The recession has begun to affect all areas of society – even those without voices to speak up for themselves. In an effort to raise money for the Maxfund Animal Shelter – a true no-kill shelter – the Bovine Metropolis Theater is hosting an improv show on Wednesday, January 28, 2009 at 7 p.m. for the shelter.

As the economy continues to worsen it becomes more important for organizations like the Maxfund and the Bovine to work together. The improv show for the Maxfund allows people to leave their economic woes at the door and enjoy an evening of laughter and enjoyment for a good cause. Leave your black tie at home, priced at only $20, this event is one for all ages and economic brackets.

To purchase tickets, please call (303) 758-4722 or visit here.  For additional information, please visit the Max Fund website.

About The Maxfund Animal Shelter

The Maxfund Animal Shelter is Denver's only true no-kill shelter. It is a 501(c)(3) and has received Charity Navigator's four-star rating for strong fiscal management.

I can only distinguish the months by the he that he has become.  Now, he is an actor who plays a bartender at night and has replaced the mid-town businessman who reminded me of my father.

     It is 4am I am sound asleep dreaming of personalities that take form in other bodies.  In front of me there is a young girl that looks like a child I taught how to ski in Colorado, but she is not her- she is my mother and I am telling her how much I fear losing my hair but she can't hear me over the television show my brother (who looks nothing like himself) is watching – she keeps asking me to repeat myself and I keep forgetting what I've said and say something different though I know its not what I've said before nor what I want to convey.

At the same time he is in a poorly light bar with blue plastic chairs that swivel and large wooden statues hanging on the wall as if on a pirate ship or the insides of a miniature golf course at the New Jersey shore.  He is touching girls' arms, asking them to repeat their drink order – everything is getting darker and darker.

     In the middle of a dream, my roommate gets up to go to the bathroom.  I know this because my mind has switched and I am now in the basement of a ship.  It is old and sterile, everything is metal and I'm having trouble locating the stairs that will bring me up to the top deck.  I find a man who is sitting in a corner looking at his hands.  I tell him about all the times I've tried to deny I had a body but he isn't following and I begin to feel the ship is sinking.

     In the morning around 8am, all of this reverses.  He is now at home in the basement of a two family house, one that shuts out the sun and smells of urine.  He is rolling, falling under the blankets to avoid the light that I am walking through on the way to the subway.  For days it goes on like this – both of us in and out of different conciseness's, different frequencies – two days existing as polar opposites, forming a negative when placed against each other; his white body against my dark sky; my dark hands falling though his white buildings.

     I enter the subway tunnel, no more together then I was above ground.  The train comes and I try to figure out how to contort my body to fit into this vassal.  I imagine unscrewing my limbs, holding them as carry on luggage and venture though the closing doors just before my hair gets caught. 

     When I emerge on the other side of the tunnel, he flips over – realizes the opening in the blacked out window that sends a streak of light across his eyes.  He swings an arm to fix the cut in the curtain and I disappear.

I am invisible one minute and then I am not.  Walking down 8th avenue by the translations of him and his universe and me and what could be connected but isn't over the trains underneath, under ground, under streets.  The M34 bus travels west to east; he is standing facing north, looks over the avenue, past me, past buildings and communication lines.  Back at the office, I could chose to reengage, read his mind as I see it, "get in touch" but touching is limbless and I can only imagine what all this could have to do with me or the clock on the corner of my computer screen that lags in the morning and doesn't catch up to universal time until well into the second half of the day.

He is inconceivable.  Gives only sentence as clues, wears the weather, coated with all the others on the street below from where I work, from where he works, where the M34 bus passes every ten minutes, where the subway reemerges from a tunnel and a train leaves Penn Station every hour on the hour and the half hour.

Mail comes in; I feel him looking. I read it, imagine his handwriting, what it would look like if this were written instead of typed. His drawn lines on the screen that once existed in real time below the offices above and the avenue below and the bus that crosses from west to east and back again.

The trains are under ground still, just as they were this morning when I passed over them.  Now I am going home, arrive in Brooklyn to disengage.  I take a shower and all of the other men in my building watch through the uncovered window.  I watch too, recall all the other bodies I have ever had, the lines that have changed.  If sown together I could cover the floor boards, walk the path of patch together skin.

Another disconnect and he emerges as words – a distorted voice on the other end of the telephone while he sits on the express train heading home – all the noise and confusion that forms a conversation – a call that can't go through tunnels and loud passengers.  His reaching goes only as far the reflections of passing telephone lines – gets redirected by shorts in the network and fallen down power lines. "Hello, can you hear me" he'll say and I'll answer "hello, yes I can hear you." And him again "can you…" space.

8am. The subways are moving still, now weighted down by commuters, my bodies pressed hard up against the closing doors.  Back at the office a transactions has been made and he appears in computers memory, a glitch in the space.  He talks about his time, but at that time I am still caught in the body march, still in a tunnel underground walking from the L train to the uptown local train under sixth avenue.  I'm not sure what now he speaks of or how slow the conversion is, where the M34 is in relation to Penn Station.

When I respond it is in a voice that only partially sounds like me, one that appears in perfectly straight lines I could never recreate.  I tell him about the eyes in my shower; all my bodies I have walked around in.  The message is sent and everything disappears, possibly never existed or is still on its way down the street.  Perhaps it was intercepted, smacked up against the M34 – riding across town along with all the other traffic.  Or maybe the clock on my computer has lagged so far behind that the trains are no longer arriving in the station and the subways tracks are empty - people still pile onto the platforms stacked up against each other, breast bones against spines, hair in mouths and heads leaning over the gaping hole of an empty tunnel waiting for the surfacing of shaking lights.

I am only a mock up in these passings, a digital reproduction.  The clock moves again in the corner of the screen and I appear with his reappearance, a fractured me digested and handed back.  He responds as protocol, a chunky voice that gaps and stutters over long sentences and words.  My hands still falling through the keyboard.

By Emily Crocker

Cut into: a girl walking in a dark city, alleyways lead her to, lanes shifting and digging back into, through and around small buildings of Dublin, crammed on twisted streets.  She arrives at an old movie theater the afternoon before she returns to America.

*********

Her father grew up in Connecticut under 200 mile-an-hour winds.  It would rain and freeze under his feet.  He still holds the ice, implants it into their lineage. In thirty years she will watch a movie where a tall thin actor plays him, does him perfectly, better then he ever could.

**********

To dissect the code in her consciousness it will take repeated beatings of films, curtains separating, coke commercials into trailers into, lights. The picture splits, tape flips over and over in her head.  A story cast across the back of her scull decayed and full of holes.

***********

During the winter of 1973 Connecticut's railway stations were shut down along with the highways and bridges.  It rained all day and when the sun set, everything froze.  Parking lots mirrored images, passengers sat stuck in train cars commuting back from New York, trucks in ditches off the sides of the road.

************

She left the movie theater, took two air planes back home.  Over the counter drugs calm nerves.  She quits drinking three times before it sticks, studies the lines that cross in her head, wave back and forth and spark behind her eyes.  Thinks about uncovering Connecticut.  The provocation of the ice storm makes thoughts separate into line breaks.  Narrator dies on the page, in-between the space.  A story she'll write for seven years until the curtain reopens: screen fades out. 

My earliest memory of feeling connected to spirit (or God, as I call that wonderful force in my life), happened far away from any man-made church.  It happened when the noise of the world was (literally) drowned out by the noise of my motorcycle, and my feeling of peace and stillness was exaggerated by the confines of the helmet on my head.  I felt alone, as if I was the captain of my destiny, setting my course and making my own decisions.  And strangely, at the same time, realizing I was not alone.  That there would be something, some force, some life-giving force that would travel the road with me.  Offering me unconditional love, counsel and encouragement; helping me to understand the paradox of my insignificance and significance, my sameness and my uniqueness.  I began to sing and pray and simply commune with God and have not stopped in my twenty-five years, though I would be challenged with guilt, shame and fear for seeking out my own answer to the question you are asking me now, "What do you believe and why do you believe it?"

Growing up in a conservative Christian environment has been both a blessing and a burden.  I never felt compelled to question the beliefs laid down by that community's interpretation of the Bible, in part because the main tenet that It was based upon, God and His love for the world, has never been something I've questioned because of my epiphany whilst riding my bike in the woods.  But the larger feeling that kept me from questioning the doctrines of the church and whether they were what I really believed was that I had been instilled with the impression that it was basically ludicrous not to believe the way we did. Thus, growing up I was heavily burdened (in addition to my inherent know-it-all-ness) with self-righteousness, harshly and overtly judging others and deeming them not worthy of Heaven (which I equated with the ultimate reward), simply because they did not share my religious views.  I believed in God and His love for the world, and yet felt that love was given more readily and freely to us, His chosen people.  When I prayed and sang at church or in school, my heart would bubble and just about burst with faith in my beliefs.  I was so sure that my beliefs were the RIGHT beliefs (as if there is one right way to believe) that I was smug and insensitive.  Sadly, I was the one suffering.

Thank God I have seen the light. The light that makes me feel happy, challenged, inspired and connected. The light and love of God that allows me to happily acknowledge my imperfectness and accept the grace that is mine, and that my heart has known ever since that moment years ago on a backcountry trail.

I do not concern myself with thinking about things such as the reality of Heaven or Hell, what happens when animals or people die or even bother trying to define my beliefs in any standard terms (i.e. Christian, Buddhist, Taoist, Muslim etc...).  I feel that I would be wasting my time, since I've already dealt with the guilt and fear that accompanied the practically sacrilegious thoughts that it doesn't really matter if I believe in Heaven or Hell, lay claim to Jesus or Buddha.  I am trying (and doing) to live fully in the moment, with integrity and in accordance with my moral fiber, which is to say, in truth and love.  On my personal journey I've come to the conclusion that what is most important is to be continually open to whatever lessons life has to offer, to respond thoughtfully and compassionately, and to have an open heart.  Everything else seems superfluous.  Because much of what I did or did not do in my younger years was either for the reward of Heaven or to avoid the consequence of Hell, my actions were for appearances' sake and little else. I feel that I'm now living and striving to live a more actualized, genuine, spiritual life. I treat others well because that is what feels right in my heart. So I guess I've come (in a roundabout way to be sure) to what I believe:

I believe in keeping an open heart and mind, letting things marinate and resonate within my heart (my most trusted friend), letting that be my guide, trusting it will take me where I need to go.

To borrow from the Indigo Girls, "the less I seek my Source for some definitive, the closer I am to fine."

This may seem simple and naive to some, but truth (your truth, my truth and the truth), is never complicated.  And to trust in and have faith in something is one of the greatest blessings in the world.  Children know how to believe; we adults have just forgotten that we know.