My T-shirts #3

The Silver Surfer, successful comedians, Mikel Arteta and the meaning of life.

Earlier this year, I was at a party in Los Angeles, and a young man approached me. He wanted to show me a photograph - the photograph below. It was taken at the Brookline Bookstore in Boston, twenty years ago, and the young man who showed me the photo was the kid in the picture. His name is Alex Edelman, and many of you in the US and some of you in the UK will know who that is.

I was amazed by the photo, of course, and immediately started to almost-remember some of the golden nuggets of wisdom I presumably must have imparted to young Alex on that evening - wisdom that, I have to conclude, changed his life forever, seeing as it led directly to enormous success, the Tony Awards and an HBO special. I probably said, “Sure,” when he asked for a photo, and “Thanks for coming,” when it had been taken. If you work in the creative industries, you know what those words mean, their power and promise. Clearly Alex knew, even at that age.

But the second thing I thought was, fuuuuuck. I still have that T-shirt.