Doggone It

The first rule of Reductress Satire Writing Workshop is…well, you can pay $45 (online) to $60 (meat space) and find out for yourself. But I broke it almost immediately in this piece I conceived during the January 23rd class, which was held in a hip and earnest Manhattan co-working space.

Help! He Thinks I Love Doggystyle, But Really It’s Just the Easiest Way to Hide My Stomach

I broke character and went into the workshop cold, no Oh, this old lump of coal I just unearthed and  pressurized into a diamond? pre-prep allowed. This resulting piece, which in its newborn form made a conference room full of delightful thirty-somethings chortle, combines a few of my favorite tropes and horrors.

It’s not perfect, but it makes me smile. A little too broadly. And it reminds me of why I turn into a white man blinking GIF when someone tells me the worst thing they could ever imagine is being single. Or, um, voluptuous. I save my irrational fears for denim fanny packs.

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Never Metaphor I Didn’t Like

My second appearance at Hillary Rea’s long-running storytelling event, Tell Me A Story, was a fun one. The audience was game. The other presenters inspired me to use the word delightful without irony. And I’d taken some of the pressure off of performing directly after a draining work day by deciding I’d read my story, though I knew it well enough to just (insert jazz hands) tell it, and ad-libbed from the heart more than once.

Cherry on the sundae? Hillary, a consummate professional and a woman after my own heart, decided that this year she’d start paying her storytellers because…fairness, integrity, ad nauseam, amen.

Mad props to the colleague who wished me good luck by hoping the audience understood that “that’s how you really talk,” the fellow presenter who tapped into my fear that I would be forced to publicly address my refusal to see either Disney’s Frozen or everyone’s A Christmas Story, and Hillary’s eye-snagging floral Doc Martens. 

Here’s what you missed. Yes, this is really how I talk.