Loose Leaf Notes

Spoken Word Open Mic at the Café Del Sol ~
Nine year old Kyla, dressed like a rock star and wearing ruby red slippers, was our MC for the night. Leigh plunked a tune on her bright red guitar. Lora sat in the midst of her own passionate pastels that hung from the café walls. She read a poem about Dance Free, written by a woman in the audience who was too shy to read it herself.

Considering that many Floydians had come out to celebrate Mama Lizardo’s 70th birthday a few doors down from the cafe, the turnout was good. Even Sally, Café Del Sol owner and local singing talent, was at Liz’s party, scheduled to sing, which is how Mara’s daughter Kyla came to be our open mic host. There were new faces in the crowd and several new readers, bringing the evening’s performer’s list to ten.

A horse name Echo… soothing Grandma Lizzy… a poem about a graveyard ….and an essay on the stuff of life and our identification with it all figured into the mix. My favorite poem title for the night was “When All Our Beards Were Brown,” read by a man with long grey hair who had tattoos up and down his arms. The work presented was touching and thoughtful, eliciting head nodding, sighs of approval, and resounding applause for its authors.

When it was my turn at the mic, I read my disclaimer (or is it a mission statement?) before passing out the photos that accompanied my reading of “The Pink Raft.” Therapy is not about finding out who did what to me or why. It’s about finding out what I’m storing and what’s weighing me down. Everyone has some emotional baggage. It’s there whether we acknowledge it or not. I figure I might as well open the bag and see what’s in there, remember why I put it there, and decide what I can now throw away. Shifting from pink to red hot, I followed up "The Pink Raft" with “Hot Flash at Night,” and then “Free Leonard Peltier and the Japanese Tanka.”

Mara, looking every bit the poet in her long kokopelli coat and black beret, read tankas, wonderful slices of poetic observation that had evolved since she read them at our last writer’s workshop. She takes her blue yarn … up on the roof and sings … while she crochets … There will come a day when things like this don’t matter … Not now.

At the end of the evening Kyla’s ruby red slippers got passed around. Sipping my Anchor Steam beer, I put my feet up on the coffee table and admired them in red. Later, Arden, a creative writing graduate student who had come up from Salem, tried them on. “I wonder where I’ll end up if I click them together?” he asked.

Photos: 1. Leigh’s red guitar and Rosemary, who is reading a hot poem about tea. 2. Kyla takes charge. 3. Colleen asks, "Do they make these in my size?"