It was just a few minutes after the event had officially started, but the line was already around the corner.
People crowded the sidewalk, some holding umbrellas to shield from the bright sun on a muggy summer evening. Having just done a hasty change-and-refresh out of my apron and kitchen clothes in the bar bathroom, I headed outside to find a reader who’d made the trek to Louisville from out of town. When I finally tracked her down midway through the line, we shared a laugh at the absurdity of the whole situation.
“I tried explaining to people what I was doing this weekend,” she said, “but ‘I started reading this guy’s writing years ago because his corgi ranked college football teams1 and now I’m driving four hours to eat at his restaurant pop-up’ doesn’t make much sense when you say it out loud.”
It doesn’t make any more sense when you type it out the next day, to be honest.
If you’ve somehow missed my relentless mentions of it over the past month or so, this past Saturday evening I te…