| 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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| a saturday spent in Kirksville |
| Sunday, August 9, 2009 |
On Saturday, I slept way later than I had intended; I had had a stressful few days and I was absolutely worn out, so it did me quite a bit of good to get the extra sleep. However, 12:40 in the afternoon is a bit late even by my standards, so I got up and around just as fast as I could so as not to spend the bulk of the day shut up in a hotel room.
First I went up to the JavaCo and blogged from there. Around 4:15 or so, I got antsy and thought I'd better start making the rounds if I was going to take advantage of the day. I secured the electronics in my trunk, grabbed my camera, and took a walk around the square (you can see plenty of those photos on Facebook as well). With Samantha's help, I managed to find Stone Creations, the hometown-type craft store at which I've found a number of Kirksville souvenirs, including the "Best Of" and "Friends" key chains I made for Rachael and myself. Only it wasn't Stone Creations anymore, it's now a place called Tranquil Seasons... and they were closed. They closed at 4:00, people... on a Saturday afternoon.
A store on the town square in a college town closes at 4:00 on a Saturday afternoon. They were closed altogether on Sundays and Mondays, so there would be no chance of getting in and seeing the place, maybe grabbing a souvenir for old time's sake. That was another thing I noticed whilst I was there last weekend: very early closing times, and many businesses that were closed altogether on Sundays (with the occasional Monday). Hell, some of the pubs up that direction even closed by 10:00 or 11:00 p.m., and I have to think a lot of that has to do with summer hours and the student population being nearly non-existent this time of year. I just can't imagine them keeping those hours when the town is full of college kids, especially the bars.
From there, I made the rounds: Toons (now called Wrongdaddy's, and which was also closed until the end of the month, presumably geared toward the students' return); the Wooden Nickel, Too Talls' Two, Sarah and Rachael's old house on W. Hildreth, which had received a makeover in the form of some new siding and possibly new windows as well; and the new eight-screen movie theater on the square -- "new" to me because I'd only been there once, and that was in 2002.
Once dusk arrived, I wondered just what exactly I was going to do with myself. The original plan, of course, had been to catch the summer play, but it had closed the night before, and I wouldn't have been able to get to Kirksville in time to see it (I'm not even off work until 6:30, and the play had an 8:00 start time). Toons was closed for another three weeks; the JavaCo closed at 7:00, which meant I couldn't hang out in there all night, much as I might like; and the grease at Pancake City tends to go a long way. So I sucked it up and did the unthinkable on a trip like this: I went to see a movie.
Funny People was the only thing playing that I hadn't seen and had any interest in at all, and honestly, my interest in it wasn't that great. But I went to see it, sans AMC discount, sans the know-how I'm used to at the old theater I used to work at... and it was a phenomenal movie. I found myself glad, as it progressed, that it appeared to have a really long running time, because the emotion of the weekend was starting to get to me, and this was a really nice escape. Turns out the film has a two hour and thirty-five minute running time, which is looooooong for a comedy, but it worked really well, and if I'd written it up on Movie-Popcorn in any kind of timely manner, I would have given it an A-.
It was just past eleven when I got out, so I headed back to campus for a late-night visit. This time, I was able to camp out in the Sunken Gardens for a while, now that the wedding was long over and I didn't have to compete with anyone in that respect. Let me tell you... I had almost forgotten what the ambiance was like in that place at night. Every insect in the world is calling your name, the breeze whispers to you through the trees like an old friend, and a kind of peace completely envelopes you, one that I remember from my college days but that I thought was long lost to me as an adult. The time I spent on the quad and in the Gardens that night proved to me that you can go home again, and when you get there, you may just find that that's where your heart has really been all this time.
Next up, my last day in Kirksville, and why I was so antsy to get on the road already. |
posted by N.T. @ 1:12 PM  |
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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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| weekend thus far |
| Sunday, August 2, 2009 |
So I'm back at my favorite JavaCo in Kirksville this early afternoon after a couple of hours on campus taking photos and reliving some last-minute memories even though the buildings are supposed to be closed and locked down (more on that later) and there is absolutely no one on campus that I can see. It's been fantastic having the Netbook along on the trip, but it's been much more tedious to edit/resize photos on it than I anticipated, so I haven't gotten a whole lot of that done so far. I've uploaded a couple to Facebook so far, but I haven't published the album yet; I'll do that once I'm home and have gotten everything right where I want it, captions included.
I'll also have a full rundown of the entire weekend coming soon, tonight or tomorrow night. It's been quiet, relaxing, and very, very tranquil, but it has not been without its share of emotion, and that goes beyond the extensive trip down memory lane I expected and into the realm of such excitement as my doubtlessly illegal entry into campus buildings and my failed attempt to gift myself with a school flag I saw flying on campus. Again, full stories on the way, all. :)
Although it has been a trip down the aforementioned memory lane, one thing it has not been is a trip back in time, as my friend Briana suggested. Everywhere I looked, I was reminded that it is not 1999 anymore. For starters, The Shack, aka The Love Shack, aka Mathilda's Love Shack, was the very center of the Theatre People's social universe when I was at Truman, and it was torn down, along with that entire row of houses, sometime around 2002-2003, as I remember. It turns out I have been to Kirksville since Rachael graduated, it was to make one or two random deliveries for the Red Cross, but they weren't meaningful visits; it was during one of those trips that I stopped by campus and found The Shack to be missing, as in not there anymore.
And since that was Landmark #1 on my memory playlist, the new Ruth Town Museum and Visitor's Center that now stands in its place was a constant reminder, all weekend, of how things can and do change over time.
Likewise, Missouri Hall? Where I lived every semester I was at Truman? Has this horrendous glass foyer tacked onto the main entrance that appears, from the outside, to be nothing more than a student lounge with red plush furniture and little else; the building was locked, and this one, I couldn't get into. :)
The Baldwin Little Theatre, where we performed The Foreigner and which had hosted countless other plays before and since, is now, for all purposes, a classroom. I managed to get inside on Friday night, less than an hour after I'd arrived in town, and you can imagine my shock when I saw that all the windows that had been painted over and covered had been cleared; the stage itself had been boarded up and sealed, as had the sound and light booths in the back of the theatre. Apparently the new James G. Severns Theatre, which was under construction when I graduated, negates the need for our historic Little Theatre, at least in the eyes of the bean counters that run the place. With time comes improvements, and with improvements come change. We know this.
This building just plain wasn't there when I was a student. I have no idea what it is:
Toons is now called Wrongdaddy's, Stone Creations is now Tranquil Seasons, the Wal-Mart is now a massive supercenter... but one thing that has not changed much is the Washington Street Java Company, of which I am the lone customer at the moment. They close at 5:00 today, and I had planned to blog and post photos until they kicked me out, but I may just head out of town a couple of hours earlier than that so I can get home and knock out a bit of laundry for tomorrow. I don't relish the thought of getting back to my life, no offense to anyone, but getting home after dark won't accomplish anything.
So until then, I will bid you all adieu, and I promise that over the next couple of days I will have many more stories and photos for those of you so interested. As a final thought for the time being... I know I've said my next visit to Kirksville could be a very, very long time from now, but I was wrong. I don't plan on waiting another seven years before I see the place again. I hope to get up here once every summer until Life no longer allows it... and maybe even after that as well.
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| posted by N.T. @ 12:30 PM |
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| ten years hence |
| Saturday, August 1, 2009 |
First things first, I suppose.
I'm coming you to live from the Washington Street Java Company, probably the most well-known hang-out in Kirksville. You wouldn't know it in the summer, apparently; it's 3:22 on a Saturday afternoon as I sit here typing, and there are three other visible customers seated and two standing at the counter. A girl in a yellow headband and braces just served me a roast beef and colby cheese sandwich with tomatoes and sliced cucumber, a side of carrot sticks, and a bag of BAKED! Lays original. While she was at it, she charged me $1.35 for a can of Coke, and I have, officially, seen everything.
I'm sitting in the front window.
This was always where Sarah, Rachael, and I sat when we came here, which wasn't often; we only came here together a few times. As I remember, they were all after I graduated, the last one was during the winter months, and I remember thinking it strange that they would want to sit so close to a frosty outside-facing window. Now, seeing it open in the middle of the summertime, I couldn't resist taking our old seat. I might move when I need to plug the Netbook in, but it tells me we have nearly three hours of juice left, and JavaCo's summer hours flyer says they close at 7:00. I'll have to find Stone Creations before then anyway.
There is a rubber tree on my right that's probably older than I am.
It's so strange, but not, when you think about it, that I never spent much time here when I was a student at the University. I never really had any money, to begin with, nor did I have a laptop with which to occupy myself as I not buying coffee -- which I don't really drink. Come to think of it, with all that and Coke running upwards of a dollar per 12-ounce can, it's really no wonder at all I never hung out here in college, is it? :)
JavaCo, to me, is a place to relax. I see people working on their laptops, studying for who knows what, since even the summer blocks are over with for now. But since I see it as a place to relax, it's especially strange, but not, when you think about it, that I never really came here much as a student. For one thing, I was never relaxed when I went to Truman, and that's particularly true of my first year here, so of all the times in my life, that was when I could really have used a place to retreat to. But I was a depressed, anxiety-ridden mess, and I really couldn't afford to relax, or things around me would have fallen apart even more than they already had. That was 1997. When I came back in 1999, I was in much better shape emotionally, but I was completely engrossed in the theatre scene, working on shows, hoping to get cast, etc. Students' lives here are very campus-centric, and since I still didn't have money or a laptop, it just wasn't a place I gravitated toward to unwind or share in a bit of literary wisdom or witticism, as I hear the people around me doing now.
And by the by, business has picked up quite a bit since I sat down. I'm counting around twenty other characters in here, almost none of them the same as when I first arrived. Good to see.
I took nearly fifty photos on campus this morning, but there was actual wedding planning going on in the sunken gardens at the time, so I didn't get any shots of it today. I'll have to come back tomorrow once everyone's married off and cleared out. I'm off now to take some pictures of the square, find Stone Creations, if it still exists (I'm reading that it might not), and let me tell you... Samantha is coming in more handy than I imagined she would this weekend. I am floored by how much I don't remember, in terms of where things are and now to get there. I've been away far, far too long. I can't do that again.
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| posted by N.T. @ 3:16 PM |
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