“Then there are those who like to act like Iowa City isn’t as great as other cultural cities of the world like maybe, New York or Amsterdam, or even Austin.”
“Please, we’re every bit as ashamed of the rest of our state as Austin is.”
-Lorin Ditzler
For every bit of vitriolic humor, there was a generous helping of adoration of course, but boy was it fun to let loose on the City of Literature. Below you’ll find plenty of media from the event with more to come in the near-future. Sit back and have a few laughs, won’t you?
Select opening Remarks by Little Village’s Yale Cohn:
It’s quite an honor to be an alternative-monthly in one of only three “Cities of Literature” in the world. We’re an important part of the community as you can tell by our magazine sharing rack space with Kirkwood catalog, Papa John’s Pizza coupons, and the Ad Sheet at your local HyVee
. . .
The magazine wanted to do something funny and light-hearted for a change to get away from our usual serious and hard hitting coverage things like politically correct way to make mulch and the cultural prejudice inherent in the Sun rising in East, and our ongoing efforts to get the city planners to rotate the city so that people on the west side get to experience the sunrise for a change.
When we were publicizing the event and asking people what they though of Little Village Magazine a number of them said it reading it was like watching paint dry -which isn’t true at all because watching paint dry is comparatively interesting.
When we announced our roast we got an angry letter from the leader of a local vegan group saying that the term “Roast” was “carnivore-normative” and offensive to the vegan-American community. I talked to her about this and invited her to submit an alternative title but she ran out of energy trying to pick up a pen. It seems that her sense of humor was not the only thing affected by her anemia.
We had a lot of great submissions to pick from and we picked the best of the best and almost everybody who had their piece chosen is here today to perform it for you. For the few folks who couldn’t make it down here we recruited some folks accustomed to being funny in public – and I’m not referring to members of the city council – but some of the fine folks from the Red Door theater ensemble.
It’s really great to be here in this famous bookstore which , I just heard, will be closing soon because the University bought the building because they need more space for their downtown properties acquisition office and will be relocating here the second week of August.
So, without further ado . . .
A series of clips from throughout the roast
Musical roast/toast by Ed Butler, courtesy of Ed Butler
Photos by Matt Butler
http://www.flickr.com/photos/matthewbutler/sets/72157624536457274/show/
Photos by Adrianne Behning
http://www.flickr.com/photos/barefootadrianne/sets/72157624406925861/show/
