Driving Mr. Uhry
Tuesday, September 15th, 2009“Is this you?” That’s what Alfred Uhry, the Pulitzer, Oscar, and Tony winner said as he pointed at my car, a recently cleaned (first time in 6 months!) 1997 used Mercedes C280 (the boxy, unsexy little Mercedes).
“Yeah.”
“Nice.”
Already things were going well. This is a man whom I’m sure has been driven around in much fancier cars; his most famous work is almost entirely about a chauffeur. He seems to know his way around an automobile, and I was nervous.
I was also nervous because the drive to Sinai Temple, where I was about to take him for a speaking engagement to promote Parade, was 45 minutes long, and I’d be driving him both ways. What were we going to talk about for 90 minutes?
As it turns out, a lot. Mr. Uhry is a kind, chatty man (good thing too, as we have him lined up for three other speaking engagements!), with an easy-going sense of humor. Like that young kid who interviewed President Obama, at the end of the evening, despite our differences in age and background, I felt proud to call Alfred Uhry my “homeboy.”
I decided early on that the most important piece of information I needed to glean from our conversation was what baseball team he supported. Mr. Uhry just gives off the impression that he follows America’s pastime closely, and I wanted to know which team he throws his foam finger up in the air for. Surprisingly, he is not a huge baseball fan, but he did say that his children, who live in Connecticut, are all Red Sox fans, and that “as a Southerner, [he] could never support a team called the Yankees.” I like this guy.
We spent a lot of time talking about names. As a man who creates fictional characters for a living, Mr. Uhry probably thinks a lot about the meanings and secrets behind names. He is not a huge fan of his first name - “Who’s named Alfred anymore?” - or his last name, which he finds limits the possibilities for first names (for example, “Jimmy Uhry” is just too bouncy). On the other hand, he is a huge fan of the name my wife and I gave our daughter, Ivy, and he would bring it up multiple times during the night (”Ivy! What a great name!”). He fears that his grandchildren’s names are too trendy, like Max and Maddie, and he thinks Ivy will stand the test of time. (As do I!).
As I dropped him off back at CTG at 11 pm after a long night of schmoozing, noshing, kibitzing, kvetching, and all the other things one does at a temple on Friday night, he stuck out his hand for a shake, and I accepted. “That was good, that was real good,” he said, as he headed off to the parking garage to fetch his own car to take home. He drove that leg of the trip himself, but had he asked, I would’ve jumped in front and fired up the engine for him. That’s what you do for your homeboys.
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