In the first open stage one woman read her piece about food and love and how they are unquenchable, one guy read about Q-Tip’s influence on him, another man read his poetry translated from Spanish and it was ornate, one meek masked girl read her quiet poetry and after a proud theatrical Russian offered to reread it much more loudly than how she was and he did this to great excitement among the classmates, one woman with long black hair read about her former self riddled with thoughts that her race should be different in order to win the affection of her former desire, one confident man told us about his upcoming release and his plans for stardom and it went on much longer than is necessary. Often when I hear student or performers going on in an introduction I get bored and bet many in the audience also are bored. I understand. I used to do things like this too and at some point realized it is not helping my purpose. Just before he started I interrupted, “you mean this is something you created last year?” and he said “yes, I wrote it in 2020” and I said “then it doesn’t count, this is all about reading what you are making now” but it seemed suddenly too mean of me to not let him proceed, so I said ok just this time. It is tricky making exceptions, often they haunt you later. Someone insists you did it for someone else you must do it for me too.