“I know you,” says an American girl in a bar.
“Oh,” I say.
“I’m always reading your blog. I love it. And then I send it to Germans I know and they say: ‘What is this racist shit?'”
“Oh,” I say.
“Yeah,” she says.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“No, don’t be,” she says. “I’m your biggest fan.”
I look at her and blink a bit. She seems fairly normal. She really does seem really quite fairly normal. She really does. Like, one of my hobbies is sorting everyone I know into one of two categories, normal and not normal, and she really does seem like she would actually belong in the normal box. Which is good. The last biggest fan I met was a fucking nutjob. She thought that my texts had single-handedly transformed the Berlin poetry slam scene and that my Muschi story was about a feminist journey and a spiritual awakening. “It’s all about you, at the end of this long quest, discovering that you yourself have the power to solve your problems – the power was within you all along.” That was the kind of thing she was saying. So, it was really nice to meet a huge fan and all – but it was a bit disheartening to discover that she was mentally ill. This girl, however, seems fairly normal. So that’s good.
“Well,” I say. “It’s nice to meet you.”
“I ever came to your Lesebühne once,” she says. “With my husband. He’s German. He thinks I’m really unintegriert. He’s always getting mad at me – ‘When are you gonna start learning German, when are you gonna stop hanging out with all these ex-pats?’ So then I came home from work, and I was like: ‘I wanna go to a Lesebühne.’ He was so happy. He was really impressed. He was like: ‘You wanna go to a Lesebühne? What’s come over you?’ And I was like, ‘I just really wanna go to a Lesbühne, okay?’ And then we got there – we went to Ä, yeah – then when we got there, he realized you were the girl from Exberliner. He was like: ‘She’s the girl from Exberliner, isn’t she? You found out about this from Exberliner, didn’t you?'”
“What did he think? Did he think my German was okay?”
“Yeah,” she says. “He thought your German was amazing.”
“Oh,” I say, and smile happily. “That’s great.”
Jacinta Nandi’s Lesebühne, Rakete 2000, will be doing a Jahresrückblick (“Look back on the year”) on Thursday, December 27, in Ä, Weserstr. 40. Jacinta’s bringing stories about Germans blacking up in the theatre, that Canadian cannibal who got caught in an internet cafe in Neukölln and why Kristina Schröder can skip over the word “Neger” if she fucking wants to.