Coincidental Poetry Night

I've actually been living a real life this last weekend. It feels like I haven't really stopped having fun since my birthday. It's a very welcome and refreshing change! For my birthday Delle rang me up and suggested an excellent little coffee place with extra charm in West End. Cafe Checocho (which I'm told is cheese coffee and chocolate all mashed into one word) was the perfect place for a cosy catch-up. Bonny arrived a little late after the somewhat compulsory getting lost on the way there. We snagged a table with a cute little window seat in abundance of cushions. As we were sipping our water and generally admiring the artwork and the bookshelf against one of the walls we turned our attention to the decoupage table. Turns out it's all illustrations from Lord of the Rings. Complete with map.

As it was we're there on the one day of the month they have a poetry night. Suddenly all these random people start turning up and the cafe gets all crowded, we start to squish up to allow more room then we share our seats, our food and introduce ourselves to the people all around us who are basically sitting on our laps! It was such brilliant fun. We met Brent, Sy, Christopher, Christian and an old guy named Tom who is a very talented artist. The poetry was mostly all their own work and performed so brilliantly, every artist so original in their presentation. Amazing to witness. Such a wide spectrum of talent. In between poets Christian (the main guy running the biz) read out a 'choose your own adventure' book. You know one of those 20c paperbacks you can purchase at just about every op shop? Anyway so he'd get someone to read out a page and then everyone would vote on which option. It was offbeat and so hilarious especially with Christian's summarizing and character voices. 

At the end of the night Alex Bell performed a few acoustic songs while everyone else had their fill of hot chocolates, coffee and gelato. It was such a cool eclectic group of people and we just kind of fell into this new culture with such ease. Really comfortable. We've been invited to film nights and poetry launches and an open mic festival. Time to soak it all up!