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| Jennifer Blowdryer before the reading |
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| Zoe Hansen before the reading |
Monday night, December 12,
at the Yippie Museum Café, the Unbearables (their website is temporarily down while it is being moved and reconstructed in a new, even more unbearable fashion) had a reading. It was great, among the best
readings I’ve been to in recent years.
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| Joanne Pagano |
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| Zoe, Anne Hanavan, Jennifer |
The Unbearables Big Book of Sex is published. Among the writers and artists
represented are woman who know whereof they write: they lived and they are
alive. Their lives demand to be probed, analyzed and reviewed, dragged out and
put on a display of lives examined, put into both past and present, frightening
and fertile, fecund and forgotten, the underside of the underside, the next
thing, exploring territory that nice, middle-aged, middle-class people just
don’t know about.
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| Anne Hanavan before the reading |
As readers, they are
experienced, and their ability to project their experience into their writing
and into their reading of their writing is powerful stuff. They know that they have lived The Life. The question is: do
we want to know? The answer is: it doesn’t matter whether or not we want to,
knowing is important. We ask: can we
imagine ourselves in the place and time of these stories? The answer is: we
live our lives, and there should be no regrets, no apologies for the decisions
that were thrust on us. If at one time or another we did things we wouldn’t do
now, should we apologize or accept that what we did was the needful thing? I
don’t know. I know that the five stories read by five women four of whom wrote
them, the fifth standing in for an absent friend, were suffused with the aroma
of a reality that we might not know but we know is out there, being lived every
day by men and women.
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| Zoe Hansen |
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| Zoe Hansen |
The stories were of
domination, of submission, of passion and cold calculation. These are strong
women, survivors, capable of going beyond the moment and into eternity. What
church will shelter them? They are sisters of mercy, sisters in sin, and they
are redeemed by both mercy and sin. I don’t know if, reading the work they
wrote, I can hear it now with any voice but theirs. Brilliance is a blinding
thing.
The last thing I want to say is I’m glad I was able to salvage the photos. I was having some problems with the lighting and my flash was acting erratically when it was working. Somehow, in their grainy, ill-lit way, they complement the reading.
If you click on a photo it will display full sized.
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| Kathe Burkhart |
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| Kathe Burkhart |
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| Kathe Burkhart |
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| Jennifer Blowdryer |
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| Jennifer Blowdryer |
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| Anne Hannavan |
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| Anne Hannavan |
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| Anne Hannavan |
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| Joanne Pagano |
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| Joanne Pagano |
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| Joanne Pagano |
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| Joanne Pagano and Jim Feast |
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The Unbearables Salute
For those who’ve made it this far, a little treat. Aron Kay - The Pieman, was in the audience. |
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