The unannounced reading

After a day full of errands, I got home at 5:45 pm and found a message in email from one of the Litquake organizers -- who is also my agent -- saying she'd had two cancellations for the LitCrawl event she was MCing, and could I jump in as a last-minute replacement?

I just had time to print off a part of a chapter from my current novel project, then I picked up my friend Katia and gave her a ride to her venue -- she was also reading, but at a different venue 5 blocks from mine, and 75 minutes earlier -- and parked. Well, I was a little early for my event, but I took the time to edit my piece in light of the fact that I was reading it out loud.

Finally the venue, the upstairs theater at The Marsh, opened, and I connected with the MC/agent, who was surprised and glad to see me. I sat there while the venue opened and filled, still editing my piece, and chatting with the other authors, including Katia's friend Elizabeth Stark.

Then I read, and I must admit -- I killed.

I read a short piece of what is essentially office comedy, making fun of the silly bureaucracy and pettiness of modern corporate life. An easy target -- but it was fun to do. Here's an excerpt:

Inside the lobby, next to the ATM, was a coffee cart with seven people in line. Stella joined the line. Every month when she did her bills she told herself she was spending too much on café latte, but most mornings she stopped at the coffee cart. While she was waiting in line, twenty or thirty people came into the lobby and walked directly to the elevators -- people with more self-discipline, or people who didn't like coffee as much. She knew it couldn't be the fact that they could not afford to buy double latte every day, because she recognized many of them from work, and she knew they'd been there longer and made more money than she did.

There went Joyce Babbage, a marketing director in Customer-Facing OnLine Services, followed by her minion Kathi, who was carrying a stack of boxes from the Kinko's around the corner. Stella smirked. They weren't supposed to use Kinko's, they were supposed to send work in-house to Duplicating. But Joyce thought she was above the rules, so brazen about it that she got Kinko's boxes carried right through the lobby.

Stella advanced in the line and was now third. There went Chet Pratt, a product manager in a department somewhat related to hers. Chet liked to throw his weight around and make other departments do his group's work and call it Mission Sharing. Then when somebody asked him to do something, he was always Overcommitted.

In addition to Elizabeth's piece, I really loved the excerpt from Joshua Gamson's biography The Fabulous Sylvester.

What fun! I'm sorry I didn't know about it in advance so friends could attend. But in a way it was nice to know that I didn't know anybody -- no friends cheering me on, the audience's reaction was completely off the cuff and genuine. Nice feeling. Not that I'm not totally grateful when friends come too!