Right Coast, Finale

It's been a crazy week in the present with rehearsals for two shows and running around trying to find props and such, but I'm back with the finale/footnotes for the NYC Right Coast Adventures. 

     When I woke up my last full day in New york I felt drained.  It seemed like so much had happened, and it melted all together into a giant heap of vague greyness.  I had the feeling that I had experienced one long day where teh sun and moon traded shifts but time never really passed.  I had coffee with Shawna, and then went out to do my best Amazing Ash impression and see the city a little.

   I am no Amazing Ash Naftule- I spent most of the day in a thoughtful fog, trying to organize the events of the week into some semblance of a normal timeline.  I wandered the parks of the Lower East Side and spent hours simply sitting in Thompson Square park, feeling the coolness of the air and wondering if I could take going back to the 115 degree summer of Phoenix.  I ate more pizza.  I started to feel a little depressed.

Depresso.

    Maybe it was the fact that my morning coffee came from "D'espresso," whose logo I couldn't help but read as "D'epresso,"  Maybe it was the time spent in the park, alone, watching families roll by even though it was the middle of the day in the middle of the week.   I'm going to blame the logo- the sideways D even looks like a forced smile.  This sort of thing seems to happen to me after a week of something new- I start to get tired, maybe culture shocked. I don't know the right term.  I was starting to get tired of delicious food and beautiful people everywhere.  I wandered into Greenwich village.

This, I guess?

I'm not sure what exactly I was expecting. Hippies?  Bob Dylan?  I just sort of ended up there because the streets took me there- I'm not particularly fond of the modern myth of the Hippy, but I guess I had thought it would be something like St. Marks a little.  Head shops.  Something...different.  What I actually found was a cloud of business suits with cell phones and places to go and a sign declaring a farmer's market that Sunday.  Pretty much everyone near me was in a suit.  Unshaved and dirty with a backpack on, I felt like punchine to a joke 40 years in the making. 

     The thing that actually upset me, though, wasn't the lack of some poorly-defined vision, but a simpler complaint.  There was nowhere to sit down.  I found this out when I went to sit on a piece of masonry next to a church, only to find iron bars with rusty spikes protruding from them welded to the surface.  I kind of mentally shrugged and moved on, but every place that looked like I could rest my tired ass on had the same preventative measures.  In a way, it was like that stuff you see on the edges of rooftops that prevents pigeons from landing there, or those bus-benches that have hard dividers to hobo-proof them.  I got the subliminal message : "Buy something, or move along."  I chose the latter and wandered back to the inviting stoops of St. Marks and Bowery.

Look at that punam.

 I met up with Shawna that evening to go and see a preview of our friend Amir Levi's one-man show, "Male Matriarch."  We wouldn't be in town for the actual performance, and so Amir was kind enough to invite us to a rehearsal to at least get a sense of what his show would be like.  Amir's auto-bio show was a story about gay identity, and Amir's conflict with his cultural desire to create a nuclear family based on his Mexican-Israeli American family's values.

 I've often say this about "fringe" theater:  I can't stand the "I'm-gay-isn't-it-fabulous" and "I'm-gay-isn't-it-painful" genre of performance art, but Amir's show was more complicated than that.  There was an interesting sense that he was not the main character in his own autobiography- the biographical stories of his mother and grandmother delivered in character take a large block of time up throughout the show.  In fact, one of the major themes was that Amir felt as though he did not have the kind of stories or identity that the guiding matriarchs of his life had.  The fascinating lives of the women he sprung from sort of create the boundries along either side of the path that he will walk through his life.  I encourage you to see Amir's show, especially if you're sick of self-importance masked as fun camp in theater.  Amir was genuinely vulnerable without the detached irony that tends to taint such works.  I was really touched he invited us to a rehearsal so we could see him perform. 

A battle of the bands.

Strings vs. Whistle

     Afterwords Amir, Shawna and I went to the Pig N' Whistle pub in Times Square.  Did I mention I was in the Theater District?  It had a lot of old tall buildings, if you like that sort of phallic visual riot.  Anyway, it struck me when we sat down that this was the second Animal & Musical Instrument named pub I'd been to, with Shawna, while travelling.  Spooky, right? 

     All the pubs I've been to have names like The Dubliner, and McCaffery's, so maybe this musical animal thing is coastal, or maybe I'm just naive.

     We had our drinks, I ate some amazing fish and chips, and we parted ways. I got a room at the Bowery hostel for one (which they ended up charging me the same as a two person for, after the fees for just walking in and whatnot) and realized how incredibly small that kind of room is.  Amir had offered to let me stay with him in Brooklyn (I think) but at this moment I wanted to be alone so much that I paid for it.   The next day was the day I had to catch a subway to the air train to the plane at JFK.  I was eager to get home, in a sense, if only because I couldn't afford to stay even one more day.  I met for coffee with Shawna, and then headed over to Economy Candy, if only to gawk.

Great, now my eyeballs have diabetes.

     And gawk I did.  Economy Candy is packed from floor to ceiling with so much candy it'd make Willy Wonka skittle in his pants.  There's practically no room to walk- children have to actually remain calm in an environment that mentally overloads them.  I didn't buy anything, because I needed to spend my money on real food, but I did spend a good amount of time just staring at the sweets I wish I'd known about when I was a kid.  I saw a little boy roll his eyes back in his head like he was having a seizure when he came in. Candytastic.

    I ate a great fish taco with shredded radishes in it for lunch , gathered my stuff up at the hostel and met up to say goodbye to Shawna (and get subway directions, because I'm dumb) before hopping on the subway.  It was a long ride, and I slept through most of it before reaching the Airtrain at JFK.  I went through the crazy screening process and stood in front of those full-body x-ray things.  Surprisingly, the TSA in NYC were way nicer than the ones in Phoenix, and had that same New York attitude I'd come to admire:  They were polite but took no shit.  The Sky harbor TSA agent I dealt with on the way to New York couldn't cut it as Wal-Mart greeter and relished the small power she had over my shoes and wallet.  In fact, fuck you, old lady TSA agent at Sky Harbor who was WAY too grouchy and mean.  There were like, 8 people in the airport on your shift, what's your excuse?  I hope your diaper breaks, and all your children resent you. 
   

"Hold on tight, spider monkey."  That joke's for the ladies.

     Everything went smooth and slow, like a greased up turtle, until I actually got on the plane and got out on the runway- then we were delayed for two and a half hours.  There were apparently apocalyptic thunderstorms over the airport and planes were trying to sneak out between the balled up fists of these thunderheads as they passed.  We finally got up in the air, and despite the constant, light rattling turbulence, everything went fine. My neighbors didn't want to talk to me so I got to listen to the crazy ass J-Pop radio channel that Delta flights have (channel 7, homie) for most of the flight.  I watched Water for Elephants because it was literally 14 inches from my face and couldn't help myself, but I couldn't hear anything, so I'm pretty sure that movie is about a hobo vet and a drunk guy who beats on animals and his wife.  Am I wrong?  I doubt it..


  I landed in Phoenix after drifting in and out of a bored, hobo-vet interrupted slumber.  I put my feet down and it was still 115 degrees out, but at least it's a dry heat.  Yeah, I went there.  It's hot in Phoenix, yes, but at least the sweat evaporates.  All my clothes were 80% ass-sweat from the New York humidity. When I got back to Phoenix, I did my laundry faster than ever before.  I woke up the next day at about noon and realized that it was probably time for me to go back to college.  So I am.

SOMETHING NEW, SOMETIME SOON!

THANKS FOR READING!

Right Coast, Part 6

     Turnips, Pac-man theater!  MTV near misses!  IRISH PIRATE BAR!  All this and a little bit more in Right Coast, Part 6!  I wish I'd taken better notes- a drunken scribble would have helped.  More after the jump!

Right Coast, Part 5

We encounter more Phoenicians in New York, eat the best dinner of my freaking life, and run the last two shows Monday the 15th.  The ensemble shares one of those numinous experiences that can't be replicated, but can be forced into the shapes of words and put on the internet! Right Coast, Part 5!  More after the Jump!

Right Coast, Part 3

     In which I discover the joy of a dollar slice of pizza, the weather shifts from hot and humid to torrential downpour, and I risk life and limb for a cab.  I reflect on one of humankind's only perfect creations.  More after the jump!

Right Coast, Part 2

     Right Coast, Part 2! Three days in the making, spent trying to remember how the hell I stumbled all over the East Side drunk after opening night.  Beers are drank, hats are purchased, memories are erased.  I think this is the gist of it- let's see if this makes any sense.  More after the jump!

Right Coast, Part 1.

    Fresh from my trip to California, I return to Phoenix, put in my two weeks at the bookstore, and book a flight to New York for early August.  I spent a week in the Lower East side eating street pizza, studying rat/squirrel relations, eating street falafel, nursing hangovers, and eating more street pizza.  My second travelogue, (cleverly named "Right Coast") begins now.....right now!