On Tuesday night, I attended an event called “An Evening With Harry, Carrie & Garp” at Radio City Music Hall, which was a benefit reading by J.K. Rowling (Harry), Stephen King (Carrie), and John Irving (Garp).  The event was put on to benefit The Haven Foundation and Doctors Without Borders. 

I was up in the cheap seats; in fact, I was just about as far away from the stage as you can be and still be inside Radio City (there was one row behind me).  Stephen King read his story “The Revenge of Lard Ass Hogan” (which is itself part of the story “The Body,” which was filmed as Stand By Me).  If you saw the movie, you might remember it: it’s the story about the fat kid at the pie eating contest.  It’s a great story to read live, because of all the groans (because it’s gross) and laughs (because gross can be funny) it provokes from the audience.

J.K. Rowling read a bit from the latest Potter book; the section she read had Harry going back in time to witness Tom Riddle’s acceptance into Hogwarts.  John Irving read part of his novel A Prayer for Owen Meany.  Rowling did a great job with her reading; she was very natural and confident, and the portion she read worked fine for me, even though I haven’t read the books, so it was a good selection.  Irving’s reading was good as well, though it was a bit awkward hearing him do a falsetto voice for Owen Meaney; it was really necessary considering Owen’s character, but Irving didn’t quite pull it off — it was a bit too hammy for my liking.  The excerpt he read was entertaining, but slight; I know the book’s much more profound than the bit he read, but I guess he wanted to go with something more light and amusing. 

Whoopi Goldberg did the primary introduction to the event, and a bunch of other “surprise guest” presenters introduced the authors themselves.  Whoopi was pretty lame; it was clear she hadn’t even read the script before getting up to the podium.  She was reading it off the teleprompter, but kept stumbling over her lines, and even mocked the script at one point after reading something clunky (and immediately afterward, she proceeded to skip ahead a bit).  Whoopi claimed to have read every one of the authors’ books, so I guess that’s why she was there.

Kathy Bates was there to introduce Stephen King, appropriate since she’s his “#1 Fan.”  Andre Braugher introduced John Irving; why, I don’t know.  I guess they couldn’t get someone from one of his movies?  Jon Stewart introduced J.K. Rowling, which also didn’t make much sense, but he was funny and charming, even if he did recycle a joke about Mel Gibson’s drunken anti-Semitic rant from the previous night’s The Daily Show.

After the readings were done, there was a brief Q&A period, MCed by Soledad O’Brian.  Rowling got some good questions by detail-obsessed fans, but King’s and Irving’s questions were all pretty stock.  King’s in particular were lame.  He got “What scares you?” and “How do you write those crazy stories (without being demented yourself)?”  Yeah, like Stephen King has never heard *those* questions before.  Soledad claimed that they had received over 1000 questions for the panel (asked in advance, via email by ticketholders); if those were the best they got, I’d hate to see what the other ones were like. 

My only real complaint about the event though was the sound; maybe it was just because I was sitting so freaking far away, but I had a hard time hearing some of the authors and presenters at times.  There wasn’t much amplification going on, it seemed.  Oh, and I wished that the authors had read something new or unpublished–something from a forthcoming work, rather than stuff already in print. 

But, overall, a fun event, for a worthy cause.  And as Stephen King pointed out: it’s pretty cool to have filled Radio City Music Hall not with the promise of guitars, but with the promise of words.