STORY BY KAREN BOSSICK
PHOTO BY NILS RIBI
A weaponized chimichanga. A shark attack on a People Mover.
Pulitzer Prize-winning humor columnist Dave Barry may have turned 70 on Monday, receiving a rousing song of “Happy Birthday” from 1,500 men and women at the 2017 Sun Valley Writers Conference.
But he hasn’t lost his boyish grin or his impish take on the world around him.
Barry is no stranger to the Sun Valley Writers Conference, nor is a stranger to vacationing in Sun Valley with its “amazing range of ethnic and cultural diversity…and log cabins with the same square footage as Connecticut.”
He came this year with a new book in hand, “Best. State. Ever: A Florida Man Defends His Homeland.”
The book covers everything from a shark killed in a traffic accident to a guy who died in a cockroach eating contest
“This guy is defined by the phrase, ‘I am not making this up,’ ” said Ridley Pearson, the Wood River Valley’s best-selling murder mystery writer. “But I benefited when he did make it up for our book ‘Peter and the Starcatchers.’”
Barry, a preacher’s kid born in New York State, recounted how he moved to Florida in 1983 “from the United States.”
He became the state’s biggest defender after it became The Joke State during the 2000 presidential election when it couldn’t decide whether it had voted for Al Gore, or George W. Bush, or Gore, or Bush.
“We’re like the Ellis Island for weird and stupid people,” he said.
Barry noted that things happen in Miami that don’t happen anywhere else.
Cast in point when a police chief was asked to address the inaugural meeting of the Homestead, Fla. Crime Watch group in 1994.
“Everything was going fine until he was hit on the head by a 75-pound bale of cocaine falling from the sky,” Barry said. The jettisoning of the cocaine, which also landed on a Southern Baptist Church, prompted a treasure hunt in the Everglades, Barry added.
On another occasion, two people fishing Biscayne Bay decided to take a 6-foot shark that was not yet dead across town on a People Mover.
“Now, People Movers are not designed for Marine life. That’s why it’s called a People Mover,” Barry said. “The point is we could have had a shark attack on a People Mover.”
Barry told of a visit he paid to a small town in Florida where every other house boasts a medium or psychic.
“It says on the white board to use your intuition to pick a psychic,” he said. “The psychic I picked said, ‘I see canisters. Do canisters have any relevance to you?’ ”
In Florida’s defense, Barry said, “The weather is wonderful except for hurricane season, which runs from June to the following June.”
In addition, he said, Florida has no state income tax and a reasonable sales tax.
“We have really corrupt and incompetent government. But in other states you pay really high taxes and also get corrupt and incompetent government. So we’re getting the same kind of government but for much less money,” he said.
Barry and Pearson traveled to Russia in 2014 as part of a 10-day cultural exchange arranged by the State Department. They were given a huge packet of information warning them how they would be under constant surveillance and that their laptops would almost certainly be hacked.
But the biggest threat turned out to be Russia’s Mexican food.
“I ate what must have been a weaponized chimichanga,” Barry said. “If they were listening in on my room, it would mean years of therapy for them.”
Barry repaid the Russians with a slide show in which he showed a picture of the day he picked his son up at school in the Oscar Meyer Wiener Mobile.
“The Russians don’t have a Weiner Mobile so they had puzzled looks on their faces,” he recounted. “Like, ‘How did we lose the Cold War?’ ”
Barry noted that he is in the process of getting old.
“Medical things are the worst,” he said. “We need the medical profession to find a way to get to the prostate gland other than the way they’re getting to it now.”
“Basically, you’re hoping a nuclear war will break out,” he said, as he described various antics to avoid the finger.
Barry continued that the worst part of a colonoscopy is the prep, which involves “a nuclear cocktail so powerful it propels you into the future.”
“You need a seatbelt on the commode. Or you could go to Russia and have a chimichanga,” he said.
Barry steered clear of President Donald Trump until someone in the audience asked him whether the business mogul had provided him with plenty of fodder for jokes.
“People say, ‘He must be gold for you,’ ” Barry recounted, after making a scene and falling to the floor. “Really, not. My job is to take ordinary events and exaggerate them until they’re funny, and it’s impossible to do that with President Trump. Plus, everything is so angry now I don’t know anyone who wants to listen to anything out of Washington. It’s hard to come up with anything that doesn’t sound like it’s making the rounds of talk shows.”
That said, Barry has gotten plenty of fodder off Ridley Pearson whom he has palled around with since they met as part of the Rock Bottom Remainders rock band made up of authors like Amy Tan and Stephen King.
He never tires of telling of their visit to Atkinsons’ Market to buy coffee.
“Ridley is a psychopath who spends more time figuring out how to kill people than anyone I know,” Barry said. “I was getting my coffee and he came up and said, ‘You know, someone could put poison in that grinder and the poison would make its way to the bottom of the grounds and they would ever know how they did it.’ Then he walked away leaving me grinding my beans—and Ridley’s a tea drinker.”
A LOOK AHEAD
The 2018 Sun Valley Writers Conference will move back a few weeks. Executive Director Robin Eidsmo says that the conference will take place the third weekend of July on July 21-24. To keep abreast of conference news go to www.svwc.com.