Story Reading review

Jed held a story reading at my request, and it was excellent! There were about a dozen people, ranging from people I didn't know to people I've known since the late '80s (Arthur E., Deb H.,...) to people I've only known a year or two (Evan LaF.). It went for over three hours, with a slightly higher poetry quotient than normal.
Highlights:
* Arthur reading a story which he later revealed was non-fiction, outrageous tales of excesses in an emperor's palace told by servants. It turns out Haile Selasse's Ethiopia was quite the pre-Revolutionary France.
* Kathleen reading a short story which used no vowels besides 'a'. It was a tour de force that would have been even more impressive if it'd been shorter -- after a while the coherence problems of being unable to say 'is' or 'the' or any pronouns got tiring. There are apparently four other stories in the collection, one for each of the other major vowels.
* Simon (who I hadn't met before) reading a beautifully worded and often hilarious excerpt from John Steinbeck's The Log from the Sea of Cortez, a memoir of a long sailing trip in Baja California. Best line of the entire evening: "[Our outboard motor] required the same amount of gasoline whether it ran or not."

and, most stunning of all,
* Jed performing "Clear Glass Marbles", a monologue from the play Talking With. He prefaced it by saying that four of his friends had had their mothers die in the last year, and the story made a breath-catching tribute.


So, I missed the English-Scottish Ball, I missed They Might Be Giants... yet somehow not being in Swarthmore tonight was satisfying anyway.