Moby-Dick/Mocha-Rich Reading Party (Melville Bicentennial)

Then: A mysterious narrator who implores us to call him “Ishmael” recounts his fateful voyage in the 1820s with Captain Ahab, a monomaniacal old man obsessed with re-meeting and killing the beast who took his leg, the notorious white whale Moby-Dick. Now: “Mahalath” spins a yarn from the late ‘90s about her first adventure on the FLEETs (the Female Learning, Enlightenment, and Erudition Teams) with Captain Jezebel, a high school senior whose only mission in life is to re-encounter and answer the question prompt so elusive and frustrating that it caused her to stab her own thigh, the "Mocha-Rich."