Coherence is for chumps.
In the past forty-eight hours I have done three sold-out performances of TMLMTBGB at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company and co-taught one four-hour workshop. I have walked several miles and been on a plane for two hours. I have done a load of laundry and watched The Last King of Scotland. I have been in a billiards hall in Cleveland Park until four in the morning with Kurt and John and Caitlin and Liz and Craig and Jay.
In the past forty-eight hours I have been asleep for three.
I am terrible about taking pictures when I visit new places; generally the effort of whipping out the camera tends to spoil whatever sensory communion I had going on in that moment…ironically, the sort of feeling that one would want to capture on camera in the first place.
So instead I rely on my memory and my facility for description. And on three hours of sleep, and my God why am I still wide awake right now, all I can do is string together phrases and proper nouns that evoke in my mind the experience of the past ten days, an experience that I am sure I will treasure for a very long time.
Kristy and Allan and Ann. The otters, the capybara, the pygmy hippo, the giant panda, the abundance of golden lion tamarinds. The inches between me and an actual de Koonig. The cookie table. The Shiny Giny incident. Heather licking coffee off the floor. The person who walked out during Lather, Rinse, Regret. Tryst. The Diner. The statue of Jefferson Davis. The Woodley Park escalator, the Ellington bridge. Corey and Jessica. Susan and Jay and Sabrina. The random encounters. The five seconds left on the clock. Watching Heather and Paul re-connect. The shockwave that John and I would pretend existed during the pre-show speech. The waiter at Pi and the man at the dim sum restaurant, so determined to say thank-you that he continued to repeat the words long after he had exited the room. The portrait of Michael J. Fox, the room dedicated to concert photos of Morrissey. The Obama inauguration superstore. The walk from 18th and Wyoming to 7th and D. Apples to Apples. The botched New Year’s Eve countdown. The random man from Alaska. Drew and Lucy and Deirdre and Lori and Julie and Natalie and Rachel and Carrie and Courtney and the three whose names I’ve forgotten. The late nights and early mornings. The Staples in Columbia Heights. The broken chairs and medical ailments. Atomic. The Cafe International. The tale of the deceased audience member. Football Fingertips and fontina cheese sampler platters. The former resort, converted into a girls’ school, converted into a psychiatric rehabilitation center for shell-shocked troops, converted into abandoned ruins, converted yet again into condominiums. The FDR Memorial. The two vastly different reactions to The Retard Game. The dead squirrel. Howard and Jeff and Brian and Taryn and Catherine and Jenn and Sharon. The habits of the North American Me.
And there’s the exhaustion setting in. G’night.
Creative Control 