Ladies and gentleman, it’s time to rewrite my Wikipedia page.  Before reading “Bossy Pants,” I had no idea Tina Fey and I had eaten at the same Red Lobster.

It happened in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, which for her was a compromise midpoint destination for family Christmas.  For me, it was a well-planned Friday trip with college friends.

In our tiny college town there was only one Red Lobster-level dining option and none that had tasty cheddar biscuits.  So weeks in advance, one of my suitemates gathered commitments from roughly 10 people to make the trip to the closest Red Lobster 45 minutes away in Williamsport.  Many biscuits were consumed on site and many, many more were squirreled away in purses and brought back to campus for future eating.

How else have Tina and I intersected?  Well, in the book she talks about the anthrax scare at 30 Rockefeller Plaza when she left the building for a few hours and returned to NBC News chief Andy Lack updating the SNL staff on the situation.  Last year, Lack was very briefly the head of my news organization.

While I did not enjoy this book as much as the one by fellow SNL alum Amy Poehler (who I like a little more), it was still an entertaining look behind the scenes of a person who has had a huge impact on my generation’s pop culture.  It also reminded me that I hadn’t seen all of her show 30 Rock, so I started watching from the beginning on Netflix.

And that’s when yet another thing came up during a conversation between Fey’s character Liz Lemon and Alec Baldwin’s Jack Donaghy.

Jack: “So, big plans for the holidays?”
Liz: “Yeah, my parents are coming with my brother and we’re gonna go see Jersey Boys on Broadway and we’re gonna go to that restaurant where they pretend it’s Mars!”

You’ll recall that restaurant came up two books ago and was the scene of a delightful dinner I had years ago with my cousin.

That’s it for direct links, but Tina and I share a similar outlook on vacations.  Specifically, our complete lack of interest in going on a cruise.

“Luxury cruises were designed to make something unbearable — a two-week transatlantic crossing — seem bearable.  There’s no need to do it now.  There are planes.  You wouldn’t take a vacation where you ride on a stagecoach for two months but there’s all-you-can-eat shrimp.”

She also imparts great advice about the fact there is no such thing as perfect in writing, because there are deadlines and when the show goes on, you can’t change anything.

“You have to try you hardest to be at the top of your game and improve every joke you can until the last possible second, and then you have to let it go.”

This is what I tell people when they ask how I get started writing something.  At work, shows are going on the air and here, well, I have other things to do so I can’t sit here all day.  Perfect isn’t coming, so just write and move on.

She also has strong words for people who feel the need to let the world know they think women are not funny.  She doesn’t care.

“It is an impressively arrogant move to conclude that just because you don’t like something, it is empirically not good.  I don’t like Chinese food, but I don’t write articles trying to prove it doesn’t exist.”

It’s not often I see the movie version of a story and then proceed to the book.  Off the top of my head, I actually can’t think of another example, but I just did that with Markus Zusak’s “The Book Thief.”

For most books, having seen the movie would provide too many spoilers to fully enjoy the written version.  Sure, there are plenty of pieces left out, but you know the highlights and especially the ending.

This story was different.  I knew the ending when I flipped to page 1, and that was okay, since the narrator, Death, pretty much tells you the end right from the start.

Death turns out to be a really great narrator and should definitely keep up that line of work.  The main focus of the book is Liesel Meminger, a young girl whose mother gives her up to an older couple in Nazi Germany.  Liesel is the ultimate protagonist you root for and the actress that plays her in the movie, Sophie Nelisse, is downright perfect.

Death takes us through dual storylines involving Liesel and a man named Max, which are destined to come together, and he handles our expectations of the merger appropriately.

“The juggling comes to an end now, but the struggling does not.  I have Liesel Meminger in one hand, Max Vandenburg in the other.  Soon, I will clap them together.  Just give me a few pages.”

Death is busy at this time in history and uses his unique position to relate Liesel’s world and the wider one around her in a way that takes a perspective outside of a human body.

“You might argue that I make the rounds no matter what year it is, but sometimes the human race likes to crank things up a little,” the narrator says.  “They increase the production of bodies and their escaping souls.  A few bombs usually do the trick.”

As the bombs fall throughout Europe, Liesel wants nothing more than to read, and to do that she needs books.  Wartime in a poor family is not the ideal set of conditions to acquire said texts, so, as the title suggests, she is fond of stealing.  Her most frequent target is the house of her town’s mayor, in a library kept by his wife.

One of her selections involved motivations straight out of “Billy Madison,” who tells his teacher he drew a blue duck in class because he had never seen a blue duck before.

“Typically, many of the titles tempted her, but after a good minute or two in the room, she settled for A Song in the Dark, most likely because the book was green, and she did not yet own a book of that color.”

For all the evil in the book, which should be expected when your narrator is Death, the story has an overwhelming balance of showing the good in people and what happens when you take the time to care.

Death sums it up.

“The human heart is a line, whereas my own is a circle, and I have the endless ability to be in the right place at the right time.  The consequence of this is that I’m always finding humans at their best and worst.  I see their ugly and their beauty, and I wonder how the same thing can be both.”

I don’t watch horror movies.  The last thing I would ever do is watch one before bed since I often dream about things I saw or thought about late in the day.  In a similar vein, as much as I was riveted by the story and wanted to get to the end of the book, Marisha Pessl’s “Night Film” was not bedtime reading for me.

The depth of this book is fantastic and anyone who is a crime story fan will love it.  I was extremely impressed by the way the print version is presented with believable recreations of media websites like CNN and Vanity Fair. 

The story follows an investigative journalist and his look into the life of reclusive horror director Stanislas Cordova and his family.  Cordova is a cult legend with a legion of fans who gather for ultra-secret screenings and an even more secret website devoted to his life and work.

The reporter, Scott McGrath, at one point gains access to the site and reads about the concept “freak the ferocious out.”

“There were quite a few pages on the site devoted to Cordova’s supposed life philosophy, which meant, in a nutshell, that to be terrified, to be scared out of your skin, was the beginning of freedom, of opening your eyes to what was graphic and dark and gorgeous about life, thereby conquering the monsters of your mind.”

It’s safe to say Cordova films would not be in my Netflix queue at any point whatsoever.  Unless by some Cordovian way they creepily appeared on their own, in which case I would throw my TV in a river and move to another country.

One of the main themes in the book is the effect that Cordova has on people and the way that those he works with and other characters make choices to completely change their lives.  He mentions in an interview the three words sovereign, deadly and perfect to describe the perfect shot in one of his movies.  Perfect hits on that theme.

“The understanding that life and wherever you find yourself at the present are absolutely ideal.  No regret, no guilt, because even if you were stuck it was only a cocoon to break out of — setting your life loose.”

Now that is a Cordova-related thing I can get behind.  Of course, it’s not always true, but isn’t it nice to think that no matter the challenge, there’s always the potential to break free and flourish into something better?

Nora, a young woman who assists McGrath, spent part of her childhood living in a nursing home, and only left when a resident handed her a bunch of money and told her to scram.

“So I scrammed,” she says.  “I walked to the Kissimmee station and got on a bus to New York.  People don’t realize how easy life is to change.  You just get on the bus.”

Again, it’s rarely so simple.  But at the same time, even a smaller version of getting on the bus is all you need to get going.

Nora works as a hostess at a fancy restaurant when McGrath meets her, but later changes jobs to a place that brought tremendous 2006 flashbacks for me.

“Did you miss work tonight?” [McGrath] asked.  “The Four Seasons?”
“Oh, no.  My last day as yesterday.  The normal girl game back from maternity leave.  Tomorrow I’m starting as a waitress at Mars 2112.”

That, of course, is the restaurant in Times Square themed like you were visiting Mars in the year 2112 for your meal.  I went there with my cousin Lauren and it was everything we dreamed it could be.