Loose Leaf Notes

“Phenomenal” was how I described April’s Spoken Word to Joe when I got home from attending last night.  What was most striking about this month’s event was the variety of literary styles that fell under the “spoken word” umbrella and the fact that the roster of performers spanned the generations. There were improv skits, storytelling, sing-a-longs, original songwriting, Peter Pan poems, and more from performers ranging in age from 12 to 70 and up.

The Black Water Loft is an especially photogenic coffee house venue and all the readers looked better against the backdrop of Heather Kappy Keoppe’s dramatic artwork.  Loft host (and Young Actors Co-op director) Rose McCutcheon served up refreshments, and Mara Robbins (pictured above), who opened the evening with a series of poems about the demoted planet Pluto, made everyone feel welcome as the night’s emcee.

The range of performances included every thing from an original Virginia state song, performed by new reader David Henley, to Wolf Cherrix’s memorable vibrating gerbil skit character.  Several Young Actor’s Co-op (YAC) members were in the house, after having just returned from an acting gig in Galax. Coriander Woodruff’s blow-by-blow poetic rant about the underwhelmed audience they performed to had the crowd in an uproar.

Picture this: We have Cameron in a kilt and head band; Wolf in a pink Asian robe on jumping stilts; me in a black-and-white Harlequin outfit on my unicycle; Kyla in a leather jacket and purple hair …  And then …    We drip of stage like ooze from a lab experiment gone wrong…Coriander read.

“Not poetry or prose. What could it be?”  I asked when I took my turn on stage.  In keeping with the night of surprising literary styles, I did one-liners from my blog and nursery rhymes.  Wolf Cherrix, still dressed as his YAC character Emperor Ming, took questions from the audience in an impromptu Q and A session.  Kyla Robbins, who has an American Idol-like local following, sang “Firefly” and later joined her friend Grace Ross (pictured) for a sing-along of John Lennon’s Imagine.

Cheryl Spangler performed an original song about the history of Planet Earth to the tune of The Beverly Hillbillies in honor of Earth Day.  In the story that Greg Locke (pictured above) told, a cigarette fell down his high school buddy’s chest cast and they put it out with a coke.

Poet Arden Hill was visiting from Washington D.C.  He had recently done a featured reading in Boston and is currently preparing to move to Nebraska to get his PhD in creative writing and English at the University of Nebraska.   Among other poems, Arden read a Prairie Sestina … I know the failed cardiogram of cartography before I travel there … While we whisper the distant grass is growing … I will miss you, I will write, is with dread growing up like ambitious prairie weed aimed at the sky …

It’s anybody’s guess who will show up and what will happen at next month’s Spoken Word, scheduled at the Black Water Loft for May 15^th at 7:00.  In the meantime, you can watch an improv skit involving a blind seamstress driving Big Bird and Peter Pan around in a car  HERE. Other video clips are linked in the post above.