If anybody needed proof that Dave Barry and Carl Hiaasen are spending far too much time together (including at Hiaasen’s house in Vero), you only have to glance at their latest books. Both came out on the same day – Sept. 6. The covers are the same taxi cab yellow. They use the same style of cartoon art.
And in both works by the renowned Miami Herald writers, there is mention of the same 2010 news item from the Florida Keys – a woman driver rear-ending an SUV on the Overseas Highway as she was giving herself a bikini trim.
That utterly improbable tale, documented by the Florida Highway Patrol and picked up by ABC News, became the premise for the title character of Hiaasen’s new release, “Razor Girl.” He’ll be presenting it Sunday at the Vero Beach Book Center.
Last Thursday, it was Barry’s turn to entertain with the shaving story and more, as he talked about his latest book “Best. State. Ever: A Florida Man Defends his Homeland.” His audience of 600 ticketed guests packed the St. Edward’s School auditorium, a fallback venue for the Book Center, though Hiaasen’s crowd seems likely to be as large.
Barry used the grooming incident in the introduction to “Best.State.Ever.” It is just one luscious piece in a fruit bowl of factoids that Barry asserts are gleefully devoured by the rest of the world as proof that Florida is cosmically whacked.
That introductory essay is classic Barry: packed with puerile humor and fixations on space aliens, lethal reptiles, death by ingested cockroaches – you know Dave’s drill, it goes on to list Florida’s attributes, with the usual ironic spin.
Then he begins to tour the state and another side of his writing comes through. It’s the side that earned him, in part at least, his Pulitzer in 1988, and that was reflected in an earlier, extraordinarily moving essay about his last day with his father.
Barry speaks respectfully of the history of these roadside oddities. A sweetness come through as he meets the people who unthinkably still make their living in the tired tourist attractions like Weeki Wachee, Cassadaga, Gatorland and the Skunk-Ape Research Headquarters on Tamiami Trail. As for more modern pastimes, there’s a winner hands-down for Barry: Lock and Load Miami, a machine gun shooting range. He regresses to his inner adolescent again to describe how he and his buddy “cradle their firearms” and are transformed from ordinary civilians into “a pair of world-class douchenozzles.”
The next day, Barry was the keynote speaker at the Florida Governor’s Conference on Tourism in Orlando.
Hiaasen doesn’t have to travel far for his Vero book signing. A resident of Vero, he just has to pull out of his driveway, cross the bridge and hang a right to the Book Center. Beginning at 3 p.m., he’ll be entertaining the guaranteed standing-room-only crowd, all of them bearing pre-purchased copies of “Razor Girl.” Reviewed in the New York Times last week, the book clearly made Janet Maslin laugh with what she called its “elegance, craziness and mike drop humor.”
In this fictionalized version of the stubble-trouble fender-bender, the shaver is for hire, bumping into cars to create kidnap victims. This time, though, she rear-ends the wrong guy, Lane Coolman, a Hollywood agent. He’s on his way to Key West to curb the homophobic comments of his client, the star of a new reality show involving a fraudulent band of “Duck Dynasty” wannabes. Coolman gets there too late, though, and the show’s racist star has had to go into hiding for his rude remarks. A crazed fan who copies his awful prejudice factors in, and so does the Mafia – it’s Hiaasen; there’s just no end to it.
