Lose Yourself, Lose the Heat
Last Thursday night, the third and final night of a record-breaking heat wave, there was not much that could make anyone in New York forget the heat. There was talk of a thunderstorm, a darkening sky, hopeful gusts of wind, but no cracks of thunder, no rain, no relief. And then there was a reading at Paragraph with Katherine Lanpher and Melissa Bank, which gave about fifty people a surprising lift, a good 45 minutes to lose yourself in storytelling. And lose yourself, lose the heat.
The reading started at eight o'clock. It should have cooled down by then, but the thermometer was holding steady in the mid-nineties and the humidity wasn't far off. The 50,000 BTU air conditioning unit at Paragraph was chugging on high, but it had lost the battle earlier the afternoon and hadn't quite regained that ground. The writing space was warm and sticky. Moving the podium and chairs into place, setting up wine glasses, we broke a sweat. We worried. Would anyone show up in this heat? If anyone did show up, would the writing space get unbearably hot? We set up more wine glasses and unwrapped the cheese.
Katherine Lanpher was the first reader to arrive. Katherine was the celebrated co-host of The Al Franken Show on Air America. She's an accomplished journalist, a seasoned and articulate radio personality, and her newly published memoir has gotten a starred review in Publisher's Weekly. And she's nervous. This is the first time she's reading, ever. We're honored. We assure her we're a great place for a first reading. At least it usually is, when there's not a heat wave. We keep setting up, open up bottles of wine, turn up the air conditioning.
Melissa Bank arrives not long after Katherine, and we're glad because Katherine's warned us that Melissa's usually late, and we're not sure how long people will wait around in this heat. The kitchen is filling up with people and conversation. The chairs in the writing space are also filling up and nobody seems too disturbed that we're unable to chill the space as well as Barnes & Noble or DSW Shoes. Phew.
Melissa and Katherine share a cigarette, get out their pre-reading jitters, and then we start the reading. Before Katherine begins, she talks about how she came to write her memoir, an account of her move from the Midwest to New York City to join Al Franken on his radio show. The book details her hilarious acclimation to becoming a true New Yorker, the familiar and tenderly lighted personalities of the New Yorkers Katherine encounters in her first few months, but she tells us another New York story in the writing of it.
Katherine did most of the writing of her memoir, Leap Days: Chronicles of a Midlife Move, in her New York City apartment. And in that apartment building, Katherine found a group of people who wanted to hear her stories. On cold, winter Friday evenings, she'd pad upstairs to a neighbor's apartment where she'd find her reading group anxiously waiting to hear her latest chapter read aloud. And in this way, Katherine had an invaluable resource that every writer needs--eight trustworthy ears to listen to her work and help her flesh out the book. Katherine pointed to the four people seated on the couch to her left -- those same eight ears were here now, at the reading, looking as ready as ever to listen.
Next was Melissa Bank. She read a fictional New York story, the titular short story from her latest collection, The Wonder Spot. In the story, a woman is self-consciously in a relationship with a younger man. The story takes place in a setting ideal for making any woman self-conscious of her age feel more self-conscious, a party in hip Williamsburg. When the narrator confesses into her boyfriend's bad ear that she feels old and he fetches her a jacket, we know this most likely will not end well. Though Melissa takes us through many painful moments of the party, peaking in a conversation with an ex-boyfriend who's changed his name and brought along a centerfold model as a date, she spares us a final tragedy, and gives us a glimmer of hope that this may not be another relationship that gives into the insecurities of one night.
And then the lights came up, and we realized that it was still ninety something degrees, we were still stuck in the middle of a blasted heat wave, and the room we were sitting in had gotten about five degrees warmer since the beginning of the reading. But for the last forty-five minutes, we had forgotten. We had been taken away with the stories of these women finding their way in New York City, and like any great reading, the rest went away.
