Tellebration!

I continue to offer my profuse apologies at how sparse my online presence has become -- the warm reception of Descendant of Dragons seems to have led to a major spike in my off-season activities, so thanks to everyone who contributed to that. You'll be duly recompensed by a significant increase in Maximum Verbosity productions in the near future.

One of which is very near indeed! I'll be one of the headlining performers at Tellebration, a phenomenon that's (quite literally) sweeping the nation, and the premier storytelling festival in Minnesota. Swing by at 8pm this Saturday, and you can see me performing alongside such local talents as Loren Niemi, Howard Lieberman, and Colleen Kruse.

The piece I'll be doing is called "Exposed!", and it's one that's lived a number of lives. It first appeared as a political rant at the beginning of Libertarian Rage, and it's being reworked into a solo storytelling piece for this concert performance. It's also a preview for its new existence as a slapstick routine developed with mime Dean Hatton in Logorrhea.

I've spent the last couple of years in the tooth-gnashing frustration of many artists, over the fact that I was investing an extraordinary amount of time and energy into work that very few people were paying attention to. Now that I'm starting to get an audience, however, I'm intensely grateful for that period of time, because I have five years' worth of material under my belt. I would have been at a loss to keep up with performance opportunities -- now, I have just enough to keep up with them. If someone calls me for a showcase next week, there's a reasonable chance that I'll already have something on-topic that can be whipped into shape, be it mime or poetry, political or profane.

Incidentally, the keynote speaker at the event (beginning at 10am, oog) is none other than folklorist Jack Zipes, whose translation of the Brothers Grimm formed the basis of a number of my early plays. There's a strange synchronicity to the patterns that have been emerging in my life lately, and I'm not really sure what to make of them.