 She's the author of three books of fiction and nonfiction. She's a longtime writer for The Village Boys. She's been theater critic for the nation, critic at large for fresh air, and a member of the Bat Theater Company. Please welcome Laurie Stone. Hi there, wow, this is so nice. Is Susan Nordmark here? Hi Susan, this is for you. She'll know why. My brother was the catcher and we were having sex. I was waiting to be scared. In our act, he would swing upside down from the bar, hanging by his knees, his arms extended, and I would fly into his chalky grip. We would sway together while I shimmied up his body for our extension tricks. Sometimes he became hard and called me goddess. I laughed and called him punk. He was wearing his hair in a mohawk in those days. We were seven and nine the first time we explored, 13 and 15 the first time we went inside each other. Now we were 20 and 22, and each time the circus moved to another city, I wondered if I should split. As soon as we were separated, I felt a drawing sensation in my chest. At the kitchen table, eating buckwheat pancakes with raisins, he said, I don't see other women. I said, you are just lazy, feeling the nauseating dizziness of trapeze. Other kids noticed the way we split off. Jed would be lingering nearby. We would hear soft laughter behind us when we left a room. It was almost romantic. Whatever people thought they knew, they didn't know. At the table, I licked a dab of mayonnaise left from making tuna sandwiches off his nose. He was bare-chested in tights and I studied the shadowy contours of his belly and ass. His legs were pillars. We had the same coppery hair, the same broad hands. I said, no one will measure up but we will have to leave home someday. He took my braid in his mouth and bit down. I still feel the tug at the back of my neck. When I close my eyes, I see him on a bench before an unglamorous stretch of river, his hair flying, his face quizzical and refusing to suffer. Each morning when I wake up, I wonder if this is the day the fear will start. That's a flash fiction that some prompts that Susan put up in Facebook created so I wanted to read that for her. And this piece is actually half of a letter, I suppose, in a way so you're only gonna hear my version of this duet and there's a series in New York City called Double Take and a man named Albert Mobilio curates and he asks a writer to perform something and you ask another writer, it's a series. So you basically create an event specific piece together and so that's what mine is, this is half of what we created and you'll hear the story of it. I suggest to Karen, we see Marnie, the Alfred Hitchcock film. John Epperson, the great female impersonator is going to introduce it in Hudson and Hudson is where Karen and I spend time together. She says, great, what a good idea. She is an agreeable person, so how can you know what she really feels? I used to take people at their word but since I started living with an English person, I have become suspicious of charm and good manners. In their affability, English people are female impersonators. The movie is screened in time and space limited. A great hulking factory turned into an art space. Little roast beef sandwiches and mushroom duck cell in pastry shells are laid out on a table and there is wine at a bar. TSL is the kind of place that makes you think you can leave New York and live in someone else's life. You imagine a place so quiet, you can hear snow mound and it sounds like a letter dropping through a slot. The smell of deer reminds you of old minks stored in attics under pearl-colored dust. You look at the sharp little teeth around the edges of leaves and it feels like being drunk all the time, nothing nagging. Karen is wearing pants, the color of smoked salmon and a pale green cotton jersey. She looks happy, she bends to kiss me and I remember how short I am and how disappointing this is. A man I once lived with said ponies were mean because they resented their size. Every day, I have to remind myself to like something. I like Hitchcock's anxious tangled up women and that no one is happy in his films. I remember seeing Marnie in 1964 and feeling somehow let down. Maybe I didn't want the heroine to chuck her life of crime, crime and espionage being havens for women from domesticity. On Homeland, for example, right now, Carrie Matheson understandably prefers taking a bullet in her side to giving her infant daughter a bath. I had also found Marnie compelling something about Tippi Hadron's gasping delivery and her forehead, which was large enough to project a movie onto. Hitchcock understands the bleak sweatiness and lurching, dead-eyed swings of entrapment. Hadron plays a woman termed frigid and kleptomaniac. The words frigid and kleptomaniac harken back to the heady days of Freudian chic when people seasoned conversations with quotes from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Sean Connery falls in love with Marnie even though she cannot stand to be touched. He blackmails her into marrying him and sets about sorting out her past. It makes you think about whether all marriages involve blackmail. My one marriage, which took place two years after Marnie was released, involved blackmail in that my father agreed to sign the lease on an apartment. My boyfriend and I wanted to move into if I would marry my boyfriend. I said, great, what a good idea. Watching Marnie this time, I thought the best line was the last line. When Marnie says to Sean Connery, I'd rather be married to you than in jail. The point being, well, you see the point. I used to think no one wanted power. It was too much responsibility. Secretly, people wanted to be stopped. Secretly, everyone was a bottom. Then I considered that this was probably something a woman would think up. Throughout the film, Marnie is working out her relationship to power. Her mother is strangely rejecting. And we don't know why until the climax. When we learned she was a prostitute and that six-year-old Marnie killed one of her Johns. The John, played by a young, not-so-toothy-looking Bruce Dern in a sailor suit, was also groping Marnie, and she struck him with a poker. There is blood. Marnie comes to fear the color red and eventually becomes a thief, of course. She changes identities, fanning out fake social security cards. During the scene, I wondered if it was hard to get fake social security cards. Who has not at some point felt stuck in a life they wanted to ditch? Who does not dream of going to sleep and waking up with a new identity? This did once happen to me. And the new identity instructed a famous poet about how to make chicken soup. The new identity said, you need stock. You can't make soup with water and vegetables and chicken. You need bouillon, at least, and herbs. The famous poet only stared back at me. The most disturbing part of Marnie is where Sean Connery's character forces himself sexually on Marnie. It is a complicated scene, partly because Connery is a walking piece of sex, and part of the frustration of the film-built is denying this man erotic success. Marnie does not fight him off, but the next day tries to drown herself in a pool. Two writers quit working on the screenplay, unable to convince Hitchcock to cut the scene, explaining the audience would lose sympathy with the male lead. Hitchcock, who had escaped the poignant bitterness of his obesity in thin-as-air celluloid, delighted in the grisly comedy of fleshly existence. Famously obsessed with Hadron, though, he wanted to see her humiliated, and he sacrificed his art to a personal thrill. At this point, the movie comes off like an unprotected child sent to camp with all the wrong clothes, and no one caring about the ridicule the child will stir up. After the screening, Karen asks what I thought of the movie. I shrug and say, it got tiring. The sexual weirdness has left a bad taste, and I have forgotten to like something. She says, she lived every moment. She is doing the shiny, radiant thing she does with her eyes as if she has fallen in love with the movie, and I am hurting the things she loves. I feel like a man in a cafe with a clump of foam caught on his mustache that no one has the energy to wipe off. The first time I met Karen, she read a loud story she had written. In the first part, a young woman wakes up in the apartment of a skinny guitar player with black, spiky hair. The sheets smell of dried sweat and have the sheen of too long a time without washing. He invites her to snort something, and she excites herself with the thought of being in such a moment. The guitarist reads poetry. Of course, he reads Rambo and Baudelaire. The young woman cannot believe he finds her sexy and smart. In the next scene, which takes place 10 years later, or the next day in the mind of the girl woman, she is with her husband, and she has been married for 10 years. Her husband wants sex, and she gives it to him, fearing the pricklier consequences of saying no. She can see in his eyes her reluctance hurts him, and that he turns the hurt into his right to her. She can see it all. When he tells her not to hang a photograph she has bought of a lonely road on the wall of their bathroom, she puts the photograph in a drawer. He doesn't like her to buy steak for company. Hamburger is good enough. She doesn't wonder why she is with him, and we are not sure if the husband was once the rocker, or the man meant to save her from the rocker. After she finished, I thought of Raymond Quinneau's remark that imaginary stories deal with love, and true stories deal with hunger. I wasn't sure if Karen knew how good she was. I told her as we stood beside a piano. Slabs of gray hair curtained her face. Her lips were full and symmetrical, like the wings of a small moth. Her moth wings, her moth lips parted in a smile. After the movie, she says, let's walk, and we head down Warren Street to a posh bistro. She has a crush on a chef there who flirts with her at the spotty dog, where she tends bar and manages a bookstore. She hosts a radio show and does vocals as well in a band. Every few feet, someone calls her name or stops to chat. A guy with a crooked grin says, hey, rockstar, and it strikes me she has become the skinny rocker she once slept with. Karen says the chef brought her a piece of pizza. Does that mean something she asks? And I wonder, how can she not know? I say in flirting, pizza is the equivalent of marriage. She laughs. When we arrive at the restaurant, the chef is spooning a reduction over grilled lamb. Karen holds back. He sees her and flashes a big smile. He is very attractive under a giant beard. When we are seated, I say he's beautiful, but not so much the beard. She says, I love the beard. And I think we will not ever fight over the same man. We talk about this boy and boys in general, two girls in a town where you can be anyone you want, two girls talking about boys as if they are ours for the taking, and then we talk about Marnie. Thank you. I don't know. If there's time for one quicky little one, I'll just read one more quicky. Let's see. Yeah, I'll read you this tiny one. A famous writer called me. She was already crazy. I was flattered. I was fluttering on the edge of people who write about drugs and sex. They had tattoos and piercings. They looked starved and glamorous. I looked like my life, but I felt an affinity with them. The famous writer was in Austin and said she needed money. I said I would send some. I imagined her on a bed wearing dark slacks and a white shirt looking up at cracks in the ceiling and discolorations from leaks. She said the government was watching her and everyone was at risk. She was a paranoid schizophrenic and after a while I became bored and felt strange to have been flattered by her call. I was afraid if I disconnected it would make things worse. Before she left New York, we went riding in Central Park. She sat up tall and confident on a chestnut stallion. I had learned to ride as a child. We were bourgeois girls who had been given lessons. Her father had had sex with her. A man my parents trusted had molested me. Some people believe you don't come back although everyone needs to remember to be happy. A year after the famous writer's call, she killed herself. Recently I came across a postcard sent to me by the man my parents had trusted. He was writing from a spa in Switzerland and sending fond regards as if nothing had happened. I have kept the postcard because the man's touch is on it and because his formality in the note makes me laugh. Thank you. Thank you, Laurie Stone. That was so great.