Saturday Night’s Alright For…

On Saturday afternoon, after a morning round of chores and stuff, I tend to take naps, thanks in part to a wonderful woman now a source of good influence in my life.

Anyway, after awakening & feeling as if I was semi-coherent, I got ready on this particular Saturday evening to do something I haven’t done in a long, long time which was to go out and read poetry in a corporate bookstore setting.

I’ve always disdained that sort of thing, primarily because it’s like walking a fine line between what you can do and what you can’t do & in some ways, it’s like trying to please a bunch of stuffy theater critics on the opening night of a brand spanking-new musical.

It reminds me of the time I used to record and broadcast public service announcements for an FM radio station in West Lafayette, Indiana and had to find the proper voice between A.M. & F.M. radio, which made me sound a little too flowery and feminine, but that’s another blog for another time.

In the previous days before this Saturday, I received an email from the reading’s coordinator telling me among other things that he liked my blog and what I post on there is strong. A mishegas master like me always appreciates flattery like that whenever it comes around.

I could see that he was trying to make peace with me after months and months of verbal strikes against each other via email. So in light of that, I decided to ring him up and talk to him. We talked for about half an hour up to 45 minutes before he had to hang-up.

At some point during the telephone conversation, he invited me out to come and read at the new venue, whenever I felt like it, just as long as I would email him first before I arrived. So I did. And I told him I wanted to come and read the following Saturday, July 23 & so after a few phone calls & emails, we got it sorted out and so the time was set.

As the day approached I wondered to myself what I had planned to read. I couldn’t think of a lot to read, as I haven’t been really writing a lot of new poetry, mostly blogs & new fiction and it’s kind of discouraged to read longer manuscripts or works at this place, so I knew most of my blogs would be unsuitable for this open mic. Finally, I started going through my poetry folders and I found a few new ones that hadn’t seen the light of day other than being read to friends or blogged about, so I picked those.

It took a while to get there, approximately 30 minutes, but I was lucky; Saturday night traffic had died down on Golf Road, the one-shot deal road I was driving down to get to the corporate bookstore. When I pulled into the driveway I saw the reading coordinator who acknowledged me, as I pulled into a parking spot. When I walked over toward him, we made small talk and I stuck out my hand and said, “It’s good to see you again.” He shook my hand. That was a good sign.

And so I got there and found a place to sit. I was still teething and struggling with my toothache or gum-ache, not just sure which, but I had brought a toothbrush with my special liquid cocaine to soothe me quite adequately, I might add.

I waited my turn for my name to be called in order of appearance to read, kind of like a human delicatessen as it were. I was placed toward the end & had asked the reading coordinator earlier when we were outside if he could do that. He had apparently decided to put me toward the end anyway, which I believed was planned, but always as a parachute, in case situations didn’t exactly go as planned, you know stuff like that.

Overall, I believe the reading went well, though personally, I didn’t think the first poem that I read, which I had written about a friend who spent some time in an insane asylum was performed with much gusto. Everyone else seemed to like it, including a friend & co-worker of mine who did come to cheer me on.

The next set of poems was a trilogy of mice poems I had written based on my mice problem in my apartment earlier this year, when everyone I knew was made me feel bad; I lost a few friends over this or made me the butt of their jokes. In any event, those seemed to go over well, so I thought my humor hadn’t exactly died either.

The night was filled with potential. What I expected did happen. It was a little boring, a little predictable, a little stale, a little sweet, a little sour, a little funny, but hey, most events are if you don’t have a full focus or heart into it.

After it was over, the reading coordinator asked me to join them for dinner, as is their tradition after every reading they hold at a local restaurant in which they talk the night away.

At first I said I would go, but as the night wore on, I chose not to go and instead stayed and talked to my friend for a long time. After that, I wandered around the corporate bookstore and looked at all the pretty books and shiny CDs that cost much too much to afford for my pocketbook & instead got a free drink of tap water to fill up my water bottle and headed for home.

If I wasn’t feeling so terrible that night, as I had to pull off the side of the road and into a parking lot and brush my teeth with my liquid cocaine, I might have taken him up on his offer.

As I say whenever a missed opportunity comes along, there’s always next time.