O sweet San Francisco!

We pulled into the city and travel exhaustion built up over the last month fell away. San Francisco’s got a charge to it—some creative power node hidden away under all the crazy hills and trolley cars. Pre-tech, we scrambled to drop our stuff at wonderful welcoming Marsha’s—we made it to the theatre with ten minutes to spare. That’s cutting it close when we started six hours away. We were the last tech scheduled in the space, and the show scheduled to open the festival.

OH MY GOD is the SF Fringe Fest well-organized. Of all the festivals, this one had the nicest and most efficient staff, the best-trained volunteers, the most knowledgeable techs. They treated us well, and in exchange, we gave our best performances here.

The roughest one, though, was opening night—our audience of 27 (smallest audience we ever had at that venue; turned out we had the #1 box office by the end of the festival! Woohoo!) was utterly unresponsive. We pushed in vain for an audience response and, in our pushing, utterly failed at any attempt at honestly playing the scenes.

There were three reviewers in the audience that night.

But, joy oh joy—they must not have noticed, because we got a brilliant writeup in the Chronicle! After that, our audience got bigger and bigger, until our last two shows in which we sold out our 80-seat house. There is so much community support for the Fringe festival in San Francisco; it is a thriving event run by generous and apparently unstressed people. Absolutely lovely all around.

There was some talk of moving the company to San Francisco in the next few years, I’m not sayin’ by who. It’s such a unique city, so crazy and full of art and food and lovely views and the smell of the ocean and good clam chowder. The people are interesting and uninhibited, the bars are great, the neighborhoods distinct and fascinating.

And now we’re driving home to Seattle. We’re about three hours away as I type this. It’s grey and rainy and I’m sick as a dog—came down with a sore throat the last morning in San Francisco, had a devastating fever by that night. The next day found me, not going to the river in Humboldt as we had planned, but sitting in the Urgent Care ward waiting for a doctor to prescribe me antibiotics for the sinus infection I seem to have contracted. Bleah. It was a day of sleep and being miserable and moping around my parents’ house waiting to go home, to my own bed and no social demands and canned soup and tea. And now we’re almost home, and the tour is almost over (if you don’t count that final, best-of-fringe performance in San Francisco a week and a half from now) and I’m not sad at all to see it go. It was tremendously fun and absolutely exhausting. Hurray for home! Hurray for good old Seattle! Maybe now I can clean my bathroom!

We just drove past two buildings in Portland that had great glass towers with loooong spikes on top, so that they resembled a giant pair of syringe needles pointing at the sky. Creepy.

Listen, everyone: life is so good it’s deranged.