Wordstock 2009
It was/is Wordstock this weekend. Wordstock being Portland’s big book festival. I volunteered again this year as a Stage Manager. Maybe they thought that because I Managed Stages last year that I was deserving of a promotion of sorts and put me in charge of the Powell’s Stage. I.e. the big stage. The most important stage. The one where if something goes wrong 400+ people will notice.
No worries, I thought. Worse comes to worse this sounds like the perfect situation for comedy.
In the end everything went find. I love hearing authors speak, but when they go over their allowed time and I need to get the stage ready for the next author but the current author is ignoring my hand signals announcing that they are out of time, then there is nothing I want more for them to shut up. I’m not going to name names, but come on!
Then there was James Ellroy. Apparently he is America’s greatest novelist and each book that he rights is better than his last. However, he was the one who told me this so I took it with a grain of salt. He reminded me of James Frey that one time I had the displeasure of going to his reading. People named James are bastards it seems.
It was fun. I think next year I may hold off on volunteering and just go for pleasure.