Main Street Readings: Flash fiction, poetry, and bluegrass!

Dear All,

We are delighted to invite you to read your flash fiction stories at the Valentine's Day Main Street Reading on Sunday night, February 15 at 8 p.m. Before we announce you as the winners of our competition...(etc).The five invited readers and their stories are:

Mack Gelber: "Frosted Flakes"
Sarah Hoffman: "Toaster Angels"
Aries Indenbaum: "The Happiest Place on Earth"
Marilyn McDonald: "A Certain Age"
Anna-Claire Stinebring: "Odd Jobs"

We will be sending out a general announcement soon. Thanks so much and congratulations!
Lynn Powell & David Young


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When I got the note, I started dancing in the library and letting out some jubilant obscenities. I hadn't expected to win, especially for a story I hadn't workshopped, in a style I was new at. It made the whole thing very, very sweet.

The Main Street Readings pair the Creative Writing department with the local community, which is flush with great authors. Events take place at the "New Union Center for the Arts", an old schoolhouse with a giant steeple. I've seen poetry readings there, children's theater, fashion and arts displays. Freshman year, Boredom, a semi-improvised dramedy group, used to perform there. The place reeks of good memories.



Boredom: Guy, the cool older kid, with Shawn, the neighborhood cutie, attached.




The V-Day readings started with the Outhouse Troubadours, a twangy, loud, and totally kickass bluegrass band. The players were tight, their sound was spot-on. Doug, who lived in my dorm last year, is an awesome banjo player. He murdered his solos in gorgeous new ways. Their fiddle, guitar, mandolin and upright bass players were similarly skilled -- the fiddler plays in OSTEEL as well and seems an all-around musical wunderkin.
I know their singer, Alex, who kicked the crack out of her notes. I didn't think Obies could sing with that much country. Best of all, they were all really, really into it. You can always tell when the band actually loves to play, and they did.


Outhouse Troubadours at the Cat, photo credit to Ethan Robbins.



After the band, Nancy Boutilier read love poems. Now, my inner sap aside, I don't really do love poems. They unleash whole new worlds of atrocious. I normally feel a bit nauseated after hearing five. But not now.
Nancy's poems were brilliant. She wrote the way I want to write: explosive, funny, poignant, amazing and sharp. At the end, when she said she liked my piece, I felt like I'd been regaled by sweet angels.



Then, it was the students' turn. Marilyn McDonald had written about elementary school love, which the night's organizer, Lynn Powell, read aloud. Marilyn isn't a student, but a violin teacher in the Con, now playing in DC. Oh, Oberlin. The second writer, Mack, wrote one of the meaningful, thoughtful pieces I can never create. He focused on the frayed relationship between a middle-aged husband and wife. The story was melancholy, but never outright sad, or depressing, just very... realistic. Anna-Claire's piece was incredibly visual, emotional without being melodramatic. It was like watching a gorgeous short film, rather than a story. It was simple--girl has sunburn, boy helps her find pharmacy--but loving in a larger and more gorgeous way.

The third story was easily my favorite of the night. Sarah wrote letters from a man begging forgiveness for his emotional unreachability. The letters were hilarious, describing angels in the toasters, and the alien-ness of the narrator, who called himself an "autistic badger." Sarah had a deadpan, Buster Keaton-esque delivery that proved remarkably effective, reducing the audience to spasms of laughter.


Despite my confidence with storytelling to large groups, I get terrible stagefright if I have to read in public. Like piss-myself-and-cry stagefright. I sat on my hands so they wouldn't shake. There were about 60 people there, but I knew many of them. Somehow, friends are scarier than strangers. My story was also the only "R rated" tale, driving a small family out of the room. It was a story of teenagers in lust, at Disneyworld. Some of my professors were in the audience, and the thought of saying inappropriate things in front of them was galling. Still, I did it.


Afterwards, there was wine and chocolate, the best way to end a weekend.

Is this safe? Safe enough.

Most events at Oberlin start a little late. Timeliness is a virtue, of course, but most shows are friendly to stragglers. Especially at the Cat in the Cream - the line for cookies gets pretty insane. Given that, we expected to close the doors at 8:10, anticipating that by 8:00, the show's start time, we wouldn't have much of a crowd.

Except by 8:00, every seat was taken. And by 8:05, the room was packed.

When Ed started playing accordion with Erika on piano - meant as background "settle it down now" music - the audience took it as an overture. They sat still, went quiet and rapt. I choked down a blissful squeal as Chris and Greg ran up from the audience, yelling, "Welcome, to the Johnson Family Circus!"

Because I'm in an act, I don't watch the whole show. But the parts I saw were brilliant. Jim's act was phenomenal - he worked the crowd into a screaming ball of delight as his LED poi cut new colors into my eyes. The jugglers nailed most of their throws. Amanda's facial expressions were priceless. Greg and Chris added new lines to their scenes, so the dialogue was even punchier.

There were no disasters, no missed cues, the step didn't break this time... It was polished. And good. I felt so proud of every single person involved.

The show's tone was well-balanced. There were cute acts, like the hula-hooper with self-esteem issues, the stepdancer who triumphs over other bullying steppers, the bellydancer who gets the stagehand-clown, an independent mermaid and a ballet act. Then, there were more mature acts, like mine... a bed of nails act.

Over the summer, I saw a circus cabaret in NYC called Vicious Vaudeville that incorporated a bed of nails into a strongman sideshow act very successfully. We like success; we wanted to emulate. So, over Fall Break, Yoshi, Amanda, Nikki, Erin and Atty built this terrifying looking object with the nails spaced an inch apart. It was meant for Yoshi.

But when Yoshi lay down on it, it hurt him. A lot.

But when I lay on it, it didn't. It tickled.

The way a bed of nails act works is basic physics. The amount of surface area you have spread over the nails, the easier it is. Weight and pressure gets distributed evenly - the more nails you cover, the less painful it is. If you drop an apple on the bed, the nails will rip through the apple. If I walked on the bed, the nails would go through my feet. That would be bad.

But, if I lie down on them with my torso flat, my weight more or less evenly distributed... all is well. It's also a helpful thing that I'm really tall (nearly 6 feet) and have a bit of flub around my stomach. It hurt Yoshi most because he's both smaller and slimmer than me. When he lies down, the nails hit bone and muscle, with less surface area to compensate. On me, they hit flub and muscle. Flub is malleable - bones aren't.

Of course, enough people have seen the county fair boards where any volunteer can lie on a bed of nails without a whit of pain tolerance or training. This is why I complicate things, by using less surface area, doing low-level contortion and by ... uh... not wearing a lot of clothes.

Is this safe? Safe enough.

Do I have a spotter? I have two at the ready, a bit offstage!

Does it hurt? Yes, but no.

Should I worry about tetanus? Yes.

Am I going to worry about tetanus? No.

Is it fun? Yes. Oh, yes. In the audience's glare, my adrenaline peaked and my ability to feel pain decreased. For the full houses we brought in, I landed two moves I hadn't before - a split with my hands up, and a cool stretch on my belly. I felt like a million bucks.

I love the circus. I love this show. I love all of you weird, incestuous bastards. It is my great pleasure to work with you all.


--


(Regarding Stress)
Aries: It's super weird, my nose randomly started bleeding in class. It was like my face was menstruating.
Yoshi: It could be humidity change. Or a brain tumor. Hopefully not the latter.