Occasionally
It was hot May 9. Poetry Center of Chicago head Ken Clarke says he worked up a bit of a sweat hauling boxes of books and other paraphernalia into the Art Institute’s Rubloff Auditorium to set up for a much anticipated reading that night by neosoul diva Jill Scott. St. Martin’s Press had just brought out Scott’s first book of poetry, The Moments, the Minutes, the Hours, and the publisher had called the Poetry Center a couple of months earlier to see if they’d be interested in hosting an event. Clarke says he threw himself into promoting it, working with WGCI and V103, among others, to get the word out. There would be a reading followed by a signing, and he was expecting about 800 people. More than 400 tickets had been sold in advance; another 250 or so had been given away, mostly to students; and he expected to sell 100 more at the door. (About 50 people had tickets that included a postevent fund-raiser.) Scott had come to town the previous day and was on local TV that morning, promoting the reading. But at 3:30, three hours before it was to begin, Clarke’s cell phone rang. It was St. Martin’s publicist Stephen Lee with word of a problem: Scott was threatening not to show up; she objected to the ticket charge.
