Late To The Party Press is a monthly (usually) reading series at the legendary KGB Bar, hosted by Sophy Drouin and Madeline Howard. I went to their one-year anniversary in May and it was a great time. Appropriately, I was late to the next reading.
I got up to the 2nd floor of KGB almost an hour after the time on the flyer. I came straight from work, and I took the late shift, and the train was delayed, and a whole lot of other excuses that happened to be real. The bouncer explained that it was pretty full up there, but I didn’t expect the door to barely open. I had to push my way into corner by the door, where until the intermission I was door-squashed by each succeeding patron attempting to get in. There was clapping and people were moving on the stage. I caught the attention of my friend Matt, who was close by, and he told me there had just been one reader. I deductively figured it was Catherine Spino; damn, the only person on the list I knew. Pretty soon, a guy got up to the mike and was introduced as Daisy Cashin. He spoke with a really strong Southern accent; his story, a child’s tale about learning the mechanics of death and sex, got loads of laughs (the narrator wants to know what it’s like to kiss someone without teeth). After each reading, the quirk of Late To The Party is that one of the hosts asks the reader a couple of questions, including “What were you late to the party about?” Daisy answered “compliments” and followed up with, “There’s this terrible truth that it goes both ways.”
Next, Kathryn Everett read an essay about her tumultuous personal journey to getting pregnant. It starts in media res with the author going to a Chinatown herbalist to get relief for nausea, rotating bacterial vaginosis, and yeast infections (I was still crammed into the corner by the door and couldn’t get my notebook out of my backpack, so I was frantically texting down everything in my notes app on my phone, which corrected this to “Yeats infections”). Then the essay skips backward to the origin state before the journey to pregnancy: the author professionally ascendant with BAFTA award nominations and travel opportunities, but fresh into heartbreak. She reconnects with an old ex and falls into the mutual decision to have a child before they get older. The story ends with the amazing line “I am now the ancestor who dreamed of the future and made it real.” Everett said she was late to the party about The Sopranos, which I am too, besides my girlfriend’s prodding.
There was a very short intermission, where I managed to sit down next to my friend Matt and order a beer. The room was packed like precocious sardines when they started again with Ben Kesslen, who read from their upcoming debut novel Brine. The narrator, Ewen, is a gay man in New York walking out of his job as a content writer for the Democratic Party. He takes the Manhattan Bridge and expands on his observations in a very The Mezzanine-esque fashion. There many laughs throughout the whole piece— you could’ve mistaken the event for a comedy night by the crowd’s reaction. Ben said they were late to the party about cats, being allergic, but they now live with a cat by taking medicine, and they love them.
The last reader was Madeline Howard, the co-host, and she started the story by telling the audience, “This is what pornography looks like, for those that don’t know,” and then she passed some copied papers around the audience.
Then Howard said, “This is what it sounds like,” and played a recording from her phone that sounded like pornography, but was blown out enough for some deniability. Her short story was about a schoolgirl who, despite being the star of the women’s soccer team, is jealous of her teammate for having big breasts. The teammate’s mother is notorious in the stuffy, Midwestern town for having been a pornstar under the moniker Kelly Kornfed. It’s a tensely psychological narrative, ending up with the narrator, who has won the soccer game but, feeling unsatisfied, watches her teammate’s mother’s old porn alone in her bed after the post-game celebrations. Drouin got Howard to admit she was late to the party about computer monitors.
After the reading, I sheepishly went up to Catherine to apologize for missing her reading, and she just gave me the printout to read at home! It’s a lovely story from the limited-close 3rd person POV of an orangutan at the San Diego Zoo named Ken Allen. He paces around the zoo and consults his neighbor, a giraffe, about his upcoming date with Iris, a female orangutan. It’s all in this heavenly Flowers for Algernon simplistic register, it’s a beauty.
“Would you like to go see the otters with me?” Ken asked.
“I’d love that, I’ve always wanted to see them,” Iris said.
Matt sent me a picture he took of Catherine reading. You can be late and get away with it. You can get away with everything if you have enough friends.
We’re so happy! Thank you for coming.