Me Talk Pretty One Day

Alisha, Sedaris’s longtime friend from North Carolina, has always visited and stayed with Sedaris in New York City. A respectful and easygoing friend who acclimates to Sedaris’s schedule when she visits, Sedaris mistakenly assumes that Alisha’s friend, Bonnie will be just as easygoing. Bonnie has never left North Carolina before and is Sedaris and Alisha’s worst nightmare. Believing New York to be filled with scam artists looking to pull one over her, she is aggressively suspicious of every interaction and does not believe Sedaris when he attempts to tell her that things are not so.

Determined to go through her New York City itinerary, Bonnie descends upon all the tourist traps, and insists that they have high tea at the Plaza Hotel. Sedaris warns her that her outfit of farmer “hog washers” (129) is not appropriate for the Plaza Hotel. She refuses to listen. Sedaris secretly hopes that she will be admonished for her inappropriate outfit at the Plaza Hotel. He discovers later that, rather than face embarrassment, Bonnie found a group of out-of-town tourists of her own ilk who were happy to entertain her demands, such as taking a photograph of her with a Plaza Hotel waiter. Bonnie continues to find herself in spaces filled with other out-of-town tourists that she mistakes for true New Yorkers. The chapter ends with Sedaris’s horrifying realization that Bonnie’s discovery of a “New York without New Yorkers” (130) makes him viciously aware of himself as an outsider.

Sedaris’s sister Amy is named one of New York’s interesting women and is about to take part in a photoshoot in honor of this occasion. Their father, who has always been overly concerned with his daughters’ appearances, enlists Sedaris in ensuring that Amy looks good in the photoshoot. This insistence leads Sedaris to recall his father’s history of controlling his sisters’ weight and appearances, often with degrading remarks. Sedaris remarks that while his sisters and mother would get angry, Amy would respond by playing elaborate pranks on their father. In one instance, she impersonates Penny Midland, a family friend, over the phone and pretends to flirt with her father. This leads her father to believe for several years that the real Penny had tried to initiate an affair with him. One Christmas, she puts on a fat suit, leading her father to believe she has gained weight. Sedaris’s father chastises him for failing his promise to watch over Amy’s health. Going along with the prank, Sedaris responds by telling his father that men nowadays appreciate a woman of Amy’s size. When Amy finally reveals that she was in a fat suit the whole time, Sedaris’s father attempts to sit with the joke but cannot let go of his fixation on Amy’s appearance.

Back at the photoshoot styling table, Amy requests, “I want to look like someone has beaten the shit out of me” (140). The stylists oblige, covering her face with fake scabs, bruises and stitches. She loves her new appearance so much that she wears it for the rest of the day, telling gawking passersby that she’s in love. 

Sedaris laments the advent of computer technology, an advancement well supported by his father who works for IBM. He decries how it has transformed life around him—from the graphic designers who have abandoned their former materials for electronic platforms to the suspicion he draws when he travels with his typewriter. He stubbornly insists on using a typewriter over a computer despite unwelcomed suggestions to switch over by airport authorities who remark upon his bulky luggage. Hotel staff has had to field complaints from his neighbors who are disturbed by his loud typing. He is finally swayed when Amy shows him a video of a woman trampling a naked man’s testicles on the Internet. He determines that if computers are capable of such content, then he may be okay with it.