Photo by Jen Ellison. This was our 'goofy' one.

A little bit of self examination forces me to admit that had I won the MAELSTROM (I did not, obviously) I would have rushed to the computer to share the news. But, though late, I want to congratulate the new champion, Kate Freedman, and all the other competitors for putting on a great show. This improvised story-telling stuff is hard, I tell you. My first 3-minute story, inspired by the suggestion "the cola wars", was basically over at 2 minutes, 30 seconds, which I and the audience realized at about the same moment. We all had a little laugh about it and then I vamped for another 30 seconds.

My 2-minute story had the suggestion "Hawaii or Your Momma" and I did a little rant in a sort of a character about how fat Your Momma is. There wasn't much narrative to it, but there was some passion and it had some great lines that I need to write down for possible stand-up use. "Your momma is so fat, she has casual sex just to have children... so she can eat them."

My 1-minute story was "a revisonist telling of the story of Abraham and Isaac" and so I told the story backwards and with Abraham hallucinating. My first line was "The end of this story is: Abraham and Isaac have cake." I seemed to score some points with some of the audience for mentioning Ur. How can you talk about Abraham and not mention Ur? Maybe it's just me.

I was just there the one night I performed, but Don Hall has a great wrapup of the whole SKALD9 week.