Alchemy

Just got back from my monthly poetry reading, which was a better event than usual, but there was much weirdness.

Gail

First of  all, Thursday was an aberration, usually it’s the 1st Monday of every month, but they didn’t want to interfere with the upcoming holiday, which is actually V-E day, but Czechs seem to have an attitude that it’s an exclusively Czech holiday, anyway, it’s a day off work, a long weekend and lots of people out of town so I can understand the change, but it cut  my poem writing time by one crucial  weekend.

So, i churned one  out and the crowd was satisfied, but by the time I got up on stage most of the crowd was gone and the rest were emotionally  spent.

I got soaked on the way  there, it started pouring down while I was standing outside Tesco waiting for the  22 so a lot of people were huddled inside the doorway and when the tram came along there was such a jumble between the passengers on the sidewalk, the passengers in the store, and people just trying to get into the store that by the time I got there the doors were closed and it was humming away.  Fortunately, there’s no shortage of trams in Prague and I was only a few minutes late.

The featured performer, on the other hand, was much later, and for much more dramatic reasons.  Gail Whitmore is always awesome, though, and it was worth the wait. Most of the  songs she sang I’d never heard before.  A defiant tune from the musical Gypsy, a love song with some bizarrely high notes (I thought glass was going to crack), a spiritual number about dying  and going to meet the Lord, and a liede from Schubert that was also morbid and dark and was sung in 4 different voices, Gail did them all, and fortunately she explained the story beforehand because my German is not really that good, but I feel as if my cultural consciousness has been raised.

Gail will  also be performing at the upcoming Prague Fringe Festival.