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Mischief and Mayhem with Justin Vivian Bond & Laurie Weeks

1. Feminist Press interns India Hoppen and Andrea Espinoza bask in Le Poisson Rouge’s red glow. 2. Justin Vivian Bond reads aloud.

There is something about Justin Vivian Bond that is so wholly glamorous and personable that it’s hard not to fall in love. While reading from Tango: My Childhood, Backwards and in High Heels, on Sunday night at Le Poisson Rouge, Bond settled into a bar stool with a cocktail and reminisced about early experimentations with lipstick and boys as though swapping life stories in the wee hours of a friend’s living room. For those who have yet to pick up Bond’s memoir, recently released from the Feminist Press at CUNY, its philosophical treaties and bold recounting of Bond’s unceasing uniqueness should be considered essential reading, and not only for those interested in gender, LGBTQ rights, and performance.

1. Daniel and Ana enjoy a pre-show drink. 2. Jason Carey, Angelica Sgouros (office manager for the Feminist Press), Gabrielle Korn and Terry Ferreira, keeping it cute.

The reading was part of the publishing collective Mischief and Mayhem’s regular reading series at the venue hosted by the hilariously droll Katie Halper, whose emcee duties mainly include tales of her Upper West Side intellectual self-hating Jewish upbringing.

1. Feminist Press publicist Elizabeth Koke meets with Amy Scholder, the FP Editorial Director, and Justin Vivian Bond before the show. 2. Laurie Weeks, reading a particularly impassioned selection from Zipper Mouth.

Bond was followed by a cold-infested Laurie Weeks, who still managed to read brilliantly from her own wildly talked about debut, Zipper Mouth, also released by The Feminist Press. Her stunning prose detailing unrequited love and drug addiction is both miserable and engrossing. Descriptions like “In the air between Jane and me was poised a fundamental stillness so zingy and taut that it seems you could have accidentally have a thought shaped just right and the strung fabric of the day would stretch to form an opening contoured just like you, through which you’d step into Jane’s hacienda…” are what guarantee my soon-to-come heart-palpitating cover-to-cover read of Weeks’ work, in one sitting. In other words, get your hands on these novels, if only to tell others of their genius.

Tango: My Childhood, Backwards and in High Heels