Performance

Erin began the festivities by stepping up to the microphone with a rather elaborate looking zine and a bucket.
“This is the zine we have just put out. Twenty people collaborated on it, and a lot of care was put into it. We’re very proud of it. It is called “Falling Slowly to the Earth,” and many of the contributors will be reading their pieces from it tonight. We will be passing out free copies so you can read along if you so choose. We ask for a $5 contribution to cover the costs of publishing. If you can’t afford the $5, anything within reason you can give will be appreciated. After our 6 contributors are done, we will have an open mic where you can come up and do whatever you want, but we ask that you keep it under 5 minutes, or under 10 minutes at the absolute maximum—maybe if you’re really killing everyone,” Erin continued, “Anyhoo, without any further ado, I will begin this performance, as the first of six contributors to read.”
Erin’s story concerned how she lived on Long Island with her father, who was divorced from her mother, and how she hung out in a tree-house and read Kurt Vonnegut and Jack Kerouac and how she wanted to escape her mundane suburban high-school existence and go to New York and be an artist. I loved her story. It was very honest, and there was nothing pretentious about it, despite its subject matter. It only made me want to go out with her more. Luckily, Liz told me that she really loved the story too.
The second kid that came up read a poem about being alone in Williamsburg. His poem was about talking to a girl (any girl, every girl) at a bar in Williamsburg, and having to go outside to smoke a cigarette, and giving her one, and talking to her about peripheral, “cool” things, while avoiding saying what he really wanted to say to her, what he couldn’t say to her in person, but what he wrote in the poem: we both like the Pixies, we are both such hipsters, if we are so much alike than how come we both refuse to fall in love with each other? I didn’t really like the poem so much. It came off as clammy. I don’t know if people describe poems as clammy, but if there ever was a clammy poem, that was it.
To be honest, I was pretty drunk at this point, and I couldn’t really tell you what the other 4 contributors sounded like. I had continued to drink vodka tonics. All I remember was one kid getting up to the open mic and trying to remember a rap he had written, and messing it up halfway through, and then saying “sorry, let me try another one I wrote,” and then proceeding to mess that one up halfway through. I gave him some conciliatory applause, but it was really a joke.