Typing at the Sign Museum

The American Sign Museum is ten minutes away from my house, but I'd never gotten around to a visit until my friend Sam and I were invited to type poems for guests at a bat mitzvah party there last night.

The museum is bigger than I'd expected. You feel like you're walking down streets that are crowded with advertising icons and neon.

Sam and I were very impressed with a display of glass panels from a Victorian artist's "specimen book." These are only about six inches across, and they show unbelievable craft.

A movie theater marquee advertised Naomi's bat mitzvah ...

... and tables were set up for a hundred guests. I hadn't been expecting such a big event!

My Voss and Sam's Remington were on duty for four hours. (The Remington is a 1923 machine that I offered through Urban Legend Typewriters over a decade ago. It's still going strong.)

Once the guests arrived, we got a steady stream of muses, mostly small kids who wanted poems on topics such as Pumpkin the Cat, Ajax the Dog, soccer, and squishies.

Sam and I listened respectfully and read the poems to our muses ... until loud dance music made it impossible to hear. Then the written list of people and their desired topics came in very handy.

All our poems were appreciated, but most of what I was able to create under these circumstances really isn't worth reproducing here. In case you're really curious, here's a poem about a lazy cat.

And I think these poems for adults are OK.

'

This first-year law student is hoping to go into immigration or fertility law:

This muse had heard of me and my book, which was nice to know:

We finished by writing poems for each other about the night's events. Here's Sam's. I didn't take a picture of mine, but believe me, you're not missing much.

I love "Watch us become." It was, in fact, a night for becoming: for Naomi to become a young Jewish woman, for her friends and family to become happy with dance and drink, for our typewriters to become conduits for new words, and for me to become a little more experienced in this practice of listening, making, and giving.