Ionesco

Someone from the Radio Times asked me to do an interview with a disc jockey. I said I was not a pop music fan but I was told that didn't matter, they just wanted some personal stuff about the man. So off I went to the BBC. We sat down and we talked. I asked him who had influenced him most and he said a name of someone I had never heard of. So we sat there a bit longer. I smiled. He smiled. Then he said: "How did they come to send you to interview me?"
A few years earlier than that I almost had a chance to interview Eugene Ionesco, the avante garde playwright. The features editor of the paper I worked for said that since Mr Ionesco was in Cardiff perhaps I could get to interview him for the paper.
I didn't know what to say except "Help".
Then he said: "You do speak French don't you? Ionesco doesn't speak English but he does speak French."
"No," I said, truthfully, though if I had been able to speak French, I'd have said "no" just the same, because that truly would have been the most embarrassing moment of my life - more embarrassing than "How did they come to send you to interview me?"
I knew that Ionesco wrote plays; one play had a couple of people living quite normal lives with a rhinoceros sitting there in the room with them.
I wrote plays about people sitting in a room with no sign of a rhinoceros, in the room or within the nearest thousand miles of the room.
That evening I went to a lecture given by Ionesco at Cardiff University. He spoke in Hungarian, I think it was, which somebody translated into French which someone else then translated into English. Everything reached such a measure of confusion that I thought "This is just like a play by Ionesco."
I waited to see if a rhinoceros would appear but it didn't.