Today I went to a park and played kickball with some people from my company against people from another company. We had lots more people show up, and we beat them handily. Then we bbq’ed food, and played on the playground equipment.
This evening I went with a guy from work to a play. It seems there is a secret underground theater life here in town. There are lots of theaters, but nobody (myself included) don’t know about them. This was my first foray into this world, and it was an auspicious start. Trixie Trueheart, Girl Aviator is an original piece, set in a struggling radio station in the mid 30’s. It was rather touching at parts. It is interesting to willingly suspend belief, and while in a different world, your ideas of what is important is changed. It’s as if it is true, and what happens to the characters matters. There was another level of abstraction, since the story centered around the title radio drama, so the actors are sometimes acting for characters within another story. One character in the outer story has a difficult time remembering that the inner story is just a story, which just makes it more confusing.
Then, after getting our emotions wrenched by this set of stories, it wraps up, and we walk out…where the cast is waiting to greet us. And they are back to being people in our normal reality, and the dream collapses in on itself, but part of you is still in the story.
I was traveling through Missouri, and I stopped, as I am wont to do, at a Subway. Thomas, the cheerful highschool student behind the curved glass and boxes of vegetables, was having a horrible day—he was at work. As I made my order, he removed the lids of the containers he would need. This was a new method I had not seen before. As I named off veggies, he stacked up the lids, giving me an instant visual of what I was ordering, and making it easy for him to remember what I had asked for. I thought all Subways should do this.
There is an oil refinery on the way from MO. Evidently they have some waste liquid or gas, and they vent it up a tall pipe which terminates in a huge orange flame, producing a pall of dark smoke. Seems kind of wasteful—-power that does nothing but light up the sky. It could be used to power my car, and probably yours too. And the smoke just floats away, to drop as ash onto my food. I think I will write to them and suggest they do something about this, and I think I have a solution: Remember that big eye thing on the top of the tower in LOTR? A flame on top of a tower could easily be converted into a lidless eye. Inject the fuel in a pattern that makes it into a glowing, flickering ring.
Tomorrow I go to play practice, to practice so that when I perform, the audience is able to willingly suspend belief, and invest themselves into the story, so that when the spell is broken, part of them is left behind, or part of the story lives on in their mind, and so the story never ends.
