You Pay Your 10 Bucks for Celebrity Yucks

You pay your $10, you sit in a room with women wearing black clothes and men wearing ponytails, and you listen to television stars read their innermost thoughts in blank verse. You are at one of L.A.’s currently popular (make that inexplicably popular) celebrity poetry readings. You experience a deep feeling of nausea. Can these people possibly take themselves seriously?

Apparently not, or on Saturday night at Cafe Largo they didn’t, when the public was invited to pay $10, sit in a room with women wearing black clothes and men wearing ponytails and listen to television performers make fun of the celebrity poetry reading scene.

It was a satirical evening called “Are We Deep or What?” The tone for the night was set when the chain-smoking 14-year-old Drew Barrymore, fresh from her stay in a substance-abuse clinic, was introduced as making “her first public appearance in four years face up.” Ouch.

Celebrity readers included Shelley Duvall, Laraine Newman, Barrymore, Katey Sagal and David Faustino of “Married . . . With Children” and David Cassidy.