"COLLECTIBLE"

The event on  Saturday went wonderfully. The set up was perfect. Familiar Trees, the venue, is a small one-story building in Great Barrington  with two rooms, one the bookstore and the other an art gallery. The gallery, where the musicians and me were set up, has a garage door which was open so the audience mostly sitting outside could see us.

There was a great sound system including a great mic for me with a monitor in front of me so I could hear myself clearly and see by the audience's reactions that they were understanding what I was saying. In the over six decades I've been reading my poetry to audiences my usual m.o. is to bring a ton of poems and decide what I'll read as I'm reading, depending on the audience reactions.

Butt I can't handle books or stacks of paper very well anymore plus my uncontrollable drooling makes a mess of a book's pages or smudges the ink on paper copies. So my son Miles helped me pick the poems and printed them out in big type and put the pages in transparent plastic sleeves, which it turned out were easier for me to turn in the looseleaf binder he put them in.

He (on electric bass) and Brian Kantor (drums) were set up behind me and Wes Buckley (on guitar) off to my left, so I had nothing to distract me between me and the listeners, which included my other two kids, Caitlin and Flynn, in the first row cheering me on. After I opened with a relatively recent poem ("I Meant To") the musicians joined in, fabulously improvising until the last line of the last poem.

 We got a standing o and everyone, old friends new friends and future friends, seemed to have enjoyed it. Turns out it was recorded and there's even some iPhone video, which I will post when it becomes available. Though I think you had to be there to get the full impact. There were several extravagant compliments thrown around, but the best one may have been: "Now that was a collectible".