Baked Spaghetti in Tennessee
Back in the seventies, I was running a small alternative-press comic book company named Aardvark-Vanaheim with my husband of the time, Dave Sim. We had been publishing his title, Cerebus, for a few years and we had been talking for a while about how we could get the circulation up to a point where we were making a living doing this. Looking at the touring route of the latest Rolling Stones concert one night after going to see them, we realized that no one in comic books had done an equivalent of a concert tour. Of course, we were talking about a book tour- but heck we were young and ambitious and didn’t know that you don’t just go and set up a cross-country book signing tour on your own.
So we asked our distributors to put the word out that for a small sum of money to cover our travel and hotel costs, we would include them on the tour and even supply each store with posters we would sign for their customers (and hopefully customers to be!) while we were there. We called our travel agent. Back then you not only had travel agents, if you traveled as much as we did you got to be good friends with her. We decided to travel to the same cities as in the Stone tour: Boston, New York City, Philli, etc. Of course, this all was changed in the end because you had to go with the cities that had comic shops willing to pay the fees to have you come. But that was the plan.
But planning a tour and actually being on one are two very different things. Oh sure- it was fun at first. The first two weeks flew by and we felt very sophisticated flying into these big American cities to do signings. These two young Canadians who thought they were rock stars. The glamour quickly changes when you start coming down the east coast and flying to smaller cities and towns. After Philli we started seeing smaller planes and shorter hops between signings. Our biggest distributor was headquartered in Maryland and he wanted all his favorite shops (I know he owned a number of them, it was how he got into the distribution biz) to be part of the tour.
By the time we were flying into this latest signing, at a now nameless comic shop in Tennessee (and probably gone out of business, as unfortunately so many of them are these days) we were in a six-seater mail delivery plane where we were flying into town with a couple of businessmen heading home for the weekend and several sacks of mail. You could look down the aisle and see the pilots, unless they drew the curtain that separated you from them. We white-knuckled it all the way down. When we had finally arrived at the comic shop we were a little worse for wear and welcoming the now-traditional apricot brandy that seemed to be in endless supply at the signings. Note to any writers out there – never include an alcoholic beverage in a storyline if you aren’t prepared to drink it frequently when meeting your readers.
The signing probably went well; I truly can’t recall it at this point in my life. What I do remember is that the owner of the shop asked if we would like to come to his home for dinner. They were just a little shop and I think that he wasn’t really financially up to having a bunch of people out for dinner on his dime. Not we minded – there had been enough of that in New York and Philli. We had been on the road for several weeks by then and brightened up at the thought of a nice quiet evening and a home-cooked meal.
It turned out he had invited a few other friends who were also fans of the books, and before we knew it we were sitting at a table with about twenty people and the wonderful smell of spaghetti in the air. Being the only woman outside of our guest’s wife, I wandered into the kitchen and saw her pulling out a huge pan of pasta and sauce from the oven. I had never seen spaghetti cooked this way and was told it was a southern specialty – Baked Spaghetti.We spent the evening eating, singing and talking, and it is still to this day my best memory of that whole trip. I wish I could remember the shop or the name – but it was almost 40 years ago. And I can still smell that wonderful baked spaghetti as it rolled out of her oven to this day!
Of course, nowadays I no longer publish comic books and run around the country promoting them. I have begun to build niche websites to help people find the things they like on the web. Some of these sites include Planting Grass Seed, All About Organic Gardening Fertilizer and You Too Can Install Hardwood Floors.