so to speak? Talk about how your family has affected your feelings about the holiday.

•    “Choruses of angels are not harking and heralding for me. I prefer dark, slightly twisted Christmases” (page 109). Stuever seems to suggest there are two types of people when it comes to Christmas—you either love it or you hate it. Why does Stuever fall into the darker camp? Which type are you?

•    “The angst over Santa’s existence comes not from the children, I think, so much as the grownups . . . Once you know

Caroll and Marissa

there is no Santa, then there’s no stopping the awful truth about everything else” (page 181). When did you learn the truth about Santa? What about your kids (if you have them)? Would you take Stuever’s advice and use the idea that once you know about Santa you get to become Santa? How else can we ease the pain of learning the truth?

•    On page 187 Tammie has her epiphany that Christmas is “not about the stuff.” So she forgoes expensive Christmas presents and takes her family on vacation so she can experience a “total moment” with them. What was the family’s total moment and was it worth it? Have you ever made a decision similar to Tammie’s?

•    Shopping for Monkey Bread with Bridgette (page 241) reminds Stuever of his own Christmas tradition. “I was happy and did not know it until now” (page 243). Why did it take so long for Stuever to realize there was a part of the holiday he enjoyed? What do you do every Christmas Eve? What one item reminds you most of it?

ST. LOUIS: What you’re about to read happened days ago, and I’m just getting around to filing a blog report. I’m on a train right now to New York to do a reading tonight at the Half King bar in Chelsea. It starts at 7 p.m., if you’re anywhere nearby.

But backing up: I have to say, my stop in St. Louis might well have been my favorite. Nikki and Melissa at Pudd’nHead Books have been enormously supportive of Tinsel. They’ve been everything you’d want a bookstore to be — local, quirky, helpful and they get it. Nikki put my book on a list of her favorite books of the year and has been working on getting me to come out there since July. I’m so glad I did. Curtis Sittenfeld, newish St. Louis resident and also a Tinsel champ, came and got me Wednesday afternoon at the hotel and we went out to Pudd’nHead to say hi, shop for books and – this was really the most delightful part – gab about books we love and books we don’t. There is nothing more satisfying than two writers browsing a good store and really slagging on some overrated other writers. Whom did we agree that we despise? Oh, wouldn’t you like to know. Not to worry, neurotic literati: we did a lot of kvelling, too. We probably spent more time talking about what we lurve.

The Puddn’Head-ers, along with Curtis, put on an excellent event at COCA that night – we had cookies, egg nog and a super-smart audience of 40 or so people. I got to hang out with my friends John and Mary Pat O’Gorman at their house for a while beforehand – and get just a sample of life with their all-girl band: Lucy, Edie and Alice. At the COCA event, people had excellent questions and several had read the book already and wanted to know more, more, more. One woman needed to talk to me about her theory that I really am a “believer” and I just don’t know it. (“You believe in things,” she persuasively scolded me. “You believe, for example, in journalism ethics. …”)

Hank defends his beliefs to Inquisitor Donna, while Curtis Sittenfeld greets more fans.

Another woman brought me her homemade monkey bread, the delectable poppin’-fresh dessert that makes a cameo appearance in Chapter 15. How wonderful is that? I can’t believe someone actually made me monkey bread and I also can’t believe I forgot to get her name and e-mail so I could properly thank her. But these things move really fast when the Sharpie is out and the line is forming. While I signed copies of Tinsel, Curtis signed her 1,000-times-more-superior novels, American Wife and Prep.

Hank and Curtis, radiating holiday warmth in our black peacoats, but ready for pizza now.

After that, a gang of us adjourned to Pi, which, as I was told a few times, makes President Obama’s favorite Chicago-style pizza. (I believe it!) I am ready to move to St. Louis just to hang out forever with Curtis and her husband Matt and their daughter (whom I saw only via iPhone movies, but still). I’m sure this is not at all what they had in mind, but I hope that they had fun.

And not hours after I left did Curtis pick Tinsel as her favorite book of the year in this Salon round-up of writers’ favorite reads of 2009. I mean, gosh.

And that monkey bread? It was perfect. I ate some on the plane back to D.C. and saved the rest for Michael, as instructed. Man, I was glad to see him when I got home. I was gone 11 days this trip. What will we ever do in a few weeks, when Tinsel isn’t hogging all our time?

RESTON, Va.: Tinsel went back to the exurbs on Saturday. My friend Tamara Jones threw a sweet little get-together at her NoVa house that afternoon for old friends. Then some of us went on to the Reston Barnes & Noble for my reading at 5 p.m., smartly bribing customers with Tammy’s famous brownies. I think the combination of free sweets and my (ahem) reading style may have attracted a few new fans. Thank you, Tammy, for the good times.

REVIEWS AND MORE: They’re still coming, and they’re still pretty good, thank Baby Jesus …

• A San Jose Mercury News review is here.

• A San Antonio Express-News review is here.

• The West End Word (that would be St. Louis’s west end, cue Pet Shop Boys) had this to say here.

• And the Canadians have a look, in Maclean’s, here, and that lady who reads a book every day had this to say, over on Huffington Post.

• The less said about Steve Blow, the better, but still, what fun it is to ride in his one-horse open slay. (Har.) Especially with the Frontburner chatterers coming so swiftly to my defense. (Because frankly, I was stumped: How do you tell — or do you even bother to tell — a guy named “Steve Blow” to go fuck himself? I decided you just don’t. But, as it turns out, they’ve been doing it for years in Dallas. And when they do, he takes his football home.)

• Moving on to cheerier things, yes? Such as Debbie Gallagher of Cedar Hill, Texas, who read the book and then had something incisive to say about it.

• Also, the ol’ Life & Times section at The Maroon (my alma mater) wrote this story. Thanks to the reporter Ashley Stevens, who kept me company on the road to Bellingham, via a phone interview. Not to make myself feel superold, but this would be the equivalent of me getting assigned to interview an alum from the Class of ’70, which might not have interested me in the least. But Ashley did a great job of humoring this old ’80s-era Maroon-ie.

The TV listings don’t lie! Barring some misfortune, I’ll be a guest on the Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson next week – Thursdsay, Dec. 17 – so set the DVR or stay up and watch! It’s on CBS, after Letterman.

I like the show a lot and not just because they’re having me on. I wrote a Style section profile of Ferguson in March 2005, when the show was just getting going, but this seems to not factor into their decision to have me on, since nobody there remembers it. (I suppose I could tell you the reason why I think I’m on, and it’s completely legit, but for now can we just bask in the delusion that people everywhere care a lot about my book? Yes?)

Want some more excitement? The other guest that night is none other than Sigourney Weaver. Man, if the opportunity presents itself, do I ever have things to thank her for, namely her timeless portrayal of one Lt. Ellen Ripley. I’ve watched Aliens more times than I can count. (That one’s my favorite, though I love Alien too, and I ache for the potential seen in Alien3.) You can keep your Tony Robbins, your Paolo Coehlo, your Joel Osteen – Ripley is my life coach, my spiritual center, my rock and my salvation. She’s my framed Successories poster of the mind.

“If just one of those things manages to get down here, then all this, this bullshit that you think is so important? Well, you can just kiss all that goodbye!!”

Bliss. I love those movies because she’s so damn right. She’s scared shitless but she goes forward. Want to get out of here alive? Then Do What Ripley Says.

Tinsel is getting good press — and I’m grateful, even if I’ve been slow to get it posted up here. So I’m spending part of this sunny Sunday making a round-up of the last several days of my media hype machine. It’s getting harder and harder to get MSM attention for a book, but my luck is holding out, and I’m even getting notice from some non-MSM. Whether any of it makes a whit of difference in actual number of books sold remains (as always) to be seen. …

I am elated about this Laura Miller review in Salon. I’ve long admired her book reviews (and no, I don’t know her) and I’m so glad that she liked the book and got it exactly. I’ll be keeping this review handy for the inevitable day when I’m feeling low about the whole endeavor, which should come any minute now. I especially like the opening:

Every year, Christmas is directly responsible for some of the worst books to cross a reviewer’s desk: stale, overfrosted sugar cookies loaded with the literary equivalent of artificial coloring and high-fructose corn syrup. But now all is forgiven because the season has inspired Hank Stuever to write “Tinsel: A Search for America’s Christmas Present,” a portrait of the holiday as it’s celebrated in the booming Dallas exurb of Frisco, Texas. A delicately calibrated combination of rigorous reporting, observational humor and old-fashioned empathy, “Tinsel” is the book that saved Christmas for this curmudgeon.

Another goody: Here’s Robert Smith’s story on the book that ran on All Things Considered on NPR Saturday (Nov. 28). I had a great time with Robert and producer Alice Winkler at Tyson’s Corner Center taping this piece a couple of weeks ago. And here’s a picture of Robert and me visiting the Tyson’s Santa Claus that day. This particular Santa is quite popular, and has been there every Christmas for many years. Last year he lost his job when the mall changed photo vendors and there was a huge outcry and protest. He’s back. (And he’s not afraid of speaking out. While Robert and I sat there and talked to him, he reminded us that “God gave his only son to mankind,”  “the ultimate gift,” and other evangelical yada-yada, which I think is sort of a no-no for secular mall Santas, but there it is. Happy Holidays and Merry CHRIST-mas!)

Speaking of radio, I had a great time appearing the other morning on the Joy Cardin show on Wisconsin Public Radio. No, readers, I wasn’t actually in Milwaukee; I talked to them from the Post‘s extremely handy radio studio.

I’ve been quoted in a few stories, like this one from the Deseret News, about the holiday season and buy-buy-buy and commercialism. Economist/author Joel Waldfogel (author of Scroogenomics) and I seem to be destined to appear in a lot of stories together.

(Disturbing print trend, if you’ll notice, and more fodder for the “death of copyediting” files: I seem to be able to get my name spelled right in the first reference — it’s Stuever –but soon enough I become “Steuver” on second references and in photo captions. I had journalism profs who would flunk people for this, but I am not in the business of handing out F’s to anyone giving my book a shred of publicity. I’ve spelled my name to everyone I talk to, and gave some of these writers the only handy way to remember how to spell it that I’ve been able to come up with, besides spending beaucoup money on a web site with my accurately-spelled name splayed all over it AND having that linked from inaccurately-spelled Google searches. Anyhow, here is a surefire method to remember how to spell my name: You want “ever” to be in it. Like forever. And however, and whatever. STU-EVER. But you don’t want to say it like that. TV and radio people always ask how to pronounce it, since they generally want to take it in the “Stoyver” direction. It’s Stooooover. “It rhymes with J. Edgar Hoover” I say.)

Jeff Baker gets my name right and then some in the Oregonian. Nice piece, which ran in plenty of time to interest people in my Powell’s reading there on Friday, Dec. 4.

And I liked reading columnist, “storyteller, writer and central Ohio supply preacher” Jeff Gill’s thoughts in the Newark Advocate.

Onward, to good reviews in today’s Sunday papers: St. Petersburg Times here, and the Buffalo News here.

Also a nice little story in the Oklahoma Gazette, the alt-weekly in OKC, which makes mention of my ancient history: I was the unpaid summer intern at the Gazette in 1988. Fond memories of Randy Splaingard and Ken “Dee Dee LeDeux” Siens and the drunken night known as the “Best of OKC” issue party, held at that old rock n’roll sushi bar over on May Avenue. What was that place called?

Some more making the Yuletide gay-ness from Pink magazine (click on the dude to get a PDF version of the magazine). And in a whole other demographic, here’s Brit Mott’s story from Plano Profile magazine, including a nice picture taken at their offices/studio in October.

Finally, and mostly, if you’re in Dallas (and not thoroughly sick of me) you must pick up the December issue of D, which has a big excerpt from the book and features an amazing portrait of Tammie Parnell in her family room with heaps of Christmas finery and regalia, photographed by Misty Keasler. The excerpt is mostly about Tammie — I took some 20,000 words of the Tammie parts of the book and winnowed them down into just a taste (5,000 words) about Tammie’s world of Christmas decorating and what it means to her. Tim Rogers and his staff are a bunch of super smarties, and I’ve enjoyed getting to work with them. I’ve also enjoyed meeting them a time or two at the Old Monk for their customary cocktail hour.

The excerpt appears only in the print edition, but here’s an outtake from the photo session that Misty sent to Tammie and Tammie sent to me — it’s Tammie and her dog, Toby. If that won’t put you in a Tinsel-y holiday mood, whatever will?

It so happens that I wound up in Houston on the Monday night that the Texans were playing the Tennessee Titans, which, I gather from the traffic jams on the way to my reading at Brazos Books, was a big game for Houstonites. They lost. I care about that about this much, but I could have done without the gridlock, you sports-obsessed America, you.

Just when I was thinking maybe I should have set up a folding table with a stack of Tinsels in the Reliant Stadium parking lot instead, I edged into the bookstore to find a nice little crowd of 15 or so people – which, according to ever-optimistic Megan (my HMH publicist) is a good size in a town where we got little to no advance media interest. Brazos Books isn’t large, but it’s a cute and interesting store, and there’s a comfy couch and chairs. I put on my gold Burger King Wise Man crown and went to work!

Jeff Trykoski’s brother, Doug, and his wife Traci came to the reading – Traci is very pregnant, due in February; a Trykoski grandchild at last!

Also present was a goodly portion of a writing class from the nearby DeVry University, which was a total surprise, and a welcome one. Their teacher, one LouAnn Gottschalk, thought it would be a good idea to go see an actual writer talk about an actual book. I couldn’t agree more and I enjoyed meeting LouAnn and her students. Also in the audience was Facebook acquaintance Mark Hager. Plus some random readers who, it would seem, were just interested the book and the author. Go figure. (Thanks, LouAnn for the photos!)

Most delightfully, I got to see Janice Welch (nee Kusbel) and her husband, James, and daughter Gabrielle. Janice and I were inseparable back in high school days, but we haven’t actually seen one another in – I added it up – just shy of 20 years. We’d lost track of one another until about 2005, when Janice’s parents saw me on the Today show one morning. So I got to have dinner with them – and meet James and the amazing Gabrielle. (I’ve been an admirer of her Halloween costumes for many years, thanks to Janice’s e-mails and pictures. Once she was Velma from Scooby-Doo, then the next year she was Daphne. This year she was Gene Simmons in full Kiss makeup.) Gabrielle asked me to sign Off Ramp, too, which she is currently reading (she is in fifth grade, people!).

After the reading, James and Gabrielle went home and Janice and I went out for drinks with David Bryce, a friend of mine from the Austin days who is now an attorney in Houston. Do you ever have one of those moments where you’re sitting a table with two people who come from completely different phases of your life? I was worried about being a bridge between them, but I need not have worried: David Bryce is interested in everything and able to talk about anything; so’s Janice! We sat on the porch at a bar called Under the Volcano. Every once in awhile, beneath a top note of another table’s cigarette smoke, I got a tropical whiff of … something, some plant … magnolia? Honeysuckle? I can only describe that smell thusly: New Orleans at night. Whatever grows there grows in Houston.

Tuesday was a long but wonderful day. I got up and drove out to the Houston suburbs to see Janice some more. Gabrielle was at school, but her son, Nathan, was home. I’ve heard a lot about Nathan. He’s autistic. Really autistic. I wasn’t sure what to expect – Janice has devoted her life to teaching and caring for Nathan, who goes to a special one-on-one school for a couple hours of day. When I got there, I was immediately struck by what beautiful and mysterious boy he is. I could have watched them together all day — a mesmerizing mother-son pair. They sit in the morning and work on Nathan’s communication skills. There are moments that are absolutely divine and moments that are tense. This is Janice’s life – and James’s and Gabrielle’s. It’s not only about constantly trying to reach Nathan, but it involves a rigid, completely organic dietary regimen and a household routine where life can only be lived a few minutes at a time.

I wonder if people ever tell Janice that she’s lucky? Because that’s what I felt for her. I know it’s not easy, but he really is one of the most fascinating, handsome and interesting kids I’ve ever seen. And right away I liked Gabrielle, who seems wise beyond her years. For all the unpredictability in their lives, their house is really comfortable and easy to be in. I’m so glad I had time to visit.

But I had to go. Left Janice’s place at 12:30 to drive like Jehu for 3-1/2 hours to get to Dallas and catch a flight home – but found just enough time to have an early dinner at the Black Eyed Pea with Louis and John and my mother. I’m on the plane right now (Tuesday night) as I type this. What a week. I saw miles and miles of Texas and did five readings.

Are you waiting to hear whether or not I’ll be on the CBS Early Show in New York on Black Friday? Well, so am I. After I told everyone about it, the producer who was supposed to call just never got around to it. Lesson learned, I suppose. Maybe I’ll hear about it Wednesday, or maybe they’ll have me on some other morning before Christmas gets here. In any case, our Thanksgiving is in limbo.

Meantime, there’s some more Tinsel press, reviews, radio and TV coming. I’m reading/speaking at the Newseum on Saturday afternoon (Nov. 28) if you want to come out and join the museum crowds. (The Newseum person told me it’s their busiest day of the year.) Something to do with bored relatives!

Also, unless their plan has changed, I think there’s a story about Tinsel on NPR’s All Things Considered on Saturday. We taped it a couple of weeks ago in Tyson’s Corner Center mall. I’ll doublecheck and let the world know.

I get back on a plane Monday morning: Readings next week in Oklahoma City (Dec. 1), Portland (Dec. 4) and Bellingham (Dec. 5). Then it’s Seattle, St. Louis and New York between Dec. 7-14. Go to the home page and click “Hank’s Next Event” if you want the details.

In other news…

City Paper called on me (and Trey Graham! Among others) to help make sense of the difference (and vitality) of the Washington Blade (RIP) and Metro Weekly. What I’ll miss about the Blade was its dogged accounting of worldwide and nationwide discriminations, slights, crimes and other injustices to gays and lesbians everywhere. It was a constant reminder (sometimes a dreary one; but necessary) that every step forward for gay rights in one time zone usually entailed a step backward in another.

And the Post has decided to close its Los Angeles, Chicago and New York bureaus. You can read about it here. This move acknowledges how, bit by bit, the Post has been scaling back its ambitions as a national newspaper in favor of keeping our foreign bureaus and emphasizing a focus on all things Washington. I spent quite a bit of time with the LA bureau in its recent permutations in the last 10 years — Bill Booth, who is now the Mexico City bureau chief; Rene Sanchez, who is now a managing editor at the Minneapolis Star-Tribune; Sharon Waxman, now of the The Wrap.com; my TV colleague Lisa de Moraes; and the most recent LA chief, Karl Vick – and I plan to keep going out to Los Angeles for various stories. All those Oscar seasons and other datelines I’ve had from SoCal, my idea of a bureau was pretty much a discounted room at the Beverly Hilton anyhow.

But as for the actual bureau, I’ll always remember seeing Florence Henderson. and other B-listers on their way to see one of a squillion attorneys, on the elevators of the Century City office building where we were for a long time – that was before the Washington Post Company started saving money by moving the bureau in with the Newsweek offices in Santa Monica.

If anyone wants to hire a top-flight young reporter, you can’t do better than Ashley Surdin, our LA bureau aide who is now out of a job. Here’s to you, Ashley. Hang in there.

If you’ve been reading this blog or if you know me even just a little, then you know that when it comes to memory and the past and driving around I can be a total sap. Fair warning, then. Move on or get in the passenger seat…

I lived in Austin for just a bit longer than three years — from 1996 to 1999, which was sort of like the roaring ’20s in that town, the decade everyone and everything became unbearably hip and people got rich just by being in the right action-figure-adorned cubicle farm internet start-up company at the exact right time. Being here this weekend really made it seem like forever ago.

Part of my nostalgia jag on this weekend was triggered by how much Austin has changed in terms of infrastructure (freeways, roads) and architecture (Christ, how many loft condos does a city need?). The pic above is one of those utopian developer photoshoppy-jobbies — but it’s pretty close to a fully realized vision. The smell of progress is also evident in the palpably increased density of restaurants, boutiques, and other places to spend money and pack on the fat grams. No city in America is better served by outdoor-seating-under-strings-of-Italian-wedding-lights opportunities. Austin may well be the most delicious city I’ve ever left behind (although Albuquerque puts up a pretty good fight).

More than one Austinite I encountered this weekend bemoaned what the city has become — the growth, the pace, the conspicuous consumption — but that’s always been a chief activity in Austin: complaining that it was so much better back in [fill in idyllic year here]. But I think Austin looks and feels better now, somehow. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and what I experienced this weekend felt like Austin Plus-Plus.

The basic quality of the place (happily dumpy, rusty, and stoney in more than one sense) is still intact, and so is the boundless civic pride. People have always loved living here; although it’s famous for being “laid back,” life in Austin requires of its people the most competitive style of laid-backitude. People hurl themselves into the weekend with gusto, determined to out-Austin one another: they are jogging around Town Lady Bird Lake early in the day; they are lined up for just the right breakfast tacos and brunch hot spots by 10; they are tailgating in deluxe style by noon before the UT game; they are in and out of all the right bars and night spots and arrive at favorite eateries with the reverence of hipster pilgrims. And they’re still record shopping, which gladdens me.

They’re also still voracious readers. Hooray! I read from and signed copies of Tinsel on Saturday afternoon at Book People, the lit’rature palace on West 6th and Lamar. I can only begin to guess how many hours I spent in this store back in the ’90s, fully absorbed in magazines and books. (More on that — my happily delusional, late-20s, literary life of letters back then — in a moment.)

Around 20-30 people showed up. Many of them were friends, including former colleagues from the Austin American-Statesman. Some were stray customers. More than a few were curious about the book, lured there by one hell of an article about by Patrick Beach, which ran in the Statesman on Saturday morning. More on that, too, in a moment — but here’s a snippet:

We have been here before, sort of but not really: Big-city journalist parachutes into Anywhere, USA, observes the curious folkways and mores of People Not Like Himself, writes a piece posing as fish out of water with tone of bemused detachment, which aims to fumigate persistent aroma of condescension toward his subjects.

Except this is my friend Hank Stuever, a prince of a guy, former American-Statesman writer, Pulitzer Prize finalist, brutally funny, warm and generous and a better writer than I could ever hope to be. I hate him.

Let us dispense with the notion of journalistic impartiality and the use of surnames on second reference and call the man whose talent I’m murderously jealous of “Hank.” And let’s talk about Hank’s new book, “Tinsel: A Search for America’s Christmas Present,” which is about three Christmases — and three households — in the Dallas exburb of Frisco from 2006 to 2008. It’s also about consumerism, an economy that conveniently imploded and red-state Americans who go to churches where they’re told “God wants you to feel good about your boobs.”

You will definitely laugh; you will probably learn; you might get angry. The scope is huge. It’s about, like, EVERYTHING.

And it just gets better. Go read it, unless you are sicker of me than I am of myself. Pat came to the reading with his sons, Adam and Joe, and like Austin, they’re all grows up! (This has been a distinct theme of the trip so far — people keep coming to my readings accompanied by tweens, teenagers, and college students whom I remember as babies.)

Of the rest of the people at the reading was a friend with whom I once sang a duet in a high school musical; another was Helen Johnson, who I profiled in 1996, and remains such a dear friend, though we don’t hear from one another as much as we mean to. The endlessly smart and entertaining Spike Gillespie was there, which is all the approval I’ll ever need. I had a happy time doing the reading, and signed as much stock as I could.

I got to have dinner with Michelle Breyer, my Austin touchstone, now the super successful goddess of coiled locks at naturallycurly.com; Michelle is yet another person blissfully aglow with newspaperdom’s afterlife. I got to see Marques Harper and his friends at a bar on 4th Street (eek — flashbacks to Oilcan Harry’s, etc.) on Friday night, at which Marques reminded me just how bad the gay dating scene can be in this otherwise enlightened town. I got to have breakfast with Pat Beach at a relocated El Sol y La Luna.

I got to spend a few hours Sunday with Spike, who showed me quilts at the history museum, bought me lunch at Kerbey Lane and then showed me what became of the old Mueller Airport land. (The abandoned control tower is still standing, amid a cookie-cutter subdivision, and it is a wondrously spooky sight. I wonder if they still affix a NOEL sign to it during holidays? Doesn’t look like they do.)

Also? I got to drive around a lot Austin, by myself, which I hadn’t done in, gosh, 10 years. This got me in one of my moods — not sad or anything, just reflective. (Self-reflective, of course.)

What was I here?

All I could think of was how much I worked. I kept wondering about the stories: Is Stevie Ray Vaughan’s stuff still in that storage unit on South Congress, and does the check still arrive each month to cover the rent? What happened to John Guerin after he sold his Guitar Heaven store in Georgetown, and did Denny keep the oft-traded Fender acoustic forever, like he said he would? Is the roller rink off 183 and Burnet still open and do they still do adult-only skate on Tuesdays? How are the Worthingtons, the northwest Austin suburbanites I profiled? Do the old men still meet every morning in the Lockhart Dairy Queen? Is that used office equipment still in the Quonset hut east of I-35, and if so, what did it look like during this Great Recession? How’s the funeral business treating Robert Falcon these days?

I don’t actually need answers to all those questions. (And, in a happy coincidence, Lupe and Sonny Falcon saw the Statesman article, called me at the front desk at Book People, and I went over and saw them on Sunday afternoon. If you’ve read “All Faiths” in Off Ramp, the story about the discount funeral home I wrote in 1999, you know who I’m talking about. The actual All Faiths strip-mall funeral home is still on South Congress and St. Elmo, but Robert left it behind years ago and moved on; he’s now running two funeral homes in Amarillo.)

So there’s that kind of nostalgia. But also I was thinking about my former world here. I had great friends back then (many now moved away), but I was also terribly lonely sometimes. I spent a crazy amount of time reading. On Saturday morning, I walked into the Little City cafe on Congress (shabby now) just to look around for a minute recall that young(er) man who spent so much time sitting there, deep into his books and magazines, or marking up his own story drafts with a red pen. (When I was feeling flush with cash, which was maybe once every six weeks, I would shift the locale to the bar at the Four Seasons.) You could not have convinced that Hank Stuever that he’d be back in Book People reading from his own book in 10 years.

Austin is like some kind of fever dream I once had. In 1996 and ’97, I got so down that I had to see a therapist, who had me try a variety of antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs, but I don’t think I was on them long enough to tell the difference, and pretty soon it was the work (and people) who lifted me out of that dark funk. What I did love was Ambien (I took one Ambien a night for almost three years — nearly my entire Austin tenure) and I wonder if this is why Austin has such a dreamy, gauzy quality in my mind.

That story Pat Beach wrote really touched me. He was under no obligation whatsoever to do such a thing, or do it with the care and thought that he did. Over breakfast Sunday morning, Pat and I caught up. When we sat two cubicles apart in the Statesman‘s features department, we used to really pay attention to what the other was working on. All of us feature writers did — we had good editors and the gang of us (Kallenberg, McLeese, Garcia, Corky, Hibberd, Barnes, others) were in the same essential hunt. It was collegial and competitive; our bosses wanted it that way. We cared about that most ephemeral thing: writing feature stories.

Now here’s Pat and me talking about it over huevos and tacos like prematurely old men. I so admire Pat for sticking with it — and sticking with it in Austin, when he could have moved to a lot of other papers, when things were still ripping along. Here, in 2009, he’s one of two (two!) full-time feature section writers who have a general assignment beat. I want him to keep hitting it hard.

It’s Monday morning now. I’m packed, checked out of the hotel, and having breakfast at Magnolia Cafe and reading the Statesman, which, I have to say, given the givens, looks and reads like a paper in relatively sturdy shape. I’m still worried about the fate of feature writing, not just here but everywhere, but a piece on the Statesman’s front page Sunday by Kevin Robbins, about one of the survivors of the Aggie bonfire collapse (there’s that 10-years-ago thing, again) made me think all this fretting is hooey. It’s good.

Gregory Kallenberg, if you were here with me at Magnolia, there’d be extra jalepenos in a little plastic cup, and yes, we could do an entree split.

I’m off to Houston for a reading at Brazos Books tonight. The fact that my rental car (a black Ford Escape; apologies to polar ice caps) has an iPod jack only sweetens the deal. Yes, I went to Waterloo Records, but once again the Internet ruins everything it touches: Instead of buying a heap of CDs and a couple of LPs, I simply wandered the store for an hour and made mental notes about what to go get from iTunes.

Here’s the video trailer for the book. (Don’t you know that the only way to get people to buy a book anymore is to throw together a three-minute movie?)

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt arranged to have this done. Charles Halpin at Bookstream Inc. made it happen and a very nice videographer named Herb, from Silver Spring, came over to my house to set up lights and get me to talk to the camera for two hours. Yes, that’s my home office — behind me is the bulletin board upon which my insanity played out for the last few years. And a cameo appearance by the bowling pin lamp I bought in Austin in the 1990s and the Harvey Girls lampshade I found a few years later while visiting Laura Trujillo in Phoenix, c. 2002.

Big shout-out to Michael Wichita, my long-suffering BF, who shot nearly all of the Frisco footage when I dragged him to Texas for Thanksgiving and Black Friday in 2007.

Let me say right now, I have never been a fan of watching myself on the tube, and that includes the YouTube. (“A-mer-i-cuh,” he tells the camera, like it’s a word no one’s ever heard before, like it needs to be said the way a teenage girl says “duh” to her dad.) But my embarrassment knob is dialed down very low these days, down to the “shameless” indicator, because I have a book to sell. So, roll the tape! And feel free to share it with every last one of your friends on the Internets.