Wednesday night at Varsity Letters reading series

Two nights in a row for me out on the town means that the cats are getting restless. It gets worse, boys: I've got rehearsal on Thursday and a busy weekend ahead. (Like they're reading my blog...)

I went to a monthly sports book reading event at Happy Ending on the Lower East Side. It's hosted by Dan Shanoff, who used to write the Daily Quickie column on ESPN.com and now blogs on his own. I'd been wanting to go for a while, but I've always had other plans. However, this evening I was free, so I had dinner at work and then hopped the J train to Bowery and Delancey. (Quick side note: I hardly ever take the J/M/Z trains, and when I do, I feel like I'm on a completely different subway system in some foreign city. The trains and stations look the same, but they're so unfamiliar that they seem completely alien to me. And when I get out of the subway, I'm in a neighborhood that's I've left largely unexplored, so I always expect to get lost.) The big draw for this month's reading was Will Leitch, editor of Deadspin.com, one of my favorite blogs. Before Will got up to talk, the guys who do the 0:01 photo for ESPN The Magazine each month presented a slide show of their work and talked about their new book, a collection of 0:01 photos. Then Tom Callahan, author of a new book about Johnny Unitas, talked about working with Unitas and interviewing old Baltimore Colts players and coaches. Will was the last speaker on the program, and he read two short pieces, one from his book Life as a Loser and another that I think he said hasn't been published yet (I don't remember exactly).

After the reading I stuck around, had another beer or two, and got to meet Will, his fiancee Shari (with her own book now on sale), Dan Shanoff, and some other Deadspin readers and sports fans. I ended up sticking around until the bitter end, mostly because I wasn't in any hurry to get home and I was enjoying talking sports and making fun of everyone else's teams. I'm already looking forward to the next event: a reading with Michael Lewis (of "Moneyball" fame) on November 8. Next time I think the Deadspin readers need to wear nametags with their commenter names on them. I'm not sure who I met this evening, but I'm sure some of them are regular commenters over there. I'll have to become a little more active in that regard myself. Not that it's a big secret, but over there I'm Peter Cavan, a pseudonym my grandfather used to use (to what end, I have no idea).