Found's Lone Surfer Tour

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presented Found segments on the NPR radio program This American Life (where they fit perfectly with the show's wider preoccupation with identity); there are Found books and CDs; he's got a book of short stories out, called The Lone Surfer of Montana, Kansas; and now he's presenting the Found Magazine Lone Surfer Tour 2005, which brings Found to life and also features songs by his brother Peter (some of them based on Davy's found items) and readings from his own prose. "Naked in New York" is an apparently truthful account of what occurred after he awakened in that condition in a Lower Manhattan alley.

The show is traveling to fifty-one cities in fifty-five days; I saw it last month at the 555 Gallery in Detroit, an old factory building with cold air pouring in a broken window. A lot of the tour is happening in places like that; the show is fast, a bit rowdy (the found materials often expose the stream of profanity that flows through the American unconscious), and full of late-night energy. In his hometown, however, Rothbart gets to play the more plush Michigan Theater, where the tour winds up on Saturday, November 19. Rothbart always wanted, he said, to go on a book tour "with scallops and caviar," but as it turned out he ended up stuffing carrots into his pockets at receptions. For much of the program Rothbart read his found notes aloud, sometimes half acting them out. Sometimes they were flat-out funny, sometimes abstractly strange one-liners. But in the longer ones something else was going on.