Laura had wanted to include hilarious writer Larry Doyle in her list of new “virtual” “friends” except that Laura was afraid she was going to come off looking like a big name dropper. I mean, she’s already afraid she’s looking like a big name dropper blabbing about all her new friends but since she got an email from Larry Doyle last night (ok, so it was a group email sent to lots and lots of people) she figures at least he won’t think she’s some self-aggrandizer, off bloviating and branticizing about him.

But enough about Laura The Occasional Name-Dropper, Laura The Fearer of Fraudulence, Laura The Long-Winded Branter. This posting is about someone other than herself and she thinks it’s high time she get to the point already.

The first point is: Larry Doyle is hilarious. He used to live in New York and write for magazines (including the New Yorker to which he still contributes humor pieces) (and Esquire, GQ, Spy, and National Lampoon) and then he moved to Los Angeles where he wrote various episodes of “The Simpsons” and several screenplays for movies that were actually made (<---very unusual). Laura doesn't want to get too bogged down in his bio (you can check his website for all the exact particulars) because she wants to get to the other points in a timely fashion.

The second point is: Larry Doyle has written a novel. His first novel. A novel called I LOVE YOU, BETH COOPER which is about a boy who confesses his love for Beth Cooper from the podium during his high-school valedictory graduation speech (needless to say, madness ensues). Laura recently heard about Larry Doyle’s novel on myspace, where she has been obsessively trolling for friends for over a month now (and only has 640 friends whereas Larry Doyle who has been on myspace for about the same time has over 1350 friends! It’s so unfair!)

The third point: I LOVE YOU, BETH COOPER is hilarious. At least, the first chapter is and Laura has no doubt that the rest of the novel is just as good. Laura would love to continue to make it appear that she somehow got special access to this first chapter because of her name-droppable connection to Larry Doyle but unfortunately she can’t since anyone who goes to his website will see that the first chapter is posted and available to anyone to read.

The fourth point: Not only is the opening chapter hilarious, but the advance praise for the book is also hilarious. So much so, in fact, that Laura can’t remember a time when she’s ever read a blurb as completely hilarious as this one from Vanity Fair:

Laura needs to take a few seconds away from Larry Doyle to explain why she finds this blurb so fantastic. Because of the word swirly. Not everyone knows what a swirly is which always amazes Laura since swirlies — or, to be more exactly, the threat of receiving a swirly — were always in the forefront of her mind during junior high school. A swirly, for those lucky enough to never have been afraid of getting one, is when a tough kid drags a gweeby kid into the school bathroom and proceeds to force the gweeby kid’s head into the toilet and then flush the toilet creating the appearance of a soft-serve style ice-cream cone out of the gweeby kid’s hair. (In fact, Laura’s been seriously considering starting a self-help group for swirly survivors, which is neither here nor there at this particular moment in time.)

The fifth point is: Laura once had Larry Doyle over to her apartment for dinner with a few other friends back when she lived in New York. It was, in fact, a New Year’s Eve dinner, though very informal (Laura, like The Barefoot Contessa, has always been passionately committed to “relaxed entertaining”) and a friend of hers brought her friend Larry as a guest. Laura can’t recall much more from that night except what Larry recently reminded her of during a brief exchange of myspace emails — that she had spent a good portion of the evening telling tales out of school about various high profile authors she had traveled with. Laura was both horrified and delighted by this bit of trivia: horrified, because she can’t believe she’s still dining out on all her old stories of traveling with horrible authors and delighted because after all these years Larry Doyle remembered the particulars of those horrible authors! As always, Laura finds such encounters with “old acquaintances” to be bittersweet, though this one is decidedly more sweet than bitter.

The sixth and final point is this: There is a photo of a chimp on Larry Doyle’s website where a photo of him should be. While Laura believes in very few things in life, she absolutely believes that anyone who posts a photo on their website of a chimp instead of their actual author photo should be applauded and celebrated. (In fact, Laura would be tempted to change her author photo to a chimp-shot if she could but she can’t since everyone would know that she was copying Larry Doyle and was thus a loser.) And so she hopes everyone will get their copy of I LOVE YOU, BETH COOPER when it comes out about two weeks from now in early May.

Trying to finish up yet another Jeopardy! category — “Virtual” “Friends” — Laura’s finally getting around to her NF #7: Nataly Kogan, co-founder of the really great new website for working mothers, workitmom.com.

Nataly emailed Laura about a month ago and asked if she was interested in being interviewed for the website. Of course Laura said yes (what’s not to be interested in?), so between that email and the actual phone conversation (again, Interview? What interview?) there were many many emails back and forth. When Laura finally talked to Nataly she was kind of impressed: Nataly was leaving a successful career in New York as a venture capitalist (actually, Laura has no idea what a venture capitalist does, except that they work in “finance” which Laura doesn’t really understand either) to start workitmom.com. Nataly sounded like one of those people who makes things happen (Laura assumes that venture-capitalist-finance-people are especially good at making things happen, as opposed to people in publishing or “the arts” like herself who are a little more laid back [ineffectual] and often sort of “forget”* (was it Freud who said that forgetting wasn’t an innocent act?) to finish what they were doing) so Laura had no doubt that Nataly was going to be able to make workitmom.com happen in a big way.

In fact, the interview could have stopped there and been terrific enough, except that midway through Nataly told Laura that she and her husband and her daughter are moving to Newton at the end of May! Laura couldn’t believe that of all places Nataly was going to be moving about a mile from her, especially since Laura is exactly one of those working moms that workitmom.com is for – that is, Laura is looking for some sort of freelance work but has no idea where to start looking or what to put on her resume since she hasn’t had a job-job since 1996. Laura can’t wait to finish work on her proposal for Failure so that she can actually start using workitmom.com for herself. Check back here for all the useful info and advice that Laura will undoubtedly find there and try (but fail) to pass off as her own.

A month or two back, NF #6 appeared: Lambeth Hochwald, co-founder with her husband of a really cool new thing in New York called Parent P-L-A-Y, which hosts events for grown-ups with babysitting for children. Or, in the website’s own words which are far clearer than Laura’s would be:

Parent P-L-A-Y (P2) is a downtown event company founded by a couple who knows that no matter how lucky you feel to be parents…you’re still utterly wiped. P2 events will take you back to the days of your peaceful (read: but surely unfulfilled) pre-parent life. How? The events are created with you — and your tot — in mind. This means spa treatments, movie screenings and sports events all while prescreened babysitters watch your kids as they jam to groovy artists like Brady Rymer and roving photographers capture the day’s magic. The result: A family outing without spousal negotiation over who runs after the kids. A win/win for everyone!

Lambeth wrote to Laura to invite her to be part of an event — this Sunday, April 22nd, along with Cameron Stracher, author of the soon-to-be-published Dinner With Dad: How I Found My Way Back to the Family Table — which Laura agreed to, and then before she knew it she and Lambeth, who’s had a really interesting career as a magazine writer/NYU lecturer/marketing person, were emailing back and forth about lots of different things. Laura is very excited to meet Lambeth (and Lambeth’s husband Brian Kaplan, and Cameron Stracher) and to be part of this really neat type of event (Brendan is really excited too, since he’ll be off child-care duty for a few hours, and Benji is also really excited since he’ll be among new people, which he loves, for several hours and he’ll also get to see a few friends he made back in the fall: the children of fellow Goober, Ivan Held and his wife Patricia.

Not only does Laura wish that Parent P-L-A-Y had events outside of New York in places like, well, Boston, but she also wishes more people were named Lambeth. But until the universe aligns itself to make those two things happen, here are the details for this week’s event:

ON SUNDAY APRIL 22:
Get Up & Greet The Authors

9 AM - NOON