Second show. These are actors actors and I’m still just loving being in their company and working alongside them.
After the show last night we all decanted to O’Rourkes, which is quite an open plan “Irish” bar in Eddy Street Commons, very close to our hotel. There we deprocessed adrenaline together. About halfway through the evening, a group of young American lads arrived and sat at the table next to us. They were very ostentatiously drunk. Drunk in a proud way. Very much wanting everyone to see how drunk they were. It was pitiful really. We are better at being drunk in Europe, I think. They felt like idiots. But they gave Sam and I and Cate an experience that honestly will stick with us all, to us all, for a long long time.
Almost immediately upon arrival, one of them dropped a fart right by our table.
Reader, this was not any ordinary fart. This fart had a name. It hit me in a wave from left to right, and it spoke to me as it passed into my presence, in foul forgotten ancient tongues. It growled into our noses, telling of rot and death, the decay of plague pits, the miasma of abominated civilisations galaxies away.
This little preppy baseball capped fucker full of lager and meat and very possibly coke by the look of him, dropping a bomb for us. I had to move until it went. 24 hours later and Sam says “Do you remember that fart?” and we had to share memories once more, like trauma victims in counselling. This is America. Ugh.
I’m in my hotel room, but I might go out and find a bite as I couldn’t eat before the show. I’ve got a slow morning tomorrow thank the lord. I want a lie in. My body needs to process that primal poison. And the adrenaline of the shows and the bone tiredness that this extreme cold can inflict.
Even the salads are full of cream and sugar. Likely I’ll end up with something terrible and quick, almost certainly involving chicken, nary a vegetable in sight. I saw a couple of flecks of courgette in my tortellini sauce at lunch, but they really aren’t at home to mister vegetable here. Hence that godawful stench I suppose. I am still in my outside clothes. It is an effort going out into that but I’m used to making it. I’m always happy with the audiences – they have filled the theatre twice running, giving us plenty of folk to talk to, and to share this story with. Apparently Arkansas has had snow too, but unlike here they haven’t the mechanisms to cope. Let’s see how that goes next week…
AlBarclay 