The time I laughed a lot.

I had gone back and forth trying to decide if I was going to go to the Christopher Moore signing at Mysterious Galaxy. I had read some of Lamb, but ended up giving it up after getting through about half of it. Not to say that it wasn't funny, because it certainly was.  I think it was just a bit too dry for me.

The topic of his new book, Sacré Bleu combined Paris and Van Gogh, so I was definitely interested , but not sold on the idea. On the day before the release, I got the email newsletter from MG highlighting the release of Sacré Bleu. I was intrigued to find out that only the first editions were going to have color pages. That got me closer to wanting it. And then I saw that the release date was the same as another book I was going to pick up, so I figured I might as well.

On the night of the signing, I got down to MG around 5:30. I stayed in my car until I started seeing people streaming through the parking lot. A woman who was parked next to me stopped at my car and told me that they were already lining people up... It wasn't even 6pm yet and the Q&A was scheduled to start at 7.

After some brief instruction about not leaning on the bookshelves, they let us into the store. The few amount of seats were taken right away and the bookstore quickly became standing room only; however, time went by surprisingly fast [sharing Post-it's and Sharpees will do that].

Elizabeth was posting on Twitter about the signing and posted this:

Apparently, I was the first one to respond to it, so I won a mug and 10% off anything else I was going to buy before the night was over. Since I am in the loyalty league, I already get 10% off, so I just took my free [and purple!] MG mug and fought my way back to my spot.

Picture from MG website. I left the mug in my car & I'm too lazy to go get it.

Christopher came out right on time. He had a stapled group of papers that were speaking topics and he just went through all of them saying "I don't want to talk about that...I don't want to talk about that" as he skimmed through the sentences.

The easiest way to summarize this signing? He. Is. Hilarious. I don't think I've ever laughed as much as I did during his monologue. I don't even think I could do him any justice by repeating some of the things he said. Alas, I will try.

He talked about writing a book about the color blue, being a "little bitch" when it came to how the cover and color art inside Sacré Bleu looked, the crazy people in Kansas and wanting to get some set of brothers to "burn them to the ground and let a cat shit in their ashes".  He talked for about 40 minutes. One because he was sick and on a NyQuil high and two because MG didn't have their PA working, so he had to yell.

After the signing was done, we were all sent outside to line up in order of our ticket. I was #55. They let us back into the store 10 at a time, the line wrapping around the shelves.  They had an employee at the head of the line so control who went up to the signing table when. I thought it was very cool that when you went to the table, you didn't have people breathing down your neck.

I didn't really have anything clever to say.  Thankfully, as I was walking up he was using some hand sanitizer and it went everywhere.  That led to a few comments by Christopher about everything being clean for me.  He signed my book, I thanked him for taking the time to be at the store and that was it... As I was walking away, he called me back to give me a Sacré Bleu temporary tattoo.

All in all, it was a fun night.  Christopher Moore is a great speaker and I'll definitely be going to future signings.  Even if I haven't read any of the books.