Tenderloin Reading Series Celebrates Two Years on Saturday

They call it the cotton anniversary. That's nice. Soft. Natural. Makes you think of cozy bed sheets. And sharecroppers. So OK, maybe not always nice. But in any case, it's been two years. It's a big deal. Like twice as big a deal as the one-year, and with a deeper sense of really being in it for the long haul. Especially when the cotton anniversary in question is that of the Tenderloin Reading Series. As the series' own website puts it: "Two years of San Francisco's literary soldiers shadowboxing in dive bars. Two years of madness along the 38. Two years of Christmas tree bonfires and mustard street art. Two years of humor, and tragedy." Those sound like some busy years, worth celebrating. Hence the event on Saturday night.

Reader-performers include, among others, Confessions of a Teenage Jesus Jerk author Tony DuShane (who reads in the clip above from 2009), poet and Free University of San Francisco co-founder Alan Kaufman, rough-and-tumble spoken-word regular Charlie Getter, and Ed Bowers, who is known as the poet laureate of the Tenderloin -- although that's an unofficial title because, well, it's the Tenderloin. In any case, Bowers probably is so known because he writes lines like this:

My mission is to take God's plan apart like a watch
Then pretend to be too stupid to put it together again.

and

just as stop signs on roads
and warnings in nuclear power plants
are needed, so are the homeless.
they alert those who work
not to stop.

So there it is. The fabric of our lives.

The Tenderloin Reading Series Two-Year Anniversary Show starts at 7:30 p.m. Saturday at Koko Cocktails.

For more events in San Francisco this week and beyond, check out our calendar section.