soup salon number one

On Saturday, S and I hosted our first of hopefully many monthly salons, we're calling them Soup Salons, because no better name has emerged, and because really that's what they are. S made two soups, as well as baba ghanoush; I made cupcakes from my Aunt Melba's Dream Chocolate Cake recipe and my mother's fudge icing recipe, using the black onyx cocoa we order from the spice shop in Boulder, Colorado. It really is black, and it's a little unruly as an icing. In the cake pan, I just pour it in and it settles, thicker in the corners and thinner (but still thick) in the center, and it hardens like a candy almost. It's delicious, but it doesn't spread once it has cooled in the slightest, so some of the cupcakes just had a poo pile of chocolate in the middle, so dark, they made the Ghiradelli's dark chocolate cake underneath look like bran! But no, it was all chocolate!

There were eleven of us in attendance. I told prose readers to bring something not more than twenty minutes in length, singers, poets and others to bring a couple of things. equally about fifteen to twenty minutes. The idea was that we would go around the room, and then back around for the singers and poets to do a second set. But we got a late start, so we didn't get back around to the poets and singers, it felt right length-wise.

We had the salon at A's house; she has a big dining room table that comfortably sat eleven (thirteen were invited but two couldn't come, and I think ten or eleven is ideal, for that situation anyway). S set out the baba ghanoush, pickled okra and roasted and spiced squash seeds that he made with the crackers and flat breads that people brought. I had put down Sun magazines as place mats; A added flowers and we set each place with napkins, silverware, plates and glasses.

To start the evening, we went around the room and most of us spoke an epigraph after picking a rune out of a bag that I had painted numbers on so we knew what order to go in. Then we started in with the creative expression. We watched a documentary about drag kings, a YouTube video of one attendee doing contact improv at Barton Springs; we saw a PowerPoint presentation that went along with an academic book-in-progress about depression and crafting; we heard poems by attendees and by a famous poet; a chapter from a completed novel was read as well a chapter from a novel that is barely a finished first draft; we got a sneak preview of text from an upcoming story/song performance piece; we heard a couple of singers sing a couple of songs as well as a recording of a song on a CD from a rock opera that is soon to be produced in New York City. It was quite a salon!

Somewhere in the middle, when the timing seemed just right, we took breaks to deliver first a creamy, spicy squash soup to everyone's place setting, and later a potato and kale soup. There was wine, there was Perrier, there was beer. And later than that, I swiftly moved the bowls and delivered platters of cupcakes. It went as smoothly as it coud possible have gone. Had we started a half hour earlier (as we were supposed to), we might have got back around the room for another couple of songs and/or poems, but nobody seemed to mind.

Many were nervous. There was some overlapping acquaintances (all from my personal collection) but several of these people had never met each other before. Some were nervous about singing in front of others, some were nervous about doing something that they feared might not be "creative" enough, some were reading work they hadn't thought about for many years, some felt completely unprepared and were nervous that the thing they did have to share was darker than what they hoped would be the first expression shared with this new community.

That last one was me. I didn't read the chapter I had intended to read A few days earlier, I felt done with the rough first draft of august chagrin and was going back through and revisiting each chapter in chronological order (chapter three is first). That was whatI wanted to read at the first salon. But when I reworked the chapter I someone mistakenly labeled it "(1976)" instead of "(1972)" which was what it was, and that changed things considerably. In a good way. Randy catches an idle train car full of timber on fire with a roman candle; it works because in the Summer of '76, the sky was "more full of fireworks than ever before." I read what I thought was the newly completed chapter to S Saturday morning, and he gave me a big note for a change making me realize it wasn't ready to be read that night, not along with the last minute shopping I had to do, making the cupcakes and getting to A's early to help set up for the salon.

I ran around anxiously for awhile, and finally decided to find something else to read. I read chapter nine, "road signs," which went well. I was actually pleased to hear it again myself; it made me remember that not everything I've written has to be completely reworked, which is a relief three years into the process!

I stayed up until two a.m. Saturday night. S and I sat on the porch chatting about the success of the salon for awhile, and then I did some writing. And then last night I was was up until three a.m. (the clock said two but with the time change early in the morning it really was three). I think I'm getting very close to a happy completed not-so-rough first draft of chapter three.

Starting a salon has been my dream for some time. I decided to start it now because it was my Birthday Season, and it was just about the best present ever, second only to the one I'll be receiving in just a little more than forty-eight hours from now. And then my celebrating will morph from being about my birth forty-five years ago to the bright future for the whole country and the world. I can't wait!