| Quotables |
"Only I wasn't steering anything, not even myself. I just bumped from my hotel to work and to parties and from parties to my hotel and back to work like a numb trolleybus. ... I felt
very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo."
-- Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar |
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"On the surface, it sounds irresponsible, but to flourish in a rapidly changing world, you actually need to make more mistakes. Fail quickly. Fail often. If you do something and it
doesn't work, just recover in a hurry and try something else. ... Help develop a culture that is willing to fail its way to the future."
-- Price Pritchett, Culture Shift |
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"There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room. It's like watching Paris from an express caboose heading in the opposite direction -- every second the city gets smaller and smaller, only you feel it's really you getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and that excitement at about a million miles an hour."
-- Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar |
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| it ain't javaco, but it'll do |
| Saturday, August 8, 2009 |
I have found, and am currently sitting inside, a coffee shop just up the street from where I live. It has a warm, earthy-colored interior, table windows, free wifi, and beverages other than coffee, which means I'll probably be coming here more than just this once.
Certainly it's no Washington Street JavaCo. If nothing else, it doesn't overlook an old-fashioned square in a quaint college town where people still smile at each other. Instead, the view out the front windows includes a Zeke's Paint & Design store complimented by an extremely uneven front parking lot, and a main drag state highway to the west with Golden Corral and Culver's as a backdrop. To its credit, there are three sets of tables/chairs out front for the outdoor crowd, but the sparse landscaping leaves quite a bit to be desired and consists of much more mulch than actual plant life. Altogether, the whole thing seems to scream "suburb," the busy, mundane day-to-day life flying past at or above the posted speed limit while no one inside cares. And yet here I sit, peach smoothie on my right, pretentiously thick book on my left, laptop on my, well, lap, because the window table I had planned to claim was shoplifted at the last minute by an unkempt girl with black-framed glasses, a prominent hickey, and a belly that can't decide if it wants to project pregnancy or just too many trips to the coffee shop for peach smoothies.
So, last weekend. In Kirksville. Something I've been thinking about from the moment I arrived back in town, no surprise there. Because I'm an incredible nerd, I know that last Friday night, the 31st of July 2009, was the ten-year anniversary of the first closing night of The Foreigner -- yes, we had two closing nights, because once the summer run was finished, we came back a month later and put on a four-show run at the end of August for the regular Fall audience. So once I rolled into town and got checked in to the hotel (which had free wifi), the first thing I did was grab my camera and head over to campus for a stroll across the quad and, if I was lucky, a quick toodle into and out of the surely-locked Baldwin Hall, just so I could say I was actually there ten years later.
Well. The building wasn't locked. Not where I was. The inside was lit up like Vegas, there was absolutely no one around, and the Little Theatre was sitting wide open to welcome me back, it seemed.
Only it wasn't the Little Theatre anymore. To my horror (and to this very moment I still may be in relative shock about it), the Baldwin Little Theatre had been decommissioned as a stage theatre and transformed into... a classroom. Yeah... that's just what I said. A fucking classroom, people. The black ceiling and walls had been painted white, the painted-over windows had been cleared, all black curtains had been removed, and worse yet, the stage had apparently been boarded up and sealed off, at least from the front. It is completely inaccessible as it was previously; a chalkboard has been tacked on to whatever fronting they had chosen to turn the fourth wall into an actual wall, burying alive inside the resulting tomb every character, every monologue, and a piece of every actor who ever took the stage in the untold decades it served as a place for theatre and drama to flourish.
I started taking pictures. For Facebook, primarily, because I knew some people would want to see this, and as it turns out, I was right. Check the photo album called Ten Years Hence, and you will see the heartbroken posts of my old Theatre friends lamenting the painting-over of one of the most important parts of our academic and social histories. It occurred to me to write, "Blasny, blasny" on the board before I left (that was one of the most prominent lines in The Foreigner), but there was no chalk to be found in a classroom that had replaced our beloved theatre with a chalkboard. It occurred to me yesterday that I could have stopped off at Wal-Mart for chalk and gone back the next day, but yeah, I didn't think of it until yesterday.
I went back into town for biscuits and gravy at Pancake City, which I was relieved to discover also had free wifi (apparently this is much more common than I realized, having just gotten a laptop myself recently). For some reason, I remember the place being much bigger on the inside (and the outside, for that matter), but I grabbed a corner booth and allowed me to Facebook like crazy in peace, the swarms of flies notwithstanding.
Up next, a Saturday spent in Kirksville sleeping late, revisiting JavaCo, and exploring the town square, which has undergone some changes of its own. |
posted by N.T. @ 2:41 PM  |
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