What You Hear is What We Got

I’ve been a fan of The Jess from the first time I clapped eyes on her quick, funny, busy blog, Blind Cavefish. She’s a writer with a unique voice, one that carries far and sweeps particularly wide. Plus we have similar tastes in Really Bad Monster Movies and a fantastically unhealthy tolerance for Great Zombie Flicks, which we devour avidly. If she didn’t like to sit in the back of the theatre instead of down row 3, I’d have proposed by now. (I’m not unreasonable. Row 5 could work for me as well.)

Last night the ongoing WYSIWYG Talent Show reading series, which has been outing blinking bloggers since Valentine’s Day of 2004, took on Summer Camp as its theme. Jess was one of the performers.

Now, Jess will insist that she’s paralyzed by crowds, likely to drape herself with lucky herbs or suck down feline quaaludes or mix red wine with gin fizzes and the like before staggering up under stage lights. When push comes to shove she turns out to be not a trooper, but a natural: easy and funny and charming, with a smile that comes quick and dazzling under theatre lights and a great story to tell.

Overall a terrific show, with Jess positioned between an outrageously funny riff on masturbation, dirty songs, and clueless puppy love by Jonny Goldstein and an equally outrageously funny Cukoo’s Nest story by Susie Felber of being the lone unhandicapped girl at a Special Needs camp (when Mom said “special,” you see, she didn’t mean special special, she just meant “special.” You can see how this could come about).

Round the corner we rolled after the show to sample the new neighborhood beer bar, Hop Devil, where suddenly it was midnight. Hoegaarden was the beer of choice in general, and I stuck with St. Bernardus Abt and Moinette — yummy — and managed to persuade a curious Roxy to plunge her sorrows into a plucky glass of Saison du Pont, which she handled very well and, I think, only regretted slightly, in a “who is this strange man and why is he making me drink strange beer” way.

Then there was pizza — because how could we not? — and a we-been-drinkin’ cab back to the hood with Curly. This morning came on quick and firm. “You,” it said. “You there. Out the bed. Prepare to be boarded.”