epershand

WOW, what a weekend. Saw lots of people briefly, spent large stretches of the weekend prone with laughter. In summary:

Woke up at 3am on Friday, slept for most of flight to Boston. Discovered lack of food at Logan Airport, hopped over to South Station for foodstuffs. Got in touch with yarngeek, who met me at South Station after she left work for the week. Hung out until eccentric_hat arrived from her plane, 1.5 hours later. Was enthusiastic about Isherwood. Read lots of Yiddish Policeman's Union while I waited.

With Barbara and Marjorie, went to Cambridge, met militantgeek and Joyce-who-isn't-technically-an-FP-anymore-is-she for dinner. Bid a fond adieu to Barbara and Joyce and went to see Cabaret at ART.

( mini review )

We had a long distance to travel before the next morning, so we took off immediately from Boston, spent longer than reasonable trying to escape the labyrinth that is the Boston street system, and finally made our way to Concord, NH, for the evening. The late-night hotel clerk was one of those very New England middle-aged man, complete with very strong New Hampshire accent and skeptical attitude. We woke up 5 hours later and set out for Burlington. The main thing that New Hampshire affords, in addition to its beautiful vistas full of peep-worthy leaves, is very many jokes about libertarianism and the tragic demise of the Old Man in the Mountain. For instance: "Little known fact, 'live free' is New Hampshire for 'own a sawed-off shotgun.' So the motto is really 'own a sawed-off shotgun or die.'" We amused ourselves thusly until we crossed the Connecticut River (HEARTS) into the Green Mountain State.

We got to the Burlington area around 9:30 and stopped for breakfast before the wedding. manifesto_tea is married, guys! Wedding-type details: she wore a home-made dress and her SPOUSE omg Jaska wore a tuxedo shirt and a kilt that Katie had made. The ceremony itself was short and sweet, and then we went to the reception, which was at a farmhouse that belonged to a family friend. The reception was really lovely. We sat at a table with some of Jaska's friends and learned that J is in fact a very good egg. The dancing was contra, the sun was shining, the new spouses were charming and lovely. We mostly hung out in the shade with some of J's friends and watched the dancers, rather than participating. At the very end, before they took off for their honeymoon, K and J signed their marriage certificate.

For the rest of Saturday and most of Sunday we hung out in Burlington. We saw the Lake Champlain waterfront, and very many excitingly decorated statues of cows. We did not see Champ. Dani's dad arrived Saturday night and hung out with us on Sunday--it was really good to see him. Finally, the militantgeek family left Marjorie and I at the airport while they went on with their planned Maine adventures. On the way home I started reading Wolf Hall, which is just as good as everyone says it is.

And now I am, sad to say, back in the real world. Not recommended. In all, I'm glad I was able to cram so much in to the weekend, but I'm left feeling like I really need to find another time for a dedicated visit with K and J.

(crossposted from the RL blog)

A few minutes before Rent Boy Ave. started, a disheveled, obviously drunk woman stumbled in though a side door with two plastic cups of liquid slopping out of her hands and handed them to a man sitting in the front row of the audience. "That's called sauvignon blanc," she slurred. And then she proceeded her way around the audience, asking for money and promising to bring us something from the concession stand if we just gave her a dollar. She was joined by another panhandler, and the two of them proceeded to harass the audience until suddenly the lights went dark, and they (joined by others) began to sing.

Rent Boy Ave. is a lot of things. It's a musical, for one. It's a meditation on cliches and fairy tales and how they play out in everyday life. It's a story about homeless teens. It's a love story. It's the most intensely uncomfortable experience I've had in a theatre in a long time. And it was also really good.

Rent Boy Ave. follows several homeless teens as they find ways to feed themselves. They visit soup kitchens, they panhandle, they sell drugs and their bodies. Mark is a veteran of the streets, a seventeen-year-old rent boy who's convinced he only sleeps with men because they pay more than women, and is concerned that he's losing his business to "ten to twelve year olds who will give it up for a candy bar." Jackie, also a veteran hooker, was a high-school valedictorian and homecoming queen before she ran away from home in the wake of a back-alley abortion, and spends the play struggling with her pimp over money and drugs. David is the new boy on the street, who goes from wide-eyed innocent to self-satisfied drug dealer over the course of the show. Paying close attention are three adults: a compassionate nun who was once an addict herself, a collected, rhyming pimp, and an abusive john who would love to get his hands on David.

And the audience too is a character, pulled into the drama whether they like it or not. Early in the second act, Trashcan Sally, the woman who panhandled the audience before the show started, confronted an audience member. "Hey, I know you. You're the guy who payed $25 to come in here and see what you could watch right outside for free." And it's true--the Boxcar Stage is at 6th St. and Howard, in the sketchier part of Soma. (However, she had to say it to him in the third row, where all the audience members who started out in the front row had escaped to over intermission.) The black box space had seating on three sides, including "scaffolding seating," cushions set on top of scaffolds that the actors frequently climbed and lept over (this is were my friends and I sat. It was billed as putting us into the action, but ironically it kept us safer from being confronted by the cast than the people in the standard seating.

We had a few technical complaints about the show. Although we loved the singing, staging, choreography and acting, the lighting design was pretty terrible, and the singers had to be miked too high to compete with the volume of the band, especially in a concrete space. But I strongly recommend it to anyone in the Bay Area at the moment, and may wind up seeing it again.

Rent Boy Ave. is showing at the Boxcar Stage, 505 Natoma St, San Francisco. It runs through August 22.