Attended a really cool event Monday night put on by the inimitable Dan Misener of CBC Radio Sparks fame.

It was called (if memory serves) Grownups Read Stuff They Wrote As Kids.

I’d been wanting to attend one of these events for a while now.  This was the ninth or tenth one Dan has put on.  Dan and his wife are about to leave for France for a year, so I knew this was going to be the last one for awhile, so I made sure I attended.  And I volunteered to read.

So the weekend before I perused my three scribblers full of juvenilia, mostly written between the ages of 12 and 14 (Grades 7 to 9) for school.  I chose three potential pieces, each one varying degrees of ridiculous.  Although I remember thinking quite highly of them at the time I wrote them!

I walked to the Garrison Pub at Ossington and Dundas with Dan an hour and a half before the event.  I told Dan I had mixed feelings about reading my stuff.  On the one hand I felt a sense of betrayal toward my younger self because I would essentially be mocking that kid’s work.  And as a kid I had been proud of my writing.  I thought I was pretty good at it.  On the other hand, I noted, maybe the kid deserved to be mocked, because the one piece (the one I eventually read) had been written as homework, sitting before the television.  Even so I had thought it was pretty good at the time (it wasn’t, really).  (Ooh, there’s that pesky sense of betrayal again!)

We got to the club and it turned out nobody had set the chairs out.  So Dan and I (and the club’s sound guy) got to work setting up the chairs (two other readers eventually joined in).

We got under way at 7:30.  The place was packed — an impressive turnout.  I was the fourth reader.  The first two readers were awesome.  One guy read from a monster book he had written in Grade One, complete with cool monster pictures.  He was quite funny.  I can’t remember the second reader’s material as I type this (it’ll come to me long after I’ve posted this, no doubt) but I remember it was entertaining and well presented.  I began to have serious qualms about reading the story I had selected.  I didn’t think it was either good enough or bad enough.  I was afraid it would fall flat.

I didn’t hear the third reader because I was busy behind the stage trying to pick out a better story.  But Dan introduced me by saying I would read a science fiction story, so I was stuck with the one I’d selected.

Fortunately the audience was laughing by the second sentence.  They continued to laugh throughout.  Bottom line, I didn’t bomb.  Of course, the story had not been written as a comedy; I don’t think there was a single line in it that was supposed to be funny.  So although I didn’t bomb, I did completely betray my twelve year old self.  What a heel.  But it doesn’t bother me at all.  Because ya gotta be able to laugh at yourself, whatever age you are.

It was a great night.  The rest of the readers were terrific. A standout was a woman names Laura (I think) who read a will she had written at the age of nine!  Surreal and quite amusing.  I was really glad I participated, and many kudos to Dan for putting an event like that on.  (It’s simple, he told me on the way over.  Book the club, which is surprisingly cheap, get readers to sign up on line, arrange for the sale of tickets online, and Bob’s your uncle.  The odd time you might have to set up the chairs yourself.  Ticket sales go to fund the venue with excess funds going to charity.  A class act, Mr. Dan Misener).

I think he’ll be putting more of these on in a year, when he’s back from France.

Which means, of course, that the next one will have to be in French.