Poetry reading

My friend Richard, who's a talented writer, let me know that he had a reading in Cambridge on Saturday night. We wanted to go, both to hear his work and to support him. We started the evening with dinner at our favorite little Eritrean spot.

Then we moved over to the art gallery where the reading was taking place. Later, I read on the web that this poetry reading series has gone on every week since 1971 and is now at home in this particular gallery.

The woman who owns the gallery is warm and welcoming and clearly wanted to make everyone feel at home. So she started out by reading poems from her self-published book about her childhood sexual abuse. Just when I thought she was winding down, she'd read another. This was the kind of material that you work out with a brave therapist and rarely with an audience of 30.

I guess that opened things up because the next reader started with a poem that Robert, kind as ever, called "raw," another howl about horrific mistreatment. I kind of wish they'd warned us so that I could have run out to the sidewalk and taken up smoking again.

A regular stood up and read a love poem to his wife about how their wedding anniversary coincided with the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire so that the young women who worked and died at the factory would never know the love that he and his wife got to experience. Um, yeah, so what does he write in a hate poem? He closed with a letter to the Globe editor he'd sent five years ago decrying the Abu Ghraib treatment as "torture," I think trying to show that he'd named it long before anyone else had.

Just when I thought I couldn't bear to sit in the metal unpadded chair any longer, just when I thought my friend Richard was going on, someone in the back said that she wanted to read. Ohhh kayyy... Robert, pulling out all the stops, said "I had an uncharitable thought. [pause] But she was very sweet."

About this time, I thought that I was given the unpadded chair to teach me a little more charity, but even that thought wasn't helping. I was squirming, and not just outwardly.

Finally, our friend Richard went on. Mercifully, he had us all stand up, turn around, and stretch, before sitting down again. And then for the next 45 minutes, we were treated to a series of delightful monologues, performed by six actors. The perspectives and geography were varied, there was a lot of humor amongst the seriousness, and at the end, I was left wanting more.

Ready to go home? Not quite. Partway through the proceedings, a tiny man walked in looking lost and homeless. At first, I thought the kind gallery owner had told him he was always welcome to use the bathroom. He was ancient, with wispy long hair, and dressed with an odd nod to a night on the town -- an incredibly stained blue searsucker jacket (complete with ink stains), on a stained white shirt, a jaunty green bandana at his throat, all over huge green zip-up sweatpants.

After Richard's pieces, the gallery owner introduced this person as Billy Barnum of THE Barnum family (I didn't catch the reference, but perhaps the circus family?). When he talked, he was hard to understand -- there was a shake in his voice that made him sound like he was coming in over a bad cell phone connection. The effect was aided by the absence of many of his teeth.

His first piece was about riding in the subway, helpful, because his voice was perfect for the setting, making hims ound as if he was being jarred by the train's movement. He was actually quite lithe and acted out being nearly unbalanced as he recited. He did another very cute piece about two drag queens and the owner of a doll hospital, bringing us back to the late 40s or early 50s. Very sweet, and clearly his mind is still intact, full of stories and good humor.

So that was our Saturday night out, an evening that brought me back to the late 70s when I moved in around the corner from that gallery and experienced the tail-end of old Cambridge, a part of the city that continues to thrive in some small corners. And I am very grateful for that.