Something There Is

Don’t want to be a misery, but 48 hours later, it still nags me:

Why was the speaker wearing a headset that apparently–since I can think of no other cause–zapped, buzzed, and shrieked the sound-system (as well as my central nervous system) whenever touched by the swing of her earrings?

I’ve spoken into mics more than a few times and was never asked to wear or offered a headset.  On stages and before audiences, I can’t recall any speakers wearing them.  Only on TV with those fat earphones.

Ironically–and tragically in a literary if not literal sense–this was a poetry reading.  If she had been delivering anything else, from a political tirade to a Chamber of Commerce pep talk, she might have turned the electric blasts into good natured jokes.  I know the woman.  She has a quick wit that, like her poetry, ranges from devilish to playful with many detours in between.

But poems combine sense with sound.  If static and feedback blur or violate that sound, we are left with nonsense.

To make the case stranger yet, she was the second of two poets to take the stage.  Not only did the first not wear a headset, he eschewed use of a mic entirely.  He was well received, especially his epic update of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” funny, incisive, profound, and oddly reminiscent of the Kink’s Sixties classic, “Dedicated Follower of Fashion.”

Yes, his voice was louder, projecting through the room.  But her voice is no mere whisper, and anyway, it wasn’t the mic, but that damned headset.

She was reverentially received by an audience, bless them, that tolerated the interference.  And by me, as I was able to appreciate the humor, poignancy, incisiveness, and humaneness that I caught between the glass-shattering of my nerves.

She, too, offered an epic titled “Crayons.” Mercifully, there was no static to mar the story of her grade school days and the teacher who assigned drawings on a subject each day.  Young children, bright colors, many echoes of Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now.”  Even the turkey on the plate was smiling on a Thanksgiving dinner platter.

I’m sure that, like the Andersen update, it drew to a startling conclusion that would have left us with an epiphany at the end.  But the loudest blast of the day came just before the closing lines.

Judging from the appreciative response, perhaps most in the audience heard them.  Or perhaps, like me, they were applauding to be polite and in a hurry to leave the room.

Politeness may be as much or more of a culprit than electricity.  Her whole introduction was punctuated by zaps, errrrrs, screeks.  Why didn’t we stop it right there before the first poem was read?

Why the damned headset?

While that may have a simple answer, the Paralysis of Politeness leaves us with a question that few are willing to ask and fewer ever answer: Is there a time for intolerance?

And while that question may well invoke Ecclesiastes, it is simple compared to the two questions that nag me:

Did 40 or so people sit through that without making a complaint? And was I actually one of them?

-30-