A Bright Eyes concert practically right around the corner from an all-blogger reading? Are you kidding me? That many personal public confessional forums in such a concentrated area is like � like � The Perfect Storm! Ripe for disaster!

I jest!

Because really, last night was anything but a disaster.

And honestly, the only reasons I might have had disaster on my mind are A. it turned out to be a way crowded SRO deal and all (which is a good problem, people taking such an interest, ass cramps and legs cramps aside). And B. in order to get to the reading you had to climb this little narrow stairway to get to the second floor gallery of Uncle Fun�s and what with the anniversary of the fatal e2 Night Club stampedes and the Rhode Island Great White inferno incident so close, I have to admit, a few tragic newspaper headlines crossed my mind. You know, something along the lines of:

DOZENS OF AREA BLOGGERS STUCK IN STAIRWAY UNABLE TO CHECK EMAIL/SITEMETER HITS FOR HOURS AND HOURS AFTER MIMI SMARTYPANTS DROPS FUNNY-BOMB

Or maybe something actually funny.

But I think you get the idea.

At any rate, I climbed the stairs, paid my five bucks and hoped no one was packing pepper spray. Or pyrotechnics.*

Luckily, the only one packing was scheduled reader mimi smartypants. She was packing all right.

Puppets.

Who doesn�t love a reading with puppets?

Also great: notebooks. As in, like the good diary/journal/blogger people they are, every few minutes you could catch someone in the audience (and I am not even talking the Chicago Reader reporter-type people covering the event) writing pithy observations in little notebooks. So thorough, these people! Sadly, I had too much of a kung-fu grip on my beer to do such a thing. But I think I might give up a six-pack to find out what secret things were being scribbled.

Really, what I mean to say is I had a very. good. time. I mean, there were toys! It was BYOB! For some strange reason the bathroom of Uncle Fun�s second floor gallery has a huge Jacuzzi bathtub!

I guess I wish I had a lot of gossipy-gossip to spread around, but I don�t. If you want to find out if any of the scheduled readers and or/audience members stuck around to find out if the Jacuzzi tub is really what puts The Fun in Uncle Fun�s you will have to go to their links (and then send me a notification email, of course). I basically kept to myself for the most part, (never really mentioning to anyone I sometimes write things here at ann-frank.diaryland.com) but managed to have a few very brief words with some very cool people who I had you know, read before, but at the time couldn�t manage to put two and two and a URL together and realize whoever I was babbling at was a particular person whose web site I had visited before.

Woo. Seriously, if you can understand that paragraph, congratulations. I certainly don�t. Such was whirl-windedness of such this event, I suppose.

So, I can only add: Mimi Smartypants and many others had everyone laughing out loud (oh my, look at that, internet lexicon goes literal!).

Plus, shasta macnasty is a definite new favorite and it was nice to see the adorable Andrew Huff smiling so much, because he and the super-cool people of SPEC did a mighty fine job putting it all together.

So, yeah. Good times.

The end.**

*For the record, I am normally a huge fan of the pyrotechnics, but apparently a bigger fan of Abiding By Fire Codes. I now know my motives are purely selfish as I never want to spend the night trying to put out blazing vintage toy-collectibles with my Old Style, because clearly, that is such a waste.

**Look, ma! No punch line! Sincerity rules!