Outside the City Opera House, a lone evangelist cheerfully distributes hate lit. I dodge the outstretched pamphlet and pull out my phone, feigning interest in the AMBER Alert that’s been blowing up my notifications since I landed. In rural Michigan, you get crime alerts on your phone. This would not fly in Brooklyn.
I wonder if it’s the ubiquity of urban crime that makes New Yorkers apathetic, or the apathy of New Yorkers that engenders widespread crime. Probably both.
Safely inside the Opera House, I take the stairs up to the auditorium, where David Ebershoff, author of The Danish Girl, is about to speak.
I’ve been in Traverse City a few hours, and spent most of that time sitting on the dock of the West Bay. The colors here are nourishment for the eyes: cerulean water and turquoise sky converge on the horizon; the hills of the Leelanau and Old Mission Peninsulas—still converting from brown to green this far north—rise at either periphery.
Ebershoff looks and sounds a lot like Edward Norton (Moonrise Kingdom Edward Norton, not American History X Edward Norton). He talks about identity, the extent to which we can define it, and about compassion, and the journeys on which it takes us. At the Q&A, I ask how he deals with people like the one outside: does negative attention bother him, motivate him, not affect him at all?
His answer is nuanced—a bit of all three. “It helps to know we’re on the right side of history,” he says. “There’s one person like that outside, and all of you in here.”
The audience, probably two hundred strong, cheers.
On my way out of the Opera House, I pass the evangelist. He gets to, “Howdy, did you know—” before I notice something interesting on my phone and walk away. The man may be a bigot, but I have to admire his tenacity—after three hours standing outside being ignored, I would get hungry.
I haven’t read The Danish Girl yet, but I look forward to fixing that.
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