Like all good storytellers, Hugh Meade knows his A-list material.
Spending any amount of time with Meade can test ones capacity to retain interesting information. He has scientific stories about Saturns rings, captivating tidbits from Tunisia in North Africa, fascinating facts on Freud all somehow woven seamlessly and joyfully into a continuous narrative that makes an hourlong discussion feel like a five-minute chat.
However, when it comes to tall tales from his own life, he knows just where to start and grabs listeners by the lapels.
There are few experiences that will make you question your place in the world like chasing a man down the streets of Atlanta with his pants full of stolen dildos, he recently told Oklahoma Gazette.
Its just another stranger-than-fiction anecdote from his one-man spoken-word show, Shovelin Porn, scheduled 8 p.m. Thursday at The Root, 3012 N. Walker Ave. in Paseo Arts District. The show is a collection of stories about his time working as a night manager at an adult video and novelty store in his native South Carolina. Meade said the performance grew out of peoples understandable curiosity whenever his previous work experience would come up.
The stories are funny, filthy and fascinating. However, Meade said his goal is to weave some truth and perspective into the otherwise bawdy two-hour routine.
Most of it is really funny, obviously, he said. Its just a bizarre place to spend time, and you get all kinds of people coming into a porn store at night. Although a lot of the material is prurient, I hope that the show has some larger meaning for people.
You can imagine what thats like, if you even want to imagine it, Meade said. I cant think of too many things worse than that, especially if its your day-to-day job.
Since I was the only guy who worked there that spoke Spanish, I kind of got to know him after awhile, and he started showing me his letters from home. He showed me the house he was building, showed me pictures of his family that he sent money to every month. He also made three dollars more an hour than everybody else, which, come on, he deserved.
There was a woman who bought her own video so nobody could see it, Meade said. She made some videos when she was 18, and when it was released, she went around to every single store that carried it and paid full-price for every copy. She was that adamant that she had made a mistake.
I cant help but think of that as a moral question. If youre 18 and you sign a contract for anything, it may be something you regret. But the way I looked at an 18-year-old girl when I was 26 and the way I look at one now at 46? Theres a huge difference there. The law says that at 18, you become an adult. But should it be legal to pay an 18-year-old girl to get on camera and fuck a man?
Hes turning the spoken-word performance into a book and said every show is helping him tighten the narrative before he puts it on the page.
I view the world with a different lens than I did back then, so I do hope that theres some different elements in the performance that appeal to people. But for the most part, its just because people really like these stories, Meade said. We made some things that you would just not expect people to put inside themselves. '
Print headline: Double exposure, Local artist Hugh Meade turns life experience into performance art with his Shovelin Porn show.