Good evening, my darling, my darling listeners.

I'm Ali Silva.

We're coming to you.

Thank you.

We are coming to you live from this most lovely and distinguished venue, the slipper room,

right in the heart of Manhattan's Lower East Side.

Now although we perform this show in The Big Apple,

my dearest audience, this evening,

we are about to take a trip together deep, deep down

into the American South, a South with a culture caught somewhere between its romanticized past

and its more complicated present and future.

Yes, yes, y'all, I'm referring to our homage to a genre known as Southern Gothic.

Tonight, we are here to serve you three corrosive courses, battered and fried up just right right so it will stick to your ribs and

may never come off who are the prime practitioners of this most esteemed

genre Carson McCullors William Faulkner Flannery O'Connor, and one of my all-time favorites,

Tennessee Williams.

Tennessee Williams, whose et tufei suddenly last summer, includes a number of ingredients such as the theme of predation.

When we got back to where my cousin Sebastian had disappeared in the flock of featherless little black sparrows, he was lying naked as they had been naked against a white wall.

And this you won't believe. Nobody has believed it. Nobody, nobody on earth could possibly believe it.

And I don't blame them. They had devoured parts of him, torn or cut parts of him away with their hands or knives or maybe those jagged tin cans they made music with.

They had torn bits of him away and stuffed them into those goblin, fierce little empty black mouths of theirs.

There wasn't a sound anymore. There was nothing to see but Sebastian.

...