Ralph Stern may be from Colorado, but he fell into the same unfortunate situation as his European colleagues when he first traveled from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. “No Americans go through Death Valley,” he said. “They know better. It was very severe. I remember telling Nicole [Huber, his fellow panelist], ‘Whatever you do, don’t lock the keys in the car.’” Stern survived, and made it to Vegas. “I said, ‘I’m going to get a van and live in the parking lot,’” Stern said. “If any time in one’s life, one lives in a trailer, Las Vegas is the place.” He never did live in the van, though he did stay in Las Vegas for a time. Read more about Stern below.
Q. What do you wake up to?
A. The sound of birds and the wish to have coffee.
Q. What’s your favorite word?
A. Apple.
Q. What do you find beautiful?
A. The desert.
Q. When you were a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
A. The thing I invested real serious time in was becoming a microbiologist.
Q. What is your greatest extravagance?
A. I have lots of books. I suppose that’s an extravagance. Whenever I fly with them, the airline makes it clear that they’re an extravagance.
Q. If you could take only one more journey, where would you go?
A. India.
Q. What profession would you like to practice in your next life?
A. I’d like to come back as a Bollywood director.
Q. What would be your death row meal?
A. New York strip, medium rare.
Q. What is your favorite holiday and why?
A. I like Christmas in Berlin, simply because of all the stuff that’s associated with Christmas in Berlin, in terms of food and lights and Christmas trees.
Q. What promise do you make to yourself that you break the most often?
A. Going to bed on time.
Q. What should you throw away but haven’t been able to part with?
A. I have a down sleeping bag that’s far too old.
Q. Who is the one person living or dead that you’d most love to have a beer with?
A. Thomas Burnett, a late 17th century natural philosopher who wrote a very, very strange theory of the Earth and the way the Earth came to be the way it is.
To read more about Stern’s panel on Los Angeles vs. Las Vegas, click here.
*Photo by Aaron Salcido.