First Impressions Are Not Always Lasting Ones

As I was going up in the elevator of the library building, a man stepped in who looked vaguely familiar. I realized that he was Richard Price from the videos we had watched earlier in class and I whispered this excitedly to my friend. I stole a glance at him and was not too impressed. He looked very serious and aloof as he leaned against the back wall of the elevator with his arms crossed. He did not look excited to be at Baruch and I feared a boring and dispassionate lecture ahead. However, when Richard Price got up on stage my impression almost immediately changed as he cracked the first of many hilarious jokes to come. Richard Price did not laugh, or even smile, at his own jokes, which made them so much more effective. He was funny without particularly trying to be. When he started to read from Lush Life, I was surprised at how engaged he was in the reading. He delivered the lines of the characters perfectly and the way he read them helped me catch on to humor that I had not noticed when reading Lush Life on my own. Price was just as passionate and engaging in his second reading about a prophetess preaching to God, revealing his talent for role-playing. During the talkback session, Richard Price answered the questions in a very straightforward manner. He did not try to “spice up” his method of capturing the voices of the characters in Lush Life but rather answered the questions about how he researched for the book by simply saying, “I just hung out with the cops.” Though this answer did not seem to please some people who kept bringing up the topic of his research, I think this was yet another impressive aspect of Richard Price, as someone who can capture the essence of a certain group of people in his writing just by “hanging out” with them.