Parking Validation
And the LA Times Festival of Books
I’ve heard from a handful of foreigners that don’t understand what parking validation is. Of course, it is when a store or restaurant provides some form of verification allowing their customers to receive free or discounted parking in a nearby garage or lot. I’m sure it’s not just an Los Angeles thing, but maybe I’ve become so accustomed to the bourgeois, $38 smoothie Erewhon lifestyle that I’ve lost touch with my roots, and assume everyone has to pay a cover charge to park everywhere.
In other news, it’s the (7th? 8th?) anniversary of the time I moderated the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books panel on Political Cartoons.
The panel was David Horsey, Tom Tomorrow and myself in a massive auditorium at USC. Berkely Breathed was also scheduled to appear, but dropped out at the last minute. To this day I’m convinced the LA Times mistook me for someone else when hiring me as the moderator. I don’t consider myself particularly chatty or naturally inquisitive; I don’t ask a lot of follow up questions. The whole day I had a creeping sense that someone with a lanyard would pull me aside and explain their mistake, and we would both be embarassed — to be honest it kind of spoiled it for me! Is that what people mean when they talk about Impostor Syndrome? The only other time I feel this is when people say they like my band. Hahaha. Should I talk to a professional?
What balanced out the day for me was my devastating off-the-cuff zinger, “Since Berke isn’t here, we can talk about Doonesbury”, which killed in the room, as you can imagine. If you can’t, I’ll just say Gary Trudeau is famously not a fan of how many ideas Breathed accidentally borrowed from his comics, and I knew the type of people attending this panel would know that. Cheeky! David and Tom (née Dan) were both very cool with me and it ended up being a fun panel. I was drenched in sweat with a throbbing tension headache afterwards — effortless conversationalist that I am.
At the end of the day, the Los Angeles Times did not validate my parking.