Practice makes...something.

Two days ago we had our monthly potluck dinner. We used the 10 foot long harvest table I bought four years ago for Tommy for his birthday, and it was perfect--just enough room for fifteen people. Domenica and I were in excellent moods because we were going to New York the next day for the reading I'm doing with One Story magazine. I was telling my friend Deborah (who just shaved her head to raise money for cancer and looks absolutely stunning) that I couldn't decide to which section from the new book to read--one written in the first person, or one written in the third person.
"I love first person in a novel," she said.
"Really?" I said. "You don't get sick of being in one person's head for that long?"
"Not if they really pull me in," she said. I made a note of that. I keep going back and forth about first or third person point of view with this book.
"You're reading from the novel?" said Justin.
"Yes," I said.
"Have you practiced?" he said.
"Sort of," I said. I had worked on the sections I was going to read all day and had decided it was between the section where Linda Hartley gets in a fight with her mother and grandmother and runs away from home, and the section where Linda Hartley gets drunk and mad at her boyfriend and ends up punching a police officer and going to jail.
(Which kind of makes her sound like a 30 year old, drunken, Pippi Longstocking, when I think about it.)
"You'd better practice," Justin said.
"Are you trying to make me nervous?" I said. Then I added that I was planning on reading the sections out loud to Domenica in the car on the way to the city the next day.
Domenica made a very uncomfortable face.
"I won’t be driving at the time," I said.
"Why don’t I read them to you, and you can decide?" she said. (Domenica doesn't really like driving.)
"Then she can read it for you if you get sick," Justin said.
"What is with you?" I said.
"Or if a piano falls on your head," he said happily. "Break a leg!" he added, and went into the kitchen to get some more food.
Our friend Paul said we should record Justin reading the work, and then I could lip synch at the reading. Everyone thought that would be hilarious, and then Paul's wife
Evangeline asked me what the funniest book I ever read was. I wanted to say mine, but I said The Vicar of Nibbleswicke, by Roald Dahl.

Now we're in New York, and the reading is in an hour at a bar called Pianos on Ludlow St. I hope nothing falls on my head. (Which sounds exactly like something my mother would say.)