5 hours of sleep later, I was beeped awake. Went downstairs to the communal bed (Jessie’s dad works for a party supply company and he brought home a bunch of cots that the incubators pushed together into a big sleeping platform) and was going to be funny but figured that it wouldn’t be appreciated. Breakfast was bagels at Bagel Maven. Then we drove to Mamaroneck, NY, getting mildly separated but not lost.
Matt had called to give Kearney more directions in the rental, but we didn’t think there was any reason for it. We sent Kearney on ahead and parked in the front lot and waited for them. Several ages later, the rental car party and Matt arrived. He led us to the theater.
And kept leading.
And some more.
See, when I think high school, even “large high school,” I picture a couple of Marquette’s. This school is immense. It has several buildings joined together into a C shape. Which is large enough to enclose a full size baseball diamond and a track. Yeah, that large. The theater we were in was just for the drama classes. The larger, 1200 seat auditorium was located in a completely different part. The theater had full lights and sound and looked gorgeous.
We had four periods there. The first one was for the senior theater class. The incubators performed a Harold and then we had a discussion and then some scenes with the class and my team. Pretty straightforward.
The second period was for a group of special education students. We started off with introductions to them and then began the short form games. They were pretty quiet most of the time. The higher energy games were better. About halfway through, the drama teacher asked if we could do some activities with them. I threw away the rest of the schedule and we just did scenes. Jess Carleton went first and she did this scene working in a coffeeshop. She had to invent a lot so Nayla came in with a walk on and asked for coffee. He gave her a cup bigger than her, which got lots of laughs. We kept this pattern up: play the scene, but walk on if needed. The last game we played was “Substitue Teacher.” Peter played the scene, taking over for the class’ regular teacher. It was chaos as three of them pushed him around, picked him up, tied his laces together, etc. Peter definitely got the good sport award of the day.
We went to lunch before the next period. Then came the tenseness. We got back from lunch too late to have a really good warmup. I didn’t do lights because I was planning on doing the information bit of a wallet for a Wallet Deconstruction (read out stuff in the wallet, and then the group does scenes based on that info) for my group. So Mike was up in the booth. The incubators had a good show, but it went so long that my team had only 10 minutes for their thing, which was not enough. They came off stage in a foul mood and I was pretty pissed too, since I’d been calling the edit from down below and Mike hadn’t paid any attention to me. My team asked to go first for the next period (again, no time for a proper warmup or even to talk about what had just happened). They went on, and their show was not so great. Then the incubators went on. It was really frustrating for everyone involved and I yelled at Mike for a bit in the light booth about it and he apologized but then said some shit about my team and then we went on for a bit. As we left, the teacher who’d overheard us yell told me, “It’s just high school.”
I was so ready to get some alone time for a bit. Took the first chance to get on the train to New York with the first group of people headed down. Slept a bit. Got out at Grand Central Station. Felt like I’d stepped into a stadium. I was tempted to hang out with the people who’d come in, who were planning to go to a show but I had my duffel with me and I really felt like a nap. So I took the subway to my cousin Chern-Sing’s place (she’d left me a key, yay family!) and checked my email and crashed on her futon. My cousin in law Jure came back about an hour later and we talked for a bit while waiting for Chern to arrive (her train got delayed).
Dinner was at The Elephant, a French-Vietnamese restaurant. It was small and smoky and noisy, but it all fit together. I had one of those moments where you see yourself from the side and behind, living. After dinner, Chern and Jure went home and I took the subway over to a bar to meet Laura and some of her friends from Fordham. Nicole from my team was also there (she’d ditched our tour to go on tour with her dance group, but they were also in NY). Met a lady who stage managed for David Copperfield. “You know all the tricks???” I asked tipsily. “I swore never to tell,” she replied.
Took the subway back at 3. There was a street performer in green tights, sunglasses, baseball cap and a knit sweater playing a portable keyboard and singing in Spanish. I would’ve given her money but she was on the other side of the station.
Chern was still up when I stumbled in. Fell asleep while she worked on the computer.