The Null Device

It was an interesting night at Babble (local spoken-word night) tonight; a few months ago, they had a theme night where people recited pieces on a theme ("The Dance"), and these would later be performed as interpretive dances by some interpretive dancers. So I decided to write a piece, in the oversexed vein of a lot of the poetry read there, titled Together We Dance, and containing the line "to the spiralling heights of the cosmic planes of supreme bootywhang".

So I arrived tonight, and was informed by a woman in gothic fishnets that she was going to be performing an interpretive dance to my piece. Which would involve me reading the piece out afterwards. Uh-oh, I thought, and went downstairs, downing a shot of Chartreuse.

Anyway, the dancer (one Lady Hannah Cadaver) came on, writhing erotically in a Sandman-style gas mask and cavorting with an ox tongue, to much applause, and then I went onstage, reading the piece out. (The Chartreuse had, by then, taken effect, allowing me to not feel like a total wanker reading said piece out in front of an audience.) I had persuaded the sound engineer to add a lot of reverb to the vocal when I gave a hand signal, which I gave just before the words "supreme bootywhang". Nobody threw anything at me, so all in all, things went well.

The rest of the night was quite good too; with the possible exception of the guy who went on to do a poem about how his girlfriend fucked up his life and ended up ranting about how Germaine Greer was in league with Hitler and Mao and abusing the audience when he got moved off after exceeding the 3-minute limit. Though, still, that's irritainment.

There are no comments yet on ""