What's a cause for jubilation? Defenestration!

So, this weekend I kicked off the open mic for Ink Slink by reading a few of my columns. I began by asking if there were any objections to my reading columns they may have already read in the Transcript, and one woman spoke up. I made a joke and continued on to read anyway, but two paragraphs into the first column, having still not elicited any laughs from the audience, I thought to myself, "I'm going to be standing here performing humor for a completely unappreciative audience for 10 minutes, and the lack of laughter is going to become more and more awkward and awful as time goes on."

Yeah, I'm an optimist.

Anyway, by the time I hit the third paragraph, some of the jokes started catching people funny, and they were laughing a little. I had most of the audience laughing by the end of the column, and I guess it was just a question of breaking the ice, because they laughed all the way through the next two columns. I finished up by doing an improvised poem about Defenestration -- a topic suggested by the_star_fish when I gestured to the audience for a word. When I gestured for a second word, eeblet took it as chorus, saying "Defenestration" again. At that point, I decided just to run with it, so it ended up being a big Call&Response poem about defenestration with the whole audience participating. It was actually sort of neat. As usual, I forget most of the poem, but I remember this one line:

"If there's something you love, give it a shove."

Anyway, I went to graduation at Williams this weekend and saw a speech by the Sherriff of Rottingham, though the highlight was naturally having ppaladin and shellaby in to see Josh's brother graduate. And tomorrow, this journal will have a special guest poster.