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William Gibson
While I'm posting stories about my embarrassing adventures with Canadian celebrities, I should also post this one about the time I embarrassed myself on national television during an interview with William Gibson (noted Canadian author and possible inventor of the entire genera of Cyberpunk fiction):
Well, as if my Jane Siberry story wasn’t bad enough, here is the story of how I met cyberpunk author and legend William Gibson and embarrassed myself on national television.
It was back in the early 90’s, when "Idoru"
was released and I was visiting Toronto. I found out that William was doing a reading from Idoru on the waterfront, so I planned my whole day in the city around going to see him.
While wandering around the city I decided to look through the broadcasting museum at the CBC building and discovered a little setup in the atrium for the show that aired every noon on Newsworld with Ralph Benmergui. There was a little sign that said that today’s guest would be, you guessed it, William Gibson!
Checking my watched I discover that it was 11:30, so I decided that I simply had to stick around and, as a matter of fact, I got a really decent first row stool in the audience.
Now, not that anybody besides Canuckians that were really bored during the 90’s would remember that Ralph’s noontime show involved a lot of audience participation. So, during the course of the interview, Ralph was tossing the microphone into people’s faces and asking them various questions
Sooner or later it became my turn to answer a question and I turned loose with something along the lines of the fact that because of computer communication I no longer considered myself a strict Canuckian, but more of a world citizen. Well, this got Ralph all worked up and he asked me to explain further, which I attempted to, talking about the importance of information in terms of being able find what you need to knowing, not necessarily knowing something specific.
Somehow Ralph took this is a challenge and decided to grill me on Canuckian trivia, asking me which Canuckian province was the first to have provincial healthcare. I didn’t know then, but will always remember that it was Saskatchewan, since Ralph completely embarrassed me for not knowing the answer. With that, the show was over and I went on my way, chuckling to myself about being utterly embarrassed in front of one of the people I admire most and on national TV to boot!
I had called my dad to ask him to tape the show, but thankfully, he forgot and hopefully it has been forever lost in the non-existent CBC Ralph Benmergui archives.
Later that night, after seeing William read, I bought a copy of Idoru and queued up to have him sign it, fortunately the line wasn’t that long and it only took about 10 minutes to make it up to him. He looked up as I passed him the book and he says “Wow, you really blew it on national TV today, didn’t you?” I replied “Yup, but it was it worth it to meet you” and went on my merry little way.
Posted by Dylon on February 19, 2007 9:48 PM |
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April 2008