For Valentine’s Day, we headed into San Francisco for a charming event called Writers With Drinks. The basic premise is that you put a variety of writers (and an amusing MC) on stage in a bar, give them free drinks, and see what comes out. There’s a five dollar cover, and there are very few seats, so if you go, go early. It’s held once a month in the Makeout Room, which is a strange little bar in the mission. It’s cash only, and decorated entirely in shiny things.
Now, as a person who once did a science project on whether my friend’s bird preferred shiny objects or food, I can tell you that the shiny things are indeed fascinating, in an inter-species kind of way. There’s tinsel hanging from the ceiling, silver mylar balloons, a disco ball, and several large (I think plastic) deer heads that have been bedazzled with costume jewelry and cast-off bras. (I always wonder how that works–do you come to the bar equipped with extra underwear, planning to leave it on the wall? Do you go bra-less after you deposit your undergarment? Wouldn’t this by necessity limit the decoration to smaller sizes? (Not just in terms of societal and physical comfort, but let me tell you that those suckers are PRICEY.) I wonder what the size distribution of bras removed and left in public is…)
The evening was MCed by the charming and hilarious Josh Kornbluth, who was hands down the most entertaining performer of the evening. Check out his website, buy his book. He made me laugh.
The readers themselves varied pretty wildly. We kicked off the evening with a passage from Anna Furtado, the author of the Briarcrest Chronicles. The Briarcrest Chronicles are a series of vaguely medieval lesbian romances generally (I believe) set in a sort of a nunnery environment. The Briarcrest Chronicles are….how do I say this?…not good. It was like Star Trek meets Redwall with lesbians, only not as cool as that makes it sound. There is a lot of worrying about the whereabouts and sexual preferences of women with elaborate and flowery names, and planning to administer herbs of various kinds to cure their various ills. Despite a little light discussion of breasts, I wouldn’t qualify them as particularly…romantic.
Shanthi Sekaran read from The Prayer Room, a novel consisting primarily (it appears) of a lightly veiled account of her own love life. She was charming and occasionally funny, although not particularly world-shaking.
This was followed by an extremely mixed bag of fairly universally depressing poems by Laurie Glover who has a real affinity for adjectives and word like “rowed” used to mean “lined up in a row.” Also, she likes rocks. A lot.
Then there was intermission, during which I defended our seats and the seats of the nice people we were sharing the table with from marauders, and Chris obtained me a charming drink called a Zephyr. It contained unfiltered sake, lemon vodka, and grapefruit juice, and it was AWESOME. Go and have one immediately. It will fulfill all of your secret citrusey desires. Our New Friend Liza (as in Eliza), with whom we shared our booth, went to buy burritos, and Our New Friend Andrew went to get drinks and look at books. ONFE eventually returned with burritos for her and ONFA, and chips for all.
Then Lorelei Lee (a porn performer and grad student in creative writing) read a story she’d written, which was really very very good, and therefore unmockable.
The final act was a long, long, many times too long short story by Ann Cummins about a weird hypnotist who stole this woman’s belly button and then went on and on and on and ON about it. SNORE.
In retrospect, this post has made it sound really horribly boring, which is totally untrue, mostly because Josh Kornblush was so awesome. It was a really fun, casual, weird night, which was capped off by our COLD, weird, awesome experience at the Millbrae caltrain station where we discovered that the next train wasn’t coming for two hours. We eventually managed (with one barely working cell phone) to find a bus that was going where we wanted in only ONE hour, which we spent hiding in the warm greasy respite of In ‘n Out.
And then the bus smelled like pee and there were sleeping homeless ladies strapped in the wheelchair harness spots, and it stopped loudly every three inches and Chris fell asleep anyhow, and there were a lot of Mancini’s Sleepworlds on the route, the end.
