NYC, Ep. 35
Wednesday, January 26, 2011 at 8:29AM January 26, 2011 — On a snow-smothered and messy NYC night, Literary Death Match celebrated the launch of Shya Scanlon's Forecast in fantastic and whimsical fashion at Le Poisson Rouge, as Morgan Meis and his team of merry mimes toppled Anya Ulinich in a game of "Blank with a Chance of Blank" with a score of 6 to 5 to win the coveted LDM NYC crown.
The LDM's 35th-ever NYC event was in full force from the opening bell, as co-host M.G. Martin (author of One for None) intro'd the night's opening pair of Ulinich (author of Petropolis) v. James Freed (author of The Unfulfilled and The Illiterate), with Freed taking the mic first, reeling off a genius tale of school day bullies that left the crowd incarcerated by hilarity. Then up stepped the show-stopping Ulinich who had the crowd in throes, with a mouth full of blood, as she told of getting teeth pulled quicker than sex, the tooth fairy that lives in Nebraska, and her russian childhood memories of instant frosting she mixed in her mouth.
The mic was then handed to the three handsome panel of judges: Guggenheim fellow and The Believer book-award champ Sam Lipsyte (author of the LDM-lauded The Ask), Broadway's [title of show] tour-de-force Susan Blackwell, and man-of-the-night Shya Scanlon. And even though the refined panel of laureates approved of any piece of writing that used the words "erection" and "mildew" in the same sentence, the trio elected the domineering (and toothless) Ulinich as the night's first finalist.
After a quick intermission, Round 2 commenced, with Meis (The Smart Set critic-at-large; Flux Factory founder), who was a blur of genius with a clickety-clack poem of trains in Europe, followed by Amy Shearn (How Far is the Ocean from Here), who upped the evening's magnificence with her rules of the cafe for assholes.
The mic was again turned over to the three arbiters of lit, who couldn't help but admit they were fond of Amy's introductory complements and repetitive use of "asshole" but, with jingle jangle imagery of European trains looming over her, the fatal decision was made to carry Morgan Meis to the final round.
Then came the finale, with LDM creator and co-host Todd Zuniga helming the wild ending, which paired the two finalists with volunteers, with the goal of acting out in a highly intellectual game of charades nonsensical weather inspired Forecasts—"diarrhea" with a chance of "thunder"; "heirloom" with a chance of "hipster"—with the halved audience left to guess the oddly matched elements.
In the end, after a jaw dropping tiebreaker, it was Morgan Meis' team who proved narrowly more capable of weather charades, winning him not only the LDM crown, but literary immortality as well.
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