Read this disclaimer first!!
Sunday, Sept. 15, 2002 - 7:08 p.m.
The Area of a Circle

On Friday night, I went to see Jake Brown.

I went to Cafe Pi (I wish I could find anything on the Internet about this place). at around 8:15 to see the show. Cafe Pi is a coffee shop where chess players and artists like to hang out. At any given time you will see 3-4 games of chess, a couple of people reading and a couple of people writing. And you will also see the unintelligible Jorge, Chilean Drunk.

Since Jake and friends were going to be performing, there were more artists than normal. As the crowd started to fill up, I noticed something about this crowd that was a little different from other crowds in other cafes. Not one of the women were dressing in an "attractive" way. By that I mean that no one was dressed as though they were going to a club, or to attract anyone. There was nothing obviously sexy about their attire, which made it much easier to focus on other things. This lack of conventional sexiness was attractive in itself.

The other thing that I noticed was that most people there seemed to know each other. Whwnever someone waslked in, there was "Hiiii!! *kiss-kiss*" and so on. But it didn't seem fake, or put on.

Lastly, there was this air of...community. Everyone was a friend, and no one was looked at as different, not even Jorge, Chilean Drunk.

Near the beginning of the first show, K.T. and her country gentleman Ronnie, a couple of women asked if they could share my table. I wasn't meeting anyone, so I let them. They weren't bad-looking; one might have even been pretty good-looking. By the time the first show ended, I realized what it was that made me think that they were a little different from most women I saw there. They appeared to be lesbians. Luckily for me, I was distracted by the show, so they didn't get me down.

There were a couple of other acts, but the one (other than Jake) who really impressed me was Fortner Anderson. This guy was passionate, a real orator. Apparently he has performed in front of thousands at the Palladium in Italy, or Greece or wherever it is. Simply excellent.

During Fortner's bit, there was a disturbance near me. Jorge, Chilean Drunk was making noise and being mildly disorderly. It was bugging me, but everyone else just seemed to put up with it. I was ready to throw the guy out myself (I spoke to the staff and it was fine with them). But if no one else was bothered by it, I figured that perhaps I shouldn't worry about it, either. Besides, I didn't want to appear to be some sort of uptight outsider asshole, which I might well have been anyway in spirit.

But no sooner did I resolve to do nothing than Jorge, Chilean Drunk decide to take off like the proverbial bat out of hell. Weird.

Last but not least was Jake Brown himself. I really enjoyed it. He was funny, smart and entertaining all at once. And friendly, too. I even got someone to snap this picture.

Artists have been kown to bug the shit out of me before, maybe artists aren't so bad. You know, I think I could do some spoken word stuff. But I think I'll put that into the Unfulfilled Dreams box.

0 scrawls at the end of this hall

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