Grace Reading Series

I'll be at this reading at KGB tonight--come check it out:

Please join us for a night of non-fiction for and about tough broads. Lisa Carver reads from her new memoir, DRUGS ARE NICE, and Kristin Kaye reads from her book about female body builders, IRON MAIDENS.

Doors open at 7PM; readings begin at 7:15.
KGB Tuesday Night Non-Fiction: 85 E. 4th Street between 2nd & 3rd Avenues. Subway F/V to Second Ave, 6 to Bleecker. FREE! -- www.kgbbar.com

Lisa Carver: DRUGS ARE NICE -- A Post-punk Memoir

In this eye-opening memoir, Lisa Crystal Carver recalls her extraordinary youth and charts the late-80s, early-90s punk subculture that she helped shape. She recounts how her band Suckdog was born in 1987 and the wild events that followed: leaving small-town New Hampshire to tour Europe at 18, becoming a teen publisher of fanzines, a teen bride, and a teen prostitute. Spin has called Suckdog's album Drugs Are Nice one of the best of the '90s, and the book includes photos of infamous European shows. Yet the book also tells of how Lisa saw the need for change in 1994, when her baby was born with a chromosomal deletion and his father became violent. With lasting lightness and surprising gravity, Drugs Are Nice is a definitive account of the generation that wanted to break every rule, but also a story of an artist and a mother becoming an adult on her own terms.

Kristin Kaye: IRON MAIDENS -- The Most Awesome Female Muscle in the World

At age twenty-three and fresh out of drama school, Kristin Kaye landed
her dream job: to write and direct a Broadway show in New York City. Its
title? The Celebration of the Most Awesome Female Muscle in the World,
starring twenty-five of the world’s most muscular women. Her mandate? To
turn The Celebration into a High Art Happening exalting women’s physical and
intellectual strength.

Kaye thought this was her chance to enter a whole new feminist arena, but in
reality she was about to enter another world entirely: her carefully
orchestrated artistic interludes would be sandwiched between skits involving
white lace thongs, smoke machines, and a bodybuilder spinning by her neck.
Kaye tells the whole story in this hilarious book, alternating between an
account of directing the show, which builds to the disastrous climax of
opening night, and reportage on women’s bodybuilding and the little-known
sub-culture around it, including the use of steroids, the side business of
strong women who wrestle men for money, and the judging controversy that
threatens to split the sport in two.