Evelyn Lau
Yesterday I went to an open-mic poetry night where acclaimed poet Evelyn Lau read her most recent works. Lau's widely read Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid, is an autobiography chronicling her journey onto the street where she escaped her overbearing parents, took drugs and entered the sex trade. This book may have been the only thing that stopped Perplexa's own alpha-mom in her tracks.
The night went smoothly until another poet read a poem about a porn actress met via MySpace entitled, "Jade and the Dirty Sanchez Army." It reminded me of how comedian Paul Rodriguez stood idly while Michael Richards spewed racial slurs at an audience. Said Rodriguez, "I kept waiting for a punchline that could justify the words before it. It didn't come."
The bespectacled male poet was asked to leave the stage 2 min. into the poem. I'm afraid that Evelyn Lau now thinks that every geek is online to infantilize and degrade "bad" women.
*Revisions to clarify- Poem was read by male attendee NOT Evelyn Lau
Labels: Diary of a Street Kid, Evelyn Lau, MySpace, poetry
3 Comments:
Oh do tell what was said that could be so offensive as to rile a bunch of otherwise docile Victorians. I can't imagine interrupting a market-tested, street-hardened, CBC darling like Evelyn Lau. Doesn't her background alone, never mind the medium, except her from the usual taboos?
-Dal
It was in Vancouver on Commercial Drive and the person interrupted was a poet who stepped up to the mic (not Lau).
While Lau is certainly thick-skinned, it is pretty tasteless to make a woman who has been through some fairly traumatic experiences in the sex-trade listen to a guy carry on about splattering feces on a woman he obviously lacks respect for. I'm of the mind that a woman's sexual history should not be a deciding factor on how she should be treated but I know that in many instances including Cdn rape trials, this may not be the case.
Not to be a scary feminist or anything...really it's just kinda gross and while he's welcome to stand there and talk about whatever, we don't have to turn the mic on for him.
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