Anna, AJ, and I decided to hop on the Blue line and head down to Wicker Park to see Joseph Salvatore read a “Quickie,” at Inner Town Pub’s reading series. The writer’s that participate only have five minutes to read fiction, and the host of this series means business, or else! If you go past the five minutes…they will blow the WHISTLE!
But before we could even hear the whistle we got LOST and depended on the kindness and incorrect directions of many Chicago strangers. We surmised that absolutely no one lives in Wicker Park and no one, save for our cab driver knows where Thomas Street is. One local we ran into who lived in the East Village for 12 years tried to explain the confusion away by taking us down dark alleys and saying, ‘yeah, we’re not really on a grid system around here.’
Luckily AJ is all about cab rides so we jumped in one after 40 minutes of walking around the abnormally warm streets of Wicker Park. Where we ended up was a corner bar full of neon, stained glass, Ms Pacman, a pool table and lots of amazing writers reading.
We didn’t hear the whistle last night, but Joe did a great job and we ran into Leigh who we think was trying to avoid us. We also didn’t end up having dinner, instead we had a shot of Jack and 3 rounds of PBR, but that was to celebrate the fact that Anna had sent an entire draft of this year’s print journal to the designer right before we left.
Anyway, if you happen to be in Chicago on the second Tuesday of any month I highly recommend checking out this reading series! If you can find it…
Inner Town Pub, 1935 West Thomas Street