Day in the Life of an Idiot

 
Image: A crowd of people at Bryant Lake Bowl waiting for the show to start. Naomi Kritzer is seated in the far left--mostly obscured by a podium/table.


On Sunday, I did a lot of my usual things including chatting with my folks via Zoom, but the exciting thing that I did was drive over to Minneapolis to the Bryant Lake Bowl theater to watch my friend naomikritzer perform "The Year Without Sunshine" accompanied by music at Cole Sarar's SciFi Reading Hour.

I will admit to you as I did directly to Cole, that I was a little worried about what this was going to be like. When I hear "sci fi" + "accompanied by music" my brain fills in "weird, discordant saxophone" and poetry with a lot of pregnant MEANINGFUL pauses. Like, some kind of bad beat poetry scene, where the vibe is intellectual, but the performance is mostly uninteligible. 

This was not that.

Despite the fact that, the band's name was "Dissonant" and THIS was the instrument, in question....


Image: Jonathan L. Ford's rig--several keyboards, soundboards, and what I'm pretty sure "technobabble" physically looks like...

The music was slightly more like sound effects. There were some background hums and such, but it was fairly inobtrusive. Being in a writers' group with Naomi, I know how hard she worked on transforming this story into something performable for two people, it was a lot more like being in the studio during a live radio play performance. For any of my local peeps who have gone to A Prairie Home Companion at the Fitzgerald back in the day, that was the vibe. Cole is an excellent voice actor and so Naomi basically removed most of the dialogue tags and let Cole's ability to make each voice that wasn't the narrator's (which Naomi read) be a distinct, recognizable character. Where there would be confusion, Naomi added in (or recycled from the story) bits to make it clearer. It was a big transformance into an actual PERFORMANCE. 

But at its basic (without giving Naomi the kudos she deserves), what it was was a "high production value" reading. 

The Bryant Lake Bowl theater is smallish, but was nearly filled to capacity.  The Byrant Lake Bowl is the kind of place that is also a bar and a restaurant (and, yes, also a bowling alley) and so it was also a little like dinner theater. There is a space in the front for actual tables and chairs, but the majority of the space is really steep stadium/bleacher seats. So, they can fit a lot of people in, in a very small space. There's a small little rim behind the seats where people can balance drinks and food, and a lot of folks were nibbling on things and sipping wine or beer or fancy cocktails.

I wore a mask and was one of maybe a half dozen people masked, which for a bar/restaurant is actually pretty good, if you think about it that way. 

Even though I was out way past my bedtime (the show started at 7 pm!), I surprised myself by really enjoying it. If you've never read Naomi's "The Year Without Sunshine," you really should. Especially right now? It's a story of people coming together to care for each other in a very diverse Minneapolis neighborhood. 

The whole thing was a lot of fun. I ran into several people I knew, no surprise. I hung around a little while after the show to talk to Naomi and some of our other writer friends, but I can't stay out too much past 9 pm these days. 

At any rate, a night to remember.