Talk To Me From Wnyc

Two is a famously bad age for toddlers, but it seems to be a prime number for a reading series marking a rite of passage—in this case, the celebration this past Wednesday of the Happy Ending Music and Reading Series’ two-year anniversary at Joe’s Pub.  Host and curator Amanda Stern called the evening “Old Friends/New Friends” and invited as readers Nelly Reifler and A.M. Homes—her first two guests when she started the series at a Chinatown bar seven years ago. Both women read stories that might be called modern fables. Reifler’s “Formica Dinette” was written for the Web site Underwater New York, which collects writing and art inspired by the waterways around New York City (take that, James Cameron). In this darkly comic piece (the actual dinette is somewhere in the East River) the Formica company somehow joins with a survivalist family gearing up for the final battle, and kitchen redesign is linked to the rehabilitation of a possessed parent. A.M. Homes’ untitled piece, written for her friend, the English pai