At one point last night I was in a room in the upstairs of an East end pub while a group of about 40 fairly cultured people chanted Rape at an 18 year old girl.
[Edit: She's contacted me on Face book,
Turns out she's only 16].
Had a gig init,
I know what yu thinking, after last months fairly well publicized notoriously "Bad Gig" I bet some of you are surprised to see folk are still willing to book me. (To be honest this had been booked for ages and the new booking ain't exactly flooding in),
but Berko's still on the circuit. 
Infact I'd like to take this opportunity to commend the bravery of the promoter, Jody Porter, who'd already booked me but choose not to sack me off. Even though I'm pretty sure he must have got a lot of negative pressure from the promoters guild, (I feel reasonably confident in asserting that there must be some kind of guild/co-op of promoters who meet on regular occasions to discuss my blog, it's just like the coalition of psychoanalysts who meet to discuss the validity of my deluded assertions).
Anyway, Nice one Jody.
14 hour at the griffin
Shorditch London
right this one was a bit different to the kind of gigs I normally do,
This time I was asked to read, Yeah "Read" not just talk like what I normally do.
tell yu the truth,
I'm not much of a reader.
But the idea of it made me nervous and excited in the kind of way that teenagers get right before their first sexual experience.
Yu know the feeling of really wanting to do it but not completely understanding the mechanics of it. Hoping to think that I'd probably be good at this but at the same time not completely sure that I'd know how to do it right.
Right, I was the headline which meant that I got to watch a couple of actual readers doing there thing before I came along to lower the tone,
One of these readers was a girl called Ash.
She did a few things, some were about relationships/sex etc.
One of her poems included a list of things that were better than sex and she pointed into the audience for us to shout out our own suggestions.
I shouted Vagina and it sort of through her off, but to be honest she opened that can of beans when she pointed her finger at ol' Berxy.
Anyway, it was this girl Ash that they were chanting at,
she offered us a choice for her last poem. It was either one about a girl who got raped or one about her ex I think.
it took literally seconds for the "Rape" chant to start.
In the end I found myself standing up in front of the girl calling for the crowd to back down,
Shit was like the Colosseum,
In retrospect I imagine after the whole vagina thing, the sight of me lumbering towards her as an excited crowd incessantly chanted "Rape, Rape, Rape, Rape," might have been a bit daunting, I'd like to hope the memory should at least stay with her for a couple of days.
I was on next, here's how I opened my part of the show.
thanks to Inua for filming.
I actually read some sections of this blog and an edited version of the first 3 chapters of DogMan.
If your interested in DogMan you can read it all if yu like. Here it is.
All in all it seemed that everyone in the room was into what I was doing,
everyone, the crowd, the promoter, even me.
I think this might be the beginning of a new style of gig for me. Berkavitch the Reader. Crazy.
Oh and in case all you people were wondering. No I didn't get paid. But I didn't want paying, it had been arranged. Basically it's a free entry night run by good people who do it for the love of what they do.
Yeah they actually love it.
Thing is I love it to yu see, and it's all about supporting the events that support the people who do what we all love.
Berko out.
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