Someone on my CD mix club mailing list posted a story this morning about how she ran across a stoop sale over the weekend which turned out to be John Wesley Harding's! (His real name, btw, is Wesley Stace, and under that byline he will be reading from his novel Misfortune this evening at Housing Works Used Book Cafe on Crosby Street. [Damn polymath!] Check it out, but show up early.)

Anyway, that post prompted me to post a story about the time I met JWH, which I reproduce here:

I met him several years ago when I worked for an online music company and he came to our offices to do a hosted chat session. I told him that I remembered when he was in Salt Lake City to play a show at the Zephyr Club in 1992, and how I won a copy of Why We Fight that morning from a radio station where he was doing an interview because I knew that all his albums thus far had taken their names from Frank Capra movies. He reminisced about that Zephyr Club show in great detail, and offered to send me a copy of a bootleg video that had been taped that night. "You might even be in it!" he said.

I didn't have the heart to tell him that I hadn't actually gone to the show.