AlBarclay

Oh Enterprise. They’re a big company and it isn’t right for me to say anything too bad about them, so I’m going to hold back and be kind and just say that getting a car from Enterprise Rent a Car is like finding a steaming pile of septic dogshit on your pillow after a long day.

Travel Day! And I’m Captain Travel!

People largely did well at hiding the fact they were stressed this morning when we headed off in plenty of time. Check in was fine, flight was fine, security was fine. If we hadn’t had a string of idiots at Enterprise we would have been fine all the way. But oh boy they showed up for us. It’s all too mundane to go into detail. It really is just pencil pushers who can’t push pencils, over and over and over. The company specialises in being at obstructive as humanly possible while still smiling. We had loads of cars out in Paris for the Olympics, quite a few of them in different bad spellings of my name. They were company rentals, not driven by me, I just collected them. Every month I get a tree of letters from them about whatever fines the drivers accumulated. It wasn’t my credit card, it wasn’t my rental, I just picked up the car, but they like sending me these stupid letters in French that are nothing to do with me.

We eventually got a competent human when the other guy went on his lunch. Now we have two cars, and they are gonna be tricky to park while we are here but we have them. Tomorrow I’m up at 6 to move them both into exorbitant valet parking. I could do it tonight, but it would cost the university an extra £140 and I’m not gonna do that to them for the sake of an hour or two of sleep.

I’m happy I have done Austin though. I’ve spent three weeks of my life here, that’s not much in the scheme of things, but I’m not gonna get FOMO knowing that they’ve all gone to an open mic night tonight and I went home to write to you all and pass out in my well appointed hotel room.

It’s hot in Texas. So the air conditioning is blowing cold. I’ve got good at switching that shit off fast now. How the heck everyone in this nation lives with that destructive bollocks is impossible for me to countenance. We kill the world to make the air processed. Unprocessed air is not fit for consumption? We aren’t burning anything like the amount of fossil we did when I was a kid. The wind blows over the prairies. This air processing lark is just hubris, an excuse to spend money. And if you multiply it by every hotel room and household in America and many other countries, it is probably one of the most destructive unnecessary details in the history of the planet so far.

We have two decent whips now at least. We don’t really need them in this city but having the option is good.

Tomorrow I’ll be hitting work running, straight into workshops. No show tomorrow though so I can stay up late tomorrow night perhaps. But I’m still on recharge and the travel day was costly. Onwards.

Today I just decided to stop.

It was raining. Pouring with rain. By the time I got up.

Grace had gone to DC to see the sights. The others had a hike and brewery type day planned, followed by a fun bar with games. They were leaving early to beat the rain. I was staying in bed.

I got up at half eleven. Closer to noon. The entire morning was spent reading in bed. I only left because I was hungry. Mangia Cucina Italiana let me do the Valentines Meal for one. Polpette and Saltimbocca, then Tiramisu. It’s a good kitchen, the portions are American. I didn’t need anything else to eat all day. And it meant I could stay here in in Winchester.

The rain demotivated me from any exploration plans I might have been harbouring. So I sorted out my bits and bobs instead. Checked everyone in for their flight. Paid for the extra luggage. Had a power nap.

I need days like this. It was great. I’ve barely spoken to a single soul. I didn’t want to have to.

Case is fully packed again. I’m ready to go to the last leg of this adventure – Austin. I’m gonna need to get some work pronto when I get back as theatre rarely pays for itself, my life expenses have been punishing lately. It’s great to be employed doing what I set out to do. I’ve had a ball so far and there’s still time left to revel in this, but the end is rolling down the track towards me and life will continue to be expensive when this stops paying me.

I’m gonna mix it up by sleeping on the other side of the bed this time. Rock and roll.

First a good long shower, a moisturise and a sleepy drink – I’ve been ekeing out a bottle, and want to definitely have some for the plane back to England as I’m planning to try and sleep most of the way back. But there’s enough for easy sleep tonight and a couple in Texas if needed.

I’m doing the laundry. Dunno why I volunteered for that but I did. Three people’s worth of stuff all mixed up. Rolling round and round and it is half one in the morning. We had two shows today.

This morning Benjy and I went to Bonny Blue for brunch. One of the professors I worked with recently had the surname “Trump”. “I don’t know if I’m ever gonna escape the association,” they said. I thought of friends of mine called Saville and felt bad for them, cos this one hasn’t even exploded yet.

Bonnie Blue is a breakfast restaurant in Virginia. There are other associations with the name. We went there with a limited amount of time. The waiter tried to make us go round the corner for some reason even though there were seats right in front of us. Accent? Still, we got sat down. We sat down in Bonny Blue.

Pulled pork? Smashed avocado? It was just Benjy and I and we were in a rush. We got crabs from Bonnie Blue.

Crab Benedict. And it was glorious. I was glad of it. Gave me the energy I needed to push through a two show day.

So much acting, and two very different audiences. The matinee there was one schoolboy, no lover but his parents – (under 30 people who look like they like each other), no soldier at all… Literally nobody bearded between the age of 30 and 50. I had to choose some good ole boy. I’m the Justice. They were all the pantaloon, with some very much pushing towards oblivion.

Just in case I’m being too obscure, I’m always checking out the audience working out who to direct the lines of the famousest monologue towards. All the world’s a stage. Often I hear people mumbling along to it like I’m doing karaoke Shakespeare.

Evening show we had one wing of the thrust eaten up by enthusiastic students. The reception was electric. We had to discipline ourselves not to showboat and to include the other two wings. At one point in a song I dropped my kazoo, character styled it and got a cheer for it and Grace quite rightly said “Don’t encourage him” to them. Moments later I told them they were fools in a circle. Bless them, they all stood up at the end. This is definitely a great way to experience a wonderful play. But clearly the good people of Winchester are starved of high quality culture. Nice to be able to bring it. This company and method is a well oiled machine now. Decades of sending out shows like this. I’m loving being part of one again. It is impossible not to enjoy it when I watch the ones I’m not involved in.

I’m still doing laundry. I got into a long long chat with Sharon at the front desk about the state of the union. And then I had to put everything in to tumble dry again. It’s fucking half past two. I will not be going for a hike tomorrow. 😦

Midnight. I just walked back from the grill down the road where they were serving fishy Friday fish and chips. I gorged myself post show. Everything always comes with something else. You can’t just order and switch off, there are millions of questions. You get two sides with that. If you do x then y. Ok you’ve chosen this side so that comes with three options. Ok option three has a branching list of 24 different choices with sub menus, we have to bring you out an extra menu to show you what you can have.

We had a lovely show tonight. A fun audience. Woke them up. Kids in the front row. It is always good to win them when they are that young, and we won them. There’s enough slide between the stuff we do for money and the stuff they do to make friends, if they can get beyond the hard language we use they can get into the playfulness. We get a lot of lovely bright comments about our physicality in this show, and truth be told I’m proud of it – the distinctions are really clear between characters.

This is a glorious group. I absolutely adore being part of it. Every night we try to grow the show, nobody is territorial or ossified, we rehearse in snatches to play ideas, we tweak moments in prep and also in live execution. It feels bright but we can be dicks to each other onstage when needed which is important too. I am sad this is the shortest tour I’ve ever done with them, just cos I love the work, I love the whole business of it – it is so busy, having to do everything. My next job will feel like a holiday in comparison but this has been bright bright life experience. The extreme cold. The work. The unusual small towns. The good people in and around the company.

I’ll get back to the uk just in time for spring. Who knows what will come. I’m hoping for a self tape before we land. I need to keep momentum going…

We got up early and drove out to Harper’s Ferry. Joanna is big into her history and knows the blow by blow of the civil war in this nation. We followed behind. Here was the Confederate Armoury. John Brown, the great abolitionist fighter, made a daring optimistic plan. Raid the armory, give all the guns to the slaves and tell them they’re free, instant army.

It didn’t work like he planned, because people don’t have context on themselves. He could see that they were oppressed. They just saw some guys in stupid hats blowing shit up in the town they were slaves in. There are big monuments made by the confederacy to various slaves that fought off the unionists that day.

It’s a pretty town, pretty much the mid point on the Appalachian Trail, from Maine to Georgia. I’ve been aware of that trail a long time. It’s low on my list compared to Shikoku and other iterations of Camino, but that’s largely down to where it is. There’s all sorts of bullshit American hikers romanticising their walk. It takes six months to do the whole thing, so I get the impetus. But the only God on that trail is nature so often the people I read who write about it think they are the God. I prefer a walk with external spirits, be they kami or holy. If I were to walk the whole trail I would likely adopt some animistic rituals to keep me honest. Likely I’d bring some shinto. There are some hilarious posts on Camino groups by idiot Catholics horrified about cairns. We really need as a species to get more private with our pretendy things. But they become pretendy clubs with exclusive entry. YOU CAN’T JOIN UNLESS YOU BELIEVE THE WORLD IS A CARROT! YOU CAN’T JOIN UNLESS YOU THINK JESUS WAS THE SON OF THE DIVINE! YOU CAN’T JOIN UNLESS YOU THINK ONIONS ARE ACTUALLY EVIL ROCKS! We can play this crap forever and we will and everyone who ever dies expecting something is thankfully going to be too dead to register their disappointment.

We walked a tiny sliver of the trail, technically from West Virginia to Maryland. Which involves looking at a rock and then walking over a bridge.

Then to Antietam. A killing field. The wind was up, this is a battlefield, it was punishingly cold. We covered it though. As with many American monuments, it is a driving route with stops. Makes it easier for the people who have eaten too much sugar. It was preluded by an excellent video, that helped us understand the slaughter that took place there, right when warfare was changing. Like the charge of the light brigade, like much of the first world war, generals marching soldiers into guns. Here’s the cornfield where loads of people got slaughtered. Here’s the sunken road where loads of people got slaughtered. Here’s the bridge where loads of people got slaughtered.

The emancipation proclamation was spurred on by this horrendous battle. The whole civil war was really just about slave ownership. It’s good it went the way it did. We are going backwards again in terms of thought.

A big wooden house out in the boonies, somewhere between Winchester and the Appalachians. The five of us drive up and park. We enter through the garage.

“This house was bought with Microsoft money”. Plugs hang out the walls now, and there are pictures up to cover holes. Two big beige leather sofas, big leather armchairs. A counter stacked with cheese and biscuits. Everywhere you look, instruments. And most of them are being played.

Ten players. Average age 75 I reckon. Mountain men and women, schoolteachers, farmers, all sorts. Vicky on the bass with her big grey curls. Two old boys on slide guitar, strange picks and devices attached to their fingers. Banjos and mandolins. Two fiddles. The bass is the only instrument that is amped. Vicky is holding it all together. Bluegrass night.

These guys meet weekly and jam. Different iterations of the same group. No pretentions here. Dinky plinky dinky plink. Dong diggy dong diggy ding dong. It is all I can do not to cross my eyes and shout “YEE-HAW” between songs.

The five of us sit politely round the edges. We are too shy to sing along even if we know some of them. The key is either too low or too high for our comfort voices even when we know them. This is by design. “Cold winters, and nobody knows how to sing well so it’s all written in screech so people make noise,” Vicky tells me later. I am in awe of Vicky.

“I get the sense a lot of them have never left Virginia,” says someone on the way home. That’s likely true of some, but these people have this life and it looks like it has been comfortable, but life is bendy as fuck and the illusion of peaceful serenity is best maintained by people who have got bored of screaming.

With their tattoos and their art, arthritic fingers picking as fast as they could, honest voices raised in a little beige room in Virginia full of cheese and actors. There’s a tiny dog that stands in front of the bass amplifier because he likes the vibrations. He’s called Tybalt. King of cats. This little tiny hairy pudding. One of the most ridiculous dogs I’ve ever met. Quiet and tiny, all hair and tongue. “What breed is he?” “Nobody knows, he’s a rescue.” Gotta be at least ten percent chipmunk. We were welcome but we didn’t know the songs, mostly. I sung quiet low harmonies on some of the more predictable ones, and when they sang “In the pines” it took me by surprise as it was only known to me as part of Kurt Cobains fantastically painful unplugged set for MTV just before he proved he was lying when he swore he didn’t have a gun. I could hear him screaming it in my imagination. Wouldn’t have been the vibe although Vicky would have rolled with it if one of us had come up with it. But it wasn’t our night. That’ll be tomorrow when we do the first of four sold out shows to these good people.

It was an insight though, being there, intersecting with these lives. “We moved to where we are now because my husband wanted to be able to kill deer in his slippers,” says one lady. “Problem is that now he could kill deer in his slippers if he wanted to, because they come to our bird table, they live in our garden. We put things out for them. They’re family. Can’t kill family.”

America …

I’m still making sense of this state. Arkansas was easier to get hold of, Virginia seems more spread out. A busy week won’t be enough. Even though we are being incredibly organised with our spare time, almost militarily so.

Winchester Virginia changed hands 70 times in the civil war. The accessible version of history of this area is tangled up in the recent squabbles of the colonisers. You will usually get half a sentence about the true history, and then a load of noise. “The Burgernurga valley was significant to the native Americans, and then Murduck Bumgitt opened his goat farm here in 17xx.”

There was a lot of death in this town though. The confederacy, the unionists, going round and round. We went into the town hall and it was a slaughterhouse. What the fuck would the world look like if the confederacy had won? It seems the current president is keen to find out, as he dismantles all the things that made this country great in our lifetime, all in the name of making it “great again”. Aka plunging it back into the anarchy that this town is a warning about.

The staggering arrogance of unexamined wealth and power. What an absolute twit.

But here I am and it isn’t as bad as it looks in the media, on the ground here. We haven’t had much bullshit. I did karaoke and built a “fuck ice” into my song twice and nobody shot me. The majority of people are reasonable, but yes there is an untrained self elected militia here controlled by a child who has never grown up. There’s a cancer at the heart of this once great nation. I’m terms of international standing, it might recover, it might not. It depends how the eventual collapse is handled, and who takes the public eye in the aftermath. It’ll need to be a strong hand that can negotiate all the “left” “right” poison that is being propagated by those who want things to continue to be just as they are now for their own financial concerns.

The “left” is allegedly weak and stupid and doesn’t realise how we are under attack from nebulous agents controlled by unfamiliar religions or slightly alien worldviews. The “right” is allegedly cruel and selfish and can’t understand that most people aren’t as acquisitive as they are personally – the only people we need to be protected from is the right because they will take everything for fear that someone else will if they don’t. These are the polarities.

Going to these civil war museums, I can really feel how people got behind their polarised worldviews. The slave owners desperately needed an ascendant worldview that allowed some people to be merely property. The unionist held truths to be self evident that all men are equal. Hundreds of thousands of people died right here in Washington for this ideal. 20000 casualties in one day just down the road from here at Antietam – the single worst day of American warfare.

This nation self determined as champions of equality after a dalek-like systematic extermination of the mostly welcoming indigenous population. And then they fought for equality and won, abolished slavery, became an almost laughable self styled world police. And now… this fuckery. A deluded fool shouting and millions of people echoing his shouts.

It’s not as bad on the ground as it seems in the media, but there’s something rotten in the state of America.

Travel day today. Somehow right at the start everyone had already worked themselves into a tizzy. It was perplexing. We had ages and everything was definitely going to be fine, but you can see when people’s breath is high – there’s not much you can do to calm it but be compassionate so I did that as best I could even though it was much ado about nothing. Thankfully it was just Benjy and me in one car to the airport. “Is it me or is everyone else really highly strung this morning?” “This is the relaxed car mate. It’s fine. Let’s just have a nice drive.”

I didn’t want to return the cars unfilled as Hertz charges $7 a gallon to the rental, where we could have got 3 bucks easy and been refunded. Better to fill them up and send a receipt surely, I argued, but it is in the contract that we can send them back full, and spending somebody else’s money is better than doing ten minutes extra driving, apparently.

I drive so constantly and instinctively that I forget that most people think of driving as a separate thing from, like, walking. Finding unfamiliar parking, leaving an airport, going to a petrol station. It isn’t a big thing in my imagination at all, but I know from Lou learning that dad taught me to drive when I was ten so it never really wasn’t instinctive. It’s just another way of impelling myself in a direction. Like skiing. I once tried to teach a girlfriend skiing. I realised I couldn’t remember learning it, so I had no idea how to teach it to an adult. I was bombing around the pistes aged 4 like those little kids in crash helmets these days. Just it was the seventies so the crash helmet was my head.

Things calmed down gradually as it was clear that none of the imaginary monsters, whatever they were called, were biting. We all made it to Winchester no trouble as we would have done just as easily if nobody had been stressing out. Long fucking day though. Chicago first, then change, then Washington DC, then get the rental cars and drive baby drive. But here we are.

We all got here in the dark, to Winchester Virginia, to another Hamptons by Hilton. We went to 50/50 for a burger and now it’s early bed. Got my first class tomorrow. And yeah I’m tired, cos I did have to concentrate and make sure everything was fine, and the stress dissipated gradually, I think people were just timing it like it was an international flight, not a domestic. Annoying though.

“Two hours and ten minutes and we are not halfway through yet.”

“It’s not sport really is it?”

“It’s capitalism.”

Pageantry. Adverts. More pageantry. More adverts. Lots of big men run at one another. Adverts. Celebrities. Adverts. Celebrities. Someone kicks a ball.

SUPERBOWL

We are in a Mexican restaurant.

I just had quesadillas. The big boys are playing the big game bigly. We are supporting the Seahawks arbitrarily. I’ve had a load of college footballers in my classes this week. I throw balls in the warm-up. Theatre and sports align very well, and these big enthusiastic boys do very well with a bit of Shakespeare text. They are used to getting stuck in.

I borrowed a book from one of my teachers here, Hal Cosentino. He is a published playwright, writing trans plays, and he had a methuen anthology where his play “Oh Buddy” has been published. I read it this afternoon and it is remarkable, really vital, playful but with edge. These tours we align with so many fascinating characters. It really is a treat to come to these places. When will I ever be in Arkansas again?

Which is why we went up to Petit Jean state park. We walked to the creek. We saw waterfalls. We laughed and breathed with trees and it was good, all five of us. We do things together when we can and it is a truly bonded company now, five brainy geeky actors running around small town America. My only sadness is that this is such a short tour, but that’s the environment at the moment.

Tomorrow we fly. I have to pack. Seth the fireman just showed up at the restaurant where we are watching the advertmatch and gave us each a fire department challenge coin! Now I’ve got 3! Air force, navy and fire department. I like the tradition and they all end up on my altar.

I’m gonna go back to my hotel room and pack, then get an early bed. I might leave the advertbowl on as I pack.

So much fucking AI in these shoddy adverts. I hope we are at peak AI now, as the servers burn the planet so idiots can rehash everything from aggregated stolen creativity language and identity. It all looks like shit anyway.

Post show karaoke. Unexpected, but there are some proper musical theatre extrovert types in this company, and Sam.

Sam kicked it off a few days ago with Sweet Caroline in White Water Tavern in Little Rock. That is a glorious place covered in graffiti and absolutely unpretentious. We met some people there.

“There were some kids who had never been to theatre before,” said Antonio, the guy who brought us in and raised the funding. “I didn’t think they were coming back for the second half, cos they all went to the parking lot and got completely stoned. But they came back! I spoke to them. They’ve never seen anything before.” “Yeah, they were our friends…” That was Elana. She played pool with us, then sang karaoke after Sam did Sweet Caroline. She was absolutely tiny, probably just 21, we literally just told her what we were doing and then she showed up mob handed to a Shakespeare play and stayed.

Antonio was generally pleased about us bringing in our weird audience members. “They stayed, and then they asked what else we have on,” he beamed.

The lady from the car hire in Little Rock, came with her mum and her friends too! She was bemused but happy. It’s a good show and as it should, it connects us to the audience.

After the show we went into town.

“I like you guys cus you clearly don’t fit in around here,” said Brad tonight as his opener. This was before anyone sang karaoke. We are just in the only good pub in Conway. JJ’s. Brad is depressed. He moved back here from Cali. His dad died. Now he lives where his dad lived. It is entirely on him to get over his shit but right now he hates his life. I wonder the extent to which we all get into these expectation tangles.

I’m just here now. I kinda had to sing a karaoke really so I did Johnny Cash covering U2 One. I can talk that mostly so

Now I’m writing at the bar while everyone goes about the things.

We had a matinee today and that was that. We are now all packed up and good to go. Lovely to see the guys off who have helped us in the theatre. It’s a brilliant college, Hendrix, with a really tight team running the training at the moment. I’m hopeful that I’ll come across people here in the greater industry. It is a frequent thing for me to meet a young American in the UK who might be at Stage Door and tell me the college we met at, and I will always remember them exactly. Some are friends on social media. None are given this link, which I’ve realised I basically never share to anyone. I think that’s ok. I’m not writing for you, darling. And it isn’t monetised so it means nothing if you read it or not. One of my friends who thinks all the things keeps apologising for unsubscribing and I literally couldn’t give a fuck. I still love them. My love is not conditional on you reading these ramblings or even knowing they exist.

That said, there are some of you who I know about and I love you for it, because life is hard. Support is a powerful thing, and even basic interest somehow implies support. So yeah – In the tone of all the instawankers: I’m so very very glad of you all. At least I’m not shouting into a void. When I’m shouting.

Right now I’m just happy to find so much liberal art in Arkansas…