#live lit

The Graduate – Miss Spoken – Medium

Meagan Dahl is a writer, artist, and former theater kid. By day she works in marketing, and by night she trash blogs and watches an unhealthy amount of true crime TV. Meagan’s short fiction and poetry have been published in several obscure literary magazines and she’s a veteran to the Miss Spoken stage. Her best life decisions (so far) were moving to Chicago 4.5 yrs ago and adopting her cat children Hall & Oates.

This post is a bit of an oxymoron. Live Lit isn’t meant to be experienced through the pages of a book. Though it shares similarities with book readings, it has no intention of getting you to read a book either, at least not directly. Book readings, as much as I love them and have a valid purpose, always come off as a tad stuffy and stiff. The selection is usually carefully selected to entice the reader to finish the whole story in their own time. It is all very polite. There is a thin layer of separation between the author and the work, the work and the audience, and the writer and their fan. By its very nature, it leaves you wanting more.

With Live Lit, those artificial barriers seem to collapse into an experience that feels more like communion. Many of you may have heard of The Moth and the gist of Live Lit events around the country is more or less similar: storytellers take the stage to present an original story in front of a live audience. I usually tell friends that it’s a bit like stand up comedy, except you get one long anecdote and there is no obligation to be funny. Not all shows are the same and what you gravitate towards will, of course, be determined by personal taste. Some shows require a first-person true-to-life narrative, others do not. Some shows let performers read off the page, others frown upon it. Some let you ramble for as long as you want, some have a strict time limit. Whatever the guidelines may be, witnessing this hybrid art form tends to be more electrifying than a regular reading. Even in those cases where writers use notes, the performance allows itself to improvise the material and feed off the audience reactions. Plus, the short format gives the audience the intense, meaty bite of a complete story.

Leah Jones is the founder of Natiiv Facilitation where she plans and leads retreats for all sizes of teams. She spends her free time paralyzed in fear about the hellscape of 2018 or trying to turn fear into laughs at stand-up open mic. You can follow her on Twitter for health policy tweets and photos of her cats Spidey and Cowboy.

Allie Wachowski is a Chicago born and raised, classically trained in absolutely nothing, writer, storyteller, and internet sensation.

Miss Spoken returns to The Gallery Cabaret for our next show, MISS MANNERS

Keidra Chaney is a writer, Publisher of pop culture website The Learned Fangirl, and occasional rock musician.

Donald Trump only likes two types of women. The first is future ex-wives, model-thin and pert, yet buxom, with eyes perpetually narrowed, lest any reality be taken in. He likes this type of woman to stand tall but stay silent, with expensive fabrics in pale colors draped across their chests like the window dressings for the White House, reportedly a fixation of Trump’s, something he has spent hours thumbing through catalogues deciding on. These women, like the White House, are to be owned and ornately decorated, reflecting the splendor of the man who holds their arms in his wimpy, yet ferocious clench.

The other type of woman Trump likes is exemplified by Kelly Anne Conway and our new Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos: work wives. These women are closer to Trump in age, but still rail thin Stepford smilers, dishwater blonde hair and mousey, self-effacing voices belying the words of sharks. These women speak for Trump when his own confused sputterings fail him; they’re vacuous, cutthroat, and importantly, rich.

The one sign of progress in the Republican party in the past fifty years is that instead of such women cringing supportively in bad suit skirts next to their husbands, these morally bereft, saccharine, incompetent white women are now in positions of leadership. Hashtag girl boss I fucking guess.

Of course, poor Lionhead Titty Coat Conway is worth only $4 million, barely enough to buy a vaginal steam treatment at Mar-a-Lago’s spa, whereas Betsy DeVos is worth $5.1 billion. And while the former does revolutionize the English language with every diamond-crusted fecal particle flung from her unprepared mouth, the latter is positioned to destroy American education. So, let’s focus on Betsy.

A graduate of private, Christian schools in Michigan, DeVos earned her riches by marrying into the family that owns Amway. You know, Amway? The multilevel marketing scam that convinced your sister’s sweaty ex-boyfriend that investing a few hundred dollars in selling knives and window cleaning products door-to-door was a good idea? The company the FTC investigates for pyramid scheme charges every couple of years? That funded so many Republican campaigns that at one point there was entire Congressional caucus composed of representatives who were also Amway distributors? The company that pressures employees to donate to Republican campaigns, whose employee training materials frequently include Biblical quotes, and which Mother Jones described as operating like a “private political army”?

That’s the legacy Besty DeVos married into, but she’s not a passive, supporting figure in it. She’s been involved in Republican politics since 1982, fighting for tax breaks for her husband’s business, cuts to school funding, and the advancement of private schools rooted in Christian morality and the gospel of free enterprise. DeVos has spearheaded her family’s political fundraising for years, and expects returns on her investments. In a 1997 Op-Ed for The Atlantic, DeVos wrote: “My family is the largest single contributor of soft money to the national Republican Party. I have decided to stop taking offense at the suggestion that we are buying influence. Now I simply concede the point. They are right.”

Unlike Trump, whom DeVos described in 2016 as an “interloper who does not represent the Republican Party”, Betsy’s policy positions are clear. She sees education as a privilege to be bought and sold, not a necessity the government provides. In her confirmation hearing, she came across as woefully inept, lacking basic knowledge about how disabled students’ rights are protected, or how assessments of students work. A dipshit who couldn’t tell the difference between an ACT and an ISAT if she was locked alone in a room with both tests and no one to smile at for twenty seven hours. A snowy owl looking ass Sarah Palin who believes guns will protect students from bears rather than give entitled, scary-ass white boys an easy means of revenge the next time they get deservedly friend-zoned. A ghoul who opposes child labor laws, who’s donated to an organization that believes a childhood spent coal mining would be “exciting” and “educational”.

It’s true, she’s an ignorant, wealthy white goblin who hasn’t changed her helmety haircut in over thirty years, a true testament to her traditionalist depravity. But her ineptitude is intentional: she didn’t bother learning about the educational system because she plans to dismantle it, dollar by dollar, with her immaculately bleached teeth. On the day of her confirmation, Republicans introduced HR 899, designed to abolish the Education Department. I promise you, when Betsy got the news, her perfectly smooth forehead did not betray a single twinge of shock. This was her hope all along.

DeVos’ appointment was approved by the Senate on Tuesday, by a 51-to-50 vote. For those of us who called and wrote our senators, and rallied against her appointment, this feels like a failure. However, we achieved a tie in a Republican-majority congress. We convinced two conservative senators to vote against DeVos’. We delayed DeVos’ confirmation vote. We drew focus. We created a tie that had to be broken by the Vice President, the first time a VP has had to settle a confirmation vote in United States history.

Confirming cabinet appointees, historically, is very easy. We made it contentious, politically costly, slow-going, and hard. And now, we can work to make Besty DeVos’ job, the one that she paid so much for, as hard and accountable as possible.

Call her at the Department of Education. Tell her you care about the student debt crisis. That you’re worried about the funding of schools in areas with low property values. That your kid’s school lacks adequate services for disabled students. That your schools arts programs will be gutted by the defunding of the NEA. That you don’t want public grants to pay for sham colleges like Trump University. We live in a difficult era, and we must get our petty solace wherever we can find it. Annoying the shit out of this wealthy hemmorodic pustule is a great place to start. Her number is 202-402-3000. Welcome her to the job.

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