There was a special children’s lit event in my neighborhood this evening — a presentation by author/illustrator Meghan McCarthy at the nearby branch library.

No one else from Austin made it, but that’s understandable: My neighborhood this week is Midtown Manhattan, where I’m attending a conference for my other career. The branch library, in this case, is the Donnell, home of Winnie the Pooh and Fuse #8. And the timing of Meghan’s to-do couldn’t have been better — right in between my afternoon conference thing and my nocturnal conference thing. And it was dinnertime, and there was cheese, and the whole thing just worked out beautifully.

One thing Meghan said about Aliens Are Coming! really knocked me out. There’s a spread depicting folks in a diner panicking during the 1938 radio broadcast of War of the Worlds. On the counter in that diner is a copy of LIFE magazine, and on the cover of that issue is a recreation of the actual image that was on the front of LIFE at the time of the big scare.

Now that’s attention to detail.