Last Friday night, June 24th, Cafe Society welcomed Neal Snidow, whose beautiful memoir Vista Del Mar has just been published.
The book’s subtitle is “A Memoir of the Ordinary,” as it’s about the kind of normal family who seemed to inhabit the houses whose plate glass windows I’d gaze into longingly, wondering what it’d be like to belong to a normal family.
And by what seems an extraordinary coincidence Neal and I lived in Redondo, the same Southern California beach town and went to the same elementary school though we didn’t meet until after his book was published.
His reading — the story of what was eaten in his childhood home — was riveting, so funny and sweet, his observations so exacting.
Neal also had several of his photographs on display at Kaleidoscope Coffee, Cassie Cushing’s new events space in Point Richmond. His work, on both the visual and the aural, displays his capacity for deep listening.
I wrote a piece for the Huffington Post on Neal Snidow’s work, the link posted here. Metering to Black
I hope you like it.
