So I'm in Philadelphia, in my friends Mark and Jen's beautiful old rowhouse, where a bunch of friends gather every year for a spooky autumnal weekend involving many many board games and horror movies and pumpkin pie and mugs of apple cider with cinnamon sticks and corn mazes in weird damp small towns with suspicious names like Lambertville. I love this house because it's narrow and tall, with creaking wooden stairways and ancient victrolas and 50000 vinyl albums and a big fireplace and lots of cool bits of art and a front porch with pumpkins on it. It's in South Philly, on the kind of block that has leaf-strewn streets, where all the houses are made of old brick and have windowboxes shamelessly filled with flowers. My friends Rob and Bonnie and I drove down from New York last night--Bonnie Shelden being the amazing and generous artist who designed my inarguably irresistible and inimicable party invitations, with the trapeze girl Molly drew--and tonight is my second reading, at Robin's Bookstore at 6pm. Obviously, you will all attend and buy me extravagant cocktails just after.

I also saw a man this morning, at the diner we had breakfast in, wearing a pair of Guinness pajama pants. At first I thought they said GUNS and was vaguely jealous, despite my calm and glamorous mien.