Cabaret!

Big love to Cynthia Sailers and Tanya Brolaski for putting together Sunday night's Poets' Cabaret, which was a great success: the most people I've ever seen at a 21 Grand event.

What you missed if you weren't there:

Del Ray Cross channeling Loretta Lynn

country music by The Cherries (Tanya "Bing" Brolaski on rhythm guitar, Mary "Maraschino" Burger on accordion, Brian "Wild" Bulkowski on bass, and Andrew "Jubilee" Waegel on slide guitar)

a velvet-clad Rodney Koeneke mis-re-un-dismantling a Sapphic fragment to the "electronic stylings" of Lesley Poirier

Brent Cunningham and Cynthia Sailers' side-splitting short play "The Poet Deflated," featuring Taylor Brady as a majestically unlistenable pseudo-laureate and Stephanie Young and the mysterious "Shonni" as unreliable sex robots

my own "Myrtle Poe," an ephemeral slice of post-Vaudevillian doggerel, lent solidity and pizzazz by the virtuoso music, singing, and dancing of Patrick Durgin and Jen Hofer

"A Psychiatric Farce in Verse" by Julia Bloch and Zoe Ullman, featuring Barbara Joan Tiger Bass and two other performers whose names I've forgotten (I lost my program!), in which "poet pills" were handed out to lucky audience members

Geoffrey Dyer as Lou Reed on guitar to Kevin Killian's (sublime!!!) Nico with their renditions of "I'll be Your Mirror" and "Femme Fatale"

"The Force Majeure," a very dystopic four-song rock opera with the spaz-tastic Judith Goldman, the lipstick-lovely Maggie Zurawski, the guitar-playing Joel Nickels and the chair-kicking Brandon Brown

Debonair master of ceremonies Sean Finney smart-alecking it up in between acts

Special off-stage luminaries: Nick Piombino and partner Toni, just in from the east!

Special thank-yous to Patrick and Jen for doing so much in so little time with my bare-bones lyrics. Patrick composed a brilliant score by sampling bits of old 78's (e.g. "Paper Moon") and integrating them into an original arrangement. Jen put together a breathtaking costume and did her hair up into precisely the illogical, gravity-defying, braided pigtails I had envisioned. Patrick sang and hoofed his heart out, and Jen ... Jen did things with a scarf, lunchbox, and toy accordion that I can't even begin to describe. I hope it's OK for me to spend so much time talking about my own number, since I really had so little to do with it beyond throwing some words together a few weeks ago and suggesting a few basic guidelines: it was those two who brought it to life!