Even Cowgirls Forget Their Q’s

It had been more than a decade since I had to sit in the sin bin. Little had changed in my absence. I was sandwiched between a shiny spherical child, who offered me a flaky ball of his earwax in what I assume was a gesture of friendship, and a girl so slight, she bordered on becoming transparent. I had wound up in this state of exile after attending one of the many events that make up the MWF Schools Program.

I had popped in to see Geoff Lemon panel a discussion on performance poetry. I’ve been terrified by poems ever since I was a child. Just stepping into the event was like hooking a fingernail under the crisp edge of an emotional scab. Each poet launched into a personal tirade, expressing just enough feminist anger to be labelled art. The emotional weight of their words could be felt in my chest. By the time Urthboy was on stage rapping, I was knee-deep in a childhood flashback.

Standing in front of my year 3 classmates. I was pouring my heart out in the form of a poem titled The Fifth Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. Upon finishing, my teacher burst into laughter and yelled “Bad poetry, oh noetry!” The phrase became a favourite taunt of my classmates, family, and one time even a homeless woman bellowed it at me. When I came to, I found I was standing on my chair and had inadvertently screamed the tormenting phrase several times. The poets on stage looked as though they were going to evil my face with kicks. At that point, a teacher badgered me into the sin bin. The adult in me wanted to argue with her, but my Pavlovian response to a teacher’s hand claps was to sit with my hands on my head, praying that I didn’t get a note to take home to my mother.

When I apologised to the teacher, I was allowed to leave my invisible cage and moved on to the next event. This was a discussion between Scott Westerfield and China Mievelles’ arms. The two authors were talking Science Fiction and the swollen biceps invited the audience to ask questions. The room was filled with the awkward silence of a crowd mustering the courage to speak. The adolescent sitting next to me had been twitching throughout the talk, but at the prompting of audience participation, his spasms blossomed into a sweat-drip seizure. His arm jutted past chin to roof, whipping an arc of sweat across several teachers in the row before us. I knew by the level of anxiety displayed that he was a public freaker. There is one in every event. When the floor is opened to questions, at least one person will start what seems like a deliberate and well thought out query. This however, quickly decays into a panic fuelled word loop. The words sputter out of the prober’s mouth at an increasing rate until an “Um” collides with an “Ah” and said asker either bursts into tears, passes out, or spontaneously combusts.

Luckily for the boy, the MWF have a crack team on hand to resuscitate and distill the gist of any public freaker. The question they got out of him referred to the popular Twilight novels. Unfortunately for the boy, the MWF have a second crack team on hand to remove anyone who brings up these novels. Upon hearing the question “do un-dead hearts break?” Scott Westerfield slammed an alert button and a group of realist-fiction authors abseiled down from the ceiling, absconding with the fan. One of them told me not to worry, and that they were going to fix him.

I saw the lad towards the end of the day. He sported a tweed blazer and was touting Sartre’s Roads To Freedom Trilogy as the impotent masturbations of a French poser, decked out in the beret and scarf of existential philosophy.

I’m not sure if I agree with him, but the tweed was persuasive.

by Frenchelbow
Festival Blogger
Dead Under Fluorescent Lights