Christmas Eve we were sitting around our neighbors' table when conversation turned to the subject of citizenship. (Our neighbors are French.) I mentioned the replica of the Statue of Liberty that stands in the lobby of the Oakland Park office next to a vending machine for junk food and one for sodas. Because I'd blogged about this, I already had my punch line, which I casually tossed off as if I'd just thought of it. The plodding writer as witty conversationalist.
And immediately I thought of the character in the Peter de Vries novel who, before a dinner party, gives his wife lines that he has already come up with brilliant ripostes to, with the instruction that she feed him the lines throughout the meal. He called this "prepartee."
Resorting to blog-enabled prepartee didn't give me pause; rather it gave me pleasure, in part because the digital age has not been kind to de Vries, one of America's great humorists who once said that he loved writing, what he couldn't stand was the paperwork.
