I love doing readings. It's almost kind of creepy how much I've gotten over my old stage fright. It helps, of course, to be reading stuff you're relatively happy with. I wish I had more opportunities to read, because it's fun. The inevitable letdown afterwards always sucks, but when I'm standing up there, it almost always feels pretty good.
Anya gave me the perfect opening for a good funny intro remark. She went before me, and she had poems from Mexico, Poland, California, and ... um, someplace else, I forget. So she made a remark about how her set was like a world tour. So when I was about to read my poem "Sleeping in Space" (which is about an astronaut orbiting the earth in the space shuttle), I said I had to read it just so I could have a poem from someplace that Anya hadn't been yet. That cracked people up for some reason. :)
We had, hm, about 30-35 people there, I think -- which is a pretty good crowd in Boxcar Books. We made back our expenses (mostly photocopying for flyers & programs) and still had $48 of donations that we were able to give to Boxcar. So yeah, I think we'll definitely be welcome back there in the future.
Of those 30-35 people, almost all of them were people I didn't know. A few vaguely familiar faces, but not people I knew well enough to even say hi to. My friend Shana & her husband came, and they were the only people who had come even partially specifically to see me. Someday, I want to do a reading where at least an identifiable percentage of the audience is there because I'm the one they want to see. Wow, is that egotistical enough for you? Sheesh.
There was a loud punk band (okay, that's redundant) playing in the park across the street for the first half of our reading. It was kind of annoying, but not too bad with the door shut, and hey, at least it made us focus on projecting our voices a bit.
Oh yeah, people really liked "Sleeping in Space." Nobody said much of anything about any of my other poems afterwards, but that one was definitely a hit. Note to self: definitely hang on to that one for future readings.