9:30. That's when i got out of bed this morning. How mortifying! What a wasteoid I am, sleeping in and leaving little messes all over the house. But last night was fun, so it's worth a little sleeping in.
Leslie, a friend from my writing group, and I went to Porchlight, a storytelling series in San Francisco. People--some of them well-known locally, some of them just regular folks--get up and tell a 10-minute story without the aid of notes or cards. Each night has a theme, which I sense is not so much a thing to centralize the evening as much as it is a jumping-off point for the storytellers.
The week is the Litquake festival in San Francisco, so the storytellers at last night's Porchlight were all writers. One was Joshua Braff, who I'd seen read at last year's Litquake because he was on a memoir panel with my friend Chun (also from writing group). Another was a reformed bank robber, another was a reformed alcoholic, another was a reformed sex addict and color guard member. Oh, and another was a bat magnet.
But one storyteller was sick, so the event hosts promised to put together an impromptu lightening round with audience volunteers: one minute story each, with a bell to signal the end.
Once storyteller, whose name was Edie somethingorather, related a story about some of her wild days, and it involved flying to Orlando for a perspective job with a dicey-sounding company that turned out ot be in the white slave trade business--I guess she was in a slave audition and didn't know it. The story's a little hazy to me, becuase right as she started out she said, "I'm going to do a little audience particiation thing, and ask you guys out there to shout out the first thing you think of when I say 'bohemian'."
"Hairy armpits!" I blurted out right away. It was an unstoppable, knee-jerk reaction, like she'd reached out to the balcony where we were sitting and prodded an exposed nerve with a long, poky stick. So the storyteller went on, incorporating the hairy armpit metaphor into her story about being bohemian, but I got the sense that she had been fishing for a metaphor that was not hairy armpits, and I spent the rest of her story regretting my blurt and feelign badly about throwing her off.
During intermission, I volunteered to do the lightening round. I wanted to clear this thing up. They drew my name first--maybe because I volunteered first, who knows--and I was all rearin' to go. One minute! I stepped up to the mic and started:
"So you know how Edie was up here telling her Florida limo white slave story and she asked the audience to shout out something that was bohemian and someone yelled 'Hairy Armpits!' Well, that was me, because I had hairy armpits when I was in high school, and I saw them as emblematic of my rebellion agains the close-mindedness I encountered in the small Ohio town where I grew up. All of these boys thought I was a lesbian because of my armpit hair, but I was horny for boys and I was like, 'no, no, I'm not a lesbian, hairy armpits don't make you a lesbian, lesbians shave, too!' I was very hairy. Like Sampson, my hair--only in this case, the hair in my armpits--gave me strength: the strength to be an annoying reactionary feminist. Growing my armpit hair became a hobby, almost.
"So one day I was browsing through a bookstore and picked up an illustrated sex dictionary. At that point, I'd never even touched a penis or anything...well, in the book I saw an illustration of a sex act consisting of a penis in an armpit--"
DING! The story was over. I had to stay up on stage while the other volunteers told their one-minute stories, none of which I remember because I was very distracted about having ended on the penis-in-armpit note. I never got to make it to the payoff of the story, which was not about kinky sex but about my eventual compulsion to expel my body hair, which is how I gave myself this awful haircut with these silly bangs.
Every storyteller after that alluded to penis-in-armpit. I was busted! Porchlight takes place in a large music hall, called the Swedish American Music Hall (it smells like an old church!), and there must have been at least a hundred fifty people there. I was wearing a red, black, and white striped shirt, as easy to spot as a target. I felt eyes boring into me, projecting all kinds of strange suppositions on me. I think it's just paranoia.
Well, I'll finish the penis-in-armpit story here in this venue someday, just form the sake of completetion, but I must warn you: it's vastly anticlimactic. Leslie and I went downstairs to Cafe du Nord after the event so Leslie could have a pizza, and we were surrounded by young hipster kids, and I felt a little more safe, for some reason.
When I got up this morning, I saw little things all over the house that let me know what Joe did while I was gone. He bought Pop Tarts at Albertsons; used the last of the Eucarin; hung a skateboard on the wall. I think it's good he was at home and not at the Swedish American Music Hall, watching his wife tell an audience of hundreds about the penis and the armpit.
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