Wednesday, June 11, 2003

Red In 2002 these two kids, Nick Mercer and Matt Herzfeld, who put out a mini-comic, “Flame Broiled,” and were fans of mine came to see me. I was in bad shape then, still recovering from chemotherapy for my second bout with cancer. They later did a book about our meeting in which I was described thusly, “Here was a man slumped up against a wall…sick as could be and very weak…in the messiest house I’d ever seen…with such a raspy voice I could hardly understand him. Why were we bothering him?” They weren’t sure, upon reflection, why they’d come to see me, so I autographed some comics for them and they left. I got better and did a book signing at a local bookstore. Nick and Matt came to the event and gave me one of their mini-comics, which was pretty good. So far they’ve done 5 issues about looking for and meeting “Harvey Pekar.” I found out that Nick’s mother Ida played cello in this kind of revolutionary orchestra, “RED (an orchestra).” They got the name RED from their goals of REDefine, REDesign, and REDiscover. They do multi-media stuff with puppets, feature unusual instruments (the theremin) and play pieces of music they thought were neglected and should be heard more often. They weren’t all that well known, but had gotten good reviews in the local media. One day Ida Mercer called my wife and me up about helping with some publicity for the orchestra. My wife was all for me cooperating, if we could work with the kids. She thought they were bright, hard working and funny. We took Danielle and all met at Tommy’s, a local restaurant. Joyce volunteered me as author for a mini comic history of RED that could be used in a fund raising campaign, saying I’d do it for free if Matt and Nick could work on the story, too. I agreed. Who knows what great things will come of our collaboration? 9:47:45 AM