Onwards and Downwards

South, that is. Armed with compact discs of my own making (who has space on their phones for new music nowadays?!) I set off for Washington D.C. to see a play I’d been hearing about for almost two years: The Object Lesson, created by Geoff Sobel, a Pig Iron gent (and core teacher at APT, according to his bio. Cue sidelong glance.) who specializes in, you guessed it, object work. Two of my Summer theater projects are focused on object theater and the last evening performance just happened to be the night I was passing through D.C..

As I entered the theater I was told to explore and interact with the set:

but the ushers don’t know me very well and within 30 seconds I was being told to please not climb that part of the set. I was about to get sassy with them for telling me I was “free to explore everything” when Justin Rose, an unexpected and wonderfully friendly face, walked up to me with a box that had a secret message inside. Crisis averted.

After the show I was left with the following questions: 1) Would anyone notice if I just hide out in here for the night and explore the boxes? 2) Should I keep the program, throw it away, or turn it into oragami? and 3) How quickly can I learn magic? I spent a fantastic post-show evening with Justin and some of the other Studio Theater folks eating vegan, rice crust pizza, playing the game of “Oh! I know that person! Do you know ______?” and “Where in New York?” while Justin played g maj add 9 songs the guitar at my request. I also had one of those rare and wonderful conversations where you mention Pepper’s Ghost and the other person not only knows it’s not an Emo band but tells you a variation on it you never knew, where to go to see it in action, where to get some state of the art materials to make it happen, and an anecdote about making an elephant appear out of thin air on stage. Geoff Sobel, ladies and gentlemen.

Around 2 am, mind sparkling with thoughts of objects and magic and future projects, I hit the road to maximize the amount of cruise control I could partake of on this trip. While I am up and walking, I’m still only three days off crutches and after nearly six weeks in boots (I sprained both of my feet in late April) I still have some time and physical therapy to go before I’m back to full strength and pain-free gas pedal pumping.

A note on the drive: FOG. DRIVING RAIN. Then perfectly pleasant night time driving. Then FOG. Then DRIVING RAIN. Then perfectly pleasant night time driving. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t love dodgy weather. It was especially welcome tonight as I was in need of a ritual opening ceremony for the trip. The drive to D.C. was so quotidian that I didn’t feel like I was setting out on an adventure. To pass through the kind of precipitation where you could as easily be on Neptune as driving through Virginia was just the step through the looking glass that I needed to reminded me that today is not an ordinary day.

I slept at a rest stop for a few hours and was back on the road by 8am. Oddly, rest stops are one of my favorite places to sleep. Something about no one in the whole world knowing where I am gives me a rush like I’ve just been injected with a dose of High-Concentration Freedom. And so it “begins.”