Spokane

Vonnegut reading a treat for all ages
Get Lit! headliner delights with wit, waltz

Dan Webster
Staff writer

For a literary festival, Saturday night's Get Lit! program at The Met had a distinctly musical feel.

As featured speaker Kurt Vonnegut said, ‘‘The only proof that you need for the existence of God is music.”

Then he danced the waltz, which was almost as touching as Lynda Barry's earlier channeling of Ethel Merman was funny.

This is the sixth year of Get Lit!, Eastern Washington University's annual celebration of all things written. And while the festival doesn't end until today, with the Spokane Opera House hosting Dave Barry's 2 p.m. performance and Garrison Keillor's 7 p.m. show, Saturday night was everything those jammed into the 750-plus-seat theater could have hoped for.

And that crowd, which laughed, applauded and threw out the occasional growl of approval to Vonnegut in particular, wasn't composed only of the college crowd. There were nearly as many gray-haired fans as there were those wearing retainers.

The novelist Vonnegut headlined the event, but he was preceded by a couple of poets -- Joseph Millar and Dorianne Laux -- and cartoonist/novelist Lynda Barry.

As Millar and Laux entertained the crowd, Vonnegut was offstage cracking one joke after another, giving a small group gathered in a side room a preview of what was to come.

‘‘I do sleep with children,” Vonnegut said, chainsmoking his trademark unfiltered Pall Mall cigarettes, ‘‘and I see nothing wrong with it.”

And he was just getting started.

Barry, a crowd favorite from the 2003 festival, was a superb warm-up act. Bouncing around the stage like a frizzy-haired leprechaun, she lectured the audience on how to write.

But to call Barry's act a lecture is to call The Met a beach-side yurt. She stalked from one side of the stage to the other, reading from blue note cards, pretending at one point to French kiss a book, and singing lines from ‘‘Silent Night” and ‘‘Jesus Christ Superstar” in the late Broadway star Merman's throaty vibrato.

She closed by singing ‘‘You Are My Sunshine” with her mouth closed.

Vonnegut, who describes himself as a ‘‘Franklin Roosevelt Democrat,” fully lived up to his reputation as a writer who has about as much fear of speaking his mind as he does of lung cancer.

He opened by reciting the prologue to Chaucer's ‘‘The Canterbury Tales,” in Chaucer's original middle English.

He took Mel Gibson to task for, in directing his film ‘‘The Passion of the Christ,” emphasizing the crucifixion ‘‘and not what Jesus said.”

He used a blackboard to graph how to write a novel, deconstructing ‘‘Cinderella,” ‘‘The Metamorphosis” and ‘‘Hamlet.”

He equated the notion of exporting democracy to that of the conquistadors spreading Christianity.

He took shots at every conservative from George W. Bush to Rush Limbaugh.

Some of Vonnegut's best lines:

‘‘The Chinese were so dumb they only used gunpowder for fireworks.”

‘‘Don't you think that it's time we used DNA analysis to find out who the freeloader is who's in the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier?”

‘‘All great literature is about what a bummer it is to be a human being.”

‘‘You think Arabs are dumb? Try doing long division with Roman numerals.”

‘‘So let's give another big tax break to the rich. That'll give bin Laden a scare he'll never forget.”

And then, with the crowd on its feet and a waltz playing on The Met's sound system, Vonnegut exited the stage.

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