Sometimes the girls call me “Poppi”. I think it started when we were in Italy a couple of years ago and the phrase, “Gelato, Poppi!” was so cosmopolitan — and effective. As they have gotten older, calling me Poppi is an affectionate endearment in so many ways that “Great Hairy Thunderer” isn’t. And today Poppi is just about popping his buttons.
I wrote last week about the Mall Diva’s debut with her friend Casii at The Black Sheep’s Open Mic Night. Last night they hit another open stage, this time at the Dunn Brothers coffee shop over on Grand in St. Paul. Whereas the first outing was for teens, the Dunn Bros. stage is a long-standing, bi-weekly event for a pretty much adult audience. There are a lot of Old Folkie types there, including one guy who looked like the ghost of Tom Joad but with even less meat on his bones, and another guy who relished the opportunity to stand on a stage with a guitar and a microphone and drop high-decibel f-bombs — not because he was outraged, but simply because he enjoyed it, I think. The girls more than held their own, singing the same three songs they sang previously, and engaging the audience which featured a lot of bright, smiling faces and bobbing heads. One guy was even moved to sing along with them as they sang, “It is well, it is well, with my soul.”
I remember the first time my wife and I heard the young Diva sing in public. It was for a Christmas program when she was in second grade. Neither her mother or I have a lick of singing ability and we weren’t expecting any in our progeny so when Faith told us she had a “solo” we figured she meant a speaking part. Lo and behold — or should I say, “Hark!” — she sang! My wife and I were flabbergasted. Never had we dared expect such a blessing! She later showed herself to be a quick study musically as well, once picking out a tune by ear on the piano even before she had had lessons. Later, when she had been taking lessons for a year, she played a recital with such skill and élan that others thought she’d been studying for year. To see her and Casii taking such confident and polished steps on a public stage is nearly enough to make me burst.
But that’s not all. As Tiger Lilly posted on Saturday, she just won a short-story writing contest sponsored by the Dakota County libraries. The contest was to write a ghost-story or thriller (the deadline was Halloween) and she took time off from the novel (or novels) she’s already writing to knock out something that came to mind. As with her sister, I was stunned with the result.
Stunned, but not surprised, if that’s possible. I’ve given her writing assignments in the past, and we’ve seen her skills posting here on this blog but those were all things I asked her to write or some inspired silliness for public consumption. True, there were the series of “Larry the Guinea Pig” books she wrote when she was little, and she’s let me peak before at some of her work in progress that was pretty impressive, but she didn’t let her mother or I see this short story before she turned it in. Naturally, I expected her to win a prize because I figured she could out-write people her age, but when I read her entry after she posted it here I was awed at how skilled and mature her writing was.
If you haven’t followed the link from her Saturday post you really need to do so. This is not a cute story that a teen-ager would write with the literary equivalent of “like” and “you know” phrasing or heavy-handed prose and awkward symbolism. The story grabs you from the first, one-sentence paragraph and she shows a lot of writerly techniques in phrasing and repetition that you would expect to see — if at all — in an older, more experienced writer. It is also, definitely, a “chiller” which I wouldn’t expect from my sweet little angel, but I can definitely pick up on some of the bent from the “Dead Like Me” TV series we’ve been laughing at lately.
Seeing such a polished, fully-formed story was amazing even with my high expectations for her. It’s both exciting and motivating to see this from her. I know she’s been pounding away, doing at least 1700 words a day, as part of the National Novel Writing Month event and I figure if she’s going to be doing this level of work I’m going to have to raise my own game or cede the writing title in the family to her. Either that or perhaps change the name of this blog to “The Night and Day Writers”!
