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NPR Satirist Sedaris Believes "Me Talk Pretty One Day"

Whether talking about his vicious French teacher, or the difficulties of explaining Easter in limited French to someone who knows nothing about the holiday, David Sedaris's keen observations show us the absurdities of life and the improbability of actually speaking comprehensible French.

Sedaris emerged as a popular NPR commentator with his adventures as a Christmas elf and other holiday disasters. Author of three books, Sedaris regaled his Chico audience with stories from his soon-to-be-released fourth book, Me Talk Pretty One Day, in an appearance sponsored by Chico News & Review, FOX30, MIX 95.1, KCHO/KPFR, The Orion, Holiday Inn, Butte College, and Chico Performances.

After moving to Paris, Sedaris took a French class. In Sedaris' stories, the French language emerges as bane and attraction, a toothache of a language that Sedaris could neither master nor leave alone. The inherent difficulties of learning a language that insists on gendered nouns was compounded by a teacher who relied on disdain and insult as her teaching tools.

She asked students to introduce themselves, tell what they love, and then shamed them for their answers. In an effort to avoid public ridicule, Sedaris said he loved his floor waxer. "'Were you always this unnhh?' she asked. 'Even a unnhh knows that a floor waxer is feminine.' I endured as much of her abuse as I could understand," he said.

Sedaris tried a variety of techniques to master the proper gender for each noun, such as finding what it was that made a sandwich male: "I tell myself that a sandwich is masculine because if left alone for a week or two it will actually grow a beard." He started to greet each object with a statement appropriate to its gender. When that didn't work, "I invented personalities for the objects on my dresser, and set them up on blind dates," he said.

When none of these techniques worked, Sedaris began to refer to everything in the plural. "A masculine kilo and a feminine tomato present a sexual problem easily solved by asking for two kilos of tomatoes." When Sedaris arrived home, his boyfriend, Hugh, asked him what they were going to do with four pounds of tomatoes. "We could put them next to the radios."

When a student asked for an explanation of Easter, her fellow students responded: "He called himself Jesus and then he died one day on two morsels of lumber. . . . He died one day, then he went above my head to live with your father. . . . After he died the first day, he came back here for to say hello to the people." As it became increasingly obvious that their language skills were not up to the theological complexities of crucifixion and resurrection, the students discussed food. When the teacher asked who brought the chocolate, Sedaris, delighted to know the answer, said, "The rabbit of Easter, he brings the chocolate." The teacher was disbelieving. Everyone knows chocolate is flown in by a big bell from Rome. A bell? "A bell has all the personality of a cast-iron skillet. It's like saying, come Christmas, a magic dust pan led by eight white cinder blocks" would deliver presents.

Religion is about faith, which all the students had. "Why bother struggling with the grammar lessons of a six-year-old if each of us didn't believe that against all reason we might actually improve. If I could hope to one day carry out a fluent conversation, it was a relatively short leap to believing that a rabbit might visit my home in the middle of the night leaving behind a handful of chocolate kisses and a carton of menthol cigarettes." -- BA