–Tuesday, 1-31-2006:
The next morning we had to be up just as early, but this time for a kid’s show, otherwise known to us as a YPC (young person’s concert.) The presenters in Lafayette asked for an extra 15 minutes to half hour on top of our normal kids show, so for this one, we brought an old piece called ladders, otherwise known to us as “Apex.” Monica, Garrett, David and John performed it before the normal kids show, and we added a section of question and answer to the roster to facilitate our extra time to fill.
The show was going to be extra fun because most of the audience was comprised of kids from the classes we’ve been teaching in the previous day. Kids shows usually start at 10:30 and this one was no different. YPC’s, normally include bench (le siège,) door (phantome,) and wheel (humachina,) along with us bringing kids up on stage to warm up with us, do some log rolls, and fall from a wheel piece. They also get a healthy dose of children-friendly trust and teamwork propaganda with a side of how to use your imagination.
After the show, we had about a two hour break. I used the opportunity to call the babers, and to go to lunch. We walked across the street and down past the hospital to a wonderful little eatery called Cafe Lola. It’s the first food in a while that I’ve completely devoured without abandon, and this made me happy – I needed some just plain good normal food to up my mood a bit. (P.S.- I got a southwestern chicken salad.) The cafe is only open from 10:30am to 2pm: I guess it’s specifically for the lunch crowd, or else I would have sought it out again.
After lunch, we had a(n extended) tech of Act II – aka Traj. We took the fact that we were teching on not the day of the show to clean up some messy stuff and figure out why some of the rocks have been getting crazy-big. This process was slightly in vain, in my opinion, since we were on a stage that a) had a number of what we for some reason call “wonky-wonks” – uneven seams in the wood below the marly that leads the rocks to be uneven, unsmooth and often dangerous – and b) the stage was SO hard, that the rocks were crazy fast and big anyway. The quality of the rock changes from city to city, and this city was particularly brutal (this would come into play when we performed the next night and the ‘three amigos’ section was out of control.)
Regardless, we teched, we finished, we went home. I napped. Then I woke up and ate the soup I had bought to-go from Cafe Lola and a bagel for dinner, and then I napped some more. I opted to skip the night’s plans of Sushi and dancing on the main street (I think it’s Jefferson) in Lafayette to instead catch up on the real life I’ve been ignoring. I finally had the time to figure out some of my finances and things like bills, flights and paychecks. I also finally (finally!) got the chance to talk to my mom for more than three minutes for just business and also got to have just plain for-no-reason phone time with Jerry. I really, really needed that. Especially in New Orleans and Lafayette, I felt so disconnected and it was really starting to wear on my ability to emotionally handle being away like this.
I fell asleep blissfully early while watching the Terminal.
–Wednesday, 2-1-2006:
Show day. It’s been a long, long time since we’ve had a show on NOT the same day we’ve teched, so it was weird to wake up in the morning and have it, and the afternoon, off. Thankfully, our crazy fun trolley maestro, Don, had plans for us all: he wanted to pick us up and take us the the nature preserve to see if we could see some gators!! Who could pass that up?
However! My afternoon off was not entirely to be: the knot had had some technical issues, and upon waking on show day, I found out I was going to need to do the long version of body sofa (Origin) as a solo (ie- without hanging duet attached to the end.) Therefore, Benji, Ed, Monica and I had to be at the theater by 2:45 to tech and run the lighting for the piece so it could be added in.
No matter, we were still able to join in on the alligator hunt. Don showed up right on time, as always, and we head about 8 miles away to a nature preserve on a lake that housed birds, turtles, egrets and gators. Before we made it, though, Don decided we needed “appetizers” (his plans for us that day also included lunch later) and so he took us to a slightly bizarre meat market in a new area of town for what he assured us was going to be a delicious local delicacy. I had my doubts about the delicacy of anything being sold in a 7-11 meets a butcher shop. It turns out he wanted us to try boudin, a kind of creepy sausage-like meal in a tube. Don promises me still that the meat therein wasn’t anything “funny” and that is was the good parts and kinds of meat, but… I’m easily turned off by presentation. It was chopped up meat and rice and celery and gravy and whatever else all jammed into a sausage casing that had been occasionally split so the insides spilled out and the the goo-train could be held/handled in manageable portions.
Don said, “it’s like getting your meat, potatoes and stuffing in one convenient thing.” You’re my favorite thing about Lafayette, Don, but there was no way I going to try that stuff. Look on my photo blog for a picture of Benji loving the stuff.
Therefore, at the market I bought a neopolitan ice cream sandwich and a cream soda for breakfast – because I am THAT healthy of an eater. I wanted to try the red cream soda, but I couldn’t find it not in a can. Other curiosities: that market sold a coca-cola product called “Delaware punch,” which was non-carbonated, and lacking any kind of description at all anywhere on the packaging. It was a curious purpley-dark-tan color. Weird.
Onto the nature preserve! We saw one (rather enormous) alligator, and a slew of birds and turtles, and one ENORMOUS bug-type-thing that hitched a ride on the inside wall of the trolley. The ride was fun because we got to see all of the nature we wanted to, without all the pesky walking. We got to get out easily, like when we saw the alligator, and mingle with others who were on similar quests to ourselves.
After the preserve, we headed to a local cajun-style restaurant called T-Coons, which we were told was the best local place to get authentic Cajun food. We had previously been planning on going to Don’s favorite restaurant – a place whose name I can’t remember, but had cameras around the restaurant that web-casted the inside of the place so you could call a friend and tell them to go online to the restaurant’s website and watch you eat – and I must say, I really, really wish we would have gone there instead. I’m not sure what about lunch I found so unappetizing, but it was my first meal in Louisiana that I didn’t like. It’s ok, the ice cream that Don treated us to at his favorite, in his words, “old-timey ice cream parlor” afterwards more than made up for it.
We then returned home, pausing briefly to take pictures of the Diavolo billboard. I had just enough time to get my stuff for the show before we again caught the trolley and headed to the theater. The tech of Origin went a lot faster than we expected. Monica and I even had some time to change some choreography that I thought was an awkward transition in the longer version. I think it’s funny, and nice, that after not having done the piece for over a month and a half, that I can just whip it out. I remember back in the day, before Miss Emily’s recitals, I would feel like barfing and crying I was so nervous, and now it’s all so easy. It cracks me up actually. I shouldn’t say easy – at all – but I can’t believe how at home I feel with all this now. I love it.
The show that night went really well, though it was kind of a weird energy show. For me, personally, I think it’s because right before we went on, we were told that the theater we were in was a shelter for displaced Katrina victims and families who had loved ones who had been transported to the hospital next door. Until just a little bit ago, the stage we were on was covered in beds. So every time my mind wandered onstage, that’s where it wandered to. Especially during Traj. After the show, a number of people from the audience said that that piece was particularly moving because of its theme and motifs…
Origin went really well, too. I was pretty nervous since it’d been so long and I was back to doing it to music that I haven’t used in months and months and that has really specific music cues and timing. That’s the hardest part for me… in tech one time I was 10 seconds too long, and once I was 20 seconds too soon… but I was able to hit it dead on in the show… woot woot. Also! Jacques randomly showed up to Lafayette – he hasn’t been on tour with us at all yet, and he won’t be with us again until half way through March. So, there was a random pressure, not bad pressure, (after all, it isn’t like he hasn’t seen me do Origin a hundred times,) but more like that fun self-imposed need to impress pressure. Also – I freaking love it when Jacques is on tour with us. The guy is a hoot and a half.
Magic Mike and his friend Mai came up to see the show from New Orleans. It was great to see him again… he said he was impressed enough with what we do that he wants to try and come take one of the two summer intensives in LA with us. I would cry-laugh if that happens, it would be so funny and so much fun.
On a random note: one lady during Q&A asked us what our salaries were… what a piece of audacious poo.
After the show was over, we looked outside to see RAIN. Like sheets of rain, and – no exaggeration – multiple lightening strikes every 10-15 seconds. And! Crazy, crazy shake the theater thunder.
After we did our usual load-out duties, we headed back to the hotel, where Jacques treated us to an impressively large number of thin crust pizzas. We were all eating in David and Crystal’s room, when someone had the idea to show Jacques all of the magic tricks we’d bought and learned from Harry Anderson and his gang of rogue magician friends at Oswald’s. Jacques was very cutely astonished by our tricks, and I think we backed ourselves into a corner of at some point either putting on a Diavolo carnival or having magic tricks play a prominent part in our next fundraiser. Damn our side-project talents!!
–Thursday, 2-2-2006:
Ah, travel days. We had to be in the lobby by 9:45am, which wasn’t too bad because Becca and I packed the night before after our pizza and tricks parade. We got a ride to the airport from Don, who let us pick our favorite Caribbean trolley music mix for the ride. I’m really going to miss Don, for some reason, we all got really attached to him. I think it’s one of the first times I’m sad to leave someone I met on tour behind. Him and Stuart. Sigh. Nice guys.
We said goodbye to Don and checked in at the eerily-small Lafayette airport. The TSA guy unpacked my ENTIRE bag, crumpled all my papers, and repacked it in the least sensible way possible. He then wouldn’t allow me to touch my own stuff, so I had to stand there like a monkey behind glass directing him on how to put my toiletries bags between all my clothes so that the bottles wouldn’t break, and to NOT put the soles of my shoes on top of my underwear. Apparently I was up on his “matrix” – the answer I got to the question, “what did I pack that’s so different that it warrants all this?” In the 40 minutes it took us to all check in, he didn’t do that to anyone else’s bag. He was obnoxiously thorough, and part of me thinks he just either wanted to look at all my shit just to get his jollies or that he enjoyed how much it pissed me off and milked it.
Also, in the airport, I read a story on CNN.com about a tornado that hit the New Orleans airport overnight, and also the canal area neighborhoods – where we’d been teaching last week. Haven’t they had enough already?! Seriously.
On another tornado-related note, after a stop over in Houston, we got to Denver. I remember the Denver airport from this summer, and my two favorite parts are the tornado shelter-bathrooms and the oversize load baggage carousel that is upright and made specifically for ski gear. I think that’s just pretty nifty.
Other cool things: our ride from the airport to our outrageous hotel was a LIMO BUS! The inside had the cool sky ceiling with changey-color trims and a TV and a CD sound system and a mini bar and waters on ice for us. It was pretty swanky. The Denver airport is about 40 minutes from downtown because of the Rockies… so it was awesome to have such a pimp way to get to where we’re going on an unusually long ride.
Also: we get to stay at Hotel Teatro – the #1 rated hotel in all of Denver. It’s luxury. The restaurant downstairs is $100 for a 5 – course meal, $60 for the wine picked to go with it, and $9 for a bowl of soup. Becca and I totally lucked out with a corner suite on the seventh floor. The bathroom has an all glass shower with two shower heads, a jet-tub and Aveda beauty products. About the only downsides are the internet costs $15 a day if we want to get it, and it isn’t wireless, and there’s no continental breakfast… oh well. Also, after Becca and I left and came back from dinner – at Chili’s – our beds had been turned down, the bathrobes laid out for us, the soaps all unwrapped and placed out, and the TV guide was open to tonight’s listing with the remote on top. Crazy eh? (www.hotelteatro.com)
It’s also pretty rad cause we’re right in the MIDDLE of downtown Denver. I love downtown Denver because it’s down-towny enough to feel like a big, legit city, but not so big and concrete that it feels burdened with people and stress. I feel completely safe here, and the whole of downtown is as cute and fun as the Santa Monica third street promenade. Lastly, it’s cold here, and I love it. It reminds me of home, though, and it makes me miss the babers even more.
I was just talking to Becca – as we have TV and robe night in our room – about how cool it is that we get to crisscross the country go from hot southern winter to cold northern winter, and from small towns to big towns, from destination places to normal places… I am so lucky to get to do this. And, that, when I get to travel like this, it’s doing what I love so much, with people I care about so much. It’s so hard though, being away from Jerry and my family… hopefully sometime Jerry and I will have enough money that we can meet up often on each other’s tours and share these experiences with each other in person instead of over the phone…