Cheers to Halloween!

I love Halloween. And I don't mind that the build-up for holidays goes on for a whole month with this particular holiday. The whole glorious month of October is filled with candy, falling leaves, carving pumpkins, scary movies, skeletons, and all that other creepy stuff that, for some reason I can handle so much better than I can handle the overly cute fat cherubs that seem to accompany every other holiday. Halloween is like a reset button for flushing all the cute crap out of my face. Cheers to you, Halloween. Cheers to you, for saying boo to the rest of the year.

True Stories

My graduate school has this really interesting thing where they try really hard to get everyone to be a cohesive group. They have a lot of happy hours and events all organized by this group called the EGSA, or the English Grad Student Association. This all seems like a really cool, healthy, non-English majory environment, the only problem is that somehow I have totally managed to avoid all interaction with these people, through no real intention of my own.

For instance, the main event of all this, the kicker, was a barbeque held at the Department Head's house the first week of school on the day, of course, that I was moving into my new apartment. In the normal world, missing something like that is not a big deal, however it has actually been pointed out to me by other EGS's that I wasn't there and that this is not acceptable. And only in a half-kidding sort of way.

The second issue is that somehow, I got into the two most unusual classes on the schedule, apparently. Not the content of the classes themselves, but the attendance. Every other class I've seen is replete with students, and I hear them talking about their classes in the library and in the grad lounge. However, I am the ONLY English grad student in one of my classes (trust me, it's obvious) and there are only seven of us in the other.

All of this build up to say that Tim and I finally tried to make it to one ESGA event on Friday , a Ghost Tour in Old Town Alexandria, so we could meet some of these elusive people. We were five minutes late getting to the meeting spot and not a soul was there (five minutes, people!?). We had no info about where everyone was going from there, but after overhearing someone on the phone mention a ghost tour we got a hint and hunted down the spot. They were long gone, but the tour organizers nicely let us onto the next tour without making us pay again.

I love ghost tours, but I will admit that the one in Dover, England, where a) a lot more people have actually died in Clifford's tower and b) our tour got chased by this manic duck that kept biting people, was a lot more exciting.

Anyway, we went 17 metro stops to meet a bunch of people who we never saw. They weren't at the cafe where they were supposed to meet afterward either. I know there are other grad students out there. I've just still never met them.

On the other hand, yesterday Tim and I went to AU because my History of the Book class read a graphic novel called Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel, and American had hosted a colloquium on her work that day. The colloquium ended with her giving a talk which was really entertaining and actually fairly amazing. She brought slides of her illustration process and of some of the photos she used to create a number of the illustrations in the book. She also brought slides of some of her favorite comics as a kid and of her own comic strip, Dykes to Watch out For.

The talk was funny, and enlightening, and sad too. My favorite authors to listen to are always the ones who are a little mystified by their own process as well, and who may not exactly know the answers to everyone's questions, but who still manage to tell you something about the book that you never, ever could possibly have gotten by just reading it, or by reading an interview or an article.

The book is a memoir about Bechdel's relationship with her dad, his sudden death, and the fact of his closeted homosexuality in relationship to her coming out. After she gave her talk, people asked questions (and I don't think a single person asked a question that wasn't a question, it was, in short, a miracle) and because she was so funny, someone asked if she was funny in her family and she said, "yeah. I was. My mom is funny and I think learned that from her. I loved to make my dad laugh, but it's not like that was hard, you know. He laughed at the road runner. Someone pointed out once that there's not a single picture in the book where my dad doesn't look very stern and serious, so... you know... ...it's not a true story."

I love that.

Hurry! Hurry! Hurry! Step Right Up!

In addition to the new trend seeing strangers vomit in public (which I've now see twice in the past three weeks--once on a metro bus and once echoing majestically across the National Mall), Saturdays are emerging as a key player in my week.

It's not that Saturdays weren't always awesome, it's just that now I think about Saturday all week because I have time to, and then I get to hang out with Tim, as opposed to before when he got to hang out with me.

(I'm just going to tell you right away that this is a two part post. Here is the table of contents: Part I: The National Book Festival, or For Those About to Read, We Solute you; Part II: The Palace of Wonders, or What is the Recommended Dose of Burlesque for a Man of My Height?

Part I:

So--the point of this is that last Saturday we went to the National Book Festival, which is Laura Bush's legacy and brain child. It's like a giant rock festival, with eight stages, and food vendors, crowds of people waiting for autographs, rain or shine--only with authors instead of Van Halen. It's also exactly like VooDoo Fest or ACL in that you have to time which authors you want to see perfectly, and run back and forth between the tents, unless there's basically only one genre you care about and then you can stake out one spot all day and just send people to go get food and drinks.

It is NOT like a music festival in that I never saw anyone's DMB tattoos, smelled any pot, or was offered any hemp clothing, knock-off hats, t-shirts, henna tattoos, "tobacco" pipes, or stickers for purchase. However, I did get two free tote-bags and a children's book. Last year they gave out free bottled water. There were still plenty of puppies and babies.

Part of these shenanigans are author signing booths, where you can get your books autographed throughout the day, and the signing schedule does not remotely correspond with the speaking schedule. I'm going to leave out all the details, suffice to say that Tim had to carry around five of my John Irving books, a Lois Lowry and a Junot Diaz all day and not one of them got signed. There are DC residents far more dedicated than I.

While half of what I imagine where the teachers and librarians of the DC public school system waited in line to have John Irving sign their dog-eared copies of A Prayer for Owen Meany (sigh), Tim, Josh and I went to hear Lois Lowry speak at the Children's tent. Tim is probably right, she probably would be best friends with his Nana. I can see them going out for breakfast. But only if they take me. Also, she wanted everyone to know that Jonas isn't dead.

After that, I headed to the Fiction tent where I heard Julia Alvarez accidentally; I was waiting for John Irving. She is a Dominican author and was an excellent speaker. Everyone who asked her questions asked them in Spanglish because they were so excited to speak to her, which made me happy.

Then came John Irving. Now, I kind of want to just lump the next four authors into one story because it's more like, "then came John Irving, followed by Nicholas Sparks (whom I wanted to murder), followed by Junot Diaz and Colson Whitehead (who completely negated Nicholas Sparks and can be in my murder-posse if they want to)".

Here's the point: John Irving, Junot Diaz, Colson Whitehead, and Julia Alvarez (though I didn't know about her until I heard her speak) all write books from somewhere more than their brains or their hearts or (ugh) their souls. They write books because they just do. John Irving said about his repeated themes of wrestling, and flawed, fragile, otherworldly children that it frustrates his critics, but that a writer doesn't chose his obsessions, that they obsess him. That, as a writer, and probably as a human, if you're not repeating yourself, it's because you have nothing important to say. He said he took nearly 20 years in writing his latest book because he knew it had to be in third person, but he couldn't figure out how. It kept coming out in first person. It seems like a small issue, but it's everything. And it's worth waiting 20 years to write the book correctly.

Someone asked Junot Diaz about the connection he felt with Oscar Wao now that it's out in the world and he said, "writing that book was so painful, for so long. There is so much of my life in that book. I handed it to the publisher and I was like 'fuck you, book.'" He won the Pulitzer Prize.

Nicholas Sparks got on the stage and talked about how when he writes his books he always thinks, "what have I never, ever, done before. I want all of my books to be totally different. I've done teenagers in love, I can't do that. What about a young man? I can't do a book about two 60 year-olds falling in love for the first time. If you're just now falling in love we've got something to talk about." And my first thought was, "yes! you do have something to talk about. That DOES sound like a story." Then he talked about how he got his inspiration for his most recent book...

Disney asked him to write it for Miley Cyrus. So they could make a movie and fulfill her contract.

Makes your soul sing.

He talked about how he hates his wife's girlie dogs, but loves his manly dogs, how he coaches a winning track team, how he runs a christian school that "accepts everyone" (I've heard that before) and then he was literally said "well, now you know how awesome I am!" (no seriously) and left.

He is what Colson Whitehead would call a "Fake-ass Members Only Jacket Wearin' bitch."

Part II

A few days before we moved into this apartment, I discovered this:





I also discovered that they have Real! Live! Amazzzzing! Burlesque shows almost every day in addition to being a ridiculous "dime-museum" and bar. And what's more! more! more! is that they're eight blocks from my house. The only problem is that when I made this Spectacular! discovery, we were moving in to our new place, Tim was starting his job, and I was starting school. The show I really wanted to see, The Skullduggery and Skin Show, is on the first Saturday of every month, which was exactly the day that we moved in here. Boo! Hisssss!

So, I somehow managed to keep this ridiculousness a secret for a whole month, and it was a surprise up to the moment that Albert Cadabra, the MC, came out and swallowed a 30" balloon. The show included magic, Ruby the Wonder Dog (jumping through a flaming hoop!), Gal Friday doing burlesque of course (notable numbers include a tribute to Spinal Tap with the song, "Big Bottom." Turn it up to 11.), and this month's special guests: Clowns Betty Bloomers and Jellyboy.

It may be a little hard to tell with the woman's head in the way, but this is a photo of Jellyboy having swallowed a 23"(?) sword with a flame thrower on the end... and then bending over and lighting it. What you also can't see is all the people standing along the wall, trying very hard not to catch on fire.

Before swallowing the world's record length-sword for us, Betty Bloomers also hung upside down and swallowed a coat hanger... which was a little gross when she bent it inside her esophagus... but then there were a number of points in the show when the MC would say "Do you want to see (blank)" and we would all scream "YEEEAHHH" and then we would all scream "NOOOOOOO!" (i.e. Jellyboy drinks wine from a tube wrapped around his head, through his nose, out his mouth, around his head and into his mouth again. Yum. Yum. Yum.)

However, she also did a beautiful fire eating act that had everyone completely entranced. Not that it's difficult to entrance drunk people, and having a) a beautiful girl, b) magical music, and c) fire, helps, but it really was sort of breathtaking and amazing.

During intermission Gal Friday raffled off a hand made tote bag full of B Movies, home made pasties, a whoopie cushion (perfect for date night?) lots of candy, a signed pin-up and lots of other goodies. Of course, the winner was the one Bachelorette in attendance with her horde of pink-tiara'd companions. I would say the drawing was rigged but even Albert Cadabra was like, "you? Oh god. Of course."

Sorry we didn't get any pictures of the burlesque... I guess we were distracted.