Once Upon a Slam

Last night I continued my foray into competitive storytelling by showing up for the second ever Once Upon A Slam. I told the same story as last weekend - got it down by about a minute and a half, coming in at something like 5:47, I think - and was pleasantly surprised by a couple of marks over 9! Besides, I got to go first this time: it's like they say, I guess, 'the last shall be first'... So, once my story was over with, I could go get a Beau's and relax.

It was a small crowd, really, but then the series is just getting rolling. Once again the stories (and tellers) were varied: there were seven tellers, doing everything from folktales to mythology to personal stories to a fairly wild bit of surrealist comedy. I'd been joking around with a couple of the other tellers about running over time, because I knew I was going to: one of the other slammers said he was thinking of calling himself "Captain Overtime," so I swore I was taking that title. We were all completely eliminated in the time-deduction wars, though, by Festrell, who clocked in at just under 16 minutes, gaining herself the biggest time penalty I've ever seen: a final score in the negatives. (There was an infatuated, drunk and gender-switching Loki involved.)

In the end, Keirsten Hieber headed home with the championship for a story involving her father, mother, tractors, and some ill-advised suntanning, and we all hung out a bit longer to talk stories before heading out into the (rather impossibly gusty) evening.

Now I've got to come up with a new story for the next one. Although I may not make the next: it'll be December 31 and I think I may well be in New Brunswick. But for January? I think there's an action/adventure autobiographical story waiting to happen.

Funny: I've never done poetry slam - I was always quite intimidated by it - but this story slam thing is, for me, far less scary. I wonder why?