Tod Goldberg Tells Stories

My friend Tod Goldberg is a very funny man who has popularized the term….well, you can find it on his blog. (Hint: It has two syllables, begins with F and ends something that rhymes with petard.)

Tod also is also the director of the UC Riverside MFA program in Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts, located out in Palm Desert (which means he’s a serious academic who lives in a resort so can tan while grading papers).

And Tod is a very gifted writer.

Sunday night he was at Borders Books in Westwood reading from his new book of short stories called Other Resort Cities.

Other Resort Cities is filled with stories that are intelligent and deep and funny and strange and familiar and gut tearing.

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” wrote Joan Didion at the beginning of her iconic collection of So Cal essays, The White Album.

True. But it helps a lot if the stories and the story tellers are really, really good.

Tod is a really, really good storyteller.

Here, for instance, are the openings from two of my favorites of the book’s tales.

This is from Mitzvah:

That Rabbi David Cohen wasn’t Jewish had ceased, over time, to be a problem.

(The hit man part of the Rabbi’s background turns up a little later in the story.)

Or there is this from Walls:

We were not consulted. It was the 1970s. And then it was the early 1980s. What would happen was that men would come to the door, smelling of Brut, or smelling of cigarettes and the fine leather interior or their Gran Torinos or TR7s, and they would say, “I’m here to pick up Sally. This the right house?”

We’d say, “Yeah, come on in. She’s getting dressed.” Or we’d say, “Do you mean Mommy?” or, and this was rare, but it happened because we were young and angry and when your parents have divorced and all you have to show for it is a mother who has suddenly decided that she’d like to fuck as many men as possible, and a father who it turns out was gay but you wouldn’t know that until long after he was dead and you found the photos and the letters, but who, at the time, was dating a woman named Miss Lisa who hosted Romper Room on Channel 2, we’d say, “Are you our new daddy?” It was cruel, but we were smart and we were sad and we had agendas….

Here’s the thing: Good books make life better and Other Resort Cities is a very good book.

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Writer Mark Haskell Smith interviewed Tod after the reading. A slew of other writers were there. Tod’s wife, writer Wendy Duran. actor/writer, Rider Strong, memoirist, Dinah Lenney, Lee Goldberg (writer/producer/brother-of-Tod), Loraine Despres, and writer/producer Carleton Eastlake, Andrea Leeb and Ryan Mecklenburg and more .