Open Mic Night
Crazy Cat Lady? Briefly mentioned in the Barnes & Goebbels story?
So, I'm telling the "Barnes & Goebbels" story (which is an awesome story to tell; I mean, I enjoyed putting it in writing, but it's got that straw-up-the-nose quality that just makes it more awesome told. Remind me to tell it to you if I ever see you) at work and my boss Patrick is almost crying and I get to the part about how the book group had had some previous experience, what with the woman and her bag of stuffed kitties ("You're not exaggerating, right?" Zach had asked me later. "You know, sometimes you...embellish") and a co-worker, Anne, comes out of her office and says, "Stuffed kitties? Oh my god, I know that woman!"
Turns out, Crazy Cat Lady had infiltrated Anne's Toastmasters group. Where one of her kitties tried to give a speech. "She was a little disruptive," Anne said.
But we're not done with Crazy Cat Lady. Oh, no.
In an effort to get more comfortable with my writing, I decided to try reading something at the Bethesda Writer's Center's Open Mic Night last night. While I do okay speaking in front of fairly large crowds at the Invertebrate Exhibit, I'm not as confident reading in front of other people. Especially my own stuff in front of other people. What if I don't look up enough? What if I look up too much and lose my place? What if I speed-read like I normally do when reading aloud?
Anyway, we'll get to how I did in a second. The main point of this is that, while sitting with my friends Anne from work, Debra from book group, and Radio Bill (Anne's boyfriend), guess who walks in? With a bag full of stuffed kitties? It was awesome.
Turns out, Crazy Cat Lady is a regular at the Bethesda Writer's Center's Open Mic Night. When we came back from the intermission (I read during the first part of the evening), it was Crazy Cat Lady's turn. And...it was...she...
Let me break it down for you:
So, the room is set up with about five or so rows of chairs, 8 chairs to a row. There's also a couch and a table with some wine. Crazy Cat Lady sprawls out on the couch and has her serial killer-looking manservant (who spoke not a word, but went straight to his work) bring her several glasses of wine throughout the evening. The cats don't really make an appearance this evening, but you can totally see several tails sticking out of the bag.
Crazy Cat Lady has some sort of upper respiratory infection, so she coughs. A lot. And then hocks up loogies that she lady-likely makes a big display of swallowing. It's never clear throughout the night if Crazy Cat Lady really knows where she is, or why people keep standing up to go to the podium to read. Mostly, she just sits, drinks her wine, and gestures to her serial killer manservant.
During the intermission, Crazy Cat Lady mingles with the others, who ask her how she's doing ("Fine, though I've got this tickle in my throat") and what has she been up to ("I was supposed to go visit a Buddhist temple, but I couldn't find anyone to watch my kitties"). So meanwhile, while this is going on, these two women, a white woman and a black woman, are having an argument about Ntozake Shange. "I love her books," the black woman said. "They're plays," the white woman countered; "and her best is For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf." "Not Enuf," the black woman says. "I'm sorry?" "It's For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Not Enuf," the black woman tries to correct. "No, no, no: you're wrong." "But I've read the book," the black woman says. "It's not a book," the white woman gruffs; "it's a play." "But I read it in a book," the black woman says, complete with neck action; "and that book was called For Colored Women Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Not Enuf. 'When the Rainbow is Enuf'? That doesn't make any sense."
I'd had to pee ever since I had gone up to read, so I had to leave those two ladies to their Shange Roundtable. In the bathroom, the MC of the evening, a tall Amish-looking man (who, as I was to learn later in the evening, translates Czech poetry), says to me -- while I'm peeing -- "Your piece was very good. I think I probably wouldn't have liked it as much on the page as I did you reading it." Which: whatever. I'm holding my penis in front of a man who looks like he'd be more comfortable at a barn raising and he's critiquing my writing and all I want to do is pee, you know? Maybe we could do this mini-workshop somewhere without a urinal cake?
So, intermission is over, I can't tell if the white woman or the black woman (who loudly announced after her reading that she has a book soon to come out. Just as soon as she could find a publisher) have come to any sort of truce or agreement about the "Enuf/not Enuf" summit, and then I hear the MC call out Crazy Cat Lady's name. And I realize that this evening could not possibly get any better, unless it was to reveal that Crazy Cat Lady and Barnes & Goebbels guy were going to sing duets made popular by pop superstars like Barbra Streisand, Diana Ross, Kenny Rogers, and Lionel Richie.
"Oh, dear," Crazy Cat Lady says. She reaches into her bag of stuffed kitties and pulls out a manila folder stuffed with many pages of crazy. She takes a gulp of wine, and then says, "I don't normally read the tabloids--" and already I'm wondering why she feels the need to lie to us "--but I'm pretty fascinated by the Biblical prophecies of Nostradamus. But I'll start with Isaac Newton." And she just sort of...spoke. For, like, 10 minutes (we were told we had a 6 minute time limit) on the Bible, Nostradamus, Isaac Newton, beheadings, church politics of the 1500, the current political situation in Iraq, and none of it made any sense.
I mean, duh, right? But I've got to tell you: I kept hoping that she'd be brilliant. That her extemporaneous crazy talk would actually be filled with insightful things from her past life as a college professor before drink and frontal lobe insanity turned her to shopping bags full of stuffed kitties. But nay nay my friends. That was not to be. She just spoke and spoke and spoke. And then she said, "Thank you." And she was done.
I leaned over to the guy sitting next to me and asked, "Is she here a lot?" He nodded. "Is she always like that?" He leaned closer to me: "Sometimes she's less coherent."
Anyway -- I did fine. I did better than I thought I would -- but I could have done much better. I looked up once or twice during a section I didn't know as well, so I had to sort of make stuff up to get me back to the right sentence. I read "Haircuts and Therapy," a piece I took down awhile back, along with some others, because the hope is they can live happily in a book of essays. It was a very odd experience, reading something I had written and hearing people genuinely laugh. It's also an incredibly energizing experience. I only read the one piece, but I wanted to stand up there and read all the pieces I had brought. And maybe if I had shown up with my own bag of nuttiness, they might have let me.
______________________________
PS: The second weirdest performance of the evening was this woman who read her one-act, 6-character "playlet" to us. She tried to read all 6 characters. It really didn't work. The play itself, too, was incomprehensible: something about weather patterns and periodically she would stop and chortle, like this: "Ho! Ho! Ho!" Which may have been part of the play, but going by the rest of evening -- I'm really not sure.
So, I'm telling the "Barnes & Goebbels" story (which is an awesome story to tell; I mean, I enjoyed putting it in writing, but it's got that straw-up-the-nose quality that just makes it more awesome told. Remind me to tell it to you if I ever see you) at work and my boss Patrick is almost crying and I get to the part about how the book group had had some previous experience, what with the woman and her bag of stuffed kitties ("You're not exaggerating, right?" Zach had asked me later. "You know, sometimes you...embellish") and a co-worker, Anne, comes out of her office and says, "Stuffed kitties? Oh my god, I know that woman!"
Turns out, Crazy Cat Lady had infiltrated Anne's Toastmasters group. Where one of her kitties tried to give a speech. "She was a little disruptive," Anne said.
But we're not done with Crazy Cat Lady. Oh, no.
In an effort to get more comfortable with my writing, I decided to try reading something at the Bethesda Writer's Center's Open Mic Night last night. While I do okay speaking in front of fairly large crowds at the Invertebrate Exhibit, I'm not as confident reading in front of other people. Especially my own stuff in front of other people. What if I don't look up enough? What if I look up too much and lose my place? What if I speed-read like I normally do when reading aloud?
Anyway, we'll get to how I did in a second. The main point of this is that, while sitting with my friends Anne from work, Debra from book group, and Radio Bill (Anne's boyfriend), guess who walks in? With a bag full of stuffed kitties? It was awesome.
Turns out, Crazy Cat Lady is a regular at the Bethesda Writer's Center's Open Mic Night. When we came back from the intermission (I read during the first part of the evening), it was Crazy Cat Lady's turn. And...it was...she...
Let me break it down for you:
So, the room is set up with about five or so rows of chairs, 8 chairs to a row. There's also a couch and a table with some wine. Crazy Cat Lady sprawls out on the couch and has her serial killer-looking manservant (who spoke not a word, but went straight to his work) bring her several glasses of wine throughout the evening. The cats don't really make an appearance this evening, but you can totally see several tails sticking out of the bag.
Crazy Cat Lady has some sort of upper respiratory infection, so she coughs. A lot. And then hocks up loogies that she lady-likely makes a big display of swallowing. It's never clear throughout the night if Crazy Cat Lady really knows where she is, or why people keep standing up to go to the podium to read. Mostly, she just sits, drinks her wine, and gestures to her serial killer manservant.
During the intermission, Crazy Cat Lady mingles with the others, who ask her how she's doing ("Fine, though I've got this tickle in my throat") and what has she been up to ("I was supposed to go visit a Buddhist temple, but I couldn't find anyone to watch my kitties"). So meanwhile, while this is going on, these two women, a white woman and a black woman, are having an argument about Ntozake Shange. "I love her books," the black woman said. "They're plays," the white woman countered; "and her best is For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf." "Not Enuf," the black woman says. "I'm sorry?" "It's For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Not Enuf," the black woman tries to correct. "No, no, no: you're wrong." "But I've read the book," the black woman says. "It's not a book," the white woman gruffs; "it's a play." "But I read it in a book," the black woman says, complete with neck action; "and that book was called For Colored Women Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Not Enuf. 'When the Rainbow is Enuf'? That doesn't make any sense."
I'd had to pee ever since I had gone up to read, so I had to leave those two ladies to their Shange Roundtable. In the bathroom, the MC of the evening, a tall Amish-looking man (who, as I was to learn later in the evening, translates Czech poetry), says to me -- while I'm peeing -- "Your piece was very good. I think I probably wouldn't have liked it as much on the page as I did you reading it." Which: whatever. I'm holding my penis in front of a man who looks like he'd be more comfortable at a barn raising and he's critiquing my writing and all I want to do is pee, you know? Maybe we could do this mini-workshop somewhere without a urinal cake?
So, intermission is over, I can't tell if the white woman or the black woman (who loudly announced after her reading that she has a book soon to come out. Just as soon as she could find a publisher) have come to any sort of truce or agreement about the "Enuf/not Enuf" summit, and then I hear the MC call out Crazy Cat Lady's name. And I realize that this evening could not possibly get any better, unless it was to reveal that Crazy Cat Lady and Barnes & Goebbels guy were going to sing duets made popular by pop superstars like Barbra Streisand, Diana Ross, Kenny Rogers, and Lionel Richie.
"Oh, dear," Crazy Cat Lady says. She reaches into her bag of stuffed kitties and pulls out a manila folder stuffed with many pages of crazy. She takes a gulp of wine, and then says, "I don't normally read the tabloids--" and already I'm wondering why she feels the need to lie to us "--but I'm pretty fascinated by the Biblical prophecies of Nostradamus. But I'll start with Isaac Newton." And she just sort of...spoke. For, like, 10 minutes (we were told we had a 6 minute time limit) on the Bible, Nostradamus, Isaac Newton, beheadings, church politics of the 1500, the current political situation in Iraq, and none of it made any sense.
I mean, duh, right? But I've got to tell you: I kept hoping that she'd be brilliant. That her extemporaneous crazy talk would actually be filled with insightful things from her past life as a college professor before drink and frontal lobe insanity turned her to shopping bags full of stuffed kitties. But nay nay my friends. That was not to be. She just spoke and spoke and spoke. And then she said, "Thank you." And she was done.
I leaned over to the guy sitting next to me and asked, "Is she here a lot?" He nodded. "Is she always like that?" He leaned closer to me: "Sometimes she's less coherent."
Anyway -- I did fine. I did better than I thought I would -- but I could have done much better. I looked up once or twice during a section I didn't know as well, so I had to sort of make stuff up to get me back to the right sentence. I read "Haircuts and Therapy," a piece I took down awhile back, along with some others, because the hope is they can live happily in a book of essays. It was a very odd experience, reading something I had written and hearing people genuinely laugh. It's also an incredibly energizing experience. I only read the one piece, but I wanted to stand up there and read all the pieces I had brought. And maybe if I had shown up with my own bag of nuttiness, they might have let me.
______________________________
PS: The second weirdest performance of the evening was this woman who read her one-act, 6-character "playlet" to us. She tried to read all 6 characters. It really didn't work. The play itself, too, was incomprehensible: something about weather patterns and periodically she would stop and chortle, like this: "Ho! Ho! Ho!" Which may have been part of the play, but going by the rest of evening -- I'm really not sure.
posted by Mike at 9:05 AM
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