Speak Easy
Published in Berkshire Living, May 2008
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Heather Fisch plays “St. James Infirmary Blues” on her accordion as she rocks back and forth, perched upon a step about halfway up the creaky, wooden stairway. With wide, dark brown eyes, fair skin, and dark hair, this twenty-two-year-old looks every bit the enigmatic French gamine . . . though on this night she lacks the jauntily angled red beret and red lipstick she’ll be wearing the next month. A crowd of about forty watches below, transfixed as she interprets the traditional blues number as a sort of Gypsy tall tale.
By day a contractor’s assistant, Fisch arrived too late to get on the sign-up sheet at “In Words Out Words,” the monthly open-mike night at Deb Koffman’s Artspace in Housatonic, Massachusetts. So, instead, she plays impromptu “exit music” as people mingle.
Tonight, guests have already seen a woman play a Brazillian tune on her harp, a science teacher from Lee High School illustrate the size of our universe with a soap bubble gun, and a sixteen-year-old girl bring down the house with an original soul song.
It’s a commonplace that there are perhaps as many artists and performers in the Berkshires, per capita, as anywhere else. At “In Words Out Words,” this mosaic of richly talented folks—neighbors, co-workers, coffee shop fellows—is on glorious display. And it’s a growing scene that happily accepts new faces into the fold. The monthly celebration features a striking diversity of performing arts, and nervous newcomers share the bill with polished professionals as all are encouraged to take a chance, to walk out on the tightrope . . . with a net.
“It’s really one of the best open-mike nights that I’ve seen,” says Taylor Mali, a neighbor of Artspace, who also happens to be a four-time National Poetry Slam team champion. One of the original poets to appear on the original HBO series, Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry, which first popularized the performance genre, he hosts a weekly open mike at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City. Last year, he added to his resumé a slot as the featured performer here.
The series started in February 2004 after Bob Balogh, a journalist, playwright, radio host, and recent transplant to Housatonic, visited Koffman’s gallery and asked her to open the double doors at the rear of the room. When he peered into the dark, cluttered space, he saw a menagerie of old tables, chairs, and art supplies. Balogh says he immediately had the “vision” of turning this storage room into a performance space.
Billed as “Words Out Loud” and initially geared toward poetry, the event steadily built from a half dozen or so original attendees to thirty folks on a good night. Balogh moved to Pittsfield during the summer of 2006, taking the event with him; nowadays he hosts a new incarnation at the Mason Library in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.
Though intimidated by the task, Koffman took over the responsibility of running the event following Balogh’s departure. She switched nights, recruited life coach John Meeks John Meeks[ARB1] as host, and changed the name to “In Words Out Words.” Something clicked. The event grew more and more colorful—more music, more varieties of artistic expression, and more participants. Crowds of fifty-plus became the norm, with the rows of folding chairs in the performance space (augmented by a few church-like pews along the walls) usually filling up fast, relegating the spillover crowd to the front room of the gallery, where some angle to catch a view of the performers while others relax on the couches, content just to listen. The December 2007 session boasted the largest crowd to date: about seventy people, including those who showed up but didn’t stay when they couldn’t find a seat. The performer list (capped at twenty) was full five minutes before the performance began.
Diego Gutierrez and his wife, Terri, moved to Housatonic from Sharon, Connecticut, in October 2006, with the explicit goal of finding a thriving arts scene and diving into it. They visited “In Words Out Words” the next month. It was the night the Democrats re-took control of Congress, and there was a particular buzz in the air. (Full disclosure: the author of this article performed the Allen Ginsberg poem “America” that evening.) A man sporting a blond ponytail, intense blue eyes, and an unassumingly muscular frame hidden beneath his fleece jacket and jeans came solo and sat silently for most of the evening. Meeks finally introduced Taylor Mali, who launched without preface into a trio of his best poems. “Scrabble was made for his mind,” he said in one,
Eddie stares at my face, at the board, at his rack . . .
And I wonder what his dyslexic, rearranging mind is doing now with my eyes and my ears and my nose
How many one-eyed, Picasso-faced English teachers are staring back at him from the educated audience of his adolescence?
How many monsters can he spell with my face?
He blazed through a short set (including “Playing Scrabble with Eddie”) filled with whiz-bang literary pyrotechnics and honest observations about his days as a math and English teacher teacher[ARB2] . It turns out that the poetry-slam champ—formerly president of Poetry Slam Inc., the nonprofit that oversees all poetry slams in North America—had just driven his last carload of fragile items from his old house in Rosedale, New York, to his new one in Housatonic. He’d seen an announcement about the open mike pinned to the bulletin board at the Berkshire Co-op Market in Great Barrington and popped in to introduce himself to his new neighbors the best way he knew how.
When Mali sat back down after blowing the room away, Diego and Terri shot each other looks. The message was clear. We need to come back here again next month!
Diego, an architect by day, had never performed publicly in his life—aside from serious presentations given in conference rooms. After a year attending “In Words Out Words,” he decided to give it a try. He chose Pablo Neruda’s “Ode to a Cat,” and employed the large-scale color printer he usually uses for architectural proposals to print a poster-sized photo of his cat, Ziggy.
In December 2007, Meeks called him up to the stage for the first time. Wordlessly, Diego unrolled the poster and tacked it to the wall. Dozens chuckled. He read Neruda’s poem, alternating between Spanish and English as the glowing eyes[ARB3] of his gray, domestic shorthair watched. It seemed as if he’d been performing for years, and he finished to great applause.
“There aren’t a lot of safe places to just expose yourself in that way, and that place just gives that,” Diego says. “I think this is a unique venue for like-minded, artistic people to feel safe and explore their own voice--whatever that is.”
It’s hard not to like Deb Koffman. Dressed in a sweater and jeans, Koffman muses on the “In Words Out Words” phenomenon as she sips peppermint tea from a large mug on a chilly Sunday afternoon in her gallery. She tends to start conversations quietly, intently holding one’s gaze with bright, warm eyes. Hanging on one wall is a painted wooden circle marked into segments: “Be Miserable, “Feel Good,” and “Don’t Breathe.” In the center is a spin-able arrow, resting on “Breathe.” A few trial spins reveal that the arrow lands there due to gravity rather than chance, so it always comes to rest at the same place: Breathe.
Koffman says she came to the Berkshires twenty years ago from the Boston area in search of her own voice, as an artist and moreover as a person. “I didn’t know if I had a voice. Be an artist? I didn’t know what ‘being an artist’ was, so I made it up. . . . I was just trying to figure out what I was doing on the planet.” She pauses before adding, in a manner contemplative rather than boastful, “I’ve come a long way.”
Her artwork reflects that journey. She illustrates stylized characters and scenes that dramatize accompanying reflections such as “It’s not what it is . . . it’s what it inspires.” One might call her work metaphysical cartoons. The walls of her gallery are adorned with signs that declare, “Look as long and as deeply as you need” and “Which way?” Out of this energy is born the ethos of the series: to express what is most personal in front of people who will support you no matter what.
“This is a great venue for understanding the Berkshires,” says Jim Fulton as he lounges on Koffman’s couch one night after an open mike, surveying the post-performance crowd with a satisfied smile. Fulton says he quit his job in Los Angeles as an assignment editor for ABC News on his forty-fourth birthday. He then moved east in search of “peace of mind and a new life” and found the Berkshires in spring 2006. Now, it’s home. This scene is “a way into the woodwork” of the Berkshire creative community, he says, “one way of walking in the door to welcoming people, of getting into the grain of the place. The art of living--that’s happening in this room.”
“In Words Out Words” has become something of a launching pad for artistic collaborations.. Meeks, a veteran of the Boston improv comedy scene in the 1990s, hadn’t performed in twelve years before his first time here; he now teaches improv classes at the venue. Regular performer Steve Dietemann hosts a biweekly radio program called “Story Time” on WBCR-LP (97.7 FM) and has featured readings from the work of several regulars. Koffman conducts a drawing class at Artspace, and Mali has led a workshop on performance poetry there.
After her second accordion performance on the stairs (it looks like it may become a tradition), Fisch says she feels like a regular already. “After the second time I played I didn’t feel like a newcomer anymore . . . I know these people now,” she says. “I like it because it feels like there’s some kind of community—and it’s here.” BL
Jeremy D. Goodwin’s writing on culture and the arts appears in numerous publications in print and online. He has been a featured poet at “In Words Out Words.”
The Goods
In Words Out Words
First Tuesday of every month
7-9 p.m. (Sign-up begins at 6:45)
Deb Koffman’s Artspace
137 Front St.
Housatonic, Mass.
413.274.1212
www.debkoffman.com
[ARB1]we need a descriptor here--- author John Meeks? or whatever he does?
[ARB2]what kind of teacher (English? philosophy? or does he mean poetry slam teacher?)
[ARB3]perhaps Jeremy will modify this or the one below...see other highlight?
Heather Fisch plays “St. James Infirmary Blues” on her accordion as she rocks back and forth, perched upon a step about halfway up the creaky, wooden stairway. With wide, dark brown eyes, fair skin, and dark hair, this twenty-two-year-old looks every bit the enigmatic French gamine . . . though on this night she lacks the jauntily angled red beret and red lipstick she’ll be wearing the next month. A crowd of about forty watches below, transfixed as she interprets the traditional blues number as a sort of Gypsy tall tale.
By day a contractor’s assistant, Fisch arrived too late to get on the sign-up sheet at “In Words Out Words,” the monthly open-mike night at Deb Koffman’s Artspace in Housatonic, Massachusetts. So, instead, she plays impromptu “exit music” as people mingle.
Tonight, guests have already seen a woman play a Brazillian tune on her harp, a science teacher from Lee High School illustrate the size of our universe with a soap bubble gun, and a sixteen-year-old girl bring down the house with an original soul song.
It’s a commonplace that there are perhaps as many artists and performers in the Berkshires, per capita, as anywhere else. At “In Words Out Words,” this mosaic of richly talented folks—neighbors, co-workers, coffee shop fellows—is on glorious display. And it’s a growing scene that happily accepts new faces into the fold. The monthly celebration features a striking diversity of performing arts, and nervous newcomers share the bill with polished professionals as all are encouraged to take a chance, to walk out on the tightrope . . . with a net.
“It’s really one of the best open-mike nights that I’ve seen,” says Taylor Mali, a neighbor of Artspace, who also happens to be a four-time National Poetry Slam team champion. One of the original poets to appear on the original HBO series, Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry, which first popularized the performance genre, he hosts a weekly open mike at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City. Last year, he added to his resumé a slot as the featured performer here.
The series started in February 2004 after Bob Balogh, a journalist, playwright, radio host, and recent transplant to Housatonic, visited Koffman’s gallery and asked her to open the double doors at the rear of the room. When he peered into the dark, cluttered space, he saw a menagerie of old tables, chairs, and art supplies. Balogh says he immediately had the “vision” of turning this storage room into a performance space.
Billed as “Words Out Loud” and initially geared toward poetry, the event steadily built from a half dozen or so original attendees to thirty folks on a good night. Balogh moved to Pittsfield during the summer of 2006, taking the event with him; nowadays he hosts a new incarnation at the Mason Library in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.
Though intimidated by the task, Koffman took over the responsibility of running the event following Balogh’s departure. She switched nights, recruited life coach John Meeks John Meeks
Diego Gutierrez and his wife, Terri, moved to Housatonic from Sharon, Connecticut, in October 2006, with the explicit goal of finding a thriving arts scene and diving into it. They visited “In Words Out Words” the next month. It was the night the Democrats re-took control of Congress, and there was a particular buzz in the air. (Full disclosure: the author of this article performed the Allen Ginsberg poem “America” that evening.) A man sporting a blond ponytail, intense blue eyes, and an unassumingly muscular frame hidden beneath his fleece jacket and jeans came solo and sat silently for most of the evening. Meeks finally introduced Taylor Mali, who launched without preface into a trio of his best poems. “Scrabble was made for his mind,” he said in one,
Eddie stares at my face, at the board, at his rack . . .
And I wonder what his dyslexic, rearranging mind is doing now with my eyes and my ears and my nose
How many one-eyed, Picasso-faced English teachers are staring back at him from the educated audience of his adolescence?
How many monsters can he spell with my face?
He blazed through a short set (including “Playing Scrabble with Eddie”) filled with whiz-bang literary pyrotechnics and honest observations about his days as a math and English teacher teacher
When Mali sat back down after blowing the room away, Diego and Terri shot each other looks. The message was clear. We need to come back here again next month!
Diego, an architect by day, had never performed publicly in his life—aside from serious presentations given in conference rooms. After a year attending “In Words Out Words,” he decided to give it a try. He chose Pablo Neruda’s “Ode to a Cat,” and employed the large-scale color printer he usually uses for architectural proposals to print a poster-sized photo of his cat, Ziggy.
In December 2007, Meeks called him up to the stage for the first time. Wordlessly, Diego unrolled the poster and tacked it to the wall. Dozens chuckled. He read Neruda’s poem, alternating between Spanish and English as the glowing eyes
“There aren’t a lot of safe places to just expose yourself in that way, and that place just gives that,” Diego says. “I think this is a unique venue for like-minded, artistic people to feel safe and explore their own voice--whatever that is.”
It’s hard not to like Deb Koffman. Dressed in a sweater and jeans, Koffman muses on the “In Words Out Words” phenomenon as she sips peppermint tea from a large mug on a chilly Sunday afternoon in her gallery. She tends to start conversations quietly, intently holding one’s gaze with bright, warm eyes. Hanging on one wall is a painted wooden circle marked into segments: “Be Miserable, “Feel Good,” and “Don’t Breathe.” In the center is a spin-able arrow, resting on “Breathe.” A few trial spins reveal that the arrow lands there due to gravity rather than chance, so it always comes to rest at the same place: Breathe.
Koffman says she came to the Berkshires twenty years ago from the Boston area in search of her own voice, as an artist and moreover as a person. “I didn’t know if I had a voice. Be an artist? I didn’t know what ‘being an artist’ was, so I made it up. . . . I was just trying to figure out what I was doing on the planet.” She pauses before adding, in a manner contemplative rather than boastful, “I’ve come a long way.”
Her artwork reflects that journey. She illustrates stylized characters and scenes that dramatize accompanying reflections such as “It’s not what it is . . . it’s what it inspires.” One might call her work metaphysical cartoons. The walls of her gallery are adorned with signs that declare, “Look as long and as deeply as you need” and “Which way?” Out of this energy is born the ethos of the series: to express what is most personal in front of people who will support you no matter what.
“This is a great venue for understanding the Berkshires,” says Jim Fulton as he lounges on Koffman’s couch one night after an open mike, surveying the post-performance crowd with a satisfied smile. Fulton says he quit his job in Los Angeles as an assignment editor for ABC News on his forty-fourth birthday. He then moved east in search of “peace of mind and a new life” and found the Berkshires in spring 2006. Now, it’s home. This scene is “a way into the woodwork” of the Berkshire creative community, he says, “one way of walking in the door to welcoming people, of getting into the grain of the place. The art of living--that’s happening in this room.”
“In Words Out Words” has become something of a launching pad for artistic collaborations.. Meeks, a veteran of the Boston improv comedy scene in the 1990s, hadn’t performed in twelve years before his first time here; he now teaches improv classes at the venue. Regular performer Steve Dietemann hosts a biweekly radio program called “Story Time” on WBCR-LP (97.7 FM) and has featured readings from the work of several regulars. Koffman conducts a drawing class at Artspace, and Mali has led a workshop on performance poetry there.
After her second accordion performance on the stairs (it looks like it may become a tradition), Fisch says she feels like a regular already. “After the second time I played I didn’t feel like a newcomer anymore . . . I know these people now,” she says. “I like it because it feels like there’s some kind of community—and it’s here.” BL
Jeremy D. Goodwin’s writing on culture and the arts appears in numerous publications in print and online. He has been a featured poet at “In Words Out Words.”
The Goods
In Words Out Words
First Tuesday of every month
7-9 p.m. (Sign-up begins at 6:45)
Deb Koffman’s Artspace
137 Front St.
Housatonic, Mass.
413.274.1212
www.debkoffman.com
[ARB1]we need a descriptor here--- author John Meeks? or whatever he does?
[ARB2]what kind of teacher (English? philosophy? or does he mean poetry slam teacher?)
[ARB3]perhaps Jeremy will modify this or the one below...see other highlight?