Raging Reading
All fifty rental chairs were taken, most of our regular desk chairs had been wheeled out, others had staked out standing spaces inside empty cubicles and there was still fifteen minutes until the official start of the reading. And people were still pouring in--single file lines moving through the entrance hall, huddles around the cheese plate and a marching line making their way up the spiral staircase to sit on the balcony. 
We carried chairs from the cafe into the writing space to provide additional seating, bumping and excusing as we went. In the end, 100 chairs weren't enough and we kicked off Paragraph's one-year anniversary party and reading to a standing room only crowd willing to put up with body heat, impaired views and limited seating to see Amy Hempel, AM Homes and Howard Fishman perform. Or perhaps they were there for the promise of free champagne and cake. Free and cake are a persuasive pair of words.
Let's take a step back and talk about the cake. Did you see the cake? The cake was nothing short of amazing. When we had started planning the party, we thought a cake would make it particularly festive. After all, our business was turning one, and the first birthday should always be celebrated with much fanfare. It takes a lot to stay in business a year. And we'd not only done it, we'd done it successfully.
Our vision was an orange pilcrow, the backwards 'P' symbol, which in copywriting shorthand signals the start of a new paragraph, and in our world, is the shorthand for our business name, the cute symbol in the upper left corner of our logo. We wanted it to be orange.
We found a woman downtown willing and able, but she had even better ideas. She proposed our whole logo, wavy lines, pilcrow and all topped off with a "Happy Birthday Paragraph" in cursive cake script. Superb. The end product? It can't be described, it can only be marveled at. Any person who greeted us that evening was shown straight to the cake. "Have you seen the cake," we'd ask, grab and elbow and pull to the table for bragging rights.
What took the cake, pun intended, were the performers. Most readings are not for the feint of heart. For the majority of people, and even some writers, readings have as much general appeal as a peewee T-ball game, and maybe less, because readings are indoors with uncomfortable seating. For instance, I would never bring my father to a reading because I would never hear the end of it, and it would be a long while before he would take a recommendation for a movie or restaurant without bringing up that reading I took him to. This is not to say my father's uncultured, but that readings take a very particular taste. Except when the readers are Amy Hempel and AM Homes.
If you've never heard Amy Hempel read, do. Humble and confident, Amy Hempel does not read to you, she infects you with her prose. Amy's writing is powerful on the page, but overwhelming when she reads it, melodic and mesmerizing with a meaning only the creator's voice can bring. I want to say something here about the Siren's call, but that seems metaphorically over the top, though correct in meaning. She read Jesus' Waiting, a story of a woman with an endless amount of driving ahead of her. During her journey, the woman contemplates fast food choices, mows down parking cones, drinks only free motel coffee, listens to Al Green's Jesus' Waiting obsessively (thus the title), and sends cryptic postcards to the ex-lover who made her the Al Green tape, and finally, with little relief, crosses the Hudson to New York City.
AM Homes, the next reader, was not always known as AM Homes. Her first name is Amy. She recounted to the audience how, early on in her career, she had changed her name from Amy to AM so that people would stop mistaking her for Amy Hempel, an irony not lost on the crowd. AM (Amy) read from her upcoming novel, This Book Will Save Your Life, a title she admitted that she had tried to append with "Maybe," and then thought better than to self-deprecate. The scene was of a man in his fifties experiencing sudden, unexplainable and severe pain. Alone in his house in southern California, the man telephones 9-1-1, and from the moment he picks up the phone for help until days later, when he is convincing the cabbie driving him home from the hospital to stop at a donut shop, AM's eye for the stark and humorous in the loneliness of our lives never faltered, not for a moment, not if we had begged it to.
Next to the podium was Howard Fishman, a versed and deft musician who can make an acoustic guitar as satisfying as an orchestra, and an all-around nice guy who showed up early and ran out to get us dinner while we prepped for the party. He chose songs that were a narrative of the Donner expedition, the famed trailblazers who got buried in thirty feet of snow in the Sierra Nevada’s while making their way to California. He told personal stories of their journey to give us a glimpse into their lives, which backed by his strumming, let us know how hopeful, sad and lovely it must have been.
And finally, we popped open the champagne and got ready for cake. Or more literally, the champagne popped itself open. Too much time in the freezer turns champagne into a Slurpee, and the rising slush pushed off a few corks. The bottles overflowed, as they must have done every night in the roaring 20's, and we poured and called everyone to toast. On the balcony, we recounted our last year in an unprepared speech, and in recounting in an unprepared way, did not make recall much beyond the renovation--the terrors of finding commercial space, chipping plaster off brick, the woes of a three-story walk-up when it comes to moving--but we did manage to gush, raise our glasses and say thanks.
Afterwards, a member said he wished we had basked more in our moment. And thinking about this, getting over the embarrassment of what might have been a diplomatic way of telling us our speech sucked, it seemed more appropriate that we did not bask. More along the lines of what we had done and believed for the past year, which is creating a space for everyone else to enjoy and make their own, a space in which to write, a space that seems it has little to do with us.
And then we ate cake!
