Sarah Vowell Cracks Wise at Vassar

Better than The History Channel

by Jay Blotcher, February 26, 2007

Those readers who are slavishly faithful to my theater blog—is anyone out there?—will recall that in a recent blog about a production of "Assassins" at The Center for Performing Arts at Rhinebeck, I sang the praises of the book Assassination Vacation, a quirky, engaging history book about presidential killings by Sarah Vowell. In a delicious bit of synchronicity, Ms. Vowell appeared at Vassar College on February 15, and I trekked out on a cold evening with Brook, Gretchen, Gus, and Ingrid to see her.

For the uninitiated, Vowell is a social commentator and humorist. She first gained attention on the NPR show "This American Life," which offers nonfiction monologues from people known and unknown. For her deadpan delivery and a unique slacker-gal voice with just the hint of a seductive lisp, Vowell was guaranteed her fame. But unlike contemporaries who merely whine and rave and call themselves commentators, Vowell does her work; a history buff, she digs deep into dusty tomes to resuscitate characters from American history. A fan of the loser, the runner-up, and the long-forgotten, Vowell is more likely to trace the life of George Washington’s stableboy than the cherry-tree chopper himself. (Nota bene, the tree story is a hoary myth.)

Vowell started churning out books that revivified dead history and received merited attention. (She told the Vassar audience that as a reporter she was terrible; “I don't like to pry.” She realized she was better suited to writing about dead people.) Soon, she was warming guest seats on "Late Night with Conan O’Brien," "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart," and "The Late Show with David Letterman." Kids will know her as the voice of the angst-ridden daughter Violet Parr from the animated cartoon movie "The Incredibles." (I watched the film again this past weekend and it remains a marvel of social satire and superhero adventure.)

So there she was up at the podium in the student center, spinning tales from our historical past. Vowell had the audience at the start with her self-deprecatory but oddly upbeat manner. (She told us that her public persona is “an idealized, edited version of me.”) Her first piece was about a sadsack cartographer from the 19th century who was a colleague of expeditioner John Charles Fremont. (I did not catch the man’s name, however, although she said it several times.) Vowell read from his disconsolate journal entries, driving home the point that this was a man who wore personal misery like an overcoat but was also a nobly persistent individual, attempting to map out terra incognita for posterity. That Vowell could get laughs from the dry-as-dust comments made by a cartographer—of an important but dry-as-dust venture, I wager—is a tribute to her scholarly and verbal prowess. The miserably funny punchline to this tale was that the cartographer hanged himself in 1854.

The rest of her hour-long program—one tart essay spanked various political grandstanders for comparing themselves to civil rights icon Rosa Parks—was equally engaging. Vowell recounts and enlivens history not by extruding it through the punishing filter of political correctness but by limning it through present-day values. Her brand of scholarship teases out the pathos, irony, and the sheer humanness of past events that most academic books overlook in their headlong dash to canonize historical personages.

One salient example of her wit that evening, of which there were many, comes to mind. Scolding false martyrs, Vowell said that they find it difficult to distinguish between “a paper cut and decapitation."

Like David Sedaris, Vowell delivers her work in a distinctive voice that borders on a petulant whine but still resonates with an underdog verve. (Vowell and Sedaris are friends, having met on "This American Life.") Her engaging reading only reinforced my recent disillusionment with Sedaris, if you will allow me to compare kumquats with plums. Granted, Sedaris’s first books were wonderful. But how long can a mega-successful writer cling to a poor-pitiful-me persona which was the cornerstone of his earlier writings? His recent book Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim strained for profundities in a way his previous books did not. And, increasingly, his New Yorker pieces are flailing essays that seem to reflect the exigencies of a deadline more than the fruits of true inspiration. While Vowell’s star continues to rise, I wonder how long Sedaris can maintain his momentum. I promise a partial answer in a future blog; Sedaris will appear at The Bardavon in Poughkeepsie on March 31 and I am paying $47 to attend.

One final, poignant note about the Vassar evening: Vowell was brought here as part of the annual Alex Krieger ’95 Memorial Lecture, named for a student killed in his freshman year in a car accident. A bummer to be sure, which is why his parents are to be praised from the rooftops for establishing a fund to bring comedians and humorists to Vassar in Krieger’s memory. Vowell has been preceded to the podium in past years by John Irving, Tom Wolfe, and the aforementioned Sedaris.

Jay Blotcher relocated to Ulster County from New York City in July, 2001. His first theatre experience was "You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown" in 1968 at The Wilbur Theater in Boston. A career freelance writer, he currently toils for Chronogram, Hudson Valley Life, and InsideOUT.