Richard Price

As we all take our seats, I look around the room to see familiar faces. I see my classmates from IDC, a few friends from high school, and Professor Bernstein talking to a main in jeans and a yellow button-down. He looked like Richard Price, but I knew that this could not be the case, because Price would have to be really dressed up. I kept looking for the author of Lush Life, but gave up after a few moments of no success.

It came as a great surprise to me when Richard Price was asked to come to the stage, and that man in the yellow button-down came up. In an atmosphere where everyone tried so hard to look nice, the most important man in the room was wearing casual clothes. It became quite clear to me very quickly that this man tries hard to impress no one with his looks. I greatly admired that his values rested in impressing his audience with his rhetoric, and not his presentation. Momentarily, he started his reading of a chapter from Lush Life. We read this same chapter in class, so the ending was spoiled in a sense, but Price still managed to hold my attention. He was a very good reader, and I noticed some key differences between the way he read his story, and the way I read it for the first time. Following the reading of the excerpt from Lush Life, Price read an excerpt from his latest work, which featured the repetition of the word “God” at the end of every sentence. It started off as a humorous piece, but quickly became too repetitive and predictive.

Then came the questions. There were only two types of questions asked. The majority of them focused on how Price writes, and it was obvious that he was getting annoyed at these questions. “Write about what you know” seemed to be the answer to most of the questions in this category. The other questions were about the police encounters and how he knew so much about them. Admitting that he had some connections to the police departments in the tri-state, Price answered them all with a hint of pride.

Pride seems like a characteristic that many people take too far nowadays, turning it into arrogance. Price, being modest about his achievements, appealed to me greatly, and I admired his excellent writing skills. “Tell me another one” was not just a sentence that his niece kept telling him, but a line that stuck with me for a long time, serving as my goal when writing captivating stories. Of course, I cannot capture an audience’s attention as well as a renown author, but by adopting his style and techniques, I might come close one day.