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One night, when we were staying in Woodacre an hour out of San Francisco, Claytie and Scofie and I stayed in for the day, went to Fairfax for coffee but didn’t stray farther from home than that. Playing with the chickens in the garden, petting the wheezy old dog. There was lots of fresh zucchini that the neighbor begged us to eat, and tomatoes ripe in the garden to pick, and pie and wine fresh-bought from the grocery store, and we made dinner out of that and it was lovely lovely. Claytie and I polished off two bottles of wine between us, and decided that a walk was the perfect thing after dinner, and rolled off into the dead-dark night. There are no streetlights in the rural part of Woodacre, but the moon was full and bright and we walked, oh, not more than two or three blocks before we rounded a corner and were confronted dead-on by that beautiful blinding moon. We weren’t talking at all, just walking with our shoulders touching, and we stopped at the same time in the middle of the road, just dumbfounded by the powerful aggressive beautiful moon. We were drunk and leaning on each other a little bit, swaying back and forth together, at first to our own rhythm and then to the rhythm of the crickets going like mad all around us, just a symphony of bugs dying to get laid and crying about it into the moon. They were almost deafening, echoing each other, the sound getting swallowed up in the moonlight and spit out again all chewed up, ragged and lilting.

We swayed until we were dancing a little bit, there in the street in the moonlight. We didn’t say one word and I was loving Claytie so much, loving us so much, for being moon-drunk and wine-drunk and bug-drunk. And then a car came and our reverie seemed a little embarrassing and we scampered to the side of the road and leaned against each other again, but the spell was broken and we started talking about the heavenly flower-smell and looked at the flowers and then turned around to go home.

But: no streetlight. And now the moon is at our backs, and we don’t know the neighborhood very well but we definitely didn’t come very far—but no flashlight, and the street signs are unreadable in the dark dark dark, and we wandered around staring at our moonshadow feeling foolish for far longer than we had walked to meet the moon in the first place. What if we didn’t find home? And no cell phones either, to make scofie drive around looking for us, no keys, not even sensible clothes since we had decided to dress up for dinner. Dress clothes, and blankets around our shoulders, and oh yes I forgot the mugs of wine we still held in our hands, ridiculous, tottering up the street with emptied mugs. All night…

Finally there was a street sign that was sort of close to the moonlight. We both tried to shimmy up the pole to get close enough to read it, but cold thick poles are hard to climb drunk. Claytie hoisted me up—the physical theatre training coming to practical use at last!—and I read the street sign: Oak Grove and Garden Street. Our corner. And we turned around and there was the house; we were standing in front of it.

As we walked in to warmth and more wine and video games, the haphazard pulse of the cricket song lurched in my breast, and trembled a little, and gave way to electricity. But they’re still out there, rubbing away. For another month at least, before they all get cold and give up. They’re singing now, nine hundred miles away from me.

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.

I’m sitting on Ben Evan’s couch composing this blog entry on his computer. I’ve spent so many of my waking hours in town, since transportation is tricky in Boulder when you don’t have your own wheels, that internet access has been sporadic; but today is a slow morning of sleeping in and taking my time about getting ready to rejoin the waking world. Boulder has been lovely. The day we arrived, everyone was tired, and David (Claytie’s stepdad) picked us all up from the airport; Scofie and I dropped off our bags at Ben’s and hitched a ride downtown with David, and Claytie and Anna went home to their rooms at David’s while Scofie and I explored Boulder for a few hours. We found some killer burritos at a place called Illegal Pete’s and figured out that the buses stop running here at 9pm–bit of a pity, since our first two shows wouldn’t even START until 10pm. Well, it’s a short cab ride. Boulder’s public transportation system leaves something to be desired, compared to New York.

But what a lovely little town. Everyone we’ve met has been incredibly nice and willing to go out of their way for a stranger. The folks who are running the Fringe are SO welcoming and excited to have the artists around, and the beaurocracy of the event has been astonishingly minimal. Unlike New York, the artists here recieve 100% of what they take in at the Fringe box office, and the festival is run on initial festival fees, t-shirt sales, and generous donations. The community here seems more than willing to support the event, and attendance at our first two shows was enormous compared to our best night in New York. The space we’re performing in is the Dairy Arts Center, and I haven’t seen a more lively space dedicated to the arts; there’s a coffeeshop in the atrium, several art galleries, and three performance spaces housed in one building, and any day or time you go there the place is full of people mingling, emerging from shows or waiting to be seated, drinking coffee and talking about theatre or the Fringe or what shows to see, and strolling through the galleries. It really feels like a living space, a true art-centered social arena, which is rare these days, and I love it. If there’s something like this in Seattle, I want to see it; where people don’t go for a specific event and leave, but linger, check out associated events, share their opinion, and finally wander home.

Our first two shows here have been quite successful and we have generated a good buzz for this weekend. Yesterday I stopped by University Bicycle and rented some wheels, so now I can get into and out of town with a bit more freedom, and travel from venue to venue with more time to spare. I’ve seen some great shows here (and some bad ones; that’s Fringe) but I have really enjoyed Maria Est Perdue, a play directed and created by my genius friend Liz Watt from the International Theatre Collective and two other performers; Arachne, a puppet/mask/classical Greek show by Sophie Nimmannit, another ITCo gal, and directed by Ben whose house we’re staying at; and Curriculum Vitae, a one-man comedy show about the difficulties of getting a job (and the author’s own employment history) by a charming fellow who is also going to San Francisco after this, and who we promised to cross-promote with when we arrive there. Last night we finally got to mingle with the Fringe crowd out at a bar called Trinity. The company was fantastic, the bar terrible; at a quarter to one, when apparently not many people were ordering drinks, they went around bellowing “last call” and turned the lights up bright to make everybody leave. When people stayed, finishing their recently-ordered drinks and talking, they starting asking everybody to leave because the staff wanted to go home. Mind you, this is about 1:15 on a Thursday night. I’ll not be back there.

Wednesday I got to go out to Brainard lake and Long lake with my ITCo friends, and it was lovely to see some national-park wilderness so soon after leaving the concrete-and-neon jungle of New York. I jumped in an ice-cold lake and jumped right back out again, and life was good.

That’s the mundane update! I think Nebunele is starting to get a little tired. We’ll need our week at home for recharging before we head off to San Francisco, our final leg. On the road, la la la…

-Alissa

There is something about a train pulling up into the subway and slowing to a stop that makes me feel rather like a little metal ball in a roulette wheel; in which car will I ultimately come to rest? Will I join the teens in party clothes, coming home to Jersey from a night of jubilant clubbing, tired and satisfied? Or will I sit in silence across from the fat man reading the newspaper, grunting over stories of foiled terrorist plots, and next to the nervous man in a National Guard T-shirt, his 7-year-old son asleep on his shoulder? In this rather crowded car, or that nearly empty one, or the one where the conductor occasionally pops out to make an announcement via an arcane, complicated, and inefficient intercom?

Something in me hopes for a friend, most times. I peer through the windows as they go more and more slowly by, looking for the person who is alone, who looks receptive, who isn’t holding a book or flipping through songs on their ipod. I take a few casual steps this way or that to increase my chances of alighting in the car with the best prospect.

Most of the time the train ride is over before I think of the first thing to say.

-Alissa

Surely the sound of rushing
water did not spring forth from the sluggish wet
garbage-laden trickle of moisture that wends its
inexplicable way
from nowhere to somewhere down the center
of the tracks.
There’s a warm pipe, running straight
up the pole next to the one I lean my sweaty hair against,
that is the source of the properly musical,
hidden-waterfall tinkle. A carefully tuned decorative fountain
or a merry stream of urine in a lonesome bowl
makes that sound.
A constant lilting rush suggests the runoff from furious rain,
despite the skies’ relentless cloudlessness
when I descended into this too-hot land of concrete and steel.
One brave rat
noses its way through the soggy newspaper in the pit of the tracks,
darts under the third rail
when the station begins to rumble with the approaching train.
I looked for him again in vain, that native
of this unnatural country,
persistent even in this sooty, sweaty, greasy,
in-between land of sparks and
muted voices
that echo on down the line.
A cave of going
somewhere else.
The Wood Between the Worlds
with riveted trees,
cement clouds,
and smudged and oily tile shrubbery.

-Alissa

Hurrah, I finally figured out how to do this blogging thing again! It’s been a while. Hello, everybody!

New York is awfully fun. I’ve not done any of the things you’re supposed to do in New York; I haven’t visited any monuments or even gone to any museums yet. I’ve seen a lot of plays, but all in the Fringe festival; nothing yet on Broadway (though Wicked is on my list for sure.) What I have been doing is running about advertising our show, going shopping (I have some killer new dress shoes) seeing fringe shows (from the very very good to the very very bad–the best and the worst were both yesterday) finding awesome hole-in-the-wall restaurants (yesterday I had dinner at a hummus place. Yes, a place that serves only hummus. Most of their entrees consist of a giant bowl of hummus and homemade pita to mop it up with. Sounds boring, but oh. my. god. was it good. I have set a whole new bar for pita bread; the store-bought stuff I don’t think I will ever eat again.) and drinking elegant cocktails in various locales. I haven’t really strayed outside of Manhatten yet, but I keep brushing up against famous places. I peered into the pit that was the World Trade Center and felt a little sad. I watched the sun set over Jersey from the Battery Park waterfront.

Today I’m taking it easy, answering emails, eating leftover risotto, avoiding the humidity outside. It’s after 2pm and I’m still in my pjs. I suppose it’s time to drag myself to the shower and face the world; there’s a show I plan to see at 4:30 today; I have Fringe business to attend to for Boulder and San Francisco. It’s nice to have a morning that doesn’t involve running out of the house the moment I get up. At some point I suppose I need to figure out my laundry. Hmmmm.

All right, icebreaker post finis. More as it comes. Hurrah New York!

-Alissa