The other day I was parking near J’s place, and there was a red four-wheel-drive Jeep parked in front of a black four-door BMW, with just barely enough space for a Honda in between them. It was tight, but I thought I could do it. As it turned out, I wouldn’t normally have been able to make it, but for the fact that my car is so ridiculously low, and the Jeep is so ridiculously high.
The bumper of my car slid right underneath the Jeep’s bumper, and I glided into the spot without a scratch. I had to capture the moment:
On Sunday afternoon, I participated in Project X, a sort of time capsule event created by a theater group called Hand2Mouth. I found out about it when I went to see a play last weekend, and I’ve been looking forward to it ever since.
The event was divided up into multiple stations. There was a main station called ‘ground control’, which was where the lion’s share of the event took place. For brevity’s sake, I will describe it as a place where you listen to other peoples’ stories in headphones, create your own stories, create a timeline of your own life and of events in the broader scope of human history, and choose how you would like to be remembered by future generations. There were ample opportunities to speak, write, draw, or add whatever you felt like adding to the project. There were also opportunities to converse with other random people, and to record those conversations via satellite for posterity.
It was an amazing experience, but it’s also a fairly daunting one. The event asks a lot of its participants, and you have to be prepared to interact in a pretty demanding way. I wasn’t prepared for that, quite frankly. I made it through three of the five stations, in an hour and a half. The two remaining stations were ones that took a bit of time, so I waited numerous times to get in, but each time I found myself turned away because the stations were occupied. At a certain point, I decided to give up. I had been told by my friend to allow about three hours to participate, but since I’d been so busy in the previous few days, I was starting to shut down and become anxious, so I decided to give the last two stations a miss, unfortunately. This exhibit/performance/time capsule/event will also be conducted in Seattle next weekend, at the Bumbershoot festival, and I think that will be a tremendous experience. I have a feeling that if I had done it up there, I’d have been much more likely to participate in all of the events, but since it was here in town, I felt my real life responsibilities creeping back in. What’s more, I felt myself falling instantly in love with one of the women in the group, so I suddenly lost the ability to speak or think in my usual eloquent way.
If you live in the Northwest and are considering seeing the show, I definitely recommend it. Be prepared to be there for quite a while, and know in advance that some of the stations are better equipped than others to handle more than one or two people at a time. Perhaps this will change by the time it has its run in Seattle.
I’m very glad to have been a part of this time capsule, and my metaphorical hat goes off to Hand2Mouth for creating such an amazing event. I hope I’m around in the future to see what becomes of it.
Saturday was not Mike P.’s actual birthday, but that was the day he wanted to celebrate it, so what’re you gonna do? You have to follow the birthday boy’s wishes. He started by having a little soiree over at his place, with about ten other people. (Incidentally, the hit of the party was Allanah’s homemade guacamole, and her chocolate ‘Irish’ cake.) From there, he, Allanah, Orion and I went to Tony Starlight’s to see the band 3 Leg Torso.
BassistMichael is a friend of mine, who actually played in Steph’s band for a short time last year. It was great to see him again, and especially to see him play in his natural habitat. He’s really an amazing musician.
It was a totally great evening, and after driving everybody home, I think I got home around 2:30 in the morning. But the weekend wasn’t over yet. . .not by a long shot.
Last week was super busy, so now I finally have a spare moment to sit, and process, and also to get you up to speed.
Wednesday night was the first play-reading group we’ve had since Tossed In tossed in the towel on leading the group. A handful of us have been persistent about keeping the group going, and after about two months, we finally managed to make it happen. We read the script for the movie My Dinner With Andre.
It was an amazing evening. A few of us were die-hard fans of the movie, and knew our favorite parts almost by heart, and a few of us had never seen or heard of the movie, so it made for a particularly interesting discussion. I really should say ‘discussions’, because we stopped many times along the way to switch to different readers, and to discuss the section that we’d just finished reading.
A couple of us had our favorite sections that we really wanted to read. I read Andre’s section about the Little Prince and about how New York is the new model for concentration camps, and Matt read Wally’s introduction, his argument near the end, and his ending monologue. We all discussed different ideas for staging this work as a play, and the various ways we could bring the various scenes to life, while still retaining the feel of a dinner. It was an amazing evening, and a passionate discussion all the way around.
Afterwards, Matt, Lindsay and I went to Squeez for a drink. I really should say ‘another drink’, because we’d already had plenty at the reading. We shared some quesadillas and continued the discussion about the play and about various other things.
Matt was too shy to want his picture taken that night. I tried to surreptitiously snap a picture of him and Lindsay while they were at the bar ordering, but the picture didn’t come out. Not that these did especially well, but the other ones are even worse, I promise you. I love the colors inside Squeez. It’s just a really cool, comfortable place to meet with your friends.
Oh, and for the record, I’m lucky enough to have found a very special copy of the script for MDWA. . .it was autographed in 1982, by both Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn, AND it’s inscribed to someone here in Portland. A bunch of years ago, I went looking for the script, and finally found it at HugestBookseller. I decided to wait, however, and felt that another one would turn up, despite the fact that I had already been fruitlessly searching for it for years. No matter, I had a hunch.
The next day I went to Powell’s (even though I’d checked there countless times before) and sure enough, I was rewarded with this:
Talk about synchronicity. . .which fits in perfectly with the themes of the script, too. The autograph picture I left at higher resolution, so you can read what they wrote. I love it.
I first saw the movie when I lived in Yakima, at the age of twenty-four, and was mesmerized by it. I instantly went and tried to find out as much as I could about both of the guys, and all of the references they made to actors, directors, books, plays. . .everything. Jerzy Grotowski, The Master and Maragarita, The Little Prince, I couldn’t wait to understand what they were talking about. For the record, not one of my friends shared my enthusiasm for this movie. I raved about it, and even made a few people watch it, but they got bored and gave up after a few minutes. (I think this has something to do with the adage, ‘You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.’)
Anyway, it’s one of my all-time favorites, and it also introduced me to the Little Prince, which to this day I re-read every year or two, and I’ve probably had to buy ten or twelve copies of it over the years, because I’ve loaned so many out and never gotten them back. That’s okay, in this instance, because the story is so beautiful that I want everyone to read it, and I hope that they get as much out of it as I have.
And I have my friends Wally and Andre to thank for it.
This hilarious two-minute video eliminates almost all of the dialogue from The Big Lebowski except for the various incarnations of the F-word. You’ve been warned.
