Picking up from last time –
It’s all becoming real. My heart starts beating faster and I’m shaking a little. We start laughing about the idea of “why are we nervous? It’s just a book signing. We’re just meeting her – and for only 10 seconds or so at that. Everything is fine. What is there to be nervous about?”
I joked, “Well, I suppose I’m a little nervous I’m gonna vomit on her (from said nervousness) when I get up there.” This was hilariously met with, “You should be so lucky! If you want that picture so badly, I’m sure vomiting on her will get you on all the new stations and you can grab still to your heart’s content.”
We had a big laugh about that. The nervous energy was pretty much dampened – though I did hear people around me practicing what they wanted to say to this amazing powerful woman we all love so much.
As we start to get closer, the one thing I do worry a bit about is trying to stealthily take video from my pocket. All the burly secret service guy (who whoever he was) was telling us was to put our phones in our pocket – he didn’t say turn ’em off, just get ’em out of our hands.
Since (as far as I could tell) I didn’t have any other possibilities for a picture, I had to try something!
Would my thigh hit the button to stop the recording? Would it even pick up anything? How do I angle my body and keep the recording going? Aye, aye, aye, aye, aye.
I practiced a bit as we wove through some more bookshelves. Suddenly, it was time.
We’d woven to this area leading right up to the table. In the final tiny line, a woman checked to make sure our book jackets were all marking the correct page for her to sign.
There was still a little time after you saw her if you wanted to try and be a rebel to make your book look different from everyone else’s. But with oh so many security people around, why have people eyeing you just to pick a slightly different page of your book? But maybe it was worth the risk to some people… I wonder if anyone tried to sneak by getting her copy signed on a different page…
There also was a person somewhere in the line handing us post-its so we could write our name – making sure we got the same book back in the end.
Finally, we made it up to the final man before the table – the one who told us “phones in pocket – put your phone in your pocket.”
This is where I’ll pick up next time.