Bay Area Icarus was revived last summer, and we are officially full of surging, irreverent life.   We held our first event on Valentine's Day--Mad Love.  We had an open mic, a skilled MC, a cabaret of musicians and poets, and the evening skyrocketed to a close with the Brass Liberation Orchestra.

If you were there, you know.  If not, read on!  Almost as good. :)

Being in the city had an advantage for me. City cops are jaded. There’s constant action in a city. A car cruising at four in the morning doesn’t raise an eyebrow. Try doing this in the lily-white suburbs sometime and see how far you get. There’s very little traffic so the roads are easy to navigate. If you’re floating on a raft of euphoria and marijuana, as I was, this can be very ooch rabazibby. And it’s very otherworldly. Large, well-lit boulevards are deserted, as though a neutron bomb had been dropped and killed the people but left the buildings standing. Everything looks cleaner, clearer, more perfectly defined. It was just me and the cabs. The cabs, the cops, the hookers, the homeless, the dealers, the debris. It’s a whole other world out there at night, a world of odds and ends, odds and unevens. Of things and people that don’t fit nicely into proper categories. And I was snaking through it in the comfort of my mini-limo, high, warm, shimmying to the funky rhythms on the radio, pumped up on the power I exerted over my growing litter of kittens. I was bad. Bad enough to make it in the big time. Bad enough to rip the cover off.