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October 07, 2002
I do feel sorry for the waitress at Mud Pie, though
As usual, events are mentioned here after they've taken place. Hell, this announcement might even vanish from DreamHaven's site before you can click over and see it:
Saturday, October 5th, 7:00pm, Lake Street store
There will be a women's erotica reading featuring Hanne Blank, Heather Corinna, and Catherine Lundoff. Hanne is author of Big, Big Love and editor of Zaftig, Shameless: Women's Intimate Erotica, and Best Transgender Erotica. Heather is a photographer, writer, and founder of Scarletletters.com, a women's erotica website. Catherine is a writer and has had stories published in many anthologies, including Zaftig, Shameless, and several of the Best Lesbian Erotica series. You must be over 18 years of age to attend.
I'd intended to blend unobtrusively into the crowd, a skill perfected in small, dimly-lit clubs in Chicago and Urbana-Champaign. They were honed to such a point that not only did people tend to back into me, they also sometimes attempted to walk through me, reacting with mild confusion, then utter alarm, when they realized the small, human-shaped obstruction they kept bumping into was, in fact, a small human.
This meant my interactions with other patrons were generally limited to surprised yelps followed by muttered apologies, with my contribution restricted to quiet assurances that no harm was done. Which is pretty much pushing the envelope on my conversational abilities, so that's all right.
I realized upon walking into DreamHaven that these skills would prove useless, as the crowd was fairly small, and the store was brightly-lit. Also, it was the sort of crowd you'd expect to find in a science-fiction bookstore in Minneapolis at a reading of women's erotica, meaning it was composed chiefly of women, with most of them fairly fair-skinned, and fairly blonde. They also looked to be mostly my age, meaning I was the youngest-looking person around.
Luckily for all concerned, I was not carded.
You know, someone else has probably already written about this, possibly one of the participants. Think I'll have a look for a link before going on about it.
Yes, I did run out of coffee again. Think I'll try to find out if I'm near the route those Fair Trade guys take on their bikes, and see if I can just buy wholesale from them. . .
I assure you, you're not missing anything. I was completely out of my depth the entire evening, and responded as I usually do by being very obviously surprised at everything. So, you know, "Wow, DreamHaven Books & Comics has a large selection of books and comics by Neil Gaiman, and it must be very difficult for her to breath in that outfit, and oh look, that long-suffering young woman seems to have brought me a cup of coffee, which that nice John M. Ford is offering to pass to me, perhaps I should read another of his books besides the musical Star Trek one."
Coffee. What a good idea. Perhaps I should get some.
Update 10/9: Oh good. Hanne has written a much more detailed, informative account. Except the bits where she's obviously confused me with some other person in attendance. Easy mistake, that.
Posted by Aaron at October 7, 2002 10:58 AM
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