When District publisher and editor-in-chief Will Swaim told me there was an Orange County Press Club meeting, and that he’d be addressing it, I put on my party shoes and rolled on down. Whee! A panel!

Will was terribly late, of course, being somehow unaware there would be traffic on the 55 at 6 o’clock at night, and so we ate food and drinked drinks and talked to Gustavo Arellano. For the first time since the press club started meeting at Original Mike’s, the appetizers were fresh and not disgusting. I’d like to credit Stavo’s recent review of Ambrosia with having shamed Original Mike’s into betterness–the best thing that can be said about Orignial Mike’s, he said, is “the MILFs are very MILF-y“–but I doubt they got themselves turned around quite so fast.

Then Will showed up and Gustavo started interviewing him for the audience, and Will took turns accidentally insulting first Gustavo then me, over and over. He’d speak at length about how New Times, our former owners at OC Weekly, wanted to measure writers’ output in words when clearly the most prolific aren’t the best, and how stupid and useless it was to compare a bunch of food reviews to a brilliancy by Moxley. Stavo, of course, not only wrote all the Weekly’s food reviews, he was also way ahead of anybody on word count, and I was far behind him on word count but way ahead of everybody else, because they were all a bunch of lazy sacs. Of shit! Gustavo, being a prince and a gentleman, did not outwardly take offense. Then Will started talking about how all the writers at the Weekly were so brilliant there was no way New Times could have had a problem with any of us, and he named Stavo, and Schou, and Moxley, and Douglas, and then he stopped naming people and I had to start yelling and gesticulating and a-waving my arms all Hitler-like. Then he insulted this here website, which I was originally supposed to be the editor of, but then instead I was the blogger, because who doesn’t want to read a bunch of goddamn blog posts about press club panels, and who doesn’t want to be the chief blogger for The District Weekly?

Then Will mentioned Sartre, and motion expert somebody Deming, and I started giggling because circa The Day, whenever I wanted to distract Will from a failing on my part–whether moral, social, or Deadline–I would ask him, “Tell me again about Jean Genet?” or “What was the deal again with Derrida?” and Will never once let me down.

Tags: Last Night at . . .