It’s Wednesday, which means the Silent Reading Party is tonight! You can get your ticket here.
Reasons to attend tonight:
1. Paul Matthew Moore’s piano music is the only relaxing thing left in this hell-world.
2. Special guest Lesley Hazleton will be in the house. (Well, in the Zoom. Also, she’ll be on a houseboat…)
3. This is a way to chip in a little to help The Stranger (where would you be without our election endorsements?!) while getting the audio equivalent of Xanax broadcast into your brain.
If you are not familiar with Lesley, here are a couple of her TED talks.
If you’re not familiar with the Silent Reading Party, here’s what the New York Times had to say about it:
My silent reading party begins the same way every week, promptly at 6 p.m., with the now very familiar initiation of a Zoom call. A piano player’s hands appear in close-up among the gallery of boxes on my screen. His set list, a mix of Eric Satie and Radiohead instrumentals, will be the only sound. Like the windows of a New York City apartment building at night, other boxes soon come to life. People are in their homes, on their couches or in bed, all with a book. A hundred, then two hundred, absorbed in their reading, muted.
There’s a gray-haired woman at her kitchen table, more daydreaming than reading. There are couples, some eating bowls of pasta; a mother and daughter snuggling on a sofa; a woman petting her dog in front of a fireplace; a young man and woman sitting in armchairs dressed in a suit and sequin gown, martinis in their free hands. One week, I counted five cats, nine dogs and 22 glasses of wine. Inside one unforgettable box was a woman lying on her red leather couch, her book resting on her chest and her eyes closed — she’d fallen asleep. This lasts two hours. It’s mesmerizing, found performance art.
It is also literally the safest possible party you can attend right now.
Grab a ticket and get a snack tray ready and see you at 6 pm!
