Desperately Seeking Salem

I receive a lot of strange email through this blog, but none has enticed me as much, or caused me more personal turmoil, than one I received last Friday from  a surgeon at the Salem Hospital named Ron.

It went like this:

“We love your column in the Salem Monthly.  This weekend we are having our annual Art Fair Party.  About 75 of our friends come and we treat them to a catered lunch and drinks (bartender extraordinaire), and then we make multiple walks to the fair and then back to our house for more eats and drinks, then back, then . . . until in to the night.  This is a great mix of Salem people–Salem Hospital crowd (I am a Surgeon), Pentacle Theatre peeps (my wife is an actor), LifeSource friends, Coffee House Cafe, and Country Fair types that get together and enjoy.

We would love for you and your husband to make an appearance and possibly give a 5 minute reading or speech about our cool little city of Salem. You would be preaching to the choir; that is sometimes fun!  If this is too late for this year; we will plan for next year.

My first thought: Hell yeah!

My second thought: But what will I read?

My third thought: Crickets. They will be chirping. I am a terrible mumbler.

My fourth thought: Strangers — they don’t even know me. Nothing is lost, but nothing is gained by not making a fool of yourself.

My fifth thought: But what will I read?

My sixth thought: I have a party invitation for next year!

This went on for a full 24 hours, in which I tossed a bit in our un-air-conditioned home and pictured myself talking like Charlie Brown’s teacher to a crowd that might rather be drinking anyway. I finally did a read-through of some of these blog posts to see if there was anything suitable that might be long enough, or interesting enough, or funny enough, to read out loud to 75 people. I  picked “Closing Time at Daynight Donuts,” which is a favorite according to the number of hits it has received, and “Waiting for Godot on D Street,” since I thought it might appeal to the theater crowd.

No dice.

It turns out that blog posts aren’t really meant to be read, at least the way I’ve been conceiving and writing them. So I moved on to some longer texts.

I ended up picking my most recent column in Salem Monthly — my best yet, I think — the one about Salem’s identity as a tourist destination.

Then we went to the party.

Ron and his wife Kelli live in a gorgeous house in South Salem. I won’t say any more than that, since I prefer not to tell other peoples’ stories on my personal blog; but I will say that they are awesome — rock star awesome.

Adam and I mingled and chatted and talked and flirted. We ate and drank and sat and stood. We stayed for three hours before I had felt like I was in the clear — that Ron had forgotten and Kelli had forgotten and I wasn’t going to have to read after all.

We were sitting near a koi pond when my husband called Ron over.

“Emily brought some  print-outs to read!” he said.

I looked at him. He looked at me.

He knew exactly what I was doing. He knew I was going to flake out and sneak away and disappear into the wallpaper.  He knew that if given the chance I would have happily waited it out until the last guest left and gone home without guilt and without having had my first public reading.

He wasn’t going to give me the chance.

“Oh yeah! Awesome!” Ron said. “That’s great!”

Ron stood on top of a rock under a tree and welcomed his guests officially. He thanked his wife, he mentioned a few of his friends who helped with the event, and then he said it:

“We’ve got something extra  for you here today, some special entertainment!”

And then he said my name.

If it weren’t for Kelli, a very boisterous, gorgeous woman who obviously knows how to have fun, I might have fallen flat. But Kelli provided the much-needed audience praise — even booing at the parts where I read particularly unflattering excerpts about Salem from Pacific Northwest travel guides.

Adam said I did great, and he never lavishes false praise.

I think it went okay. The people sure were kind…

The Wall Street Journal article on Salem’s urban chicken debate that I’ve talked about on this blog finally appeared in the paper’s issue today. Dude must have been working on that piece for a while, or the paper’s time line must be on someone else’s news cycle — it’s been months since I first heard of the interviews being conducted here.

Sadly, if you’ve been following the news here in town — and if you haven’t, you must be living under a rock (urban slugs?) — you will already be familiar with the story lines and personalities in the WSJ piece. The difference, of course, is that Salem’s drawn-out discussion on chickens has now entered the national debate.

Yes, Salem is still a little late to the chicken dance. Articles about backyard chickens have been coming out for months, even years at this point. One Slate.com columnist, Jack Schafer, even went so far as to hail the issue as a “Bogus Trend of the Week,” arguing that media organizations had fabricated the existence of the trend to drive a good story.

And what a story it is. Chickens! In your Backyard! In a time when we can buy eggs and completely skinned  chicken breasts in the market! It’s the perfect Depression 2.0 meets D.I.Y. culture story!

As I’ve argued before, keeping chickens in no longer a twee agri-fad to shrug off after the 6 o’clock news. I don’t know what’s going on in Jack Schafer’s community, but here in Salem, chickens were all random strangers were talking about to me last spring. Everybody has an opinion. But most of the most opinionated tend to be the people who haven’t really engaged with the studies presented by our own chicken keepers, C.I.T.Y., Chickens in the Yard.

The Wall Street Journal does add one little wrinkle to Salem’s chicken story, one that I knew about when I wrote my own story on the issue last March, but which Ms. Palermo wasn’t ready to reveal at the time.  It reveals that Barbara Palermo, leader of the group, had chickens herself before her neighbor complained to the city, forcing her to usher her hens to a safe haven out in the country just four months after she got them (if you’ve seen her coop, you might wish we all lived as well as her chickens).

If we have anyone to thank for this local kerfuffle making national headlines, it is this neighbor who first called the cops on Ms. Palermo. I’m surprised his house hasn’t been egged.

All politics are local? Well, they may start that way…