"Teenage Dream" by Katy Perry and "Party in the USA" by Miley Cyrus, as sung to us by Rakesh Satyal

These videos are my gift to all of you who supported In The Flesh Reading Series for five years! The rest are on YouTube and I'll be posting them soon. Also working on an essay about why I ended the series, which I plan to post on The Nervous Breakdown, where I last wrote about bailing on the $1,000 Erica Jong essay (editors, take note: it's a new year, new and improved me and I would looooove to write for your anthology, regardless of pay). I am hoping to do an event in April or May with lots of hotness and humor so stay tuned and sign up for my mailing list at rachelkramerbussel.com for details. Do make sure to visit Rakesh's site and read his Lambda Literary Award-winning novel Blue Boy!

Also? What Rakesh said about me being a character? Meant so much to me. And is very in tune with my photocomix profile by Seth Kushner on CulturePOP...and, synchronicity, he was also a performer at the last In The Flesh!

If you were there, you also caught the awesome interplay among performers based on Samara O'Shea's letter to a certain anonymous novelist. THANK YOU to everyone who showed up and made me feel like everything was right with the world for one night. There is no roadmap when you start a reading series, at least, there wasn't for me. I was kindof flailing at first and somehow things clicked and I figured it out, or was lucky, or whatever, and I'm so glad that I met such amazing people, performers and audience. So truly, thank you for all those hosting highs I wound up with, and I hope to further all the things I learned about putting on fabulous events.


Rakesh Satyal sings "Teenage Dream" by Katy Perry


Rakesh Satyal sings "Party in the USA" by Miley Cyrus (I requested this! My cousins introduced me to it last summer on Martha's Vineyard in a ride that is inspiring the YA novel will be writing as soon I'm done with this one)