The theme of the night was mistakes.
The back room at the Gladstone Hotel was packed.
Ostensibly, they were there for Farzana Doctor, being interviewed by Marc Glassman about the launch of her brilliant and tragically-themed book, Six Metres of Pavement, about an immigrant who accidentally leaves his child in a car on a hot summer day.
The literary crowd listened intently as Farzana discussed how she went through fourteen drafts of her novel, revealed the soft spot she has for misbehaved Muslims, and described how the grief resulting from such a horrible mistake would stick to her characters like the invisible silk of spider's web.
The audience was humbled and awed.
Then I got up on stage, and told a story about my testicles.
What better way to celebrate International Women's Day?
My tale of substandard kitchen cleaning protocols and misguided ingredient substitutions resulting in burning genitalia was the second story of the night.
The first was from Liz Worth, an author whose book, "Treat Me Like Dirt", an oral history of the punk rock scene in Toronto, had launched last year through This Is Not A Reading Series (TINARS).
Liz's story described the two years she spent ignoring red flags (she was a vegetarian and the only fruit he ate were organic strawberries from his mother), enduring forced walks through the rain (to retrieve money for her too-cheap-to-spend-$1-on-convenience-charges-from-nearby-ATMs boyfriend), and all the other elements of hell one suffers when trapped in a relationship they don't want to be in.
The women in the crowd were appropriately empathetic.
Right before the night concluded with music from local blues artist Sarah Greene and her band, there was one last story from Sage Tyrtle, who had previously contributed a story to our second 10 1/2 Stories event. Hers was a heartbreaking, heartwarming story about her long-time relationship with her husband Todd, and how the simplicity of love can so easily be derailed by the complexities of life (and boys on the Internet).
Normally, at this point in the post, I would be including a link to the audio from the evening, but we neglected to mention to the sound engineer on hand that we wanted the audio, and so, nobody, including and especially us, pressed the handy little button on the sound system marked "REC" (which, I have it on good authority, stands for Record).
We also neglected to set out an iPhone with a running recording app next to a speaker as we have done at every other storytelling event we've held.
And so, while I would normally, at this point in the post, include a link to the audio from the evening, I will instead be signing off with the assurance that it was a fantastic night, that any recording would not have done it justice, that you simply had to be there to truly appreciate it, and that if you missed it, you will drown in an unending sea of regret for the remainder of your days.
Did I mention the theme of the night was mistakes?
