My Dates With Hannah Tinti

Date: February 22, 2011
Author: Hannah Tinti
Venue: The Stone
Neighborhood: East Village
Celebs Present: Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson, Amy Hempel, A.M. Homes
Free Drinks -- none
Q & A -- none
UE Check Number -- benefits expired



I met Hannah Tinti about three years ago when she sat down next to me at the KGB bar. I asked her if she was a writer and she said she was. She told me her first name and I told her mine. We started chatting. Because of her youth and because on a given night, the fourteen-seat bar at KGB may well have eight or nine writers in the chairs, I figured she was some MFA student with maybe a half-finished novel on her computer. So I breezily started pontificating on some writing related topic or another. She had come to hear her friend Said Sayrafiezadeh read, so we probably talked about how great his "When Skateboards Will Be Free" is.
But then the reading started and a writer, not Said, took the podium.  I remembered hearing Hannah read from her novel "The Good Thief" at McNally Jackson a few weeks before. I was talking to Ren's mom!
At the next intermission, I tapped her on the shoulder and said, "I know your last name."
"No, you don't," she said.
"Yes, I do."
"What is it then?"
"Look, we're two people who've just met in a bar. No sense dragging our resumes into it," I said.
Hannah was fine with that and we talked a little more before she excused herself to go say hello to Said.
Meeting Hannah was like I'd sat down at a bar next to a young, black man with a bandana around his head and upon learning we were both guitar players, started telling him how I like to play my solos. But then I realize, half-way into the conversation, that I'm talking to Jimmy Hendrix.
I've gone to a lot of Hannah's readings since that first meeting when I'd just started this going to readings project and she's always been pleasant and gracious. Well, I am a One Story subscriber, but even beyond that, it is fitting that as this "In the Front Row, On the Dole" thing winds down, I do a post about Hannah.
She's probably been wondering why I haven't. I've got the "My Date with Jonathan Galassi" and the "My Date with Andre Aciman" posts so Hannah's is overdue. Maybe it took a while, Hannah, but your post is the first with a poem. 


Hannah Writes All Night

Hannah writes all night.
At the Stone
the new kid, shot in the back.
Oh, for testosterone’s tumult
she has the knack.

Hannah writes all night.
Sure, we were getting bored
us boys, stuck with a dick.
Filling bottles at crazy angles,
changing size like an accordion’s
a neat enough trick,
but Ren makes it fun
to have a prick.


Watch out, Lou Reed.
Step back, Laurie Anderson.
Hannah’s breaking out the uke.
The loveliest thing in a gal
makes Hannah the best kind of pal
before we perish in a ring of desire
Hannah writes all night
and her boys take us higher.