On Saturday (8/16) at the Downtown Block Party, Creative Colloquy opened a big book and asked everyone who was interested to add a line to our story. There were simple rules:

– Add one line or two
– No hate, profanity, or sexually suggestive themes
– Published Monday 8/18
–
After that it was a free for all. The contributors were only given the previous page (approx. 5 lines) to work from before adding their own.

Contributors ranged in age from 4 to 70. They were at all levels of writing skills, and equally at all levels of imagination. This is what (roughly) 75 Downtown Block Party patrons came up with.

“No, the Future.”

And So Our Story Begins……

The doors were locked on this floor too. He tried the fourth floor stairwell. There was a giant explosion with lots of smoke and fire!!! Five army guys came running out with big BIG BIG guns. Sirens raced down the street traveling faster than the speed of light. The “gritizenry” were quaking in their boots! The dogs were barking and the coyotes were howling.

Then all of a sudden a blinding flash of white light and total silence.

A man in red spandex stood in the shadow of the doorway. “Don’t Stop Believin'” started to play. No matter how hard he fought it, he couldn’t keep his toe from tapping. It’s beat radiating around the stairwell. It was infectious.

Then there was a horrible smell and a large fire began to grow. The fire grew and grew until it consumed everything in its entire path.

“Path?! What path?” she said. She was fierce like the fire with glowing hair and a radiance that surrounded her like music. Fireflies danced behind her as her shadow grew. “I am the mother of light,” she said. “All that is bright and powerful comes from me.”

The house shook angrily as an enormous crack opened up and swallowed her whole. It was dark. The man in red spandex guffawed, “That’s what you get for thinking you are the mother of light! Now I am the mother of light!’

The man in red spandex was a serpent. But even his trickery could not fool the mother of light. The enormous crack began to glow and the booming voice of the mother of light called out from deep within the recesses.

“I am HUNGRY. Hmmmmm what happened to that red spandexen when we needed him?” The house shook again slowly closing the enormous crack in the earth and for a moment all was quiet.

Then the voice of Pandora and the Angels burst forth from the crevice and the sounds of ZYDECA burst forth with accordion rhythm and the dancers became alive. That is when Lloyd McClendon made the call and brought Fernando Rodney from the bullpen to close the game and secure the wildcard playoff berth.

Then Leonardo DaVinci screamed “NO, the future!”

Then there was this huge lightening that struck! And from where the lightning struck animals! All kinds of animals-old, giant, fast, slow appear. The dog with the multicolored mohawk was up to no good. And unicorns, thousands, no longer were they extinct and they roamed free.

This fourth floor stairwell was getting pretty crowded. The guy in red spandex rode a unicorn up to the roof. There he met a chimera with a lisp and a dog name Foo.

*someone wrote in French* but the end can be translated as “It’s good right?”

And Foo translated for the guy in spandex. Though the mohawk had too much blue in it for the dragon’s taste (picky dragons). The dragon preferred red so he ate the spandex instead.

Luckily he was wearing leotard tights under the spandex, colored in a cheetah spot pattern. The cheetahs were an old stuffy bunch of scoundrels. The thunder shook everything, Fortunately red spandex was his favorite flavor.

“I wonder what happened when he woke from that dream?”

Suddenly a monstrous bear roared in the woods by the house. But since no one was home did he really make a sound? He did and it was so terrifying it scared the window panes out of the sills.

*Someone writes in French again* At the end it translates to “Pardon”

*Someone then writes in Japanese*

Panes dancing in the sound of a roar, rattling the dream until the dreamer the wakes and finds the dream is really a bad flavored lollipop. But not only was it a bad flavor, it was a lollipop…inside a lollipop….inside a lollipop. Finally the dreamer decided he should just throw the dang lollipop away. He was immediately REJUVINATED. With his newfound verve, the dreamer decided to rename himself as the “hero” of his new, more energized state of being.

That is why he is now a sandwich. But not just any sandwich, the best sandwich in the WORLD: Peanut butter/banana/waffle sandwich. Now the problem was survival. How to avoid the best sandwich in the world being eaten by himself and the polar bear whose only mission in life was to eradicate the world of all sandwiches?

But without realizing the bear ate an old sandwich and got sick. The sickness caused him to sleep for a thousand years! A thousand years to the day he woke from his sleep, opened his eyes and in his bewilderment did see a tuna sandwich next to his bed.

“A tuna sandwich?!” He exclaimed slapping his forehead with the palm of his head. “I sleep a thousand years and what I get is a tuna sandwich?!?!?”

Throwing the tuna sandwich against the floor he stared in agitation as it bounced back into his awaiting hands. The sandwich was following him. “Oh no,” he exclaimed. Too bad he didn’t go to Subway for a footling special.

Boom! Pow!

There was a brilliant flash of light from the sky. He looked up and he was stunned to see the biggest graham cracker he had ever seen. Then another one appeared. “Oh boy, I could make a better sandwich if only I had lettuce! If we had lettuce we could make that best sandwich that could stop the graham crackers from leaving us without a tomato? However we are so blessed to have the ingredients we have.

Or so we thought! As the food sprouted legs and gathered into a large killing machine like Voltron.

“Call the military NOW!” shouted the Mayor, “What is wrong with this blasted phone?” blurted the Mayor. His phone was disconnected all of a sudden due to a storm.

The killing machine was no match for the storm. Problem solved, food was flying EVERYWHERE. When food magnet pizza dough was flattened against the Mayor’s Hummer and with food magnet strength pulled everything together to make….well…a most unusual pizza.

You would not believe how good it was considering it had….anchovies and every other seafood you could imagine on it. Oh, the taste was unbelievable. The taste of salty sea in ones mouth, you could only imagine.

Crustacean, Oh Crustacean.

— For people reading with small children, CC advises you to stop now. As it got later at the Block party the story got stranger. Try as we might, the CC crew was unable to corral the block partiers into producing work for all ages. —

But what does a crustacean taste like? I’m imagining the texture is almost unbearable. Plus all that sand stuck in bizarre crevices? No thank you! Plus oysters seriously look like labia. Did you know that? I’m kind of sad I know that…..

Ah yes, they do look like labia, however they also make pearls and that kids is a lesson brought to you by the great neighborhood of Tacoma. That loves…

The love of Tacoma is as deep and wide as the ocean and it is the number of each individual sand of the beach. Oysters make pearls. Have you ever wondered what it would be like to find an oyster in a pearl? And it turned out the pearl was in the tummy of his best friend’s wife and they named it Yoda. Yoda the pearl would smile and when he opened his mouth to speak he would glow. This is how the pearl necklace was born to make a woman’s beauty beam from her most inner soul.

Now buy your lady a necklace and make it a pearly one…

Where does the story go now?