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<p>Kristi Leach: Researcher, designer, so what?</p>
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<h1>The Screamer in a City of Writers</h1>
<p>First off, sorry about the HTML markup. One day soon this will be a website at kristileach.com that you can read without HTML tags, but I haven't gotten that far. Welcome, though. Hi!</p>
<p>I was <a href="https://twitter.com/neofuturists/status/645737326723891200">tweeting with the Neo-Futurists</a>, and they asked what I thought of the show I saw there on Saturday. I mostly loved it, so we tweeted about that. But the first play did not spark love sparks, and I want to talk more about that, now.</p>
<p>The play was "The Screamer in a City of Writers." The Screamer is a guy who panhandles in Andersonville and Ravenswood, and in between calling, "Change?" he screams. I know The Screamer. My friend, Brad, has lived here all his life, and he told me The Screamer has Tourrettes, but I don't know how Brad knows that.</p>
<p>The Screamer's name is David. I know THAT because my friends at <a href="http://www.timeout.com/chicago/bars/farraguts">Farraguts</a> told me. David screams on Clark Street near Farraguts. The bartenders and some of the regulars there have talked to him way more than I have. I just say "hi," and also, "here you go."</p>
<p>When I lived on Summerdale, on nights I had the windows open, I could hear David calling out at regular intervals into the early morning. I walked past David while on a date, once, and my date started talking about trying to smile at every homeless person he sees, and about how the homeless people seemed grateful for that. We did not go out again.</p>
<p>"The Screamer in a City of Writers." In the play, David was only referred to as The Screamer. It took me about 2.5 seconds to figure out who they were talking about, and after that, I'm sorry to say I missed a lot of it. They talked about seeing The Screamer at 7-11, and someone laid down on the ground to have a chalk outline drawn around The Screamer, and then they filled in the outline with more chalk. But I had a buzzing in my ears, and Brad and I were busy giving each other the "What the Fuck?" face, and drunk people were laughing (I think not at things that were intended to be funny, but I'm not sure), and really, I missed two or three more plays trying to get past the guilty feeling of having talked shit behind someone's back.</p>
<p>I am so embarrassed to tell you this—when that play was over, I said, pretty loudly, "Well, that sucked." That is the kind of nuanced audience response that comes from pre-gaming at <a href="http://www.drunkenhistory.com/bar-travelogues/70-simons-travelogue">Simon's</a>, I guess.</p>
<p>It was <a href="http://neofuturists.org/people/kurt-chiang/">Kurt's</p> play, and I talked to him about it after the show. The chalk part was about him, as a writer, filling in David's story, he said. With what, though? I'm still wondering. I've only heard a little of David's actual story. So far, it's more interesting (to me) than what I managed to digest of that play. This is someone who lives in our neighborhood who we can talk to, if we want to. And it seems like NOT doing that may be part of what the play is getting at. But then, an audience full of people who maybe do or don't know David trying to take that in via a two-minute, fast-paced play--how did that come off? Some of them might have walked by David on their way to the show. I'm curious what they got out of that musing. Not a sense of David as a person, I'd wager.</p>
<p>That seems to be the point, which is legitimate. And what have I (a writer!) added to the story besides a first name and a few stories about myself? In <a href="https://github.com/kwritenow/kristileach.com/commits/master">previous versions of this post</a>, I camplained that I hadn't come away with a nugget. Maybe now I'm just down to complaining about how much this nugget looks like so many of the other nuggets I already have.</p>
<p>Kurt asked me if I was offended, and I avoided answering that. Later that night, my friend asked if I was offended, and then didn't have much patience for me possibly being offended and changed the subject. But being offended wasn't the part that was interesting to me, and I didn't want to dwell on that part.</p>
<p>In most things--conversation, stand up comedy, magazine stories, songs--being offended is information. That's almost certainly privilege speaking, because when I am offended by sexism, I am usually OFFENDED. Other things, I am able to have more distance. But even with sexism, I get less worked up the more I mature and get better at granting myself some distance (distance=safety).</p>
<p>Anyway, the feeling of being offended is information. It's like a dashboard light coming on. If you take your car to the shop because the check-engine light comes on, the mechanic doesn't turn the indicator light off and send you home without looking under the hood. If I'm feeling offended, it tells me something under the hood is harmful, or boring, or productive. Discomfort can be productive, no? In art, in journalism, in friendship—being offended is the beginning of the discussion, not the end of it.</p>
<p>So, I'll say that yes, I was offended. But with that caveat.</p>
<p>***</p>
<p>Thanks for reading. If you want your reply to show up as a comment, someday, when this is a real website, submit a <a href="https://github.com/kwritenow/kristileach.com/compare">pull request</a>. Ditto if you see something that needs correcting. Otherwise, see you on the Twitter machine.
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<footer>Copyright Kristi Leach 2015 |
kristileach.com by Kristi Leach is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
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