(1) Thanks for going to Amazon the last few days. When I went to bed last night my number had dropped to 950. I met my goal to see a number under 1000 posted on Amazon (it’s jumped back up tonight but we’ll get it back down) before I started my book tour …

(2) … which I did today. I’m typing this in my hotel room off Union Square in San Francisco. Taped a couple of radio programs for the local NPR station this afternoon. Taping another one at an NPR station out in Berkley tomorrow morning. Being photographed and interviewed for a San Francisco Chronicle story tomorrow for its Style section. (It’s running its review on Sunday.) Then a reading at Books Inc. on Market at 7:30 p.m. tomorrow night - Thursday 3/8. More on all that anon.

(3) Was up against two other memoirs for an “ELLE LETTRES” Readers Prize in the new issue of ELLE. The editors said it was as close a contest as they’d ever had. Without A Map came in first by a whisker. (I’ve heard it’s an amazing book, so a shout out to its author, Meredith Hall.) And I was in a basically dead heat as a runner-up to it along with A.M. Homes and her The Mistress’s Daughter. (Another great book I hear.) So it was an honor to be included with those two books and those two talented writers.

(4) Did a Sirius Radio interview yesterday with Michelangelo Signorile. His producer asked me to come back next week and go one-on-one with Norah Vincent. I said sure. Will she? Whatever … I’m moving onward from all that. Could be fun though.

(5) And on Monday night I went to hear Toni Morrison lecture at the Alliance Francaise on 59th Street. Her speech was based on the multidisciplinary art installation she curated for the Louvre last November called “The Foreigner’s Home.” The lecture she titled “Art is Otherwise” and it focused on the importance of “the other” in art. Theodore Gericauet’s 1819 “The Raft of the Medusa” was projected behind her. It’s a painting of Algerian immigrants -some alive, some dying, some dead - as they await rescue after the French ship, the Medusa, sank off the shore of Africa in 1816. Morrison said it was a work - considered in its day to be a subversive politcal act by the French government - not of defeat, but of hope. Art, at its best, she posited, deals with the stranger. It can be the stranger. It can fear the stranger. Or it can acknowledge the stranger. When I heard that litany, spoken in her softly eloquent voice, it dawned on me that my own book, whatever its own artistic merits - I blush to even mention my book in the same sentence that cites Toni Morrison’s voice - is about the stranger within each of us. But the order is different. We first fear the stranger within. We then acknowledge that stranger. We finally be(come) him. Become her. Be.

Okay, I’m just going to put this out there and see if it works. The power of the internet and all. One of my goals with this book was to get my Amazon.com number for Mississippi Sissy down between 0 and 999 before my book tour starts on Wednesday with my flight to San Francisco. (Check my tour schedule and come out and hear me read if you’re out in Frisco - do people still say that? - or Marin County.) So if you’re reading this blog and haven’t bought a book yet - or even if you have and want to buy one for a friend - please go online to Amazon and order one. This is the last time I’ll blatantly be a huckster on here. Promise. Kind of tacky I know. But thought I’d give it a try.

Plus, I do want to thank all you folks for your comments and support over this last week. It’s meant the world to me. Now: ONWARD …

I just got a get-over-yourself comment on this blog, to put it more nicely. Stop moping. All that stuff. (A friend thinks it was Norah Vincent herself in one of her male guises hiding behind a fake email name.) Whoever it was, I have to agree. But as I told the commenter by email - I respond to most of your comments privately by email instead of publicly below the posts - I’m the kind of guy who has to process whatever he’s feeling in order to get to the healthiest emotion a situation calls for. This was no exception. But I’m mostly over it now. I’m waking up tomorrow and, gownless (I’ve hung the drapes back on the window where they belong), I’m kicking ass.

So enough hangdog posts coming from me. I’m beginning to bore myself as well.

In that regard, I’ve been meaning to tell you that I got the Seth McBride piece of art from the Bailey House auction that I wanted so because it was a rendering of Sidney Poitier from The Defiant Ones. (Great title for the mood I’m now conjuring for myself for the coming book tour and party and reading.) I just hung it this afternoon and love it. Like Miss Horne, Mr. Poitier has no place in his own conjured world for self-pity. A beautifully rendered Poitier is staring at me right now as I type this. I think I’ve found a new talisman. Thanks, Seth McBride, for making this piece of art. I’m glad it’s found a home in my apartment.

But it gets better. I’ll tell you one thing that happened at the private picnic I took my nephew to last Saturday. But this is the only thing I’m going to divulge from that day. I can’t resist. Sidney Poitier himself - the real man, every dignified, 80-year-old bit of him - was seated a few picnic tables away from me. I marveled at the straightness of his spine over there on his bench. I walked over and knelt at his side and introduced myself and told him that I had a book coming out and that he was a huge part of it. At each critical juncture of the narrative, Sidney Poitier surfaces. Indeed, the ideal of a Sidney Poitier was one of my earliest talismans, an abstract one that I deeply grasped but could not touch. That afternoon, in the southern Californian light, I finally, actually touched him. He, yes, grasped my hand and held it in his own, continuing to grasp it after our handshake had ceased. He listened intently. He promised to buy the book. It was a moment in my life I will never forget. In such moments one feels blessed. If you read the book, you’ll understand how important that meeting was to me. And it outweighs any fucking review.

Well, this is harder than I thought it would be - the review being out in the world in the last 24 hours. The last thing I heard when I walked my dog last night was a remark about it. I was buying the Sunday Times - can’t miss Frank Rich’s column - and ran into a male couple who are neighbors. “You’re still buying the Times?” they jokingly asked and then admitted they had read the review. “It’s pretty bad. You were right,” one of them said. The other: “But it’ll be gone by tomorrow.” The newsprint will; I hope the effect will as well. Then this morning I was walking Archie again and ran into another neighbor. “I just read that nasty review of your book,” he too remarked. “Congratulations though,” he continued, trying to make it seem better once he must have seen the look on my face. “How many of us can even say we’ve written a book that’s gotten a bad review in the New York Times. But damn she was nasty. What’s her fucking problem?”

So the last thing I heard before I went to bed and the first thing I heard when I woke up this morning were remarks about the review. The muscles in my neck are getting tired from holding my head up - but I am. I keep focusing on to the fact that it could have been written by a real writer I respect instead of some rightwing hack with her own self-aggrandizing agenda - but she still has the imprimatur of the Times behind her. I’m beginning to get in touch with the populist deeply ingrained in my southern sissy soul who is always willing to rear his aggrieved but dignified head and rouse the rabble - those who still read - over the own heads of the intelligentsia.

Oh, well … onward ….

In that regard, I’m heading off today to meet up with Brandon, th 12-year-old Puerto Rican kid I’ve mentored for the last four years. We’re going to go bowling and I’ll listen to him tell me about all his problems at school and what’s going on in his sadly complicated family situation and what girls have ignored him or flirted with him and what bullies in his neighborhood have picked on him and I’ll realize what is important in life and gratefully shuck off the shame I feel for letting myself be bullied in my own rarified neighborhood, “bull” being the operative syllable.

Okay. By Wednesday of this week I had processed the review in the Times that’s running. I listened to a lot of Lena Horne to help me do it - especially her “Live on Broadway” recording. I not only love listening to her sing her songs, but also all the patter between them when she relates the ups and down of her life and how she consistently had to overcome shit. “I ran up the steps of MGM (where I was already signed) and told them you call Twentieth Century Fox and you tell’em ah’m back and ah’m gonna be Pinky!” she exclaims at one point - I love that moment - when she heads out to LA on the Super Chief train in the 1940s, quitting her job at Cafe Society to try and break into the movies for the second time, in order to claim the title role in that upcoming movie. She loses out, however, to Jeanne Crain. “A pretty little brown-haired blue-eyed child,” she says, her voice reverberating, reverence far from its tone, with all the times she had heard that very phrase spoken around her, no doubt, as she grew up in Brooklyn able to pass as a pretty little white girl herself but proudly refusing to do so, joining the Cotton Club chorus line by the time she was 16. “I felt bad for a while,” she deadpans to the audience about losing the part to Crain. “About 12 years. But I got over it. I knew life would go on and history would catch up and I’d end up sweating like a dog up here on Jimmy Nederlander’s stage actin’ like a damn fool and lovin’ every minute of it!” God. I love Lena Horne. If you don’t have any Lena in your music collection, go out and get some. She won’t let you wallow in self-pity; even when she’s singing about it you can hear in her voice that it ain’t gonna last too long because wallowing is for lower forms of life. And Lena is one superior form.

If color-blind casting had been in effect back in her day, Lena would have made a great Scarlett O’Hara. In fact, I summoned my inner Scarlett on Wednesday night. I stared at the drapes in my window. Tore them down. And whipped myself up a gown to wear out and hold my head high. I’d been invited by Graydon Carter, editor in chief of Vanity Fair, to a cocktail party he was throwing for an old colleague of his, Kurt Andersen, who has just published a highly praised novel, Heyday. Graydon was holding the party at his exclusive new restaurant, Waverly Inn. At first I thought I’d not go since I knew probably a lot of the people there would have already read the nasty review of Mississippi Sissy in the NYTBR. (It publishes early and the literati of Manhattan all grab their early copies so they know what to gossip about in the days leading up to another Sunday.) But I held my head high and made my way to the Village. Sure enough, a lot of the people there had read my review and were spitting mad about it. I talked to several friends who bucked me up. Others, I spotted, to reprint the list that Page Six ran: Rosanne Cash, Jim Cramer, Barry Diller, Jonathan Franzen, Kurt Vonnegut, John Huey, Walter Isaacson, Norm Pearlstine, Rick Stengel, Jacob Weisberg, and Michael Hirshhorn. Amy Fine Collins and I hung out for most of the party and made our way back to the lovely garden room of the Inn. It is said - this was my first time there (I did love the murals) - that one doesn’t want to be seated back there because it is considered Siberia, not part of the inner sanctum’s inner sanctum. But that’s where I felt most comfortable.

I walked home listening to Lena. I smiled all the way.