Way to Go, Smith!
New York: Rob Weisbach Books, William Morrow and Company, 1999. First Edition [Stated], First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. [12], 284, [8] pages. Inscribed on the title page To Jody, Remember books are always great in bed. XO Bob Smith. Bottom of the book has gotten wet. There are stains inside the front and back covers and on the bottom of pages. Rear board has some damage and peeling. Inscription is unmarred and the text is intact. The comedian and author recalls growing up gay in Buffalo, New York, scrutinizing his classmates, teachers, family, and relationships with the observant eye of the stand-up comic. Bob Smith (December 24, 1958 – January 20, 2018) was an American comedian and author. Smith, born in Buffalo, New York, was the first openly gay comedian to appear on The Tonight Show and the first openly gay comedian to have his own HBO half-hour comedy special. Smith, along with fellow comedians Jaffe Cohen and Danny McWilliams, formed the comedy troupe Funny Gay Males in 1988. With Funny Gay Males, Smith is the co-author of Growing Up Gay: From Left Out to Coming Out (1995). Smith is also the author of two books of biographical essays. Openly Bob received a Lambda Literary Award for best humor book. Way to Go, Smith! was nominated for a 2000 Lambda Literary Award in the same category. Smith published his first novel, Selfish and Perverse, in 2007, and Remembrance of Things I Forgot in 2011. He published a new collection of essays, Treehab: Tales from My Natural Wild Life, in 2016. The essays cover a wide range of subjects including his career in stand-up, his love of nature, and his experience with ALS. Bob Smith died on January 20, 2018 from Lou Gehrig’s Disease. In his award-winning first book, Bob Smith offered up a witty dose of nineties reality with his observations as a happily adjusted gay man. Now, after breaking up with his longtime boyfriend, Smith looks back to his painfully normal childhood to see where all the trouble really began. Like every other American kid, Bob's adolescence was marked by alternating moments of blissful ignorance, hazy confusion, and humiliating self-consciousness. And in these pages, Bob evokes his youth with a vividness that will make you shudder and howl with recognition. In these hysterically humorous pages, Bob Smith introduces readers to his comically unsympathetic grandmother, who makes light of his carsickness: "Bob only throws up because he's near the window and he can"; to his first teacher crush, whose "five-o'clock shadow could plunge a room into darkness"; and to his first brush with fame, when he fainted from his chair during a biology filmstrip ("Way to go, Smith!"). Sharp, observant, ingeniously ironic and wholly satisfying, this new Lambda Award-nominated collection is at once bittersweet nostalgic fun and a testament to the unquestionable gifts of a highly original comic writer. Condition: Fair.
Keywords: Comedians, Stand-up, Homosexual, Gay Men, Buffalo, New York, Childhood, Adolescence, Carsickness, Lambda-Award, Writer
ISBN: 0688162878
[Book #81962]
Price: $25.00