Posts Tagged ‘Eastern Europe’

Body Show Benefit: Margaret Malone + I’m Your Man with Brian Padian

A couple is running late for a medical appointment which turns out to involve an exam and a doctor in knee-high boots about to go on African safari. Oregon Literary Fellow Margaret Malone and filmmaker Brian Padian recently released a short film Brian adapted from her short story by the same title, “I’m Your Man.” Cinematography by Scott Ballard, song by Joe Haege, performers include Christine Calfas and Karen Hepner. Real-life couple Margaret and Brian are also collaborating on a memoir about Brian’s survival of a brain tumor, The Year of Travel & Good Fortune.

i’m your man from Northern Flicker Films on Vimeo.

Also catch Margaret reading more of her hot fiction at the Body Show Benefit on Nov. 3rd at Someday Lounge. Performers include Arthur Bradford, Gigi Little, B. Frayn Masters, Nathaniel Boggess and Danielle Fish, and there will be a Voodoo doughnut contest judged by style points. Door at 7PM, 7:30-9:30PM, $5-15 donation.

EXCERPT: I’m Your Man

We sit in the small room. It is already crowded. Bert is on the papered exam table and I’m on a loveseat smooshed into the corner. The loveseat is pink pleather cushions and wood arms and legs, like something out of a medical office furniture catalogue under the heading – Make Your Patients Feel Right At Home – only of course it doesn’t, because our home does not look like the exam room of a urologist.

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Contingencies_Serbia_1996, a poem

Between 1996 and 1997, I was living in Transylvania and would frequently go down to Northern Serbia to visit with my boyfriend because he had a friend there in a small town in Vojvodina, a once autonomous region that  was faced now with the growing tension between Serbs and other groups.  You could actually feel it between people as the year went on.  We once jumped off a train a station early because a bunch of guys with shaved heads and steel-toed boots were acting jumpy.  One kept walking up and down the corridor and opening the sliding door of our compartment and looking in.  He was tall and looked big like you get from training.   The older lady next to me in a flowered headscarf and peacoat just looked straight ahead, not looking, so we copied her example and got off at the next stop.  This was in between the two Bosnian wars.  Dragorad was Serb, and over the year grew more and more nationalistic, which began to put a strain on our friendship with him.

But early on, before spring break and the debacle with getting kicked out of his friend’s flat in Novisad for saying the wrong thing about Clinton, we used to have long chats in the evenings in the rundown stucco house he shared with mom and brother who he took care of despite being only seventeen.  His mom couldn’t get out of bed.  She was ill somehow, in some way I never fully understood.  We would sit around the rough wooden table and eat simple food he cooked and smoke and drink coffee and talk and argue late into the night.  This is one of those evenings.

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