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Daniel Handler Mixes A Drink

Getting ready for Dawn 2010

by
Marc Tracy
May 06, 2010

Daniel Handler will be among the presenters at Dawn 2010, the Tablet-sponsored late-night cultural arts festival going down in honor of Shavuot on the evening of Saturday, May 15 in San Francisco. Handler, who is best known for writing the A Series of Unfortunate Events books under the pseudonym Lemony Snicket, will be presenting on cocktails. In fact, it’s entirely possible he’ll be drinking them, too. He told me:

Bryan Ranere, bartender extraordinaire, will be joining me onstage as we examine the intersection between Jewish culture and cocktail culture, by presenting various Jewish issues and anxieties and mixing the cocktail that will allay them. Volunteers from the audience will be invited onstage to sample the cocktails and the anxieties. I never like to promise that a good time will be had by all, but I will promise that I will have a very, very good time.

When asked if he’s ever stayed up late on Shavuot to study before, he replied, “To ‘study’? I can’t tell if that’s a euphemism.”

Well, first time for everything, then! He is most looking forward, he said, to “swooning in the presence of Sandra Bernhard, lurking in a corner with Gary Shteyngart, and seeing if I recognize anyone from Camp Swig.”

Marc Tracy is a staff writer at The New Republic, and was previously a staff writer at Tablet. He tweets @marcatracy.