Classic Water

I had an intensive creative period during the spring.

 I was writing and rehearsing for Improv Asylum's Life Before Sext which you can now catch Thursday through Saturday nights at Improv Asylum in the North End. at the same time, I was recording the Explosion Bus web series with Jonathan Katz, which you can start watching on Sept 13th. Also, I had the pleasure of co-writing my second Gorefest script. This time I teamed up with Laura Clark of Improv Boston to create a creepy and disgusting muscial medical horror show entitled Gorefest IX: MASSacre General Hospital. The show opens October 10th but you can already buy tickets online. After such a busy spring, I really didn't do a lot of writing this summer, including, as my brother continues to point out, in my blog(s).

Since yesterday was Labor Day I figured I would reshare my favorite David Berman poem and consider this the official start of my beginning to blog again. Here we go.

"Classic Water"

I remember Kitty saying we shared a deep longing for

the consolation prize, laughing as we rinsed the stagecoach.

I remember the night we camped out

and I heard her whisper

"think of me as a place" from her sleeping bag

with the centaur print.

I remember being in her father's basement workshop

when we picked up an unknown man sobbing

over the shortwave radio

and the night we got so high we convinced ourselves

that the road was a hologram projected by the headlight beams.

I remember how she would always get everyone to vote

on what we should do next and the time she said

"all water is classic water" and shyly turned her face away.

At volleyball games her parents sat in the bleachers

like ambassadors from Indiana in all their midwestern schmaltz.

She was destroyed when they were busted for operating

a private judicial system within U.S. borders.

Sometimes I'm awakened in the middle of the night

by the clatter of a room service cart and I think back on Kitty.

Those summer evenings by the government lake,

talking about the paradox of multiple Santas

or how it felt to have your heart broken.

I still get a hollow feeling on Labor Day when the summer ends

and I remember how I would always refer to her boyfriends

as what's-his-face, which was wrong of me and I'd like

to apologize to those guys right now, wherever they are:

No one deserves to be called what's-his-face.

Classic Water

In honor of Labor Day, my favorite poem by David Berman:

"Classic Water"

I remember Kitty saying we shared a deep longing for

the consolation prize, laughing as we rinsed the stagecoach.

I remember the night we camped out

and I heard her whisper

"think of me as a place" from her sleeping bag

with the centaur print.

I remember being in her father's basement workshop

when we picked up an unknown man sobbing

over the shortwave radio

and the night we got so high we convinced ourselves

that the road was a hologram projected by the headlight beams.

I remember how she would always get everyone to vote

on what we should do next and the time she said

"all water is classic water" and shyly turned her face away.

At volleyball games her parents sat in the bleachers

like ambassadors from Indiana in all their midwestern schmaltz.

She was destroyed when they were busted for operating

a private judicial system within U.S. borders.

Sometimes I'm awakened in the middle of the night

by the clatter of a room service cart and I think back on Kitty.

Those summer evenings by the government lake,

talking about the paradox of multiple Santas

or how it felt to have your heart broken.

I still get a hollow feeling on Labor Day when the summer ends

and I remember how I would always refer to her boyfriends

as what's-his-face, which was wrong of me and I'd like

to apologize to those guys right now, wherever they are:

No one deserves to be called what's-his-face.

Performance Annoucement: Zombies and Improv coming your way.

Two posts in one day is excessive, but after writing so much about improv I realized I had a plug that needed its own post.

There is a performance in Boston tonight you should come see.

Here is the facebook event.
Here is the press release:

The Zombie Apocalypse is coming!

Saturday January 17th
Studio 414 is 551 Tremont St, Boston, MA
ring the buzzer and you will be escorted upstairs

This collaborative, improvisational, audience-participatory performance will incorporate poetry, hip hop, drag, comedy and anything else YOU bring. It will start at 5:30 pm and last until 9:30 pm-- come and leave at any point within that time frame. The space is not handicap accessible. All ages welcome.

The performers will be cycling through the space much as the audience will, so you may see:
Mumbles and the Dust (touring poets extraordinaire)
members of Three Hole Punch , local queer performance artists:
Havalah Grace Backus, M. Hanora and Johnny Blazes
MC Mr. Napkins
Other guests!

everything was exact.

Last night during the 3HP show we did a structure we call "Diary River," where we got a date from the audience and we all read from our 2003-2004 journals (the year we all met.) It's golden. Every time.

And although I'm surprised and even shocked by some of the content, I'm not really embarrassed to share it because A) it's funny stuff, and B) it doesn't matter. It comes down to what Eggers refers to in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius when he writes:
What am I giving you? I am giving you nothing. I am giving you things that God knows, everyone knows...
These things, details, stories or whatever are like the skin shed by snakes, who leave theirs
for anyone to see.

But I feel like the same logic can be applied to keeping these journals in the first place:
So should the snake bring it with him, this skin should he tuck it under his arm? Should he? No, of
course not. He's got no f*cking arms!

I have this large, heavy box of notebooks, dating back to 1993. Literal baggage. But like Eggers' snake, I've shed these skins. So why carry them?
Well, that's easy. Fodder for comedy shows. Because is there anything so endearing as the following?

"A poem:
Shannon is not wicked drunk.
But she is hiccoughing [sic]." 11/16/08

When I read that I remembered the night it referred to, and also recalled a book of two line poems* I had completely forgotten about. Thanks, comedy!
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Nice Hat. Thanks., by Joshua Beckman and Matthew Rohrer whose signatures appear on the same page in my journal as this Shannon poem because I went to hear them read at a book shop in the Valley. And they improvised a poem based on my suggestion. Which I had also forgotten all about

Quarter of a Century

Today I am 25 years old. That is to say, I am a quarter of a century on this earth. I am beginning my 26th year of life. I am a year older (wiser?) than I was when I turned 24. I am finally old enough to rent a car.

To celebrate my birthday my supervisor let me out of work early today. I met up with Quinn and we went to Toro, which is a tapas place not far from BMC. Our waitress spoke mainly Spanish, and so Quinn did all the talking, although I could understand enough to pick out him telling her it was my birthday. She brought us a cookie at the end of the meal, and held two burning candles in her hands while she, beaming, sang Feliz Cumpleanos.

Then I met my Mom and we went for a walk in Forest Hills Cemetery. I know that seems like a weird thing to do for my birthday but you have to go there and then you will know why it's one of my favorite places to go in Boston. It is also right at the end of my street.

So Mom and I have been trying to find e.e. cumming's grave armed with only a crappy map for a few months. We set out determined rain or shine to find it and after an hour and a half we did exactly that. The grave is hard to locate because it is amongst a different family plot, the stone is flush with the ground, and the name is written out "Edwin Estlin Cummings." It is set on a bit of an incline, and we looked around for a landmark so I could easily return. Then, straight across from us, and down the hill I saw my favorite tree in the cemetery.

It's my favorite tree because it's hollowed out and the inside has been bronzed and inscribed with this e.e. cumming's poem:

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth
day of life and love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any--lifted from the no
of all nothing--human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

I took Mom down to the tree and climbed inside because something caught my eye. Since I had last been inside the tree someone had wrapped a book of cumming's poems in plastic to keep in a nook inside. I opened it and read out loud a bit. Even further back in the nook, which I had never once noticed was a journal and a pen. The journal was full of poems and messages from different visitors to the tree. Mom and I wrote our own message, and the sky opened up and began to pour.

I think this is going to be my year.