OAF flyer

I started this post by just putting that flyer up there that I made for OAF, and now I feel the urge to give some background!

OAF was a really important little group for some of us in college.

Maggie Ginestra, now living in St. Louis where she started a chapbook shop called Stirrup Pants, started OAF when we were in college at FSU and several OAFers are basically lifelong friends because of it.

The format was simple- each meeting started with a question (which was often off-the-wall or silly). Everyone had a title they could make up for themselves. Multiple titles were fine, too- Sean was like ten things. I was Animator then Historian/Archivist, and I think Cameron was Pilot. Then we shared art with one another- readings or drawings or music.

OAF is how I befriended Sean Jarrett, who did all the voices in my films "Chickenheads" and "Fluidtoons" and asked me to animate "Victory Remix" (see 'em at fluidtoons.com).

I also met William at OAF when I was transfixed when he read an excerpt from his "Scrap Cops" project. In William's reading he described a veteran cop (named "Big Hockey") showing a newbie cop a fully-assembled handgun in the bowl of a toliet in the men's room. "I ate that gun piece-by-piece and shat it out fully formed," Big Hockey told the newbie. The hilarity and bizarreness of that story has stuck with me since!! Was Big Hockey lying to the newbie to intimidate him, or was that kind of thing possible in the fictional William D. Tucker multiverse?

William lived in Atlanta for a little while and had a few gigs at Eyedrum, such as this one:



I also Graham Goodman through OAF! I already knew Bobby Z and Cameron from before OAF, but it was important for getting us closer.

Eventually we rented a house (Roberto found it), which had a shed in the backyard, and Bobby Z and Kevin and a few others cleared it out (it was totally full of stuff) and built benches and a stage. The Slusher St Theatre was born!



The plays we put on there were magical. There was "Prisoners of Gotham" (about Batman and the Joker), "Magnificent Forge", "Everybody Knows Time Machines are a Bad Idea", "Alcestis", Kate's musical... amazing.

We also had open houses, which were interesting- a mix of some amazing stuff and some regular stuff.

Eventually most of us left Tallahassee and turned the OAF house over to Tall Tom. Slusher St Theatre continued to be used, though no longer for poetry and plays but more for punk or rock shows.

One thing that I'm really proud of is Jean-Louis Costes performed his "Les Petits Oiseaux Chient" (Little Birds Shit) show at the OAF house in 2007! I caught it at Eyedrum in Atlanta and was blown away.





I drew on a wall in the bathroom- I'd intended to draw over all of the walls, but never did. Thankfully Diana sent me some pictures of it!

Here are a couple pictures I stole from the OAF house MySpace page: