An endearing finale

By Diane Prokop
Times Staff Writer

A good play takes an audience on a ride where they experience the depths of every emotion and leaves them thinking and talking about what they just witnessed.
The Keswick Theatre, while not offering a stage show, will offer patrons that same ride on Sunday, June 8, when Wall Street Journal columnist and The Last Lecture co-author Jeffrey Zaslow appears as part of the Michael Smerconish Book Club event.
While Zaslow will certainly be in Glenside for the 6 p.m. event, he almost didn’t travel to Pittsburgh last September where it all began. If he hadn’t, he would have missed Randy Pausch’s last lecture — Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams.
Pausch, a 47-year-old Carnegie Mellon computer sciences professor, was slated to give the talk as part of the university’s Journeys lecture series. Previously known as the Last Lecture, it called for professors to act as if the lecture were the last they could give before they died.
For Pausch, the old moniker was all too appropriate. The husband and father of three young children had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. In August, doctors told him that he had only three to six months of good health left.
Zaslow, a Carnegie Mellon alum, didn’t hear about the event from his alma mater but rather the Wall Street Journal’s Pittsburgh bureau chief.
It would have cost Zaslow $850 to fly from Detroit, where he lives with his wife and three daughters, to Pittsburgh, and Zaslow’s editor gave him the option of doing a post-event phone interview with the tenured professor. After speaking to Pausch the day before the lecture, however, the Delaware County native decided he should make the 300-mile drive.
"Something about Randy made me go," Zaslow said by phone last week.
He wasn’t disappointed.
Zaslow was one of about 400 people who witnessed an American moment in time that some liken to Lou Gehrig’s "luckiest man alive" speech.
"I knew, we knew, we had seen something extraordinary," he said.
Zaslow wrote about this cool and quirky professor, who sang Happy Birthday to his wife Jai, who showed people his CT scans, his stuffed animals and the family he loved, and who wanted people to live their dreams the way he was able to in his condensed life. It wasn’t just a school lecture, it was a love letter to his children — Dylan, Logan and Chloe.
The lecture was to be Pausch’s last hurrah. Thanks to the Internet, however, the hurrahs keep coming in as more than 10 million people have viewed the talk, which has been translated into several languages, including German, Chinese, and Arabic.
According to Zaslow, his first column on Pausch was posted at midnight and e-mails immediately began flooding into the paper from readers and publishers.
Gemcitabine, a cancer-treatment drug, was keeping the tumors at bay, so Pausch agreed to work with Zaslow on The Last Lecture book. The publisher, Hyperion, wanted the book by Jan. 15.
"They wanted the book out when Randy was alive," Zaslow said.
Pausch didn’t want to take away precious time from his family, so he wore a cell phone headset and would talk to Zaslow while riding his bicycle as part of his exercise routine.
"I’ve never written a book in seven weeks. Randy was dying. It was a weird dance, a frantic dance," said Zaslow, who made himself available whenever Pausch wanted to take a bike ride.
The book is a number one New York Times best seller advice list.
"It’s bittersweet. It’s great about the book, but Randy is dying," he said.
Zaslow spends a lot of times googling his friend and sending him links to what he finds.
"He said, ‘Quit googling me and give your kids a hug.’ He’s still giving me advice," Zaslow said.
According to Zaslow, Pausch recently returned to Carnegie Mellon to give the commencement address. Despite a number of bad weeks and heart and kidney failure, he carried his wife Jai off the stage.
"He’s perked up," Zaslow said, acknowledging that there aren’t a lot of options for his friend. "His goal is to see Father’s Day."
Smerconish, a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News and host of the Big Talker’s a.m. drive-time radio show on WPHT, has been holding book club events since 2005 on a wide variety of topics and authors. They include presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain, authors Jennifer Weiner, Lisa Scottoline and Scott Turow, political commentator Pat Buchanan and former New Jersey Gov. Jim McGreevey.
Smerconish found The Last Lecture one of those things that gets you to stop in your tracks and take stock of your life.
"I think I see a lot of me in him. It’s equally terrifying and at the same time compelling," he said.
His listeners are just as interested in the book and the lecture. Ticket sales have been brisk with more than 700 sold the first day. As the Times went to press, tickets were still available.
According to Smerconish, the book club events are bonding experiences that people seem to enjoy.
This particular book club installment will be more than just a question-and-answer session. Smerconish will roll a highlight reel of The Last Lecture and is looking for Zaslow to put in perspective, explaining the background story. ••
Reporter Diane Prokop can be reached at 215-354-3036 or dprokop@phillynews.com

Get in the know . . .
For tickets, call 215-572-7650 or visit www.keswicktheatre.com
For more information about the book, the talk and the man, visit www.TheLastLecture.com
You can also check out Randy Pausch’s blog at
http://download.srv.cs.cmu.edu/~pausch/ news/index.html