For The Next Thirty Minutes, The Part of Your Id Will Be Played By Kendall Yorkey

With all the requisite charisma of a professional actor, Michael DiPadova tells me I’ve arrived, “in the nick of time.” The show hasn’t started yet. I am the last to arrive. I’m covering Nevermore Theatre’s staged reading of a one-act for a free weekly metro paper. The lights fade. Three women of three different distinct ages stand at three music stands on an otherwise blank stage. It’s Nevermore’s fundraiser for its upcoming production of Hamlet, so why does it look like the opening of Macbeth? In a moment it becomes clear: Ravenna is the Ego. Kate is the Super Ego. And for the next thirty minutes, the part of your Id will be played by 15 year-old Kendall Yorkey. There’s something very pure about the spoken word onstage. It’s like home. On the number 15 back to the East Side, I run into a vague acquaintance from the East Side Poetry scene of ten years ago. 10 years ago the scene was flourishing. The east side was crawling with poets. The old acquaintance engages me in failed attempts at conversation. Things are suitably awkward until a girl in a fauxhawk sits in front of me smelling of something very familiar that I can’t quite identify. It takes me a few minutes to realize that she smells like polycarbonate plastic with a faint hint of aluminum. This anonymous east-side girl smells like a fresh CD straight out of the shrink-wrap. The scent is overpowering. (Weird.)

Russ Bickerstaff has been writing for VITAL since 2003, when the world probably made slightly more sense. He co-manages an apartment complex with his beautiful wife Carrie, a poet for an insurance company with whom he hopes to eventually move to the suburbs to raise some little insurance poet-critics. There must be decent paying work around here somewhere...