Last night, Li Han made zucchini, Shiyan made an omelet, and Melissa made curry, and we all feasted. It’s been a week of good food.
I swam this morning with Shiyan before biking in to rehearsal.
Camille heard the Bach suite mentioned in GOLDA’S BALCONY in the Starbucks this morning.
In preparing for the Menlo Park “House of Flying Daggers” housewarming, I have recreated the Oh snap! infographic on posterboard in our bathroom. I think I’m going to put it on my business cards.
Li Han, my freshman year Mirlo RA, just arrived from London (like Shiyan, she was forestalled at O’Hare) for the party.
Tomorrow begins a Pacific Northwest Odyssey: Zach and I are meeting Mia and Nelle in Walnut Creek, then driving to Ashland and seeing the Martha Graham Dance Company at the Britt Festival with Caitlin, then driving to Portland for a chorus workshop with Jessica Wallenfels, then to Seattle, where I’m (hopefully) meeting with Christopher Frizzelle of The Stranger, seeing my cousins, and hanging out with Sam Cheng of the infamous EBF year. And then back to the Bay on Sept 3rd.
So much for a non-theatrical vacation. But I’m really looking forward to the trip.
Back in Menlo from a whirlwind, exhausting SF trip: saw Ellen, Gabe, Morgan, Mary, Nelle & Mia, and Mere all up here. PHEW. Plus interviewed with Octavio Solis and Aaron Davidman: two of the best I’ve had so far. And James Still on the phone. Such great stories. It must mean something, perhaps about my self-satisfaction, that the more theater people I meet the more I love theater. But there are amazing folks in this business, in this basket-weaving, early-music-making, hybrid of the extreme past and the unrealized future. Nothing “present” about it. Dreamers.
The last time I was on Florida Street, where I met Aaron at the TJT offices, was years ago when I took the CASSANDRA SPEAKS crew up to a show there, and thought it would be a good idea to get off at the 22nd Street caltrain station and WALK from there to Florida Street. We arrived, halfway through the second act of a dance performance at Theater Artaud, absolutely exhausted, having trudged lost through the streets of SF for nearly two hours. I thought this would be a good “bonding experience” for the cast. This is, without question, the worst thing I have ever done to a group of actors.
So I must have grown some since then – at least now I’d know to get off at 4th & King…Perhaps if the Millbrae BART connection had been up then, I wouldn’t have so completely traumatized all of us. Blame your bad directing on the public transporation system. What would Darin Nichols do?
And it seems like there’s always more of SF to find. Ellen and I got totally windblown in this park at 19th and Yukon. Mary and I walked all around Union Square looking for something that wasn’t a glorified sandwich. North Point and the Marina with Gabe. (Again, more wind.) Mere and I went to the Ferry Building and the Embarcadero. Lots of good solid tourist stuff. And I explored Oakland with Morgan a bit – saw her house, and Mike’s enormous fish triptych. But my heart still belongs to 16th & Valencia. To the Mission district. Morgan and I hit Club Baobab and I watched people who know how to salsa.
I’ve been driving Shiyan’s hybrid Toyota Camry for a day now. Delightful. Pushes a button to turn on. She had to drive from Syracuse to NYC after trouble with a Chicago connection dropping her brother off at Cornell…and then a big-rig overturned on the freeway south from Syracuse, and she had to sit in traffic for hours on end.
Mere has been helping me set up my bookcase encampment too. And we watched the end of Sabrina 2 and most of Avenue Montaigne. Is it just me, or do French directors find naivete more attractive than anyone else does? Americans like our ingenues jaded.
You’d think I’d remember not to get gas at the Millbrae exit from the 280. You go down miles of a windy road before you come out by the station. I once did the same thing, at school, when I was nearly out of gas, and I was just cruising down the hill without any prayer of finding a station. There are so many roads like that around here – windy and endless. I got stuck on the 84 going the wrong way last night, too.
Anyway, I did manage to get to SF, find parking (miraculous!) return the car to Kersti, and take the train back to Mountain View in time to have sushi with Cisco, Shiyan, and Meredith. I love that BART connects to the Millbrae Caltrain now. If that had been an option when I was in school…
No more car! Hooray! Kersti drives back to Ashland at some point today.
We adjourned to Cisco and Lax’s apt for bread pudding and some weird variation on British cookies called “tim-tams.” That evening, we read from THE GIFT OF NOTHING (a Matt and Earl comic book) and Derrida’s ON GRAMMATOLOGY. I’d never picked the thing up before. It repays the reader with great amusement. I’m going to have to get through it.
“Speaking of the hymen,” Stayner and I took the Taspers to see Gayatri Spivak (Derrida’s translator and cultural critic) at Cornell once, and we had trouble understanding the meaning of anything in her lecture. I found her introduction to be much more comprehensible because I could read over it again and again.
I have four interviews today:
Peter Van Norden (actor)
James Bundy (YSD)
Juliette Carrillo (director)
Claire Peeps (Durfee)
Getting busy.
I’m writing this morning from a black papasan chair in Menlo Park, where Shiyan, Meredith, Vickie and Melissa (three venture capitalists and one production manager) have a beautiful house.
It feels like home, more so because of all the Stanford-abilia around the place. Pictures of rugby matches and of friends. A giant zucchini from Ali Reichenthal’s garden is in the kitchen. Furniture I recognize from various dorms is in each room. A television the size of a bed is in one corner.
These ladies are letting me store my belongings here while I embark upon a voyage of discovery and freelancing. It really feels like home.
Our trip yesterday was lovely but long – Kersti and I drove down from Ashland in Nancy’s car, with no hitches except a jam around Redding for bridge construction. (We didn’t make it out till 2 pm, after a Dragonfly goodbye breakfast with Jeremy, Mark, Daniel, Robert, & Caitlyn. It was lovely.)
Ashland has been such a good place to me but I feel the blood coming back into my veins being in a major metropolitan area.
We went over the Bay Bridge, straight to SF, and saw her first boyfriend Travis, who’s now out and living at the very corner of Haight and Ashbury with his boyfriend Joe. We had champagne by candlelight, with owls and unicorns watching, overlooking – yes – the corner of Haight and Ashbury.
They have the entire second floor of a building. 3 rooms, a kitchen, a bathroom, a hallway, a living room. They work in the hotel industry AND the apartment is rent-controlled.
Then I drove to Menlo. I got lost several times, first on Woodside Road and then on Santa Cruz Ave, but eventually I made it. And it’s so, so, so good to be here.
The Crossover interviews continue this week, and I have an interview with TJT on Friday. It’s not exactly a vacation. But it is a great time to rest.
Dara Weinberg 