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Tonight in L.A.: Funnier than your dad

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Maybe you, like 1.4 million other people, follow the Twitter feed. Maybe you have heard that William Shatner is slated to star in a TV version. Tonight, you can meet Justin Halpern, the man behind the Tweets-to-book-to-(maybe)-TV-show ”... My Dad Says.” He reads at Skylight Books tonight; chances are he’ll be signing books and fielding questions about his dad.

Now 29, Halpern was down on his luck when he moved back in with his parents, near San Diego. A writer, he was online a lot. He was also exasperated enough by his father’s frequent and profanity-laced exhortations to condense them into 140-character Tweets.

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In the book’s opening pages, Halpern explains that he began Tweeting without his father’s knowledge -- and his trepidation at having to explain to him not only what a Tweet was, but that someone wanted to turn the Twitter feed into a television show, and also a book.

Instead of blowing up or being concerned at the number of people getting a peek at his private conversations, Halpern’s dad was nonplussed. “I don’t care what people think of me,” said the seventysomething Samuel Halpern. “Publish whatever you want. I just got two rules: I’m not talking to anyone, and whatever money you get, keep. I got my own [...] money. I don’t need yours.”

Justin Halpern will be at Skylight Books in Los Feliz tonight at 7:30. The event is free, but if you buy the book, you can rest assured that Halpern won’t have to give the royalties to his dad.

— Carolyn Kellogg
twitter.com/paperhaus


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