a Pushcart Prize nomination?

http://ocvictor.livejournal.com/606408.html

Honored, humbled, and…wow, the company I’m in…

Well, the Duende show turned into a Tony solo show last night…due to a bartender at the Vernon who decided to be a hardass and who wasn’t informed about the fact that bars with entertainment licenses in MA are allowed to have performers under 21 if they don’t drink. She tossed Faro out unceremoniously without an apology or chance of appeal AFTER we’d set up all the equipment.

Bobby, the host, was mortified. I had talked to him about Faro’s age earlier when we set up the gig, of course, and we assumed the usual rules would apply (never had this problem anywhere else), but this was a new bartender and not amenable to discourse.

We consulted outside. My first reaction was to simply cancel — no Faro, no Tony — and if we had been anywhere else but a mile away from home, we would have. But Bobby’s assured us that we can get the situation remedied and come back in the future, so we mutually decided to not bail on the gig entirely and take care of the reading (which is slowly building steam) and the audience with me solo, while Faro and Capri and Missy and Chris went back home and hung out playing guitars and such.

In retrospect, I think it was the right decision for this gig and this gig alone because of the circumstances — but in the future, if someone books us and then has an issue at the gig itself, it’s a cancelled gig.

The old school audience got an old-school set — I skipped all the material we do as Duende (with the exception of “Chrysler” which I perform solo on “Americanized” and which was requested) and for most of the set I went WAY back for poems I haven’t done regularly in years:

Why I Killed The Buddha
Poem For Eddie (these two are from REALLY old chapbooks, and date back more than ten years)
Punk/Seafoam Green (I still do “Punk” often, but rarely include the companion piece anymore)
Jazz Under The Nazis
Chrysler
Light and Glass
First Letter Home
6AM, Hell’s Ditch, USA
Aunt Mary’s Family
Radioactive Artist (something I still do regularly, but a traditional closer)

Good times. At the Ship reading, you get paid “stripper style” — money in the belt, on the stage, between the man-boobs (or woman-boobs if that’s whatcha got) and it was a decent payday. Add in Bobby giving some money to Faro for gas and sorrow, and we ended up OK money wise when all was said and done.

It’s a shame we didn’t get to do the set we’d planned — we were going to do “Jim’s Fall” start to finish and then toss in some other stuff including some likely improv work — but all in all it was OK. I still feel bad about the mixup, but now this makes it IMPERATIVE that you come see us on December 14 at Storytellers, of course, where we’ll be doing the Worcester premiere of “Americanized” in its entirety with a few choice bits added.

Onward, Duende…