Hot-Dog Buns, the Pope and Good Writing

When the Vatican announced a new Pope yesterday, I immediately thought of hot-dog buns. Not, I admit, the typical response to a centuries-old ritual intended to inspire religious reverence.

Blame David Sedaris.

In his essay The Hem of His Garment, published last year in The New Yorker, Sedaris recounts a visit to the Vatican as part of a small contingent of comics and humorists invited to meet the late Pope John Paul II. However, what stayed with me long after reading the piece wasn’t his encounter with the Pope or what ensued. It was Queen Elizabeth’s feet – more specifically, their size.

With his off-kilter brilliance that feels at once improvised and surgically precise, Sedaris describes the late monarch’s feet as “the size of hot-dog buns.” A throwaway line, perhaps, but it lodged itself in my brain. It was absurd. Humorous. And deliciously unhinged.

That, to me, is the secret sauce to good writing: The audacity to say something so accurate and ridiculous, it takes up permanent residence in your hippocampus. To come up with figurative imagery that shouldn’t work – but somehow does. That’s Sedaris’s genius and why, as the newly chosen Pope Leo XIV stepped onto that balcony, flanked by cardinals and dwarfed by fanfare, I found myself wondering what bread size his feet might be.

Ciabatta, I suppose.