July 18-20: Missouri

Saturday, July 18^th, 2009

A lot of people expressed surprise that I was returning to Kansas City, since our numbers last year weren’t great and we had a few stressful experiences along the way. But, hey – it’s close and it’s cheap, so it’s relatively low-risk. More to the point, it’s a young Fringe (at five years it’s heading out of toddlerhood in people years; I guess that means that the Minnesota Fringe is well into its adolescence, and starting to notice boys. And girls. Because the MN Fringe is totally bi), and there’s a certain excitement to getting to jump on board a Festival as it’s just starting to achieve wider recognition. Plus, our numbers did start to pick up towards the end of our 2008 run, so I’m curious to see if I can now continue to build on that.

Arrived at my billeter’s place, a stunningly schwank apartment that is clean. Very, very clean. Like, Felix Unger clean. I, on the other hand, live in a tepid pool of my own filth. Spent some time exploring the neighborhood. I’m currently located in the Westport district, a prosperous area bearing signs boasting “Real people. Real places. Real life.” (Which suggests the kind of cultural elitism that drives me up the wall – so¸ your implied assertion is that the people who live on the other side of town from you aren’t real, yes?) So it’s a nice enough area, but it’s not the Kansas City I remember.

Then I drove down to the Fringe in the Crossroads theatre district. Crumbling warehouses, wailing sirens – there’s the Kansas City I remember.

(So one thing my hosts in both Chicago and DC asserted – independently of each other – is the role that artists in play in transforming the landscape of a city. Their assertion runs thusly:

1) area becomes economically depressed;

2) artists move in (presumably because the spaces are

a. cheap, and

b. because only artists are dumb enough to invest so much into operating their respective businesses at a severe loss);

3) gay couples move in nearby; and

4) neighborhood becomes gentrified.

If this assertion is true, then it begs the question of whether or not artists are a symptom or a cause of gentrification. It also suggests that Detroit is about to become the arts capitol of the nation.)

Was too early to check in at Fringe Central, so decided to swing by my venue to take a look. Coincidentally happened to arrive at the same time as my venue tech, which granted me a handshake, some face time, and a chance to look around before they set up.

Headed on over to check in, and was pleased to shake hands with and be introduced to the various staff members I’ve corresponding with online. Ended up hanging out for about twenty minutes, telling jokes and sharing stories of the various Fringes that we’d all worked. When I glanced back into the main area, I was grabbed by the arm and promptly given a tour of the building.

Is this what I’ve been missing? Midwestern hospitality? I feel like I’ve made more connections here in a half hour than I did in a week in DC.

Opened up a special weekend edition of the Kansas City Star, since they had an article about the Fringe in there. Guess what their leading image was? That’s right: a half-page splash of my publicity photo, with a caption plugging the show.

I have no idea whether or not that’s going to translate into audience numbers: but either way, this place feels right.

Sunday, July 19^th, 2009

Had my tech rehearsal early this morning. My tech guy’s been super-cool and laid-back about everything.

Lighting is pretty limited – pretty much on and off – which I’m used to on the Fringe circuit. But surprised, this time around, that I find myself missing the cues – the subtle changes in mood, the abrupt blackouts, et cetera – which interests me because it indicates a pretty dramatic turnaround for me – that I now find myself thinking in terms of lighting design and stage pictures, as opposed to solely in text.

Went exploring the Westport area. I enjoyed the Kansas City ribs on my last visit here, but not enough to actively seek them out – so I stopped in a place called the Flea Market, which is, appropriately enough, a bar set in a flea market. They advertised something that had apparently been voted “Best Burger in KC” for two years running. They did not disappoint. You know it’s a good meal when you have to wash the grease off your hands afterwards.

Also swung by a used bookstore. They had an audio adaptation of several short stories by Tolkien (including my single favorite short story of all time, “Leaf By Niggle”), as well as a number of books by Geoffrey Ashe. He’s that rare combination of rigorous scholarship (at least, he usually indicates how much of what he’s saying is derived from solid detective work and how much is speculation) and raw enthusiasm – he’s the medievalist’s answer to Carl Sagan in that respect, I suppose. I picked up two on the cheap, since I’ve nearly burned through what I brought with me. (Just finished Robert de Boron, and am slowly working my way through an abridgement of the Lancelot-Grail Cycle. One of my goals on this trip has been to read all of those remaining Grail texts that I haven’t read yet – I note that most of those are extremely pious in nature, which I found kind of a turn-off at the point in my life when I was first discovering them. I’ve since developed a fascination for medieval theology, so I’m having all kinds of fun digging into them now. Next up: Perlesvaus.)

I’ve seen two mentions of this show in the press, describing this as an attempt to examine the Gulf War through the lens of Arthurian legend. Erm, well, yes – you sort of end up doing that by default in the course of writing it, and there’s a level on which the action of the play can be read as a kind of protracted metaphor for American foreign policy – but my original intention is in fact the reverse: to find a new way of looking at these old stories, and to see if they still have anything to offer us. But I’m struck by the assumption: is there something in my marketing material to suggest that the Gulf War is the point? (Granted, I’ve been pushing that angle, since I’ve learned that a mass audience just doesn’t give a fuck about King Arthur. I have since learned that a mass audience doesn’t give a fuck about the Gulf War.) Or is the assumption that modern political commentary is simply more interesting than the old adventure stories?

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Checked out the opening-night party, which was already exponentially better than last year – I remember being here in 2008, where most of the after-parties consisted of the Maximum Verbosity crew, 3 Sticks, the staff, and a few stragglers hunched over their beer in the corner. And maybe my expectations have been adjusted, but this place felt hoppin’.

(The T-shirts – although I haven’t yet sold any – have already done their job in terms of building audience interest – I’ve had several people come up to me, peering at it, reading it aloud, offering their various jokes and commentary, and lending me an excellent segue into plugging my show.)

Monday, July 20^th, 2009

A dream…to some. A NIGHTMARE TO OTHERS!

It’s been said that every profession has their own unique nightmares. I know that’s certainly the case in theatre, as most actors will nod in recognition when you mention “actors’ nightmares” – which usually consist of being onstage, unrehearsed, without being able to recall a single line of dialogue.

Now, I used to have these all the time. Only they stopped a few years ago, when I switched from primarily performing the words of others to primarily performing my own. Now?

Now I have writers’ nightmares, in which I find myself onstage, struggling to perform a show that I haven’t written yet. I usually have a few notes scribbled down, consisting of a few vague plot ideas and a couple of one-liners, which I bumble through before a stony-faced crowd.

I wonder what’s going on in my subconscious. And if this is the reason that I suck at improv.

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I spent most of the day in working. I’m relieved to have finally caught up on my publicity for Boulder and Indianapolis. Still to go: Melbourne. Plus the shows I’m still getting set up for October and December.

Arguably the single most frustrating aspect of doing such a wide tour is the amount of energy I have to spend catching up on publicity – I’d rather be able to focus on the show itself once I hit the road. Oh, well. Tradeoffs in all things.

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Hit up – and performed at – the previews tonight. The quality of the material seems to be generally high (although I was, once again, the sole performer doing drama).

The event was hosted by a pair of performers doing schtick as outrageous characters. They were both entertaining and did an excellent job, though I maintain my usual dislike for “wacky” MCs: my sense is that the job of a good host is to keep the evening clipping along sharply, not to bring the show to a halt every five minutes.

Classic “straight-man funny-man” stuff, anyway, with a heavy emphasis on Don-Rickles style race-baiting. Managed to subtly keep the audience in the “it’s okay, we’re joking, we’re all just playing around” space without drifting too far into audience discomfort. He found one Hispanic audience member who cheerfully played along: when asked “What do you do for a living?” he replied, without a missing a beat, “draw on social security.”

(I was particularly impressed with the fact that the comic immediately identified me as half-Asian; most people who register anything at all peer at me for a moment and make several wrong guesses.)

Along those lines, the standout act for me was definitely by an Indian performer – the KC Fringe’s first international artist. It was a kind of dance/storytelling performance, a tribute to Mahatma Gandhi, about the moral dilemmas faced by a hunter trying to kill. The performance ended up being part dance, part pantomime, as he shifts into the various characters and animals; while the bulk of his movements are designed to clearly indicate character and action to us, these are punctuated by several that are purely expressionistic. I even found something Chaplinesque in his ability to rapidly switch back and forth between intensity and whimsy.

(Although the content of the piece raised many of the issues I have with Hindu/Buddhist/vegetarian points of view – which is that they tend to sidestep the whole point that we are killing machines. We’re built for it; two hundred thousand years of evolution have made us into the most effective killers in the history of the planet. It’s arguable that our most significant environmental problems emerge from the fact that we’re just too damn good at it.)

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Part way through the evening, I felt someone tugging roughly at the back of my waistband. Kirsten spent several minutes fussing over my uniform. “You need a belt,” she said, frowning. “And your boots aren’t regulation. Pellinore looks like a sloppy soldier. He’d get his ass beat.”

Kirsten – of the Kirsten & Dean comedy duo – is also Air Force (although she recently switched to the Navy), and was one of my early consultants – I sent her an early draft of the script, to see if she could help correct any of the glaring inaccuracies. I’m amused to note that she’s more distressed by what I’m wearing than by what I’m saying.

I’ve had a few veterans see the show by now, and for the most part they tend to either avoid me or take off immediately afterwards, which I’m not sure how to interpret. I’d be fascinated to hear what they make of this nonsense, despite the fact that what I’m doing is far from documentary – the Iraq of the story is a fantastic landscape, after all, having about as much to do with the real Iraq as say, Thomas Malory’s Britain had to do with the real island.

In any case, she expressed her desire to hit up an army surplus store and get me whipped into shape. We’ll see how that works out.

Star Trekkin’, Across the Universe…

Mike Shaeffer and I found ourselves stranded and without car. Fringe being what it is, we simply trusted fate to take us by the hand. A dude offered to give us a ride:

ME: What’s your name?

HIM: Kirk.

ME: Oh! Like the captain I’m sure that’s the first time you’ve ever heard that I’m so sorry.

HIM: Yeah. Let me just pull up my starship.

A few minutes later, a limo pulled up.

MIKE: (joking) Well, looks like our ride is here, guys!

(Kirk gets out.)

ME: Holy shit.

It turns out that the dude has a private limo that he just picked up on Craigslist. He’s been toying with the idea of throwing in some Guitar Hero 3 and turning it into a gamer-specific commercial vehicle. Or possibly fixing it up and selling it. But he may just hang onto it because it’s, y’know, a fucking limo.

ME: So are you from Kansas City?

HIM: Not originally, but I’ve lived here for a while now. I moved around a lot growing up – this is the first place that really felt like home.

ME: What do you like about it?

HIM: I don’t know. It’s a way more cosmopolitan city than most people think.

ME: Yeah. This is my second time here, and I feel like I’m seeing a completely different place.

And thus we spent the evening with Kirk, an Air Force brat turned rainforest explorer. He took us out to an Irish pub and regaled us with stories of avoiding deadfalls. It’s fascinating to see that there’s still people doing the Richard Francis Burton thing – traveling the world and accumulating bizarre experiences.

And then I find myself thinking, holy shit, am I one of those people? I don’t feel like it – I feel like an uptight small-town Midwestern boy. But it’s one thing that always baffled me about the success of Descendant of Dragons, when people expressed fascination with my experiences – wow, they didn’t feel magical at the time. How did I feel performing a pig sacrifice? Well, I was hot and sweaty and annoyed for the bulk of it. In retrospect it’s totally heady stuff (and yes, I’m working on some more autobiographical shows down the line, get off my tits), but at the time it’s just one more day in front of you.

Glanced up at the clock on our way out of the pub: after midnight, making it officially the twenty-first. Travel stories, a limo ride, and a pint of Guinness. I’ve had worse starts to a birthday.

July 16-17: Virginia, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri

Phil ‘n’ Max in Surfin’ the Highway

…and a long trip it’s been, too – not least having to once again traverse the purgatorial wasteland that is Ohio.

Pulling out of Virginia, I found myself reflecting on my Fringe experience. Frustrating, yes, but not just because I lost a few hundred dollars – I’m confident that I’ll be able to earn it back in Minnesota – but because I’m really not sure what else I could have done. I was never able to find the mechanism to let me into the crowd. And though I didn’t have to cancel a show – to date Maximum Verbosity has only ever cancelled once – it was a close thing.

I am, perversely, relieved to see the other touring artists struggling. The question of whether or not this particular show is a failure will have to wait until further down the line. (Although I note, with a grimace, that my brilliant marketing strategy consisted of taking one genre that everybody hates – Arthurian legend – and stapling it to another genre that everybody hates – military drama.)

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There is, apparently, a Green Lantern Road located somewhere in Virginia. This knowledge makes me happy, and I choose to share it with you.

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Stopped for gas part way through Ohio, and stopped into the station to see if they had any CDs for sale (seeing as I’ve burned through The Hobbit, A Wizard of Earthsea, two separate recordings of Le Morte D’Arthur, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Jarhead, and a solid chunk of Dante’s Divine Comedy). They did – two shelves full of country music and Hannah Montana CDs. (I wonder how many of the latter are being picked up by truckers on their way through?) Audiobooks consisted of memoirs by Ollie North and John McCain.

This was in a gas station attached to a Country Pride restaurant. Driving away, I passed two more restaurants with “country” in the title. Then I drove past three dudes on horseback. Man, I assumed I’d have to be at least two states south to start encountering this stuff.

Rifled through my pile of CDs, and contented myself with some bardic tales from the Mabinogion. Listening to them, I found myself reflecting on the tradition of bard and skald – on the fact that there were once storytellers who traveled from place to place, being offered food and lodging in exchange for both their performances – tales of wonder – and their gossip about the bizarre fashions and customs of the various lands that they’d traveled through. Which really isn’t all that different from what the artists on the Fringe circuit do now, I suppose, or the vaudeville entertainers who preceded us. The model’s slightly different, due to the fact that we rely more on a money economy than a barter economy, but the principle is basically the same.

In one respect, that kind of continuity is comforting, with all of the doomsayers who are constantly clamoring that “theatre is dying” – no, it’s not; even if the economy completely tanks, there’ll still be plenty of people struggling to do this for no kind of reward at all. It’s one of the peculiarities of our species: that we have this compulsion to write poems or sing songs or tell jokes.

(Of course, theatre as a viable economic specialization may well be dying, so that’s cold comfort for those of us trying to make this our profession.)

Also found myself listening to the Rockstar CDs (fifteen bucks for a two-CD set! How are people not buying these?) and, aside from experiencing my usual amazement at the fact that I get to work with these people, was particularly impressed, this time around, with Allegra’s piece, and particularly the craftsmanship of it – I see her perform frequently enough that I’ve come to take that for granted. It’s one of her usual meandering road-trip stories, beginning with her cousin’s eulogy and drifting through seemingly unrelated episodes before elegantly tying them back together. Her theme this time? About how the journey is of at least equal importance to the destination.

When I first started planning this trip, I had a number of people express concern, and not without reason – I don’t have a great driving record (God, I fit every awful Asian stereotype on that account), I get panic attacks in traffic, I’m notoriously absent-minded – but even now I find myself regretting the fact that I’ll be flying the second half of this trip. The talk of the romance of the open road isn’t all bullshit, and while many of the trade-offs are painful – the complete lack of economic stability, my poor earning power, the complete accountability for my actions, the dependence on so many factors beyond my control – still. I’m not punching in somewhere at nine o’clock. I don’t have a foreman standing over me. And while it produces a lot of misery, it’s worth remembering that sometimes – liberty can be sweet.

Along the way, I eventually stopped at a station with a slightly wider range of options. Rifling through their bargain bin, I walked out with a collection of old bluegrass hits and – wince – Andrew Lloyd Weber. (I know, I know, I just lost any Fringe cred I might have had, but I need to stay awake, and that means something I can sing along to, and thanks to my sisters I know the lyrics to damn near every Weber song ever written.)

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Stopped at a Long John Silver’s in Missouri. I haven’t eaten there since I was a kid. I’m not a huge fan of fish normally, but I can’t get enough of the stuff if it’s batter-fried. (Does anyone know if there’s one in Minnesota?)

While I was dining, I noticed two sets of teenage couples enter separately, order their food, sit down, and start holding hands. Oh, I thought, isn’t that just precious. Then I realized that they weren’t sharing a gesture of affection: they were saying grace. I’m back in the Bible Belt.

July 13-15: District of Columbia

Monday, July 13^th, 2009

The omnipresence of Greco-Roman architecture, not to mention the anthropomorphosis of various political ideals (the Ladies Justice and Liberty are only two of among several), can’t help but put me in mind of classical temples. So if the Supreme Court building is our temple to Themis; the efficient angles of the Pentagon, our temple to Ares; Fort Fringe, with its grungy warehouses promising cheap beer, naked flesh, and spiritual revelation, our temple to Dionysos (my patron); and the White House, our seat of executive authority, the seat of almighty Jupiter; then the National Archives and Library of Congress can represent only our temple to Athena, goddess of wisdom, civilization, and accumulated knowledge.

I spent most of the afternoon at the Archives – I knew if I was going to do at least one tourist-y thing while I was in town, this was it, because I’m super-geeky for this kind of thing. And it’s all here, from General Washington’s wartime correspondence (scribbled onto sheets of parchment) to the audio recordings of the Nixon administration’s backroom dealings. The documents here not only store history, but have, at various points, made history as well. And for me – as someone who’s spent several years traveling the world, tracking down decaying documents that have been carefully concealed from a government actively seeking out and destroying them – the existence of a place that not only accumulates information, but makes it available for public dissemination – well. The significance is not lost on me. Somewhere among those piles of sheets are my parents’ immigration papers, and the patents for my father’s inventions. The history of my family – in this country, at least – is documented.

Saved the main event for last, the Rotunda, which houses the Charters of Freedom – the three founding documents of the United States. Forget the White House tours, man – this is what I came to see. Since it is the main event – most tourists just come to see those and skip the rest of the exhibits – it was a large line, with about a forty-five minute wait. It was all restless and antsy and sweaty and lots of people complaining – judging by what I overheard, the vast majority of people didn’t know what it was they were seeing. (No, I don’t mean they didn’t appreciate it, I mean they didn’t know what they were in line for. Or where they were. Which leads me to wonder what they were doing there – do tourists just naturally gravitate towards crowds?)

(I also overheard one child behind me, exasperated with her enthusiastic father’s explanations, exclaim “I hate history!” Heh. Wait until you’ve lived long enough to see some of it happen, kid. It gets real interesting real fast.)

So I was expecting to be underwhelmed, but still got choked up when I saw the documents and the signatures and everything. Because I’m a big dork like that.

(Also – since the line is so large, they display a number of other related documents, from an early copy of the Magna Carta onwards. The exhibit then concludes with – a copy of the Charter of the United Nations? Which seemed like an incredibly weird choice to me. The implication seems to be that the existence of the UN represents the natural evolution of what the other documents began. A hypothetical person very similar to me might be inclined to argue that it represents a completely opposing impulse from the one that produced the Declaration of Independence. But he’s not here, so.)

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Les asked me if I’d be comfortable hitting up a gay bar he found, to promote our respective shows. Comfortable? I work in theatre. If I’m not comfortable, this is a piss-poor time to realize it.

Monday nights, as part of a desperate effort to play to stereotype, constitute their “show-tunes evenings,” where patrons may request numbers from various movie musicals to be broadcast on a variety of screens set up around the bar. (Which leaves me wondering, why the close association between theatre and gay culture? I mean, I get that it’s self-perpetuating now, but where did it originate?) (And also sheepishly acknowledging that I actually know the lyrics to most of these songs. I grew up as a little brother to three unrelenting musical-theatre machines in the eighties, so.)

Flyering was moderately successful, in that the people expressed tremendous enthusiasm and interest, as well as a lot of “Oh, that Fringe Festival thing – is that going on now?” I guess I just always assumed that the gay community knew whenever a major theatre event was taking place – like, there’s a pink telephone that goes off in a wealthy socialite’s mansion, a la the 1960’s Batman.

(Also successful in that I was kissed on the throat by either a woman or a reasonably convincing tranny. Lights were low, so it’s anybody’s game at this point, I suppose.)

But this is the first trace of nightlife I’ve discovered in DC – a community of people who are relaxed and playful and welcoming. (As opposed to the occasional stiffness of the Fringe after-parties.) If only there was some way to throw the two groups into a large hadron collider – then you’d have a Festival. (Or possibly the destruction of the Earth. From my perspective, either could arguably be an improvement.)

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Les and I then proceeded to discover exactly why the nightlife dries up so quickly in the District. We decided that we’d be responsible and take off early, so we left at around 11:30pm to hop on the metro. We then spent a frantic period of time attempting to decipher the various garbled, automated voices telling us what transfers to take, and ended up stranded in a metro station as the last train pulled away.

OPERATOR: We’re closing up now. You guys have to leave.

ME: But we aren’t staying anywhere near here.

OPERATOR: Wow. Sounds like you’ve got yourself a real problem there.

(pause)

OPERATOR: Whelp, gotta go!

We emerged from the station to find ourselves in the middle of nowhere – no cars, no cabs, nothing. I called my billeters, who agreed to come out and pick us up, because they are BBE (again, Best Billeters Ever. Or quite possibly Before the Battle of Endor.)

Another one of the weird aspects of this city – since significantly more people work here than live here, everything tends to shut down at, like, ten o’clock. This is a really weird place.

Tuesday, July 14^th, 2009

Walking around the National Mall, wandering through various gardens and displays and munching on food obtained from the street vendors, I’m struck by the observation – particularly in light of the fact that all of the tourist attractions are in such a compressed space, and that nearly everything is free and easily accessible to the public (with the notable exception of security checkpoints in damn near every building) – that this whole area resembles one gigantic museum. I imagine it would be possible to wander through here for days without seeing everything.

Spent much of the afternoon at the Smithsonian Museum of American History. I’m actually enjoying being able to sightsee under my own power – I can skip over the exhibits which hold little interest for me and pore over others, without worrying about someone impatiently tugging on my sleeve.

One floor was divided by quotations from the Preamble to the Constitution: for example, the section “Provide For the Common Defense” was devoted to military history. That was an interesting section, detailing surviving pieces from the American Revolution through the current occupation of Iraq. And one thing that struck me was how our perception of these wars has changed over time, in direct proportion with media access to them. Images from the Civil War included uniforms and swords – for Vietnam, you could walk through a simulated POW camp. Yikes. And it’s an exponential leap over the past fifty years or so: after all, Vietnam was our first televised war; the Persian Gulf, our first which broadcast live from a war zone; and the current invasion/occupation, the first to rely heavily on journalists embedded directly into fighting units.

But one weird side effect of this is the fact that we have a bizarrely sanitized view of wars preceding those, as though there were something far more noble and civilized about someone being hacked into pieces with a saber. We still have this perception of WWII as a clean, efficient engagement, when it was no different from any other conflict: rife with poor decisions and bureaucratic stupidity. The only difference is that now, we see those taking place in real time.

(One item I found fascinating in the military memoirs I studied in preparation for this project is how this changing perception has affected the attitudes of those within the military: that we now have a generation entering military service that is already incredibly jaded about government. There’s no longer the same kind of naïveté and loss of innocence that’s such a strong aspect of the mythology of the generation preceding them.)

Okay, so, one thing that irritates me about all this: I’ve opposed this particular engagement since its inception – regarded it as a tactical error of nightmarish proportions. (This is, in fact, one of the very few political points that has remained consistent through my near-total ideological transformation.) So while I’m gratified to see that resistance to the occupation has grown, I find myself growing increasingly irritated with the manner in which the American public flipped its original position: that we sent an armed force overseas in a surge of emotion, but promptly lost the will to fight once we realized that it was going to be messy. The fundamental question, surely, is whether or not the war is just, no? If it is, then we persevere regardless of the cost; if it’s not, then we get the hell out. But the revelation that war can in fact be long, and difficult, and painful, and expensive, seemed to come as a total shock to that not-insignificant portion of population that was cheering as tanks rolled into Baghdad. We were perfectly okay with initiating a conflict until we realized – gasp! – that some of our people might actually get hurt.

I still oppose the occupation, and support withdrawal. But as usual, I find it a lot easier to support a cause when I don’t have to be around other people who do, too.

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Hit up a storytelling open-mic with Les that evening, partly to publicize and partly to see how they do things in my particular medium out here. (Actually, it was more like a storytelling cabaret – they rely so heavily on such a wide variety of content restrictions that I’m actively uncomfortable with referring to it as an open-mic.) They had a decent house of extraordinarily well-dressed individuals (I mean, seriously. They make the Rockstar audience look practically blue-collar). I ordered a double-shot of Jameson and promptly choked on it when I was charged as much as I would normally pay for a bottle of the stuff.

The tellers were all more-or-less solid, with a supremely warm and appreciative audience. Afterwards, while the audience presumably waited for their limos to come and pick them up, I went out with some of the core group.

There’s obviously an art to the aggression of east-coast conversation that utterly escapes me – I made several attempts to enter the conversation, failed, and gave up after about ten minutes, resolving to just absorb as much information as I could. It’s fascinating to observe the mechanisms of another group of this nature, although the dogmatism that many such groups share continues to rub me the wrong way. (There were the usual screeds against tellers who utilize music stands; against tellers who work in genres other than autobiography; against tellers to swear too much. Urgh. Surely effectiveness is the key question? No?)

We left at around eleven, since it’s DC, and it’s apparently the law. (“You look so gloomy!” expressed the host with some concern as I got up. Ah. I see we haven’t met.)

Wednesday, July 15^th, 2009

Last day in DC, so I decided to round it off with a trip to the Library of Congress, since there’s few things I love more than poring over documents.

Was particularly impressed with Thomas Jefferson’s personal library, which forms the initial core of the existing collection. It’s only a third of its original size – the rest were destroyed in fire – and it’s still more than worthy of note – his vast supply of medical textbooks, Islamic theology, political science, Ovid, Homer, Virgil ­­– I found myself standing there and thinking, whoa. There were pieces of all of these books floating around inside this guy’s head. He really was a classic polymath. And in that respect, the perfect dude to have around when trying to figure out how to build a new system of government from the ground up. We were lucky to have him.

There’s a certain trend among bibliophiles to be extremely resistant to new forms of technology. This isn’t something that I share – I love the internet, love the blogosphere (obviously), love electronic books like the Amazon Kindle (though I can’t afford them, myself). I don’t fetishize paper, but the words they contain, and those can be transmitted through a variety of different mediums. (Another reason I found myself in the theatrical profession.)

But – and this thought struck me as I was looking at a set of notes for a speech, scribbled down by Benjamin Franklin – the problem posed by electronic media is its impermanence. (Okay, yes, technically all media are impermanent – paper will sooner or later crumble away into nothing, as well, and most of it has.) We still have much of the correspondence between the founding fathers as they were composing the foundational documents of our nation, and that’s incredibly valuable information to be preserved. But e-mails and Twittering and text messages vanish away into the ether and are gone forever. (In most cases, thankfully. Lord knows, I have plenty of drunken messages I’m glad will never again see the light of day.)

Maybe it’s just another unfortunate side effect of prosperity – that whatever we have in abundance, we cease to value. And this is the Information Age. We’re so bombarded by stimuli that we cease to trust or value any of it.

No, stop. This is a bigger thought than a blog entry. I have to think about it more.

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Climbed up top to look down at the view of the central library, with the various researchers at work. It’s an impressive sight – a large, circular hall, with books and books and shelves and books radiating outwards from the center; out into the various hallways and side rooms beyond it; out into the other buildings surrounding this one. Somewhere, among all of those texts, are neatly filed (I wince at the thought) several of my earliest scripts, since part of the copywriting process is sending texts to be filed away here. I wonder how many of the other fumbling, broken attempts of other struggling writers are housed in those corridors. This is the single largest library in the world; the single largest collection of books. This is our Library of Alexandria, our record of the achievements of our people. And like the Library of Alexandria, war and flame could do away with it all forever.

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Swung by the beer tent before my final show – not so much for a marketing push (since I’ve basically given up on that at this point) as to take one last look around. I was surprised to discover that the place was hopping, more so in the middle of the week than it had been over the weekend. Moreover, I received several friendly greetings and even sat down and managed to have a few amiable palavers with people I’d met. So it seems that there is some success, as far as community-building goes; it’s just a much longer, slower process, for whatever reason.

Not that that translates into audience numbers – I got to close out my show with a grand total of four in the audience, which is as large as an audience as I’ve achieved out here. Nobody from the gay bar; nobody from the storytelling evening; none of the dozens of dozens of patrons I’ve handed out cards to and fired lame jokes at.

But it was all right – well, not all right, but it was for that night, at least – because the show was fun. There may have only been four people, but hey – at least half of the audience with me, chuckling at the various jokes and attentive throughout. If I’ve gotten nothing else out of this, it’s a hell of a tighter show. And a resolve to bring my A-game to each and every Festival down the line from here.

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My trip in Washington, DC, ended exactly the way that every good party does; with everyone else asleep in their beds, and two guys polishing off a bottle of good Irish whiskey into the wee hours of the night, talking shit about nothing important, nothing in particular. Because I have BBE.

Which can, well and truly, stand for only one thing: the Best. Billeters. Ever.