11.10.02 – Jackson, MI

it’s the subtle changes in the body – they happen in small degrees, unnoticed, until one day you realize the body you’re in has changed. my palms are yellow with calluses, the sides of my index fingers are rough and callused from turning bolts. by the end of the week the dirt has ground so deep into my fingerprints that it takes scrubbing my hands with a nail brush to get them clean at the end of the day. they are laborer’s hands now. my legs are marked with bruises of many shades, many vintages, from purple to brown to yellow. the knob on the back of my shoulder sticks out further, my elbows are pointier, my arms are larger at the bicep and smaller above the elbow. my ribs show more clearly, the jeans hang lower on my hips.

the internal changes are harder to track. have i gotten stronger? tougher? gentler, more patient, more diplomatic? more demanding? the body is elastic; it changes with life’s demands. bruises and scrapes heal, fat replaces muscle or vice versa. i don’t know if changes to the personality are as reversable. we take experiences into us and move forward with those as a part of our new selves. it’s harder to take an inventory of our internal selves. i’m a little bonier here, a little softer here, bruised over here and callused here.

11.7.02 – Nashville, TN

i think i hit my low point on the tour this week. had an ugly altercation with an actor on the tour on tuesday – i grouched at him for being late, and he publicly ripped me a new asshole. being an empath sometimes makes me very good at my job – i (usually) have a subtle understanding of what people feeling and how they need to be approached – but other times it makes it hard for me to deal when someone aims as much wrath at me as this guy did. this particular occasion it was just enough to shove me over the edge into emotional breakdown territory for the rest of the day. i’m over it now, and he did apologize later, but i have to say i’m not sorry that he’s the one who’s quitting and leaving the tour at the end of this week.

on a lighter note, the loyalty of a good friend is priceless:

Well, you certainlyfuckin’lootley ARE NOT a bitch and that guy can smell my dirty underwear and drink spoilt milk before what goes around gets back to HIM!

hee hee. hannah lights up my world.

11.8.02 – Memphis, TN

[BEGIN RANT]

i hate memphis. i hate the south in general. and in particular i hate the buttmunches at the main office who book us at the cheapest possible hotels in the middle-of-fucking-no-where, such as tonight’s gem: la quinta inn next to the memphis int’l airport. i asked the guy at the desk if there was anything to eat within a half-mile radius of the hotel. they sent me to a gas station at the outer confines of my distance limit. in spite of the fact that my trusty danger-antenna was screaming out don’t walk here alone! in big red letters, i walked down the dark road to the gas station – which turned out to be a shack the size of a hotel room, with bars on all the windows, where one had to purchase items thru a small window with a sign reminding customers that the attendant had less than $50 in the cash register and was behind bullet-proof glass. i didn’t even bother to buy anything, just high-tailed it back to the hotel. every time an airplane flies over the entire hotel shudders. i wonder if the pizza man will even deliver here.

[END RANT]

11.6.02 – Louisville, KY; Memphis, TN; Birmingham, AL; Chatanooga, TN, Nashville, TN

i’ve got a little technological rain cloud following me around on this tour, so it’s been a few days since i’ve been able to turn my computer on. blog entries are piled up in my notebook again, but i’m short on free time in the hotels at night.

i took a walk thru downtown nashville today. it’s nice to be in a town with some life for a change, and to walk the streets and think of all the music history that has been made in this place. nashville has that sense of gilt-edged glamour tinged with desperation that you find in cities that collect a lot of stars, and the associated star seekers. walking into downtown i went over a bridge that crossed very high over the river. the city in front of me was backlit with the late afternoon sun, and the sky was the first blue we’ve seen in weeks. the air was mild, almost warm, and walking into a lively city lifted my spirits. i suddenly felt very small on that bridge, but small in a seeing-my-little-space-in-this-world kind of way that that was this strange moment of enlightenment for me that to some extent defines description. anyway, it was a good feeling. after shopping at a run-down walgreens and then making dinner on a slice of the Worst Pizza Ever i walked back across the bridge in the dark, and my spirits had apparently sunk with the sun. i’m terribly moody these days. this was a rough week for the tour – everyone is over-fatigued and homesick and disillusioned with the purpose of our tour (bring theatre to children? make money for our producer?), tempers flare easily, and moods swing wildly. h-o-m-e-s-i-c-k. i don’t really have a home to be sick for, but i’m sick for the homes i’ve loved in the past. and the home i’m looking forward to creating when i get done with this tour.

the hotel we’re staying in has a giant guitar shaped swimming pool. no kidding. and one wall in our hotel room is mirrored, floor to ceiling, right next to the bed. how kinky.

10.31.02 – Charleston, WV

onomonopia

lolita

16th c. tart

el nino

stage manager barbie

rock

genie

belly dancer

alien

southern belle

dead girl

coca-cola can

rubix cube

halloween is my favorite holiday. i’m not doing anything particularly fun this year, as i have an early morning call for a show, and well, i’m in a strange town and all the haunted house stuff seemed to be back in Michigan, but it’s the little things that make me happy anyway: the ambiguously gay redneck (i don’t think it was a costume) at the hotel desk gave us all little packets of halloween candy; walking thru a shopping mall this evening and seeing fairies and punk rockers and human ketchup bottles going about their normal business, as if there is nothing out of the ordinary about wearing a foot-high mohawk or a heinz label. and i love that split-second reaction when you glance at someone and think, “is that a costume or do they just look like that all the time?” there were a lot of people around downtown tonight dressed in suits and conservative clothing, carrying little american flags and saying things like, “i hope my pictures come out!” at first i thought they were just going as republicans for halloween, but it turned out that a political rally with president bush had just gotten out at the civic center.

my college roommate, lauren, always celebrated halloween by popping out of bed and putting on The Monster Mash first thing in the morning, a tradition that i dearly love her for. this morning i was halfway thru load-in before i realized that i’d missed the monster mash ritual, and it made me sadly nostalgic for the our dorm room in toyon hall from sophomore year. that year lauren and val and i went out dressed as devil with a blue dress on, baby spice and el nino, respectively. monster mash came on the radio later today while we were driving to west virginia, but the trouble is that monster mash always makes me want to jump up and boogie in that only-when-no-one-else-is-looking sort of way, and i was in the driver’s seat, so….

10.30.02 – Detroit, MI, Pittsburgh, PA

i am in a communication wasteland. my cell phone broke, had to be mailed back to idaho, and then fed ex lost it in Flint, MI (of Roger and Me fame). the hotel charges us a $1.50/minute to make local calls, which pretty much makes being on the internet out of the question. (i’m posting this on a computer at kinko’s, on the company bill at a rate of $.20/minute). i have no calling card, no way to make long distance calls from the hotel. i’d borrow a cell phone from someone on the tour, but we’re all short on our daytime minutes so i’m completely incommunicado until after 9pm. i’ll hide in a starbucks with tolstoy until the rain stops, and try not to think about all the call-my-insurance-company type errands i’d planned to do with my day off.

10.27.02 – Elkhart, IN; Milwaukee, WI; Chicago, IL; Rockford, IL; Hammond, IN; Saginaw, MI

weekend, where did you go so fast? i have tendonitis in both hands and one of my elbows from lifting stuff that’s too heavy, but i can’t get enough days off in a row for it to heal – when i get out of bed in the morning i feel like an 70-year-old woman, all stiff and arthritic. i work for a theatrical sweatshop. having worked entirely in non-profit theatre before this tour, i hadn’t quite fully grasped the importance of unions in commercial theatre until now. unions prevent the show we did on friday from happening: we arrived at the road house to discover that it wasn’t really a theatre at all – more of an old 1930’s movie house (now crumbling to bits, as many of them are), with a curved thrust stage. no main drape, no masking or wing space, no backstage crossover, no headsets (the stage manager was calling cues over a walkie-talkie), no fly pipes so we couldn’t hang the cyc (plain white backdrop) and had to shine the cyc lights on the white back wall. half the crew didn’t show up, so we only had 2 guys to help us load in thru the back of the house. oh, and there was no heat. the place was barely 50 degrees – the poor school kids were turning blue in their seats. but the kicker really was the fact that the dressing rooms and backstage areas were infested with giant centipedes. i’m not making this up. i’ll publish photos after i get them scanned in. they were crawling up thru the drains in the sink and dropping off the ceiling onto people’s heads. now, i know i’m new to touring life, but i’m pretty sure that rock stars don’t have to put up with this kind of crap in their dressing rooms. and the awful thing is that the company sent a tour to this place last year. which means that they actually know how awful this space is, and they make us do a show there anyway because there’s money to be made. which is why i’m renewing my vow to work in non-profit theatre again where the product is art, not money at the expense of the performers’ health and safety.

on a more cheeful note, i got to see a show at Second City in Chicago last wednesday, which was super cool. Second City is the improv/sketch comedy house that has produced nearly all of the SNL comedic greats – Jim Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Mike Meyers, etc. michael and i grabbed a commuter train from our hotel in Skokie, had dinner at this fabulous stir fry resturant and caught the show “Thank Heaven It Wasn’t 7/11: A Sense of Irony Returns to America.” halfway thru the evening it occured to me that for a couple of hours i felt like i’d escaped tour life. i was cleaned up and dressed for a night out, rather than the usual grubbiness of my daily schedule, having a great dinner out with a friend and seeing a cool show, exploring a new city and riding around on public transit and just somehow feeling normal. by the time we hopped on the L to go home, i felt like i should be heading back to my apartment, where zeke and a pair of p.j.s would be waiting for me. reality struck about the time we hit the hotel, and i was back to my vagabond existence. it’s not all bad. it’s just hard, living this way. feeling like my real life, whatever that is, is on hold while i do this tour. our sound tech, martin, has been doing these tours for 22 years. i can’t imagine spending three or six months of every year out on the road, feeling like my whole life is waiting for me to come back home to it. mom says that zeke sits at the top of the stairs every night till 1 or 2 am, waiting to see if i’ll come home, before he goes into their bedroom and shoves the dog out of her bed so that he can sleep there. (i love loyal pets.) this summer was the first time since i finished college that i finally got a rest from the wanderlust that drives me on to new adventures, new cities, new lives all the time. it was the first time that i liked my life so much that i stopped looking ahead to the next job, the next challenge, and just started living.

10.20.02 – Grand Rapids, MI

this hotel smells curiously like rice pudding. it’s odd, really, but not necessarily a bad thing – there are far worse things for a hotel to smell like. like the one in Joliet last week that smelled of dead, rotten fish. adam commented on the stench to me while we were standing at the front desk. “i know,” the girl at the desk said carelessly. “i called the guy whose room it’s coming from, but no one answered.” adam and i looked at one another in horror. i spent the rest of the night in my room (thankfully on a different floor) with the door locked, convinced that there was a dead body in the smelly room downstairs. suffice to say i did not enjoy my stay in Joliet.

and finally! a hotel room with incandescent light in the bathroom! i mean, what is it with hotels that insist on putting flickering, humming, stroby fluorescent lights in the bathroom all the time? do they actually want to make guests feel bad about their appearance all the time? cause it’s not like anyone is beautiful under the flicker of fluorescent light. i can’t think of a harder way to get up early in the morning than to roll out of bed and into a shower under a eye-searing, brain-numbing fluorescent panel.

photoshop 6.0 (at kinko’s) isn’t playing nicely with photoshop 5.0 LE (on my laptop), so there will be a continued delay in getting tour photos posted up here. in the mean time i will subject you to the pictures of my cat that my dad sends:

10.19.02 – Kalamazoo, MI; Joliet, IL; Grand Rapids, MI

I’ve changed time zones four times in the past five days and i have managed to oversleep/get up too early three of those days; suffice to say i’m a little disoriented. it is winter here. the wind is howling outside my hotel room window and my 1/2 mile walk to kinkos today necessitated a stocking cap, mittens and my teddy-bear coat. the teddy-bear coat has that name because it is a coat lined with light brown fake fur much like that of an old-fashioned, well-loved stuffed animal, so that wearing the coat is like being wrapped up in a big teddy bear.

new fan mail for the filthy stove!

To: brillig@slithy-tove.net

Subject:

Date: Wed, 16 Oct 2002 18:07:29 -0400

X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2720.3000

Hi Slithy.

I came across your site looking for a solution for my filthy stove, and instead I find some exellent, refreshing and witty text from a future brilliant writer. Keep it up.

umm, for filthy stoves try oven cleaner, i guess. or trick someone else into cleaning it, better yet. i typically don’t stick around long enough in the same apartment for my stove to get filthy. i find that being on tour stimulates one’s internal nesting instincts. walking thru home depot, picking up hardware for the set, i get distracted by things like shower curtains and candle holders. then i remember that duh! i don’t even have a home to put that stuff in. my cat lives with my parents, i live out of a suitcase. if i can brave the cold again tomorrow i will walk to kinkos and scan in some pictures of my gypsy lifestyle.

10.15.02 – indianapolis, IN

you know you’re in kentucky when,

-the laundromat has a sign asking people to please not wash their horse blankets, as the horse hair clogs the washing machine.

-your hotel is hosting the Central Kentucky Knife Club.

i am sooo happy to be back in the north. the final send-off from the nightmarish hotel in lexington was the sour milk on my breakfast cereal this morning. my conspiracy theory is that the microtoxins in the spoiled milk were what caused the migraine i got later in the morning. at about half hour, i realized that those sparkly blind spots in my vision were not being caused by looking into bright stage lights and pulled my stage manager, adam, aside.

me: i think i should tell you i’m getting a migraine

adam: uh, i’m sorry? need some ibuprofin?

me: that means that i’m going temporarily blind.

adam: oh. okay, umm, sure. this is what we’ll do.

most of my vision was back by the time the show started, but the look on adam’s face was pretty comical when i told him i was going blind. especially considering that michael, who runs the show backstage with me, scratched his cornea over the weekend and had an eyepatch over one eye, so that between the two of us we had a total of one eye.

tonight we’re in indiana, and the cold night air smelled like winter for the first time of the season. inside the hotel had the the musty scent of heaters turned on for the first time. it’s a pair of smells that i’m terribly fond of, and get all sorts of nostalgic over.