This Sunday a few of us went to a performance in the small Tuscan town Bucine. My friend Casey took us. He knew the guy who was performing and operated the lights. The performance was OK, what I really enjoyed was the countryside. Gene and I played Durak on the train ride there, te stars were out in full force, and the aperitivo in Montevarchi was glorious.
I met Gene (AKA Zhenya, Euvgene) in 2005 when we both worked at the Paramount in Wellington. We were fast friends and collaborated on a few projects together. (Maybe you remember this?) We’ve been in intermittent contact since I moved off the Long White Cloud.
Gene’s visited the U.S. a few times since then, but every time he’s been stateside I’ve either been too far away or too broke to see him. But a few weeks ago Gene ventured outside of New York City and went on an impromptu tour of some great American cities, Baltimore, Detroit, Chicago.
I jumped on the chance to meet Gene in Detroit, a city that looked close enough on the map to justify jumping in without much of a game plan. I meant to spend a day with him but we ended up spending the long weekend together.
THE SPIRAL
Gene filled me in on what he’s been up to for the past few years. Back in Wellington he had been performing a little, collaborating on a few shows, he started a theater company, produced some plays and even flew a director in from New York out for a production. But he told me, “I made a hundred bucks man, it just wasn’t worth it.” He swore theater off and focused on making music.
After several months of producing music and DJing in Wellington, Gene found himself in a Commedia del’Arte workshop given by this mad man. The work was powerful enough to inspire taking a significant risk, so after talking it over with Giovanni (the mad man) and Gene’s long time partner Erin, he took the plunge and for the past six months has been studying at Helikos, a small physical theater program in Florence, Italy.
As it turns out, the woman who gives the amazing red nose workshops I’ve been taking in Chicago, Paola Coletto worked with Giovanni to develop the previous incarnation of the school in the early 2000s. Small world right?
Here’s a video I meant to post several weeks ago. Fair warning, it’s pretty stupid and there’s one instance of NSFW language.
This spring Dub hosted a Whole Hog Party pig roast at his house. I had really wanted to see my old buddies from high school again, before I moved out of Helena for a while and I was lucky to have been back home to catch up and join ’em for this. Jayson and I used to play a game—he mentions it briefly before I smack him—called Paper, Rock, Scissors, Punch-in-the-Face. The rules were simple. The winner of paper rock scissors gets to punch the other guy in the face. The loser gets to decide if he wants to play again.
Here is a table full of some of the people I’m in class with at the iO Training Center every Friday. For the past couple of weeks a handful of us have gotten together at the Salt and Pepper Diner, right next door to the theater, shoved tables together and started to get to know each other. We just finished our sixth week of first level classes, and only have two weeks to go. Time flies!
