Sister Slam

"This ultra-hip Cinderella tale, written entirely in verse, introduces an unconventional, memorable heroine... High creates events and people bigger than life, yet readers will find some very genuine emotions beneath Laura's loud, cynical front. Her transformation from outcast to superstar, lyrically captured through snappy rhymes, is satisfying as well as hilarious."-Publisher's Weekly, March 29, 2004
"I was smitten,
bitten
by a love bug
or something
I didn't
even care
that I'd
just been hit.
I was in deep
smit."
Laura Crapper, a seventeen-year-old combat-boot-wearing poet with spiked red hair, renames herself Sister Slam and hits the road with her best friend, Twig. On the way into the slam poetry world of New York City, they hit a pig, get pulled over by the cops, fight with a poetry contest's judge, lose the contest, get into two more fender benders, fight with each other, and finally land on the front page of a newspaper in New York City for their amazing impromptu performance at the famous Tavern on the Green. The girls and their fresh style of poetry take the city by storm, but when Laura's father back in Pennsylvania has a heart attack she must face her fears about home and the still-raw loss of her mother. An inspiring romp of a coming-of-age story, written entirely in Laura's in-your-face slam poetry style, that proves you don't have to give up your home in order to live your dream.
"I was smitten,
bitten
by a love bug
or something
I didn't
even care
that I'd
just been hit.
I was in deep
smit."
Laura Crapper, a seventeen-year-old combat-boot-wearing poet with spiked red hair, renames herself Sister Slam and hits the road with her best friend, Twig. On the way into the slam poetry world of New York City, they hit a pig, get pulled over by the cops, fight with a poetry contest's judge, lose the contest, get into two more fender benders, fight with each other, and finally land on the front page of a newspaper in New York City for their amazing impromptu performance at the famous Tavern on the Green. The girls and their fresh style of poetry take the city by storm, but when Laura's father back in Pennsylvania has a heart attack she must face her fears about home and the still-raw loss of her mother. An inspiring romp of a coming-of-age story, written entirely in Laura's in-your-face slam poetry style, that proves you don't have to give up your home in order to live your dream.
Excerpt (Chapter 1):
Sister Slam and the
Poetic Motormouth Road Trip Lesson 1 Never Ignore Spam Because It’s Not Always What It Seems Sister Slam I am. I don’t like spam. Not the fake pink ham that comes in cans, or the electronic moronic super-sonic junk mail that never fails to sail through your computer screen like an intruder seen only by you. It was the first of June, and soon, by the next full moon, I’d be loony with jubilation: my graduation celebration would be happening with my too-little two-person family in the House of Crapper. I swear, by every blood-red hair on my spike-cut head, or lightning may strike me dead, that this is my real name: Laura Rose Crapper. My lame-brained name was my main claim to fame, at Banesville High School, where I wasn’t exactly in the cool group. The kids of cool in Banesville School drove brand-new cars and lived in fancy mansions, where I liked to imagine they had monkey butlers. These kids lived mostly on Sutler Boulevard, in the rich mountain part of town. Pops and I lived down in the hollow, just us, in a teeny green submarine of a mobile home, and I drove my Mom’s old clunker car - a ‘69 Firebird - the funky sick color of rabbit turds dried in the sun. Plus I was way past chunky. In fact, I was downright clown-white fat, and big hippie chicks in thick-soled black combat boots just didn’t fit into the cool kids group at Banesville School. I was an Outsider, a Misfit, a Freak. "You leak pain all over the place," announced Ms. Nase, who was a space case. She was the school counselor, and a total waste of time. "Whatever," I said, slumped on her dump of a lumpy old couch. "Maybe I’m just a grouch, or a natural grump." "Perhaps it’s depression," said Ms. Nace. "The hurt shows on your face, and in the slow pace of your walk. You sulk." I just let her talk. The House of Crapper used to be happier, back before cancer won the war in my Mom’s body. Mom died when I was nine, in July. She was only thirty-five. I wasn’t fine, never again, but I was maybe okay. So anyway, it was just a normal day of formal blue-suit sky and baby birds chirping for worms on the first of June, and I was checking my hotmail account, deleting, weeding out seedy stuff and junk, when an ad from Creative Teen Zine caught my eye. "Come Try," it said in the subject line. "Try what?" I muttered, then clicked the mouse and read the message. "It doesn’t matter if you’re an amateur or a pro poet. Nobody knows until they try it, what a riot it is to sizzle in competition in the sport of spoken word. Sixth Annual Tin Can, New Jersey Poetry Slam." Well, wham-bam, thank you, ma’am, a poetry slam! This was the spam that saved my life. This was serendipity: a true whippity-do of a gift come straight from techno-heaven. Ever since I was seven, and saw the poet laureate of the entire United States, just like an everyday person, eating a Hershey’s bar in the local Seven Eleven, I’d been revvin’ my poetic inspiration, ignited with the sensation that someday I’d be a famous poet. I wanted to light up the night with the genius of my rhyme schemes. Well, don’t you know it: this was my chance to dance in my underpants with Peter Pan, the green-jeaned flyin’ and rhymin’ man. I’d always wanted to slam. And so had my best friend Twig, an indie-goth-hippie chick like me, only Pringle’s Chip-skinny, whose parents named her for the limb of a teeny weeny tree. Twig and me, we were a team, and it seemed that most of the poets on TV were like us: they tended to cuss sometimes without even trying, and they weren’t afraid of crying. They wore black and they liked Jack Kerouac and some were wacked and needed Prozac. |
(continued)
Poets seemed bohemian: somewhere in-between what passed for normal and the lunatic crazies in the Banesville Home for the Insane. Well, right there on that day of June first, I decided that the worst thing that could ever happen was for me to remain forever tethered to the House Of Crapper. I’d just get me some magic and a map, and ZAP . . . I’d travel this nation and be a sensation! Laura Rose Crapper would be one happy rapper . . . a jazzer, a be-boppin’ hip-hoppin’ beat poet, the queen of cool, don’t ya know it! But I’d be a fool, and that’s no bull, to keep the name of Laura Crapper, which sounds like a slacker or a toilet. So I changed my name, right there on the spot, and wow, was it hot, so hot it sizzled and blistered your fingers like Crisco-fried ham. My new name was: Sister Slam! But damn, Pops got way hot under the collar of his Dollar store working stiff shirt, buttoned all the way up to his neck. (Heck, Pops puts up with shirt suffocation, and the humiliation of dirt-factory work all for the perk of a three-week paid vacation. I don’t know why, but he wears a tie to make cherry pie at the Mrs. Smith’s factory on Sixth Street, where the freakin’ heat makes his face even geek-redder than ever.) But I never saw his face as beet-red as that day, when I said I’d changed my name and after graduation day I was going away to take place in the Tin Can Poetry Slam. "You’re not as big as you think," he sputtered. "And you’ve never driven further than the next town over. And there’s not a thing wrong with your name, Laura." He was disconcerted, but I asserted my decision, mister, fixing my vision of fame firmly in my brain. "Sister Slam I am," I said, and did he turn red. I thought I was dead, he was that red. Father Strangles Daughter With Dollar Store Necktie would be the headline in the Daily Local (loco) News of Banesville - Hicksville - Pennsylvania. "I don’t like green eggs and ham," I said gently, hoping to joke his face less red. Mom and Pops (before Mom was dead and I was fat) used to read Dr. Seuss books to me a lot - The Cat In The Hat, and Red Fish, Blue Fish, and Green Eggs and Ham - and probably that helped to make me into Sister Slam. My parents rocked me to sleep by reading heaps of poetry: Edna Millay and William Blake, Edgar Allen Poe and Van Fernando, some guy they used to know in high school. Mom and Pops created this word-addicted cool-kid-evicted fat chick who wanted to be a butt-kickin’ shit-slingin’ road poet. Pop’s eyes misted, and I knew that he was wishing that Mom was here, missing her as much as ever. It never goes away: the ache for what used to be. "Do what you want," Pops said, shaking his head. His voice was soft. "You’re eighteen, and you think you’re an adult. It’s not my fault. It’s not your fault. Do it. I can’t stop you, anyway." Hooray. Whuppity-do. Wham-bam, thank you, Pops. Damn, that was easier than a spray of fake grease in a hot sizzling frying pan. Better than butter in the sun. I grabbed Pops, wrapping him in a hug. My new name - my claim to fame in life after Banesville High - was Sister Slam. Sister Slam I am. |