From the sidewalk outside our hotel. I'm guessing that "goot" means trash can? All I know is that Mike and I now really enjoy saying "in de goot" as an answer to any question. Where's the nearest grocery?In de goot. Why do German clowns smoke so much pot? In de goot. Where is my lost innocence? In de goot.
We're now in the Netherlands, up in the northeast corner of the country, Groningen, getting ready for our tech rehearsal.
It's disorienting to have a 30-degree temperature drop--suddenly the scarf I used to cover my head in Istanbul's mosques is now wrapped around my throat to bar the cold.
Mike's performing in a speigeltent, pictured above. (Note: picture was actually taken last year, though I expect it will look very much the same.) It's a round, mirrored structure, with lots of velvet and colored panels. It feels very much like performing in a tented carousel, except there is a stage and audience instead of wooden horses.
So, when Mike and I went to the Noorderzon Festival last year, Mike made a little film of me doing what I like to do when I'm happy: making up a silly song, in this case, about the sheep and horses and cows we were zooming by in our train as we made our way from Groningen to Amsterdam.
At some point he posted it to YouTube, which was like, Aw, cute, but really not interesting to anyone except family members, and even then, only the most indulgent of family members. But I keep hearing about it from folks and I'm realizing that it's not quite as underground as I'd thought. And then earlier this year, we were doing a weekend at a performing arts center in California, and they posted it to their website as an example of Mike's work!
And just now, I was emailing with the head publicist for Noorderzon (where we'll be returning in a little over a week), and at the end of an email he wrote, "by the way: I loved your song about cows that I recently watched on YouTube."
So I went to find it, and it turns out 697 people have viewed this bit of afternoon whimsy. I'm posting it here for any who might have missed the pastoral rhapsody of the 2007 Noorderzon Festival.
"I always go to sea as a sailor, because they make a point of paying me for my trouble, whereas they never pay passengers a single penny that I ever heard of." --from Moby Dick, by Herman Melville
Meet the Travelmonkeys
Well, it's me, JM, my partner-in-crime, M, and our small black pug, Baci. We work in theater; I'm the director, M's the creator and performer, Baci's the little bit of chaos that keeps life interesting. We spend about half the year at home in Brooklyn and the other half on the road. This blog is an attempt to document that half, so we can remember where we've been.
Where We're Going Next
--SEATTLE! (early August with workshops at Seattle Rep) --INDIA!!! (rest of August, with performances and workshops in Chennai, Hyderabad, New Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai) --VANCOUVER, B.C.!(performance with PuSh early September) --SEATTLE!(please, sir, no more shows, sir, just rest, sir) --PORTLAND!(for the mighty T:BA Festival, second two weeks of September) --AUSTIN!(shows at the University of Texas at Austin, where my parents met, third week of September)
