Lucky Me

I am an incredibly lucky person.

Tonight I attended a book tour and interview for journalism icon, Nina Totenberg. I’ve been a fan of hers all my professional life. When I had a commute, I listened intently to her on NPR to and from work. Weeks ago I bought her audiobook Dinners With Ruth.

My husband and I listened to it on our recent trip to and from the San Francisco Bay Area from our home in Southern California. I was really excited and looking forward to the evening, to hearing her interviewed live onstage at The Granada Theater.

At The Granada

The seats in The Granada Theater are not sized for anyone over five foot six and 120 pounds. I am five foot eight and 100 pounds over the intended design. From my perspective, the seats are tight and the aisles prohibitive, but that’s just the price I have to pay for live performances.

In any venue, I try to get seats in Row K if I can afford them. Not so close that I can see up the performer’s noses, or be spit on if it is Shakespeare, but close enough to feel a rapport with the people on the stage. I was in seat 16. Lindsay in seat 14 and Suzy in seat 12 separated me from my husband Mark in seat 10, who was finishing up a chat with Suzy when we all filed in.

The theater was nearly sold out, and we had to climb over a few people to get to our seats. As soon as we sat down in our even-numbered side of Row K, we had to stand back up and bend back to allow one…and then another group of people to make their way past us further into the row. The third time we stood up it was for a solo wiry man in a brown plaid sport coat. I didn’t realize how tall he was until he brushed me, towering over me as he passed. While I was turned the other way, checking to see if he had a companion, he settled into the seat directly next to me. 

Conscious of my new stranger-neighbor, I wedged my wide hips and the bulging pockets of my leather jacket into my seat. My keys, cell phone, gloves, and hat made me even wider than necessary at the hips, so I tried to lift the coat and make myself smaller. I did this with the deference of someone happy to give up the armrest as long as my neighbor agreed to overlook the fact that no matter what, my large frame was going to be in their personal space for the next two hours. 

When we had to stand again, all together as a row, one last time, to let yet another couple make their way down the nine already-filled seats in the constricted aisle, I noticed two more details about the man. First, the plaid of his coat in subtle browns was very beautiful. It was definitely not the sort of thing anyone would wear in our beachy Santa Barbara town. The other thing was his mask. Masks were required—no one was allowed in the theater without one, and his mask was handmade of black fabric, printed with a bust of Ruth Bader Ginsburg—The Notorious RBG.

“Great mask,” I said to him. “Very appropriate.”

“Thank you,” he said with a bit of an accent.

We had just a few minutes until the start of the interview and it occurred to me that wedged in as we were, if I got too hot during the performance, it would be almost impossible to remove my coat. It also occurred to me that if I took the coat off, both myself and my neighbors would have a little more breathing space without the full pockets adding to my width. I mused aloud to my friend, “I should probably take my coat off now, for when it gets boiling hot in here in a few minutes.”

I sat forward (as forward as I could), swiveled toward my friend, and did my best to remove my bulky leather coat without elbowing anyone. I had most of my left arm out when I felt a tugging on my right side and realized my stranger-neighbor was helping me in the constrained space…probably because he was a gentleman, but also quite likely in proactive self-defense. 

“Oh, thank you!” I said, folding the coat on my lap, turning to him, and giving him one of my biggest smiles.

All Gentlemanly Politeness

He kept his narrow face, with its round glasses perched on his nose, pointing straight forward. He acknowledged my gratitude with a nod and then said, “Did you read the book?”

As he asked, he made a gesture with his left hand that conveyed, I’m doing my duty, I have asked you the obvious question, and having asked, the house lights will now dim and save me from having to listen to your answer.

It felt to me like he had asked in the same way he might have gone to the bathroom after an overlong wait at a restaurant to make the food arrive. 

His voice was clear and accented with a particular New York sound that I associate with Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, and everyone on my father’s side of the family. The clear, ringing consonants and vowels of New York Jews who at some point learned at least enough Hebrew for their mitzvah. The RBG mask man didn’t have his restaurant timing exactly right though.

I Love Talking About Books

I answered his question about the book with a triumphant “I did!”

I assumed (incorrectly, it turns out) that he had bought his ticket, and must have read the book or also been a Totenberg fan (I was not wrong about that second bit). “I listened to the audiobook,” I said, “because I wanted to hear her voice – you know THE VOICE.” This was NINA TOTENBERG after all. “Her voice is everything after years and years of listening to it on the radio during my commute. One thing I noticed is that it seemed like the book was in longer segments than she was used to. It sounded sometimes like she’d get to about the length of a news story and she would slow down, or stop, or her voice would break, but she had to keep going…” 

“Well the director was on the other end of the line telling her to hurry along,” he said.

What?

Processing the way this man had just said with complete authority something that sounded factual about Nina Totenberg recording her audiobook, I got out something like, “That makes sense,” before falling quiet again. My brain was replaying everything the man in the RBG mask had said, what he was wearing, and what the odds were that someone from Nina Totenberg’s entourage would just sit in a random seat in the house instead of backstage or up in one of the empty private boxes.

“What was your favorite part?” he asked next, and from his voice, it sounded either like the conversation was on autopilot for him, or he was trying to determine if I had actually done my homework. Was he a UCSB faculty member, reflexively testing me to see if I had made it all the way to the end of the book?

I felt suddenly guilty about not getting to the last two chapters.

I launched into several of the things I enjoyed about the book. The unique, narrow-perspective history lesson it provided to me. The fact that it covered all different kinds of friendships; those that were easy and hard. Those that had been kept and lost. And I mentioned how I was very passionate about the subject of friendship and felt lucky to be able to read an East Coast point of view much different than the one I had been raised with on the West Coast, and one that was an example from a different generation. 

I could tell that the man in the RBG mask was listening and emotionally responding, but he didn’t turn to look me in the eye. He didn’t jump in or offer his own reactions. So after I produced the amount of genuine gushing about the book that approximately equaled my growing suspicion, I quipped back, “And did you get a chance to read the book before tonight?”

He crossed a leg, turning a bit away from me and quietly swallowing the words, “Hah, yeah, you could say that.”

OH SHIT.

Who was this guy? Her editor? Had I said anything weird or disrespectful? A fellow NPR employee…his voice did sound kind of familiar. I snuck a peek at his tidy dark hair, combed back thinly across his head. Someone with a New York Jewish accent. About the right age. Someone traveling with her…

“Well, the question I submitted,” I went on, “was what happened with the violin and who has it…”

“We don’t know.”

OHMYGOD.

The lights went down.

I sat in the dark as the man I was now sure was Nina Totenberg’s husband, David, shifted every now and again to cross and uncross his long legs in the narrow aisle. I kept my knees together, my elbows tucked and I leaned ever so slightly toward my friend Lindsay. Away from my not-at-all-a-stranger neighbor. 

Because if you’ve read Dinners With Ruth, David Reines is a major character. He is, in many ways, the hero of the book. The man who provided the wit, wisdom, and trusted support that kept Ruth Bader Ginsburg going for so long and made Nina Totenberg happy after being widowed. Totenberg talks about him in the book. A LOT.

While Totenberg was interviewed, most of the time answering questions with stories or information I had already heard in the audiobook, I laughed and clapped and wondered why the heck “David” as Totenbrg called him all through the book, would choose to sit in a narrow, uncomfortable seat and risk being recognized or forced to make conversation with random theatergoers.

The Giveaway

When Totenberg paused because she couldn’t instantly recall the name of the violinist who played her father’s Stradivarius after it was recovered, my neighbor whispered to himself, “Nathan” a second before Nina recalled the name and said it up on the stage. Yep. I’d been spouting off to David, and he’d probably heard the same thing a hundred times. 

As the interview went on, I stopped myself from commenting under my breath. Part of me wanted to say something from having read the book that would let him know, I knew (or at least suspected) who he was. Like when Totenberg said, “my husband David knew, but I didn’t,” in reference to RBG’s lung cancer, I was tempted to whisper, you were an amazing friend to RBG-Thank you.

But I didn’t. 

I didn’t because maybe I was wrong. There must have been a reason he didn’t introduce himself. And also because, for all I knew, perhaps he didn’t consider himself a friend to RBG. Perhaps he thought of the privacy of their consultations as his job as a doctor and an American and a good husband who extends his affection to his wife’s friends. I didn’t actually know anything about this man next to me, even if, after listening to his (maybe) wife read her story to me for hours (much of which included stories about him), I felt like I knew him. That feeling is pure fiction. Created by excellent storytelling.

Friendships Across An Aisle

Every so often, David would mumble some telling remark, and I held my tongue even though I was bursting with curiosity. I kept in my own side comments until the story about Justice Antonin Scalia and the dinner party with the water guns.

A large part of Dinners With Ruth is making the case for how to have friendships with people who hold radically different opinions from yours. As told in the book, Nina and David were hosting a dinner party, and Scalia and his wife were guests. Scalia had written the opinion allowing for handguns to be kept for personal security in the home. The book says Scalia was a passionate hunter and gun owner, while, as a trauma surgeon, David had operated on gunshot wounds and was anti-gun.

For the dinner, toy water pistols were acquired and put into the soup bowls. The host, David, pulled out a super-soaker and pointed it at Scalia to make a point…and as Totenberg finished the tale on stage that I had already heard on audiobook, I couldn’t stop myself from quietly muttering, “Saying it, without saying it. Brav-Oh.” My neighbor shifted a little in his seat. 

The evening ended with Nina Totenberg making yet another comment about her amazing husband, and as the lights came up, the man in the RBG mask said, “And that’s why we have such a good marriage after 22 years.”

We all stood up, gathering our things, and then…just continued to stand there. The aisles were filled and the crowd wasn’t moving very fast.

“My husband and I have been married twenty years too,” I looked up into his face and smiled. What I hope I conveyed was You and I have that in common, and we know it’s the best, don’t we?

“Why isn’t he sitting next to you?”

“We see each other all the time, and sometimes it’s nice to share your spouse with your friends.”

Knowing from the book that Nina often did exactly that and that David did basically all the cooking in their home, frequently kept heroes RGB and Totenberg fed, I said “Thank you for feeding them so well, and for traveling along.” 

“Well, that was the agreement. If she wrote the book, I had to go on the book tour.”

“I’m glad the Simon and Schuster people convinced her to write it,” I began, referring to something Totenberg had said early in the interview that surprised me…

“I convinced her to write it,” he interrupted. “Look at the dedication…pardon me, may I?” He reached past me to my friend Lindsay’s copy, opened it to the dedication, and handed it to me. I read the dedication out loud and he said with the voice of a husband absolutely full of pride, “That’s me.” 

“That’s amazing. Thank you so much. And please thank Nina too.”

“Yes, good evening—I’m glad you enjoyed the book,” our row finally moved enough that he could make his escape and fulfill his promised duties to take care of his wife.

Lucky Me

Did I mention I am an incredibly lucky person? Not only do I have the privilege of being able to afford tickets when Santa Barbara Arts & Lectures announces its season, but I tend to be, more often than most, in the right place at the right time.

I didn’t connect with Mr. Raines on a deep level. Nor did I get to ask him questions, have a unique discussion about his wife’s book, or ask why he so adamantly wanted her to write it. But feeling him next to me—his attention; His pride; His interest even though he had probably heard everything said on stage tonight dozens if not hundreds of times before, added a layer of joy to an already wonderful evening.

Thank you, Nina. And thank you, David. You’ve reminded me again how very lucky I am and made me astonishingly happy this evening.