A brief email from John has updated me on how the primer of Cake the opera went. Both casts did a great job in both performances and John is still in love with the projection based scenery he and a buddy created. The producer loved it and wants to try and get a scene or two performed again -- my layman's understanding is that there are frequently productions that aren't full operas but are more like opera samplers. That news is great and I'm really excited for John and all the opportunities he now has to choose from.
Monday night was the reading given by my lit class. This is my Folklore and Fairy Tales course. Since the course is made up of a mix of students (primarily teachers working on getting masters degrees in English education, but also a couple of undergrads about to graduate, a woman about to get her PhD in medieval literature and two MFA candidates) the professor offered us a range of options for the reading. Most of us read poems that had been published by well known authors -- all about fairy tales, of course -- and the rest of us read poems we'd written ourselves. Given those options I figured that as an MFA candidate it was my duty to write a poem instead of just find one. So I did.
I was incredibly amused by my poem in the end. I retold Little Red Riding Hood from the point of view of the friendly neighborhood woodcutter and I just ended up burying this thing six feet deep in innuendo. I finished with the three page long poem Monday morning (roughly seven hours before I had to perform it -- fear of humiliation and a deadline are great motivators) , stepped back and said, woah, that's a dirty poem.
The reading wasn't recorded but I did a quick recording on my computer of one of my practice runs (yes John, Audacity is amazing) and you can now listen to the recording on my website. I have the typed copy but it's so rough right now that I don't want to put it up right now. However, after some editing, I do hope to submit it to the Fairy Tale Review (literary journal) as they're currently putting together their "Red" issue all about you-know-who.
I'd also like to put in a plug for Kazoo Books, the locally owned and operated book store where we had this reading. The space over at Kazoo Books is great, big enough to have a reading, but small enough that you feel really excited to have 30 people in the room. They sell new and used books and I think I'm going to have to spend some time at both of their locations next month.
Highly Recommended
