Please join us for a reading by performance artist Mary Paula Hunter (MPH) from her new book Can I Please Have a Hug First

And you won’t want to miss the cake made by Peter Hunter Meckel

CAN I HAVE A HUG FIRST? is a short story collection born out of author Mary Paula Hunter's career as a performance artist. Her monologues turned short stories feature midlife adults struggling to align their crazy minds with an equally crazy world. Hilarious and tragic in a high-energy mix, these stories will get the reader questioning what came first- the whacked mind or the whacked world?

Mary Paula Hunter is a writer living in Providence, Rhode Island. She received early praise for her writing when as a dancer and choreographer, she told stories about her eccentric Midwestern family while she danced.

Laurie Stone, in the now-defunct VILLAGE VOICE wrote that Mary Paula’s writing was brilliant. Jennifer Dunning in THE NEW YORK TIMES also praised her hybrid work, especially the honest storytelling.  Finally the writing won out… although she still creates dances (mainly in her kitchen), and works on performance art projects.

The NYT writes: “Peter Hunter Meckel, 36, a Brooklyn-based baker inspired by the grandeur of Victorian-era sweets, uses chiffon in his outsize sculptural cakes adorned with edible strings of pearls and portraits of imaginary duchesses. Creating his signature sweets — which he’s made for weddings and fashion world parties — required a fair amount of trial and error. Whipping egg whites to just the right frothiness for maximum height takes practice, he says, and, because chiffon is prone to collapsing under weight, layered cakes can require meticulous engineering, including reinforcement with dowels and cardboard. Still, Meckel is drawn to chiffon’s airy delicacy and notes that its sugar-to-flour ratio is lower than that of traditional butter cakes. “A lot of desserts are just so sweet you can’t eat very much of them,” he says. “This is a nice change of pace.”