Lantern Awards

The Lantern Awards presented by The Lit were last night. It was a fairly fancy pants event at the Palace. Check out how cute I looked!

This is like the best picture taken of me in years!

Anyway, there were ten different categories, each with three nominees. The Man was up for "Poetry, Single Poem". It was cool to be nominated, but neither of us thought about it much in regards to winning or losing. It was an event to go to with free tickets that involved appetizers.

When we sat down in our seat, the awards themselves were sitting on the stage.
Each one was different and they had a flickering candle glow inside. That's when I wanted The Man to win because I wanted one of those lanterns!

Being a nominee for this award has kept The Man busy over the last month. He had to go to a photo shoot for the picture in the program.

He also had to go get videotaped talking and reading for the show they put up on the big screen.

Not a great picture, but that's really him talking away. The little lights underneath are the lanterns flickering.

He was really dreading the video parts, but he looked good and sounded smart.

And then he won his category. It was really cool when his name was announced. Since he wasn't planning on winning he had no idea what to say, but his acceptance speech was perfect.
Later on he had to accept the Lifetime Achievement award for Shelia Schwartz and that speech was even better. He had that one worked out a little bit in advance.
Dan Chaon won the award for Best Novel, but he couldn't be there and asked The Man to pick it up for him if he did win. So we ended up bringing three of the lovely little lanterns home.


Here's The Man's...

Here's Dan's...
Here's Shelia's...

Those are pages from her books wrapped around. Very cool.

Here's all three showing the side with their name and which award they won...
And all three lit up.I love that these awards are locally made pieces of art instead of something like a slab of polished wood with a brass plate or a block of etched glass. These little lanterns are just beautiful.

There's a nice write up of the event in today's Plain Dealer. It says that The Man is 43, which cracks me up, but he's not finding much humor in.

At the after party, he carried around the same plate of food all night but never ate because he kept talking to people. Not to worry, I put away enough appetizers for both of us.