Second Day Back, Saturday, August 19, 2006
The seminar was wonderful, informative and powerful. I am a changed man. The very foundation of existence has shifted. Life as we know it on the planet will never be the same. The universe has shifted three degrees into the blue. God wept. Okay, enough of that, this is a travel journal, and, although the seminar was a journey, the signposts of that journey will have to show up on their own here, I won’t consciously try to insert them. I did meet some great people who I think will be around for a while. That would be nice.
The seminar ended Thursday afternoon and Thursday evening four of us went into downtown Minneapolis to see a play at the Guthrie Theater. The Guthrie is one of the premier theaters in America and I’ve always wanted to see something there, but it didn’t even dawn on me that it would be right down the street (so to speak) until a friend back in LA said, “You’re going to Minneapolis? That’s were the Guthrie is!” So. I mentioned this to one of the guys at the event and he said he’d get tickets. We got directions from the concierge and four of us set off on our adventure (with a side trip to a good sushi restaurant for a little raw fish and saki). The directions were wrong. Seems that they’ve built a new Guthrie Theater, that this is the first season at the new theater, this the first play there (The Great Gatsby) and that most people in Minneapolis were unaware of this. Everyone we stopped to ask gave us a different idea about just where the place was. We traveled all around downtown Minneapolis until we stopped by an odd fellow who looked slightly off, friendly buy possibly schizophrenic, possibly occasionally homeless. He very clearly knew right where the place was.
By the time we found it, parked and picked up our tickets, we were about fifteen or twenty minutes late for the opening curtain (a misnomer, of course, there is no curtain on a thrust stage and the Guthrie stage – old and new – is about as thrust-y as you can get) so we quietly found our seats. The theater was amazing, large but intimate if that makes any sense, a wonderful facility. I’d love to work there. The play was good, a few of the actors were “acting”, the guy playing Gatsby was very good, the guy who played the gas station owner was amazing. Daisy was cute and alluring, but I couldn’t imagine her as someone who three men would destroy their lives for. The sets were great. They used very little to suggest the setting but did it in a very effective way. It even included a simulated swimming pool where Gatsby floated around on a rubber raft. Very cool. In any case, the experience was what counted and the experience was grand. The building has one long arm jutting out of the fifth floor, a cantilever that hangs out over the river (which someone on the balcony at its end told me was the Mississippi and I have no reason to doubt him) that was a highlight of it.
Back to the hotel, drinks with several of the seminar participants (one of whom was a handsome straight man who had thought he had lost it because I hadn’t flirted with him. After that I made a point of flirting with him whenever I saw him. What fun – safe flirting – who’da thunk?) then bed. Left the next morning after lunch with two of my theater companions, then on the road.
In the movie The Secret, Jack Canfield talks about driving from Los Angeles to New York at night. You can see about a hundred feet in front of your car. And yet, only seeing this much, you can make it all the way. He’s using it as a metaphor for life – know your destination (your goal) then just take the next step, don’t worry about the next two, three or fifteen steps, they’ll take care of themselves. This, maybe, is why I like driving. I know where I’m going, know I can get there even with a detour or two, and all I have to worry about is what I can see right in front of me.
Okay, philosophy aside, the parking lot of the motel I stayed at last night was full of small beetles. (I almost spelled that “beatles” but that would have been wrong, wouldn’t it?) The room was clean, but I got the sense the beetles hadn’t stayed outside. (The beatles probably did, though, I never saw any of them.) The clock wasn’t plugged in, so I had to pull the little bed side table out to find the outlet and noticed part of the cord was stuck in this little plastic tray filled with something sticky, and in the something sticky were more beetles. (Ringo may have been there, I didn’t study it long enough to find out.)
I thought about being creeped out but decided if I want to get any sleep I’d just have to come to terms with my roommates. I asked them all pleasantly to leave me alone while I slept and left it at that. The only one I actually saw (besides the unfortunate few in the sticky tray) was walking along the edges of the floor in the bathroom in the morning while I was sitting there voiding and reading. He circumambulated the room a couple of times, then disappeared into some crevice or other. I only bring this up because, as I sit at this rest stop in the middle of Nebraska (the motel was in Iowa) a lady bug decided that the top edge of my computer was something needing exploration. She (he? Who knows the sex of a lady bug. There must be guy lady bugs. Do they, like the one in the bug cartoon, have issues about that?) made the journey several times, decided she’d (he’d?) gleaned all she could from it and flew off. Normally I would have shooed her away as soon as she landed. I don’t mind lady bugs, mind you, but the instinct is to shoo away anything not congruent and lady bugs are not congruent with the top edge of a laptop. After all the beetles last night, bugs not nearly as pleasant as this little orange and black dainty, I realized that, if I can sleep with them in my room, I can let one explore my laptop.
It has been cloudy since I left Minneapolis. It rained for about ten minutes late yesterday afternoon, but I was on the highway and it stopped before I was able to pull off and put the car top up. It wasn’t raining very hard and was actually kind of pleasant. The wind is blowing a bit, now, and I’m trying to decided if I want the top up on the next leg of the journey or not. I will decided after I start the car. Perhaps, if I remember, I’ll record which way I went. Perhaps not. Some things need to remain a mystery to preserve that sens of wonder in the reader, don’t you think?
Since there is no Internet connection at this rest stop (did you know all the rest stops in Iowa have wireless Internet? Very twenty-first century, I must say. I didn’t use it at any of them because you only got a small, finite amount of time before they started charging and it seemed, somehow, pointless) I will post this once I touch down this evening. Til then, the road beckons, the next hundred feet await.
I took the top down. So much for mystery and wonder. I’m at a motel in Brush, Colorado run by a young, blondish poor-white-trash woman and her poor-white-trash husband. She has two young poor-white-trash children and most of the night’s tenants are poor-white-trash. The main exception being the oriental family two doors down. (I leave it to you to decide about me.) My immediate neighbors are a thin, blond grandmother, her two small blond grandchildren and at least two rowdy and possibly drunk men who I haven’t yet seen. I did hear them arguing with each other about how to use the key card to open the door, with a lot of back and forth about the timing of the little green light and turning the handle and a large double “Whoop!” when, I assume, they got it right.
The Internet connection doesn’t reach to my corner room, so I’m sitting in the gazebo between the parking lot and the pool, my blowing coyly in the evening wind, typing furiously, trying to get this written and posted before my coy hair drives me nuts and I have to go inside, away from the wind.
Ah, travel. There’s a Chinese restaurant with a bar right past the pool. Perhaps I’ll have a small drink before retiring for the evening.
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Geoff Hoff is co-owner of Joseph Coaler Productions and, with Steve Mancini, co-wrote the best selling satirical novel “Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend
Tags: Essay, My Life, Observation, theatre, Travel