Panto

What could be more Christmas-in-London than going to a panto? As it looked increasingly certain that I'd be here for the holiday, I made a list of things I wanted to do. One was to get out of town on Boxing Day to go to a mummer's play or some other quintessentially British thing. That one I'll forgo for the trip home! But the thing I wanted to make sure I did was go to a pantomime. And so, last night, still assuming I'd be here, I went to what I thought would be the first of a few pantos. At least I got to one. And what an experience it was.

The show was "Aladdin" at the Hackney Empire theater. The posters show Clive Rowe, a huge black man and one of the grandest of the panto "dames," dressed as a woman with very pink cheeks, very red lipstick, and a wig that looks like a cross between Pippi Longstocking and Diana Ross. I'd never been to a panto before, but that gave me some idea of what the tone of things would be. But by the time a few minutes had passed, I could see it was going to be so much more raucous than I had expected.

The show started with a singing camel and the audience of kids and adults calling back to her. Then the villain came on to a great chorus of boos, which he only egged on. What fun it must be to grow up as a kid in London and go to these shows at Christmas! It was all very bright colors, broad humor, bad puns, great singing and dancing, cross-dressing, quick pacing (I'm learning so much about how comedy is all about rhythm), and great good fun. The show went on for three hours. Part old-style Broadway musical, part vaudeville, part fairy tale, part mellerdrammer, and quite a spectacle.

I wish we had this tradition in the US. For a taste of panto and the panto dame see this BBC piece. Unfortunately it doesn't capture at all how great an entertainer Clive Rowe is. See him sometime if you can.

Minneapolis or bust

The mail came today. No passport. I sent Robin the sad news by email.

30 minutes later, the doorbell rings. Special delivery for Eric Nelson. My passport!

I won't be able to get back into the UK without a new ID card, but it's supposed to come in the post in the next 7 days. So I've arranged with a housemate to FedEx it to me at home. And I've booked a flight!

Robin tells me they're predicting 20 inches of snowfall in Minneapolis between now and tomorrow. Will this saga never end????

Couldn't get a direct flight, so I'm coming via Chicago. Here's hoping I make it all the way home.

... if only in my dreams ...

As in "I'll be home for Christmas..."

Passport didn't come on Saturday so I had to cancel my ticket to fly home today. There's still an outside chance that I'll make it, if my documents come in the next couple of days and if I can get a flight, but it's looking less and less likely.

Close encounters of the painful kind

In the past week or two I've had an increasing number of close calls while biking in London. For a while I've thought that an antipathy toward cyclists must be part of the cabbies' union code of conduct--they seem to love squeezing the curb so you can't get by--and you also find car and bus drivers who do the same thing. Twice within 10 minutes a week or so ago I almost got run off the road by van drivers, and once again earlier this week by an ambulance that wasn't in any apparent hurry to get anywhere. It can't be that I'm invisible. I wear one of those day-glo green cycling jackets or, in cold weather, an even brighter green vest with big reflective stripes on it, plus head and tail lights on the bike.

Then on Wednesday I got caught between another bike that wouldn't move over as I passed him and a tourbus that veered in my direction as it passed me. The bus and I bumped twice before I went ass over teakettle onto the asphalt. My bike fared better than I did, but we both got banged up. My elbow was the size of a baseball, but x-rays showed no broken bones. Now I'm just sore in the ribs and have a puffy, colorful forearm as the fluid from the elbow disperses. I was very lucky.

Still hoping for that luck to manifest itself in a passport in the post so I can come home for Christmas. Has to happen today or tomorrow.

Last night was our final presentations for the term. The Back to the Future platform piece went well. People tell me I was born to play Doc Brown. That part was a lot of fun. Lord of the Rings has come a long way and became quite complex, dark as well as comic. Dracula and Moses also were presented well--no, not in the same piece--as well as four commedia pieces, including "Mamasita Chocolate," a randy Latina piece featuring two hot-to-trot parents and their bratty little boy who keeps interrupting them, with a mixup of medicine bottles (dad's Viagra and the sleeping pills intended for the baby) as a complicating factor. Words cannot describe...

A friend commented that people from Latin cultures seem to have a special feel for commedia. Thinking back on it, of the pieces last night, the women in Mamasita (from Puerto Rico, Argentina, and Brazil) and a Portuguese lothario in another piece were among the stars of the genre in our class. Many English-speaking actors seemed to carry their characters in the head and shoulders and with a high voice, while those who found it better like the four above brought an earthier, more pelvic grounding. Surely it had something to do with who played more with themes of sexuality and libido and who played more with hatred and greed. Which may also be cultural markers.

Today we see the Initiation Course final projects and have our Christmas party, before adjourning to a pub, I'm sure.

Fingers crossed for good news in the post.

Waiting

No answer yet to the question whether I'll be home for Christmas. My visa application is still in the works and though I've asked for it to be expedited, I've received no answer from the UK Border Agency. I've tried all the angles here that Robin and I can think of, and she's tried working channels through Sen. Klobuchar's office back home, but to no avail. I have talked CheapTickets.com into giving me a partial refund on my ticket if needed, but that's small consolation. So now I have six days to receive two key pieces of mail from the UKBA (my passport and a newly issued ID Card for Foreign Nationals) or I have to cancel my ticket and stay here for the holidays.

On to more definite things... Tomorrow the last week of Term 1 begins. Thursday night we'll present the best-of pieces: some commedia, some platform. The platform piece I'm in is still in the running. The commedia piece I was in didn't make the first cut. Tomorrow we present the remaining pieces (4 platform, about 8 commedia) to the teachers one last time and then I assume we have yet another class meeting to decide what will be on the program. There are a few excellent pieces and several very good ones, judging from what we saw last Monday. But pieces can change quite a bit in a short period of time--and sometimes for the worse--so I look forward to seeing them one more time tomorrow.

I'll be more reflective at another time when I have more leisure--especially if I'm here for the holidays--but for now just one fun link that an American classmate sent around as we worked on our commedia pieces. Read it and weep, or laugh, or scratch your head. His comment: "If you love commedia and want to make a living sharing it with paying audiences, the public may not be ready for you..."

Isabel brings the sunshine

Isabel arrived this morning on her way to Portugal for about 5 days. And while the weather has been gray and or rainy for days and days (of the 8 times a year that TfL sys a cyclist will get caught in the rain, I've had 7 this month), today it's clear and sunny.

We're working in commedia del'arte style now. Generally I really like the earthiness of it--the characters are motivated by the most basic of desires--but I'm getting a bit tired of the self-centeredness that's coming to the fore at times in school. Maybe it's that people are taking commedia to heart. More likely perhaps is that it comes from an awareness that we only have so much time left here and people feel some urgency to get what they can out of the program. Admittedly some of my aggravation probably comes from my wishing it were easier for me to claim that for myself. They're not all the same thing, but there is some overlap between assertiveness, self-centeredness, and pettiness.

Another week gone already?

Closing in on the end of Week 3. Only four more in this term. This year is gonna fly.

Back to the Future is coming along, as are the other platform pieces. The teachers gave us one more week to work on them before setting them aside for a while. Meanwhile we've been playing with masks in class this week. We got some feedback on the ones we made, which we'll start to use next week, and have used some of the school's masks twice so far. One day it was leather commedia masks, another, wooden Korean masks.

It's remarkable how you have to tell a story differently when you wear a mask. Movement and language have to be used much more economically; messiness and rambling are laid bare. In a way, we're being asked to do two almost opposite things at the same time: keeping an openness to improvisation and creating on-the-spot while also moving and speaking only when and as it serves what we're making up in the moment. There's also a necessary moment-to-moment awareness of how to hold your head so the mask plays its best. And since these are half-masks, ending just below the nose, how you hold your mouth becomes part of the mask itself, so that too becomes essential and magnified. So much to be aware of without being so focused on it that it blocks your spontaneity. It's a tremendous discipline to develop, and just watching others struggle with it has been an education in itself.

One story we were to prepare for last week was that of the crucifixion of Christ. (A rather ballsy choice to assign in an intercultural school, I thought. Then again, it's probably as well known a story as any.) The storyteller was to tell it from the perspective of 3 to 5 characters (which could be completely made up), switching back and forth between them, speaking directly to the audience or the other characters they were also creating. This we did without masks. Then yesterday those who hadn't had a chance to go the week before were given the same task, but with the addition of using the Korean masks. Instead of quick-changing between characters as those of us who went the week before did, these storytellers were to pause between characters, turn around, take off one mask, put on another, change character, and then turn around again to continue the story in that character's body and voice. They weren't to hurry, but had to make sure the energy/tension/atmosphere/magic of the moment didn't drop. Whew!

When you can't use your facial expression, everything else becomes magnified. And the abstraction of the mask moves the whole thing into a fantastical (transposed) world, where the artifice of the whole thing is apparent but also has to enhance the experience. It's almost like alchemy. I'm learning a lot. Again.

I'm also having to set up appointments with the osteopath. Again. This 54-year-old back of mine has bedeviled me of late. Acrobatics, as you might guess, is going very slowly. Some days I just do the conditioning exercises and spend the rest of the hour and 45 minutes stretching while everyone else works on handstands, straddle ups, and all sorts of other moves I don't even know the names for. My accomplishment of a 2-second handstand this past summer will probably turn out to have been the high point of my acrobatics career. But I can live with that.

Isabel passes through town twice in the next two weeks. It'll be a joy to see her. And I hear that it's about time for Thanksgiving again, since one American friend is hosting a turkey dinner this Sunday and my house is having our own gathering the following weekend. Christmas decorations are up in London stores (though much less so than back home). But the weather here doesn't give much clue as to the season. Weak sunlight, trees slowly going bare without much color, rain as often as always, I suppose. Not every day, but the air's always damp.

Here's hoping Isabel gets through immigration without a hitch this time.

Back to the future

Two weeks in now. A lot of our work has been in trying to get a good start on the platform piece. The group I'm in is working with Back to the Future 1. Others are doing Nosferatu, The Princess Bride, Moses (part of the Book of Exodus), Star Wars (the original one); so you can see the variety. I hear that one group is doing the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy--with five people on a door-sized platform in about 10 minutes. This I gotta see. And this afternoon I get to. The pieces aren't expected to be in finished form yet. We'll come back to them as we learn other styles and skills.

You could say that what we're doing is learning different languages, different styles of storytelling that require different kinds of structure and movement. Each is probably best suited to particular kinds of stories. If we keep on schedule we begin with commedia dell'arte tomorrow. I've just made my first papier-mache mask. The masks don't have to be traditional commedia characters (which I know little about). Mine has a big nose, the suggestion of a curly mustache, and an arched eyebrow. He looks kind of like a Cyrano de Bergerac or a musketeer. We'll see how it plays.

Today we also get to see the Initiation Course (first year students) present for the first time. I'm really looking forward to this. Last year I enjoyed those times when the whole school gathered--there's no more appreciative an audience than people who know what it's like to struggle with what you're trying to do--and the second-years said how much they learned by watching us do the same thing they had a whirlwind trip through the year before. A bit like traveling back in time.

(Cue movie soundtrack: Huey Lewis and the News...)

They lied

Yet another wet one.

Guess I'll have to start wearing summat like wellies on me feet, now won't I?

Soaked to the bone again

And in one place the standing water was so deep my feet were pedaling underwater.

Two down, six to go--for the whole year? Or did they lie?

Soaked

They say ("they" being Transport for London) that if you bike year-round here, you'll only get caught in the rain eight times. I hope they're right, hard as it is to believe.

One down. Seven to go.

Off we go?

They say the postal strike is over, or at least on hiatus until after Christmas. But my visa application is still in transit to the processing center, 12 days after I mailed it. It took a month for my Oyster card (tube & bus pass) application to get across town, but only two days to get it back after they processed it, so who knows what my chances are of getting my passport back in time to travel home for Christmas. (The Home Office is not known for processing things quickly. It was their slowness that started this whole dragged out thing in the first place.) So the saga continues, silently and at a distance.

Meanwhile, classes have started. It's all structured very differently this year, with mostly shorter classes and often longer waits in between. Tuesdays are the worst for the group I happen to be in so far. First class: 12:30-1:30, second class doesn't begin till 4:15. Some of this is due to occasionally splitting us into 3 groups of about a dozen. Some of it in having one fewer classroom/rehearsal space. My class is also a lot smaller. We started with about 45 a year ago. Now, with the addition of 2 people we didn't have last year, we have 35. The smaller classes are good, but we're also getting only an hour to an our and a half each day with the main teachers, whereas we got 2-1/2 hours last year. And there are no voice classes this year since neither of the voice teachers came back. In its place we have a group-singing session.

One thing I knew would be different: Our improv/creation work is more specific this year, focusing on particular styles of theatre. We're doing platform dramas now--stories compressed into small spaces and time frames, with no costumes, no props, just 5-7 people on basically a table top and a lot of imagination. It's fun, and quite a challenge. Next we move onto commedia. We're making our masks now. Later some Greek chorus work and epic stories (melodrama). Then clown. Along the way there's some bouffon and grotesque. I'm not sure what all of this is yet.

We continue to have acrobatics, Alexander and Feldenkreis movement classes, and space lab, plus a course in "company development," which gets to a lot of the practicalities of starting and working in a small theatrical company. And a new course called Applied Techniques, in which we specifically build on skills we learned last year in a supplemental way to what we do in the other improv classes. We're also learning a traditional mime routine in one of the improv classes.

So in some ways it's tremendously busy, while in others we seem to have more time in our hands in between things. Our classes are also afternoons and evenings (which means that this time of year we don't even start till it's almost dark), plus Saturday creation times. Later in the year, classes end altogether and it's all individually designed projects for the final 10 weeks or so.

And so in we plunge.

Bottom of the ninth, man on third...

The score is tied...

Squeeze play...

And he gets the bunt down! Run scores!

Eric can stay in the UK legally past tomorrow. His application for a visa renewal is in the mail, just a day before his visa expires.

The crowd goes wild, as the runner collapses after crossing home plate.

This is going down to the wire

So I received the statements from my bank in Minneapolis via FedEx yesterday. And they were just photocopies. Which are explicitly disqualified from consideration by the UK Border Agency. So now I wait for yet another FedEx from the States which is supposed to get here by 12:30 tomorrow.

One thing about the postal strike here: The Royal Mail website tells you which parts of town will be affected on any given day. How very British. So there's no point in trying to mail off my application tomorrow afternoon from a collection point anywhere in my part of town, but Central London post offices are supposed to be functioning, though with longer lines, I'm sure.

I did get my bank here to provide me a letter stating my balance, so hopefully that will suffice to take the place of the statement that's stuck in transit by the strike.

Oh, and that possibility of hand delivering my application? The office isn't in London, as I'd assumed all along. It's in Durham, which is just a caber's toss from the Scottish border. So that's a no-go, too.

Hoping for smooth operations tomorrow. Else I have to leave the country on Saturday.

The visa blues

My visa expires in three days, and I still can't file for a new one. Hopefully tomorrow.

I've been surfing the anxiety wave for what seems like weeks now. I've read and reread pages and pages of regulations, filled out government forms (two kinds, since the UK re-did their forms in the midst of all of this), contracted with an agency in Chicago to help me negotiate an expedited passage through this (to no avail), burned through an international calling card, arranged for a trip to and stay in Chicago that won't come to pass and (the good side of this) been in touch with friends back home who were willing to help, gotten all geared up for a quick visit to home that's not gonna happen, and seen deadlines come and go while I waited for other information--deadlines that have required yet further waits for new documents because all my bank statements have to be no more than 30 days old. So now I sit at home in London waiting for a FedEx package which will bring me fresh bank statements from the US in the next few hours. And I hope for mail delivery today (there's an on-again, off-again postal strike here) and the arrival of the most recent statement from my bank here. After a long flirtation with plans to go to Chicago to get this all handled in a 48-hour period, I just found out night before last that that's a no-go. And last week I found out that there aren't any walk-in appointments to be had before my visa expires in all of England, Scotland, and Wales.

Once I finally receive these financial statements that are en route, I have until the end of the day Friday to post it or hand it in. And then I wait again, hoping that I get my passport and visa back in time to use that nonchangeable, nonrefundable ticket to come home for Christmas.

Oh, and school starts on Monday.

So that's my life for today. (Except that some mail just now arrived, but without a local bank statement. And so this stretches out for at least one more day. Out of a possible two.)

Distress, fresh air, inspiration

All along through this drawn-out school accreditation/certification process that had to be completed before I can even apply for a student-visa renewal, I've been comforted by the knowledge that I'm fine staying in the UK and starting classes so long as I can get my application in before the end of the month. That much is still true. Even when I found out that for some unexplained reason there'd been a week's delay in even telling me that the letter I needed from the school was available for me to pick up (the fact that I was apparently the only one whose letter wasn't mailed out notwithstanding), that was no more than an aggravation. What I hadn't figured on, however, was what I found out when I picked my letter up: there's a good chance I might not get my passport back from the Home Office until after Christmas, meaning I wouldn't be able to go home for the holidays. This is distressing.

So now I'm trying to figure out if I can avoid paying the nearly $1000 expediting fee to get the thing processed in person. Ouch.

More than ouch. Way more than ouch.

And to add to the whole thing I have to go back to school tomorrow to get the letter reissued because it says the school year I'm applying for an extension for ... ended in July 2009. There are other frustrations that this extra delay has set in motion, but I'm sure you get the point.

Anyway, since there was nothing more I could do about the application on Saturday, I took my bike on the train again and went to Essex for the day. Cold, windy, and hilly, but a tonic for my spirits. I stopped in a few towns with great names, like Saffron Walden (a few others I've been close to on my rides these last two Saturdays: Tiptoe, Sway, and Ugley), visited some very old churches and a windmill, walked a "turf maze" (what we'd call a labyrinth), got lost a few times, and finished the afternoon in a small town pub that seemed so far away from London as to have absolutely no need for the big city at all. I came back exhausted, with deadened legs, and in a much better mood.

Tonight a housemate and I went to the Barbican and saw a show called Raoul, by James Thiérrée. Amazing, inspiring, fascinating, magical, delightful--if you ever get the chance, catch his show. Londoners aren't prone to giving standing ovations, but he got a long and enthusiastic one. It seems unfair to identify somebody by their relation to somebody else (you know, like Jesus, son of God), but Thiérrée is Charlie Chaplin's grandson, and the show had that kind of lyrical, graceful, acrobatic quality to it. If Chaplin were creating theatre now, this might be the kind of thing he'd do. Thiérrée is an amazing physical performer, so fluid in his movements and endlessly inventive. He has a background in circus and acrobatics, which you can tell, but it's not a three-ring circus kind of thing at all. It's really hard to describe. You might call it Lispa to a sublime degree. Highly visual, imagistic, not dependent on language at all. He shook like a leaf, he flew, he became a horse, then an ape. He danced, he used music magically, he played with the audience. There were larger-than-life puppets--a fish, a crustacean, a fossilized bird, a jellyfish, an elephant. OK, that last one was only life-sized.

It was basically a one-man show, but he had an alter-ego (another actor) who briefly came and went and then became Thiérrée or back again. Usually you could see how they did it. Once, in apparently full view, he/they did it in a way that neither my housemate nor I could figure out. And then as a great comical counterpoint, there were times when a prop guy would come out (carrying a huge ladder for example) and Thiérrée would try futilely to hide him.

It really was a tour-de-force. And an inspiration for the coming year.

Gathering solitude like a squirrel gathers nuts

A beautiful season to be in London, made all the more precious by remembrance of how awful the winter is. As I bike around I keep thinking of how a former parishioner used to take walks in the rose garden at Lake Harriet this time of year, aware of the autumnal passing of time.

Just a few months ago it didn't get dark till after 10. A couple of weeks ago as I washed coffee cups at the end of my work day a little after 7 (a sign of the awesome responsibility I bear in my day job), I was looking out the window at a gorgeous sunset of deepening salmon, orange, blue, and purple behind the London Eye, which is kind of the luxury skybox of Ferris wheels. This past Monday around 6:30, I stood on the Millennium Bridge over the Thames (aka the Wobbly Bridge from the way it shook as people walked across it when it first opened) watching the last colors deepen.

I continue to spend a lot of time by myself, maybe storing up the solitude while I can before things finally launch in a few weeks: the solo bike ride in the New Forest last weekend, a mostly solitary birthday (haircut, reading the paper in Trafalgar Square, a stroll through the National Gallery, Evensong at St Pauls, dinner and the Millennium Bridge before meeting friends for a pub quiz in the evening). It's not that I'm antisocial (I enjoyed buying coffee for a stranger that morning), nor is it that I necessarily want to be alone, but there's something in me that's gravitating in that direction. It may be bad timing--more and more people are getting back into town now and it seems that there are more occasions for potlucks and parties--but the upside is that my solitary ways are giving me more room for reflection.

When I had coffee with Thomas a few weeks ago, the conversation turned at one point to what I might do after I finish here. I don't have anything specific in my sights yet, but I've been thinking I want to be involved in storytelling in some way. I've always been drawn to stories, certainly more than to doctrine, and he asked a great followup question: What kind of effect do you want to have on people? (And then yet another: And who are those people you want to have that effect on?) Those are questions I'll keep coming back to during the year. It's helpful to have longer-range questions like those in mind during the close and intense focus of Creation times in the Lispa school calendar. I think I'll be fighting an uphill battle by trying to keep inserting those questions into group work, but I think it'd be helpful if we remembered to keep those kinds of things in mind. Why just aim for cleverness if you're going to be trying to create something that goes deeper? I want to help create something that will evoke wonder, discovery, and an awareness of possibility. It may be it's not so much through story as through fertile and evocative images. (To do both, of course, would be of great reward! Personal, if not financial.)

The year ahead seems like a laboratory in which to try out ideas and approaches for whatever will follow. My questions aren't necessarily others', I know, and trying to get agreement or a shared direction among strong-minded creatives is indeed a bit like herding cats (while being one of the cats yourself). Still, I don't want to get completely subsumed in immediate goals and concerns this year.

The year is going to rush by--if it ever gets started! Here's to finding moments of reflection and insight in the midst of the coming long days of activity (and short days of sunlight).

Refreshed

Ah, yesterday I got the kind of restorative trip out of town that I've been wanting. Took my bike on a train about an hour and a half southwest of the city and spent the day in the New Forest. Though much of it is forested, it's anything but new: a tract of land set aside a thousand years ago by William the Conqueror. Now a national park, there are small towns scattered throughout it, as well as crushed gravel bike trails and footpaths. Covered with forests of pine, oak, and fern as well as open moors, it's the kind of place that welcomes a switch from the fluorescent green biking jacket to a brown wool sweater, when you're off the paved roads anyway. Wild ponies are a regular sight, as well as free-ranging pigs and horses of the domesticated kind. I spied a couple of deer, too.

I biked from Brockenhurst to Lyndhurst in a meandering loop of 20 miles or so before whiling away the last hour at a pub as I waited for the train back to London. A lovely day that did my soul good.

Lyndhurst seems to be the main hub of the area. It's a lovely if highly commercialized little town with a charming hilltop church. It has its quirks, too. Here you can arrange for a remarkable variety of coveyances to transport your loved one to their final resting place. There are the traditional horse-drawn carriages in black, of course. Or perhaps you'd prefer the all-Volkswagen cortege, consisting of the VW van hearse and stretch Beetles for the family. There are Land Rover hearses for the dearly departed who loved that rugged off-road experience. And, my favorite, how about a stylish motorcycle sendoff? Your choice of a Triumph, Suzuki, or Harley with a sleek hearse sidecar. I was finishing reading that book on eccentric Britain yesterday between legs of the trip, so somehow this just seemed a normal part of things.

Homeland security, UK style

A bit of excitement on Cleveleys Road this week. Late one night my housemates with rooms at the front of the house heard some shouting and commotion in the street. Apparently a couple of guys got arrested in relation to a murder at or outside a "social club" a couple of blocks away. The next day our street was blocked off and police were taking the names of everybody who came and went. The day after, half the street was still blocked off and a cop told me they were still looking for "a few things"--the murder weapon, maybe? (Or have I watched too many police shows on TV.)

Apparently there's a Turkish gang war going on in this part of town (again, according to what the cops are saying). It's probably stupid of me, but I find myself taking some comfort in that. It seems less random, more targeted. Yes, I know, people get caught in the crossfire, and every thug is some mother's son, but I feel less threatened than if there were some solitary madman out there. It also seems that police must be hovering out there all the time, ready to come out of the woodwork and swarm a neighborhood when something like this happens. It's kind of impressive, really, but seeing how at least a rowdy few of the Metropolitan police force got out of hand at last spring's G20 meeting here (one man was dealt a fatal blow by a policeman, unprovoked), "impressive" also can have an ominous aspect to it. London's a curious city. It seems pretty safe overall, even when there's been a murder around the corner, but you're also repeatedly aware of how many CCTV cameras there are. Word is that you're almost always on a TV screen somewhere when you're out and about.

I mentioned the other day that the beginning of school has been delayed into November. The reason is that the Home Office--kind of like the State Department, if I understand correctly--determined that all schools that admit international students had to be reaccredited this year. Some apparently were schools in name only and thus served as an easy way for us foreigners to get into the country. In the US, you'd expect such an action would be out of fear of some perceived terrorist threat. Here I think it was more because of the bad economy. "British jobs for British workers" has been an occasional rallying cry on the right, and among unions. Anyway, several thousand schools had to be reaccredited, including Lispa (the i and s stand for International School; most of the students come from outside the UK). Accreditation involved lots of paperwork and a site visit, then the Home Office decided it too had to do a site visit for each of the 4000-some-odd international schools, and then the slow-grinding mills of bureaucratic paperwork have to churn out a certificate. Cud moves faster through a cow.

The upshot of all this is that people like me can't even start the process of applying for a student visa or the extension of one till the Home Office issues a certificate to the school. We're still waiting. I'm here legally until my current visa expires, three weeks from tomorrow. So long as I can file the forms to apply for a renewal before 31 October I'm OK to stay. But pity the incoming students from outside the EU. They can't even start the process to get their visas till we all get the letter that opens the door to the process. And if they don't already have a visa, they can't enter the UK till they get the whole thing processed and returned to them. How one buys an airline ticket in advance in that kind of situation I don't know.

The other part of this is that, according to new and related legislation, by applying for a visa or visa renewal, all of us are applying for a national ID card that will have certain biometric measurements encoded in it. Whether I'll need to carry that with me at all times is unclear. Then again, I was surprised that the cops who were blocking off my street the other day didn't ask for any ID at all, just my name and address. After a year here I had just that morning stopped carrying my passport around with me. But I suppose once I get this ID card I'd better have it with me.

All England, all the time

Off to Brighton today, just £11 for a round-trip ticket. With school beginning soon--it's been delayed till 2 November, but still...--and the days getting shorter alarmingly quickly, I'm determined to use this month to get out of London at least once a week and also to do some special things in town. Come November, I'll be in class every weeknight and -afternoon, and apparently some Saturdays as well. So now's the time.

I checked out a book from the library yesterday about those only-in-Britain eccentric events, like contests in chasing a wheel of cheese down an incredibly steep slope, shin kicking, bog-snorkeling, and this thing called "mob football," in which about a hundred drunken men form a scrum around a leather tube on a muddy field and push each other back and forth in a knot of bodies for hours until the tube (with mob attending) is finally pushed through the doors of any nearby pub, where they all apparently keep sharing pints till they fall down drunk. OK, I added that last part, but the preceding weirdness is all true. I don't expect to find any of that in the coming month, but what a country to explore, eh wot?

Mostly I just want to get out of the city from time to time.

Off to the train station. Maybe this little post will break my recent writer's block.

Last night I had the strangest dream...

I'd taken friends to church with me to hear a friend of mine preach--Newell Bishop, who was as close to a mentor as I've ever had. Newell died earlier this month, though in the dream I had no awareness of this. The thing I did notice, though, was that Newell's hair and beard were pure white. The church looked more like a high school auditorium, rectangular, with a screen and stage at one end, padded metal seats bolted to the floor. Newell was giving some kind of a farewell sermon, and he talked about the search committee that was doing the work of finding his successor. As he spoke, people were setting up projection equipment for some kind of presentation. One man brought in canisters of what looked like movie film. I assumed the committee would be watching videos of their finalists preaching while the rest of us went to coffee hour following the service. Newell finished by directing everyone's attention to the screen, and all of a sudden we were watching a film that introduced the finalists. This is really odd, I thought. The whole congregation doesn't get to see this.

Then everything shifted and rather than being on film, the people were there in person. I must have changed seats, because I was right next to the communion table as the first finalist led worship. She was giving a sermon, sort of, but was overwhelmed by having to marshal her three young children into something like a cooperative state. All the while she was talking with the congregation (they seemed more like an audience), and I remember thinking this isn't a sermon at all. It was more of a monologue on how hard it is to be a single parent. She had my sympathy, but I was thinking this isn't a very good way to present yourself to a search committee. There was something about the interplay between her and her kids, though, especially her adolescent daughter, that was intriguing and beautiful. When she finished, I realized I was wowed by how musical their interactions had been. They hadn't been singing, but the pitch and rhythm, the counterpoint of their voices, even their subtle movements and shifts in position, could only be described as inspired. How did she get them to do that? I wondered. It looked completely unrehearsed, but was so amazingly well coordinated that it had to have been. That was what I wanted to tell her, rather than how it was lacking as a candidating sermon, when afterward she asked me what I thought. But things were changing quickly on what had become a stage that I didn't get a chance to say anything meaningful.

Then the next candidate came out, and the whole scene bore no resemblance to a church. It was clearly a theater, and four people came onstage in costume, onto a set that was a living room. They were ready to begin, but I was in their way, lying down on the front of the stage and blocking others' view. For some reason, that seemed to be my assigned "seat." I shifted to the side of the stage, near the curtain. All was very friendly, though, and the actors, the people behind me, and I all joked about how I was kind of like their footlights.

And then my alarm went off and I woke up.

Several years ago I was talking with Mary Ann Mattoon about dreams and what they might mean. Mary Ann (some of you will remember her) was a Jungian and a distinctively practical one. A dream probably means whatever you think it means, she said. I'm not sure about all of the details in this one, though I do think some of the particulars are simply trace elements of things I've been thinking about in my waking hours--Newell's death, the search committee looking for whoever will be the next principal minister at the church I left when I moved to London--but on balance the dream seems to reflect the transitional process going on in me, away from the pastorate and toward something that at least uses the tools of theatre, or is in that aesthetic world. I see my dreams not so much as predicting things to come as reflecting what's going on inside, the mind continuing to deal symbolically with things I think about, usually more analytically, in the daylight.

I still don't know where this exploration at Lispa is leading me. I don't even know what language to use to describe it. Is it leading me at all, for example, or is it completely up to me to chart the course? Where between the two does the balance lie? I have this image of balancing a long stick on its end in the palm of my hand. There's a back and forth between being able to stand still and being able to control which way I can walk while balancing the stick, and corrections in course that I have to take because the stick isn't completely in my control.

And so on it goes. Hoping (and praying) for a fertile year as I move from what I did before to what possibilities I may yet step into--and help to create.

Back in London

I'd signed up for a weekend course in street photography for yesterday and today, but with my foot all banged up, I thought it best to cancel. (Sigh.) With the help of a friend I was able to see an osteopath within hours of arriving back here on Friday, though, and found that I hadn't broken a bone after all--I love that they test for fractures, not with an X-ray machine, but with a tuning fork. I did, however, do a number on some muscles and tendons in my right foot. Reassuringly, I also found that I'd been doing the right things by icing and elevating the foot as much as possible the past week, and using crutches to keep off it when it got sore. At least I'm learning something from all the injuries of the past year! Now I'm doing painful massages to help with the healing, and the improvement has sped up. At this rate, my hobbling days will soon be in the dust receding behind me.

Another insight into the health care absurdity back home: I went in search of one of those padded plastic boots people wear instead of a cast these days, as well as those shorter crutches that have a cuff that goes around your forearm instead of the pad that's designed for your armpit. I thought it might be easier to travel with those than the pair of vintage wooden crutches we had in the basement. At Fairview Medical Supply, the crutches cost $58. Each. And the boot was over 150. Surely it can't cost anything like that to manufacture them. I assume they get away with this because insurance companies will pay the bulk of the cost. Sounds an awful lot like the $300 toilet seats the military used to buy from defense contractors.

I did get a couple of unanticipated benefits from using those ancient crutches on my flight--I was invited to jump to the head of the line at immigration at Heathrow. And I found that a Boeing 777 has an amazing amount of legroom for the bulkhead seats. If you ever start to feel invisible, just get around on crutches for a day or two. People offer you their seats, call you sir or ma'am. It's still a kind world after all. (Yes, I know, with notable exceptions.)

"Large live rats"

You know how, when you sit on a plane waiting for takeoff and they run through the safety instructions (this is how you buckle a seat belt, etc.--I mean, really, come on), those times when you tune out and you're not really listening? I had a bit of a startle the other day as we were waiting to take off from Minneapolis. I heard the flight attendant say--or thought I heard--"Large live rats are located in the overhead storage compartments." Large live rats, you say? So I perked up my ears (wouldn't you?) and was relieved to hear the next part was about how to inflate your life vest. Never has the reminder of the possibility of a crash into Lake Michigan been so reassuring.

The Great Thanksgiving

Must be the Rick Steves in me, but whenever I go to a country where I don't know the language, the first things I try to learn to say are Hello, Goodbye, Please, and Thank you. And sometimes the word for Cheers or whatever it is people say when they toast one another. This, my children will tell you, is a big improvement over when they were young and I insisted that they learn the phrase for "Where is the bathroom?" (When in Rome, I may know little else, but I can say "Dov'e la tolletta?" with the best of them.) In Crete a couple of weeks ago for a friend's wedding, I was delighted to learn that the Greek word for "Thank you" is Eucharisto.

Had I taken even the most rudimentary Greek class in div school, this would surely have been no surprise to me. One of the humbling results of blogging is that you reveal your own ignorance. Perhaps a happier ripple effect is evoking an affirming "Well, even I knew that" response in many a reader. (If many readers there be.)

Another liturgical echo: From an essay in yesterday's Guardian looking back on the anniversary of the stock market collapse:

In the dock together, both in hock together, what answers have the English-speaking peoples come up with? They have duly shown remorse. They have drawn on the resources of a common cultural heritage in acknowledging the sinfulness of their ways. Like the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, the mode has often been that of general confession: to acknowledge and confess manifold sins and wickedness, without specifying personal lapses. Have we followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts? Guess so. Have we left undone those things which we ought to have done? You betcha--we should have shackled Wall Street and the City. And have we done those things which we ought not to have done? Yes, we too got a bit greedy, we too were had, we too have been burned and we won't forget it (unlike some folks who still expect their bonuses).

Many's the time I would have loved to insert a "Guess so" or a "You betcha" into a Sunday morning prayer.

Labor Day, without the labor

Enjoying some time at home in the beautiful late Minnesota summer. A cookout with friends this afternoon. Lots of time reading these days. Mostly with my right foot propped up because last Thursday, just before heading off for a long day at the State Fair, I was working on my handstands at home and cracked a toe hard against a piece of furniture. I assumed I'd just bruised it and then spent all day walking around on pavement at the fairgrounds, only to have my foot swell and turn all sorts of lovely colors. I think I may have broken a bone. But since I have no health insurance in the good ol' U S of A, I can't afford to go to a doctor who will probably just tell me not to walk on it (too late). So I'll get it looked at, some 2 weeks later, by my GP in London, with whom I've set up an appointment by email. And meanwhile I read all these articles in the paper about people demonizing "socialized health care" in Britain, where it costs me nothing to see my doctor and next to nothing to get prescriptions filled. The tone of the public... debate? discussion? those words seem too elevated a description ... here is so disheartening. I'm afraid the best we can hope for is so complicated a package that almost no one will understand it. An interesting article the other day in the paper quoted Bob Dole, first as saying that health care reform is the most important thing most senators and reps will ever vote on and that just saying no to everything is simply not an option (hooray there) and that having a complicated bill is actually an advantage because people can fiddle with the minor points and still feel like they have something to show to their just-say-no constituents. (I guess I'd give that a qualified hooray.)

This is why I shouldn't wait weeks between posts. There's always something present to write about and I never get caught up.

Back to Greece: While in Rethymno (on Crete) we saw two classic Greek plays, one by Aristophanes (Thesmophoriazusae) and one by Aeschylus (The Persians), both in Greek of course. I couldn't follow the dialog at all, but it was fun seeing Greek plays in a (modern) amphitheater in the old fortress at Rethymno, under starry skies. The comedy was broad enough that, with some previous description of the plot, we could basically follow it. With Persians, again we were given a preliminary description of the plot by a friend who's well read in such things, but I gotta say, I find tragic chorus things pretty impenetrable (in my limited experience). That'll be one of the challenges of the upcoming year at Lispa, when we run through a rotation of dramatic styles. Tragic chorus is one of them. I have a lot to learn there. (So what's new?) Other dramatic styles ahead of us include platform, melodrama, commedia, grotesque (and/or bouffant? not sure if there's a difference), and clown. Again, stay tuned. This is a collection of areas I can promise I'll write about.

More later, little by little.

A post before traveling

Oops. I meant to set aside time to write before today, but no. It hasn't been hectic here. Maybe if it was I'd have been better organized. Not that I'm complaining.

In a few minutes I head out to Stansted airport to go to Greece for a friend's wedding, on Crete. Nikos (a classmate here) asked about 7 of us to come from Lispa to do a short play at the party after his wedding next Saturday. So this week we devise and rehearse, and enjoy being in Greece. Then a few days in Athens before going home for two weeks. And the Great Minnesota Get-Together (a.k.a., the state fair). I think we get the chance to see some Aeschylus this week, then deep-fried everything-under-the-sun on a stick a week later in St. Paul. Experiencing the breadth of human culture I am.

Speaking of cultcha, I've been able to see some quality theatre lately: Helen Mirren in "Phedre" at the National, and Mark Rylance in "Jerusalem" at the Royal Court, which was one of the best performances I think I've ever seen. And a second helping of Godot squeezed in between, which was even better than the first time.

I'll have to write more about those later. But for now, off to the airport...

This and that, part 2

The chaos of free speech

Last Sunday a friend and I wandered through Hyde Park and came upon Speakers Corner. I'd been there before on a weekday, but no one was holding forth then. I imagined that if I ever did find someone there, there'd be one man or woman speaking from a stump or soapbox while a few people stood around and listened. I still have this image of the English that's more Jane Austen and less House of Commons. As we got within a hundred yards of the corner, I could see this would be more Parliament than Pride and Prejudice. Someone was waving a Union Jack, and there were lots of people, standing in clumps of various sizes. Each clump was centered around a man or two on chairs or stepladders, shouting out their opinions, often engaging in argument with angry other men in the audience. Very few women there.

The first guy we came across was standing in front of a red flag and excoriating the bankers and capitalists. The second was wearing a helmet with horns of different sizes on it, proclaiming himself to be Lucifer and laughing off the protestations of a Somali man. The third was a hoarse man proclaiming the virtues of Islam from a lamppost. About 20 yards away, a Nigerian evangelist in a purple suit was trying to convert the masses to Jesus and clearly enjoying the spotlight. A bit farther along, two men stood holding a sign saying Free Hugs. (No one was gathered around them.) And then there was what looked like it had started out as a debate between two speakers--an American Christian and a North African Muslim standing on chairs--on the respective merits of Christianity and Islam. But now the self-appointed spokesman for Christianity and the West was engaged in a shouting match with an angry Muslim who started shoving the people around him so he could get closer to the guy standing on the chair. "Isn't this the way it always is with the Muslims?" the American said, playing to the crowd. If this guy doesn't have a background in talk radio, he's certainly learned a lesson or two from it, for better or for worse.

Oy!

Since moving to Clapton I've let my Tube pass expire, so I'm getting around on bike and bus. I have a little ting-ting bell on my handlebars, but have been advised that a good shouted "Oy!" is a more effective warning. Still haven't got that syllable hard-wired into my brain yet though.

What is it with these signs?

Maybe it's the move to new surroundings, making me more alert to things around me. Or maybe it's something more transcendent. You tell me. Last fall when I first moved here and was preparing to begin this grand adventure or folly, I came across a traffic sign that said Changed Priorities Ahead. I haven't noticed another one like it since. Yesterday, having recently completed Year 1 and hoping to use the summer to reflect more on it as I prepare for Year 2, I saw one for the first time that says Priorities Changed.

Excuse my asking,O Holy One, but Your point is...?

And finally...

Words to live by

"The greatest potential for growth and self-realization exists in the second half of life." — CG Jung

This and that, part 1

Some random notes to start catching up again:

The pub at the end of the world

There's a canal at the other end of the park near my house. Last week, several housemates and I walked up the canal path to a pub called the Anchor and Hope. The barman looked like he'd been there for years--literally, standing behind the bar for years with no break and perhaps no nourishment except what he pulled from the tap. Pretty much the worse for wear. One in our party wanted a shandy, but he refused to make one. Only beer, he said. After getting our pints and half pints we took a table outside with the rough-looking but genial clientele and the bar dog, who was looking for any new friend to scratch him on the butt. The sun had just set. All was calmer than I'd have expected. Across the canal stretched the Walthamstow Marshes--acres of grasses with feathery heads. Off in the twilight, some buildings poked up like grain elevators. The only activity across the way was the occasional passing of a train. I felt miles away from London, very much like being in the Midwest.

Variations on a theme

Went to the National Portrait Gallery again the other day. In addition to a showing of the annual portrait painting contest, there's an exhibit of one artist's collection of other people's paintings--about 300 of them, all of the same image. He went to flea markets and antique shops, originally thinking he'd collect every copy he could find of da Vinci's Last Supper or some other well-loved image. What he found over time, however, was painting after painting of a 4th century saint named Fabiola. The curator's notes describe her as the patron saint of nurses and protector of abused women. The walls are a hodgepodge of copies. Almost all show a woman in profile, facing left, red cloak on her head. A few turn her around to face right, and some change the color of her cloak. Her face, of course, is at least slightly different in each one. Most are probably in oil, some in acrylic, at least one is seed art. Some are on canvas, some on wood, one on black velvet like those homages to Elvis you find at state fairs and cheap bars back home. Some Fabiolas are huge, most modest in scale, a few are tiny, pieces of jewelry.

It's a fascinating experience to walk into the rooms and see the subtle and at times dramatic variety. Reminded me of a comment earlier about how some painters or sculptors (or actors) seem to recreate the same thing over and over again. Are they trying to get it right, or working out something inward, or is this just what we do? It occurs to me that maybe this exhibit imitated something like an archetype--an image that keeps coming up over and over again, in different parts of the world, in different times. It was also interesting to note in the curator's display that the original painting has been lost, so all we have now are probably copies of copies of a 19th century image of a woman who lived a millennium and a half before that. So it's not at all about what she really looked like, really about how she's been imagined and envisioned by individual artists of varying skill, over and over again. I guess you could say the same of any actor's portrayal of any given character. Or any preacher's take on Jesus or the gospels, for that matter.

Swine flu liturgies
Speaking of church--and no, I didn't even plan that segue--there was a notice in the paper the other day that the Church of England has, because of the swine flu outbreak and for the first time ever, directed its priests to stop using the common cup when celebrating the Eucharist. They didn't even do that during the plague--though Parliament did pass a law back then saying that in cases of necessity, Communion would be considered valid if only the bread or the cup were used (and not both). Interesting that it took an act of Parliament to settle such an issue. But this is the Sovereign Queen (or King) of England's church, after all.

Eric, Clapton

Ahhh. I've moved. And I think I'm really going to like living here.

I'm in an airy, light, old house in Clapton, in a room that's more than twice the size of the one I had in Vermin House. A nice high ceiling--and room for a chair! There wasn't even enough space in my old room to lie down on the floor to do my back stretches. It'll be a pleasure to stretch out in a room like this.

I bIked over past school today (maybe 30 minutes, which is also about how long it'd take by bus) and then came back and wandered around my new neighborhood, found the local pub (with a quirky name, something like The Crooked Billet) and a couple of little restaurants and cafes (in addition to the ever-present kebab shops), checked out the bus routes, etc. My housemates told me of a couple other pubs a few minutes away that overlook the canal. And I found Hackney Downs, a pleasant park just a few minutes away. I think I mentioned the large park at the end of the block, too. I've rearranged my new room and spent most of the morning unpacking. It's nice to have leisure time to do all this. Unlike last October, when I moved in and started classes all within about 48 hours. And also unlike last October, I didn't get egged on my way home the first night in my new place. Ah, Plaistow, I will not shed tears for you.

Another good sign: Last night not one but two housemates brought home some Haagen Dazs. Some housemates will come and go over the next few months, but nations represented include Australia, Guatemala by way of Mexico, Italy, Switzerland, and the US. At any given time there will be 4 to 7 people living here. We'll eventually settle down to 5. Six when Robin comes next May-July or -August.

My new address, in case anybody needs it:
22 Cleveleys Road
London E5 9JN

The 20 movements

One of the main events at the end of the first year is each student's presentation of 20 specific movements that we learned over the course of the year. We all have the same repertoire to draw from, but it's quite revealing how everyone does them differently and how each person strings them together in their own unique way. I'd heard that the 20 movements show who you are. That's quite a claim. But I'll grant that there's something to it. I wouldn't say the 20 movements are likely to reveal something that's never come to light before, more that they often crystallize some key parts of what has shown through from time to time.

We 40 or so did our presentations over three days, and we all watched each of them. The 2nd years were invited to come, too, and several did. As did most of the teachers. I'd worked on my presentation quite a bit. I enjoyed the challenge of finding a flow from one movement to another, also including some surprising juxtapositions and varying the rhythms. A few movements take just a few seconds. Others are quite involved--a dozen steps or more. And you can cycle through a movement several times before moving on if you want; so each presentation took a while. Mine was about 8 minutes. You're out there, all by yourself in front of potentially the whole school. The stage is yours. The time is yours. The goal is more to show yourself than it is to hide your mistakes, because often the things that are most difficult for you show you more in your fullness. (The things that are most playful often do, too.)

As I watched others go before me, I often thought of which movement I would go into from the one they were doing, just as a review to myself. The morning I was to go, I was a bit chagrined to see that a classmate had almost the same routine as I'd be doing a few people later. Of the 20 transitions, about a dozen of hers were the same as mine. Oh no, I thought at first, mine's going to look so familiar after this. But each of us does them differently--different bodies, different ways of moving, different things that we bring to it--and so after she'd finished, I realized mine would be different in its own way. I'm not sure anyone but me (and maybe she) noticed the similarities of pattern when all was said and done.

Doing the 20 movements was one of the highlights of the year for me. The feedback afterward was very encouraging, and I got a lot of strokes from my classmates. I don't know exactly what it looked like, but several people commented on the "maturity" I brought to it, which I really do think was not just a way of saying I'm obviously older. (One of the teachers even said I look much younger now than when I started last fall. I am a lot more limber. And lighter.) I won't go into the specifics of the comments here, but apparently something did show through that drew on a different level of life experience. I felt really good about it. It was one of those times (that we all need so much) when I could tell that I really have learned something in my time here.

It was also a time when I could get out of my head and trust that my body knew what to do. I remember thinking at one point in the middle of it all, "Did I just forget something there? Did I skip a movement?" But there wasn't time to stop and fret over it. Actually I could have stopped and done that, but I didn't want to. So I just went on, trusting that my body remembered the patterns I'd rehearsed. I wish I could do that more often.

End of Year 1

Wow. What a ride, especially over the past few weeks. I won't try to put it all in one post.

At the beginning of the 7th week when we presented our final works-in-progress, they were so rough that the teachers decided on the spot that we wouldn't be ready to show them at the scheduled time. So final presentations were postponed by 6 days. A wise decision, though it threw scheduling into chaos (something that happens here fairly regularly). The pieces continued to grow and change in the extra time given. Our piece in particular was disjointed and benefited from the extra days. Even a week later--on the Monday of Week 8--it was pretty awful, but the final 72 hours proved to be fruitful (as well as temperamentally volatile). Two-thirds of what we ended up with was created in the final three days.

The six final group presentations varied greatly in subject and treatment. As did the 50 final projects the Advanced Course students presented in the last two weeks. And the 40 or so individual 20-movement presentations that we in the Initiation Course did on the last Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. (It's been a busy end of term.) Oh yes, and the nearly 40 double Acrobatics presentations in Week 7--one a set routine, the other created by each of the first years. Except me, who just did a set routine since I had to protect my neck and was pretty low in energy following a weekend of being sick.

I didn't have swine flu, but at least one classmate has had. I'm not sure what the impact has been in the US except to know that Robin had it and got through it OK, but it's starting to hit pretty hard here. They're predicting up to 65,000 deaths in the UK, and I've read of plans to give everyone shots. Concern jumped to a new level last week when a GP and an apparently previously healthy 6-year-old girl both died on the same day. They're expecting up to 100,000 new cases each week. Most of them mild, of course, but the numbers are remarkable. So this is a pandemic...

Moving house

Now that classes are over, it's time for me to get back to work and also to move out of my old digs. I won't be sad to shut the door on that place. Again, fine housemates (what else can one say?), but a bad house to live in. Poorly heated, often infested (flies, mice, throw in a little mold), dark, a crowded little room, not much to offer in terms of location. Frankly, Plaistow--the town I've lived in since October--doesn't have a lot to recommend it. I'll be moving to Clapton (or Hackney--not quite sure what forms the boundary), to a house with more room, more heat, more light, another set of good housemates, in a much more pleasant part of town. A bit farther from school, and not at all convenient to the Tube, but I can live with that. More bike riding lies ahead, as well as increased familiarity with the bus system and parts of the Overground and National Rail.

More anon, depending on internet access. Our connection at home went kaput. (I do not recommend Vodafone Mobile Broadband. I'm locked in one of those absurd situations where to get out of an internet contract I have to negotiate with the company via internet, even though my internet connection with them doesn't work. Grrr. Honestly, why do they even have stores if the staff there just tell you you have to do your business through your computer?)

Another plus of the new house -- wired for internet. And it works.

Moving the finish line

The homestretch just got shorter. Today we found out that, contrary to previous terms in which we made our final presentations on the last day, this term we'll do them a week earlier. Ouch. And last Friday we found out that our Acro presentations will also be in Week 7 rather than Week 8. And on Wednesday to boot. That's a mere 9 days away. Double ouch. As if that weren't enough to mark the nearness of the end of term, a classmate bid us all adieu today. He's leaving Thursday and won't be back. Several classmates are thinking they won't return next year. I don't think it's a disenchantment with the school on any of their parts--more financial concerns, or life intervening--but we've already lost 3 or 4 people since the beginning of the year. We're all supposed to let the school know by the end of the week if we're planning on doing the second year. I don't think anyone will be told not to come back, but as it is we'll be significantly smaller, which is a loss.

¶ Last weekend I saw Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart and Simon Callow in Waiting for Godot. Yes, it's a truly odd play, but the actors played it with such humor that it was a treat to watch. I read an article a month or two ago in which comedians spoke of the influence that Beckett has had on them (the illustration was a famous photo of Beckett with a clown's nose added). I'd never known that so many people see his plays as comical, but it worked really well with Godot. Maybe that's the way it's always done, I don't know, but clownish or vaudevillian treatment really made the play move along, at times in a touchingly endearing way. There's a lot of cruelty in it, too, but that works well pushing hard against the comedic elements. It was also reassuring to see actors of that caliber stepping on each other's lines occasionally (once, anyway) and dropping their accents from time to time.

And yes, Robin, to answer your question, they pronounced it GAH-doh. Who knew?

¶ I've seen a few plays lately: another odd one (this by Wallace Shawn) called Aunt Dan and Lemon. A one-woman show called Kafka's Monkey, starring Kathryn Hunter. I'm too ignorant to know how famous or well regarded she is but it was an amazing performance. The character is a chimpanzee who's learned to pass as a human, who thinks and feels like a human, more or less, but who still moves and acts like a chimp. Then there was an experimental theatre piece that a few classmates were in and one devised, with all the aspects (for better and for worse) that "experimental theatre" implies. Overall recently, quite a range.

¶ Last night I went to a two-hour African dance class. What a workout, and what fun! Led by a Ghanaian god of a man with incredible stamina, and charisma, and what a body. Oh my Lord...

¶ And today, the 29th of June 2009, some eight months later than most of my classmates (the whippersnappers), I was able to consistently accomplish the headstand.

(He takes a long slow bow.)

Thank you. Thank you very much.

Into the homestretch

The lack of posts recently reflects, at least in part, the pace of things. With only three weeks ahead, everything is accelerating. Just a few notes here and then, I hope, more short posts in the next three weeks.

The schedule changes from here on out, to give us more time to work on our final group presentation (for me, that's the community folk dance thing) as well as individual presentations in acrobatics and what they call the 20 movements, which are choreographed moves that we each string together in a unique flow. Many are mime-type movements (like climbing a wall or punting a boat on a river), some are a succession of specific postures or "attitudes," some are acrobatic moves. Each is quite specific and some are complex, so we'll be getting a series of refresher sessions over the next week or two. The acrobatics presentations (one set routine, one of each student's devising) have me a bit distressed. I had to take it easy for a couple of weeks since I'd reinjured my neck (yet again!) and now there's not a lot of time left, especially for someone like me who really needs to do it on the padded mats that are in one of the classrooms, and the classrooms are almost always in use. I'm going to have to cut back on the hours I work at my job in the next few weeks to prepare.

A few brief notes:

¶ I may have mentioned earlier that we'd watched a film on CG Jung a while back. I've started doing some reading on him (finally getting around to Mary Ann Mattoon's book, for those back home who also knew her--and of course I wish I'd read it years ago). I'm seeing where some basic elements of the Lispa approach reflect Jung's thought. For example, that the unconscious is the source of creativity, and how the mask and countermask work that we did a bit ago parallel his ideas about persona and shadow.

¶ We also watched a film on the director Peter Brook a week or two ago. At one point he talks of contrasting kinds of improv. One is where they tell you you're so many years old, and you're dealing with these pressures at home and at work, and this is where you are, and these are the things around you, and this is what happens to provoke you. Now improvise. And the other is, Here's a shoe. Improvise. Occasionally we shade toward the first of those scenarios, but for the most part we deal with the second.

¶ So often my movements in improv are too small, too relaxed. A lot of that, I recognize, reflects my personality. But I also think it comes from my having watched so much more film than stage work. So much of film is amplified by the camera so the movements can be--have to be--small, and the intensity is in the magnification that the camera does of the small movement and gesture. Also, as an audience we often don't believe things on film that are done too big (regarding character, not action like blowing things up). So also with personal interactions, sometimes (at least in an understated culture like in Minnesota): smaller things seem more trustworthy, or at least there's a distrust of too much emotion or movement. You know the old joke: How can you tell if a Minnesotan is outgoing? He looks at your shoes when he talks to you.

¶ I'm only just starting to understand how live theatre is so much different from film. For example, if you see two people in a film who are hiding from (or looking for) each other backing up toward one another and then, butt to butt, pivot around each other, never knowing the other is there, it may be amusing but it's a bit like, C'mon, we've seen this before. Seeing it in live theatre is more enjoyable because you're part of it. Yes, you've seen it all before, but what's enjoyable is how well they do it, not that they do it. We watch differently because we invest differently in a play than we do in a film or a TV show.

More scattered thoughts later.

Have we really gotten that bad?

... I wondered after presentations last Monday. The criticisms were pretty pointed again, and interruptions were standard. I think we're all feeling a bit out of rhythm, and we've lost some of the fun of it all, which is coming through in the performances. But we've had an unscheduled two-day break yesterday and today because of a Tube strike in London, so maybe we'll come back a bit fresher.

Meanwhile, I've been back to the osteopath twice this week. The less-than-graceful forward-roll I ended class with last Friday caused increasing pain over the weekend. I'm feeling much better now, though still a bit stiff and sore. I'll be sitting out of much if not all of the Acrobatics work tomorrow and maybe next Wednesday and Friday, until I'm pain-free again.

The neck didn't keep me from going Morris dancing on Tuesday night. The long bike ride didn't do my neck any favors (again, Tube strike) but the dancing was a lot of fun. A friend and I went this week. We're hoping to bring along several others next Tuesday.

Louie, Louie

It's been another week of character creation. This week Louie emerged. Louie wears aviator-style sunglasses and a shiny black shirt. I think he'd like to slick his hair with Brylcreem, but I haven't found any yet. He's from Harrisburg, PA, but runs a sex shop in Soho. Married three times, has two sons named Louie Jr. (He calls them Louie 2 and Louie 3.) Louie's a bit like our dog Finn in that he's just sure everybody likes him, but unlike Finn, Louie's confidence about that may not run very deep. He's been through a lot, is just who he is, and wants people to like him. But if you don't, who needs ya? (Life's too short, y'know?)

I'm enjoying this. I think next week we get into situations where we switch back and forth between our characters very quickly. Too bad that Louie and Bobby Lee won't ever meet face to face. I'm not sure how that would go.

Meanwhile we're back to handstands and such in Acro. A bit of a sore neck today, and I can feel the fatigue in the front of my shoulders from working on the handstands--a feat I haven't accomplished yet, but it's starting to come along. Slowly. I've learned (again but probably not for the last time) to pace myself better so as not to suffer too big a setback.

We also formed groups for the long-range project that will become our final presentation. I'm in a group that will be creating something that comes from participating in a community folk dance group. What a stretch, huh?

No such thing as easing in

We're back in the thick of it (and I'm not talking flies now; I'm happy to report that we're down to mere dozens--oh, the carnage of May!* Do come see me in the ring of hell reserved for mass insect murderers, won't you?)

I don't think I really expected that we'd be ramping up slowly this term. But I also didn't expect that we'd start each of our first two Acrobatics classes with 100 sit-ups, 50 push-ups, and a round of two other diabolical variations on a squat-thrust/jump combo.

The fun part of the week has been in developing a character. We were to come dressed as one of our choosing on Monday, and then we worked with ways of building that character physically throughout the week. Also in putting them in different situations. Next week we each create another one. In Week 3 we'll apparently switch quickly back and forth between the two.

I would be delighted to introduce you to Robert E. Lee Beechum sometime. Professor Beechum (Bobby Lee to those of a more familiar acquaintance) is a Southern gentleman who simply does not understand why an appropriate decorum is not observed in all situations. He is a scholar of the American South, specializing in its fine literary tradition. He has a fondness for bow ties, and it is as obvious to him as the green on God's green grass that he has earned the respect to which he is due. Mm-hmm. Yes.

[Who will come forth next week I don't know for sure yet.]
___
* An unintended allusion to Truman Capote, I just realized. (Meaning I stole it.) Extra credit to whoever can name the book. This Professor Beechum has more of a hold on me than I knew!

Summer comes to London

I generally have compassion for other members of God's creation, but when they outnumber me hundreds to one in my own kitchen, they have to die.

I arrived back in my house yesterday to swarms of flies. "Oh, well," one housemate said. "Summer." Which seemed an, oh I don't know, inadequate response to me. Now that the weather is dry and fairly warm, we tend to keep the back door open. And some of the windows. None of which have screens here. And when nature-boy housemate installed a compost bin last fall, he put it right outside the kitchen window, which was fine and even handy in the winter months. But with the coming of spring--or maybe this is summer for London--it just made for a breeding place in very close proximity to a key part of the house. I just wasn't in the mood to deal with this in my jet-lagged state, so I left the house for a much more pleasant experience (see below), and in search of flystrips. Luckily what they sell in Tesco is a less ghoulish version, cute little window stickers that look like flowers. And that kill bugs dead. I've already replaced one that was covered with the little buggers this morning. And my ecologically minded housemate has moved the compost bin toward the back of our little garden, so things are more under control today. But I'm going back to Tesco to resupply my personal arsenal of mass destruction for my six-legged brothers and sisters in the family of God. Kyrie eleison. Christe eleison. Kyrie eleison.

And so it was that I set out on my bike, pedaling along the Greenway (a bike/pedestrian route that looks like it may have been an old railbed), only to find a section I usually ride on closed until sometime in 2011 because it passes by the Olympic stadium construction site. Finding my way onto the network of towpaths by the canals, I passed through parts of London I'd never seen before. You'd never have known it was London, actually, as much for the leisurely pace of life there as anything else. Not a lot of people, even though it was a gorgeous day. A few here and there fishing, some reclining on the bank as if they'd been transported from a Seurat painting. A few canal boats puttering along, working their way through the manually operated locks. Ducks, swans, and other waterbirds I didn't know the names of. Lily pads and flowers. A man throwing sticks for his dogs to retrieve from the water. Woods and fields alternating with low-rise industrial-looking apartment buildings.

Later I made my way back to London Fields, where I thought everyone was waiting for some kind of concert to begin. Hundreds of people sitting on blankets, several with their portable grills. Some sections of the park were just packed with people, while just across the walks that cut through the lawns there was nobody, as if some kind of zoning were in effect. I asked a guy in a fluorescent vest who was cleaning up around the overflowing garbage cans what was going on. "Maybe Jesus is coming," he said with a smile. (Earlier I'd passed by a teenage pentecostal street preacher. He was working the crowd on a street called the Narrow Way. But of course.) The guy at the trash cans later said something about, "When you only get three months of sun..." so I guess this is what the parks are like in London on weekends for a while now, everybody sitting in the sun just waiting for the party to begin.

And last night I went to a "scratch night," in which people presented 15-minute theatre pieces that are still works-in-progress, with audience feedback afterward. Some Lispians presented. A housemate and I biked over to see it at an arts space on the Isle of Dogs--a short but harrowing ride on six-lane roads, especially as my handlebars kept loosening up from all the road vibration and some screws that just won't stay tightened. (Gotta get that fixed one of these days.) Blessedly there was little traffic late last night when I biked back home by a more circuitous route.

Another lovely day today. And then classes start again tomorrow. Stay tuned.

Going back for more

On my way back to London again, Philly airport again, layover again. But this time no free wifi so it’ll be tomorrow before I can post. Before I left London, a classmate told me I had to buy a pretzel in the Philadelphia airport and have it for him, which I have. I may have a second. Yes, Frank, they’re that good.

But as this isn’t a culinary blog, I digress.

It’s hard to believe that we only have one more quarter left in this year. Then again, starting classes last October in the Hackney space does seem a long time ago. I feel like I’ve learned a lot, though what exactly is hard to encapsulate. A neighbor back home asked me what I’ve learned (Midwesterners being innately practical), and what I found myself saying was “Something about presence. And timing.” Not a very definite answer, I’ll admit, but it does touch on the essence of a lot of what we’ve done.

I should probably write just about that sometime, but as I go back, presence and timing are on my mind in a different way. A few months ago I was sure that I wouldn’t come back for the second year. I thought I might not even finish the first. It was in that period of time last winter when I just didn’t have a sense of where I was on the learning curve, or whether I was on it at all. And no sense of where I was in terms of why I'd thrown myself into this whole mess (for a mess it was, then). I’d also lost a sense of my own presence to myself, you might say, because I just didn’t feel at home anymore in whatever had brought me to leave everything I was doing “in my previous life” as well as where I was living, my home and my community. The vocabulary that I’m newly immersed speaks of being in your body and there was a sense of estrangement because I had little or no sense of what I looked or sounded like. I felt vacant, empty, alien even to myself physically and spiritually. I wouldn’t have thought to say it in these terms, but I just wasn’t very present to myself or to others at that time. So in moving through that, I feel like I've regained a sense of presence in my own life. That’s not what I had in mind when I answered my neighbor’s question in the driveway the other day—I was speaking more of stage presence and awareness of others in an ensemble, which also has to do with timing (knowing when a scene or a story needs you to say or do something, or needs it from someone else so it’s your job just to hold on and allow for it to happen*)—but there’s something of presence and timing in this larger life sense that I’m also learning in new ways through this Lispa experience.

Part of that knowledge comes in a confidence that it’s not time for me to leave Lispa yet, that I'm making some headway now and that I'll continue to do so. I do go back, however, with the awareness that time is going really fast, and I want to be more aware of each thing that I do. To continue to exploit this metaphor—I’ll let loose my grip and release this poor thing soon. I promise.—I want to be more present to this sense of passing time and to make better use of the time I have left in London. Just a small example: We concluded last term with The Brawl, as mentioned before. My part in our presentation was as a quiet, fussy laundromat owner, every thing having a place and everything in its place, cleanliness being next to godliness, and all that. My character kept to himself as tensions rose around him, straightening up, taking an almost fetishistic pride in keeping the floor mopped. This was, as they say, my mask. Not a physical mask, but it was what you would have seen of my character if you’d watched the presentation. It was my character’s persona. (Somebody pointed out to me a couple of years ago, talking about “the three persons of the Trinity,” actually, that our word persona comes from a (Latin? Greek?) word for mask.) And when everything was falling apart at the laundromat and everyone was making such a mess of things, flinging clothes around, using a bra as a choking rope, you name it, my “countermask” emerged as my character went berserk, screaming, throwing things around, dumping bags of clean and folded laundry on the floor, until another character floored me with a strong right hook. I think I realized at the time, though not at the level of full consciousness, that I was talking way too fast in my berserk state. I was paying more attention to the rest of what I was doing. But I want to have a fuller awareness of the moment to be able to attend to more than just the most obvious elements. A fuller sense of presence in the moment, both to be more intentional or practiced in what I’m doing, and also what others are doing around me. (On the flip side of all this, as my laundromat guy was mopping earlier in the scene, so into that activity that it was almost as if waltzing with my mop, I missed the moment in which I was to do a key physical element of the story: I was to pick up one woman's panties that had dropped out of her laundry bag and mistakenly put it in someone else’s bag. The whole brawl eventually would spring from that. Luckily I found the bright red panties on the floor just in time, and actually had to cross the stage with them to catch up to laundry bag #2, which ended up working out better anyway since it drew people’s eye to them in a way that picking them up at the moment we'd practiced wouldn't have. But one of my scenemates told me afterward that I'd almost given him a heart attack when I’d missed my cue. As you might expect, I still have a lot of awareness to cultivate going in both directions.

That last was an awkward sentence, I realize, written as they were calling my flight in Philadelphia. And I was going to go back and rewrite it, but now that I look at it again, having just arrived back in London a few hours ago, it gives me a chance to segue into an item I just read in the Guardian:

One evening about 150 years ago, a busy House of Commons was listening patiently to Sir Robert Inglis, a High Tory and bitter foe of Roman Catholic and Jewish emancipation, or anything with a taint of liberalism, although he happened on this occasion to be complaining about an injustice. A prisoner had been denied visits, known in the legal phrase as “right of egress and ingress”. Or, as Inglis unhappily put it, “Things have come to pretty pass when an Englishman may not have his wife backwards and forwards.”¶ We know this scene from a famous pen. “The shout of laughter in the house was electrical,” Benjamin Disraeli recorded. “Sir Robert Peel, who was naturally a hearty laugher, lost his habitual self-control and leant down his head in convulsions.”

Once again, I digress, but wasn't it worth it?

More later. I have to get out and enjoy this lovely day.

* footnote to the asterisk above: looking back on this sentence later, it kind of describes parenthood too, doesn't it?

Three terms behind me

Heading home for the break, battered and bruised but happy. The past couple of weeks have been focused in large part on stage combat, which is one of those paradoxical things in which the person who is apparently getting beaten up on stage is (supposedly) the one who is safest, and the one who’s doing the beating or making the sounds that make the whole thing convincing is the one who gets bruised up. Of course, tumbling around after having just apparently gotten the punch to the face or the knee to the groin leads to some bruises and scrapes, too. So I’m heading home with sore knuckles and bruises on my legs, hands, and arms, but little worse for wear.

We prepared fight scenes for two classes—Creation and Acrobatics. And each group of 3 or 6 or 7 set, developed, and choreographed their own scene, so fights were set in dining rooms, offices, emergency rooms, rec halls, laundromats, tea shops, county fair pie judgings, bakeries, even ballet studios and Lamaze classes. Some were comical, some terribly unsettling.

We also did final presentations of closely observed animals in Movement class, with even more variety, each person choosing whatever animal interested them. Noah might not have had such a variety. Elephant and giraffe, yes, and snow leopard, goat, and horse. But also starfish, komodo dragon, osprey, sloth, and amoeba. And on and on. A classmate and I were iguanas, and thank God for YouTube. (OK, maybe not God directly, but…) It’s amazing how much stuff you can find videos of online—I’m talking educational stuff here, by the way—and it’s fascinating to pay really close attention to how an animal moves. And often frustrating to try to make a human body move the same way. So the goal becomes (and here comes a favorite Lispa verb) to transpose it, to give the essence of your animal through a human body. So much of it, and so much of this term, has been about specific details. With all the mask work we did, again and again the goal was to boil down the movement, to find that essential detail and surround it with enough focused stillness that it has the impact that a lot of movement never could. At one point I was reminded of a phrase from E.B. White’s classic little book on writing The Elements of Style: the point is to make “every word [or here, every movement] tell.”

This week also included continuing work on passages that we’ve memorized from whatever source. Some were dramatic monologues, some were poems, some passages from novels. First the process of working with the text to memorize it was fascinating. I think I wrote something about that previously. And it got even more interesting when we moved into the speaking phase. One week we split into groups of three, and first we reacted silently to where each other was in the space. No script, no agenda, no words. Just three people starting out about a meter apart from each other, and our entire vocabulary for responding to one another was to stand, sit, lie down, walk, run, or stop. After a few minutes of moving around the space in reaction to the other two people, we started speaking our lines to one another. Contexts emerged as if out of nowhere. The second time we did it (in our final class this week), we stared in our groups of three and eventually were interacting as a whole group of 20 or so, each bearing our our own text in mind. Then each would choose the moment to speak their lines. Usually it came in response to what someone else had spoken, often a text we’d never heard before, and so it became this ever growing dramatic piece that had its own logic and probably could never be the same again. I’d memorized a passage from Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead that I ended up speaking after a classmate did a monologue about a madwoman from Cork. Others who are more theatre-literate than I am can probably identify the madwoman piece, but I didn't know it. A short speech by one of Lear’s daughter’s (from near the end of the play) came in response to my little part of the drama.

I guess I’m ever the old guy in this group, but there are worse things to be, and much worse characters to be compared to!

In the first term we focused on closely observing nature. In this term we were closely observing animals. Next term we delve more (among other things) into building characters through close observation of people. At times the progression of themes at Lispa isn’t apparent, but at times I can glimpse the grand arc.

As I write this I’m in the Philadelphia airport, waiting for my connecting flight. It’ll be good to be home for a couple of weeks, to reconnect and heal up a bit. I’m sure the next term will fly by.

Beware the chair, and note the socks

It all seemed so innocuous at first. Thursday in class we began by taking a chair and noting how many separate movements are required to approach and sit in it. To be sure this came after a brief and seemingly unrelated comment about how music is distilled emotion and how certain chords or chord progressions are known to evoke strong emotion (and how advertisers manipulate us through their use). But that dropped from notice as I counted 1) look at the chair, 2) turn toward the chair (beginning with the pelvis!), 3) step toward the chair with my left foot, and so on. Sitting down took me 20-24 movements. Then all of a sudden we're in a different world. Amy told us she was going to put on a piece of music and wanted us to imagine returning to an important place and finding it destroyed. See it, walk through it. Touch parts of it.

I didn't notice other people, but I know I wasn't the only one bawling a couple of minutes later. I didn't think I had it in me. (One draft of a blog piece I never published reflected on how I think I've forgotten how to cry freely. It's not that I never cry. It's just that I always rein it in as soon as the emotion crosses a certain threshold.) Then she put us through the exercise once more without the music. Tears again. Then she offered some of us the opportunity to do it again wearing expressive masks, which cover your whole face except for the eyes. Which all led to a discussion of the need to and difficulty of moving past the point either where your own emotion overtakes you, or where it simply runs out and you're still in the position of sharing that experience with an audience. This is where relying on the space you're in and the specific objects around you comes in. (Thus the chair exercise, I guess? I'm still not sure. Some of us wondered afterward how we got from Point A to Point B in this lesson.)

For any others who also wonder about such things, I think Amy said the music was from Elgar's Enigma Variations. She also used Barber's Adagio for Strings later in the hour.

When I wrote my essay as part of the application to come here, I mentioned how sometimes in preaching the connection that happens is when the person speaking reflects and expresses the thoughts and emotions of those who are listening, and how that's probably a bit like theatre in some way. Not that you should gin up the emotion just to make a point or to manipulate those you're speaking to. Then again, that wouldn't be theatre at its best either, so it's another similarity. I've been thinking again over the past several weeks about how there's a generosity in theatre performance (I find myself avoiding the word acting) in helping the audience feel something deeply by feeling it yourself and reflecting it back out again. That's not the most elegant way to express it, I'm sure, and no great insight to some who might be reading this, but for this novice to this whole endeavor it's important. This whole experience is certainly giving me an even deeper respect for actors.

Show and tell

I mentioned expressive masks above. It's always better to show these things than to describe them. The video on Lispa's new website shows some of them, as well as the neutral mask and some of the larval masks (and other masks made by students). It also gives a general taste of the school and of Thomas's approach. And an extra bonus: if you wait and watch through the stills in the five panels at the top of the webpage, you'll see Isabel a couple of times.

The billionaires' convention

OK, this one has nothing to do with Lispa. The company I work for as an "administrative associate" (that is, a lowly office worker) had a booth at an exhibition for investors yesterday. We were told to be at our most professional as we handed out information because the people who'd be attending have beaucoup moolah--millionaires and billionaires. Who knows how many fit whatever category, but it was clearly a mixture of people enthusiastic either to give advice or to get it. There was a mad rush to the podium after one guy finished giving his tips for the coming year. (Which included be patriotic about Britain, wait for the Tories to come back to power and reinstate Mrs Thatcher's policies--and buy German real estate. Not quite sure how those go together, but I'm not his intended audience anyway.) Men in suits were running down the aisles to be the first to get whatever materials this man was giving out as soon as he said thank you and turned from the mike. The program said this guy--whoever he is--is worth about £700 million and that his predictions of a year ago proved dead accurate. I was curious, though, to note that he had the most nervous ways of wringing his hands and brushing back his hair as he spoke. (The jumbotron didn't do him any favors in the credibility department, I thought. Then again, I'm just a part-time administrative associate at a small company.)

Anyway, the convention made for great people watching. We've often worked in school with the idea of noting whatever animal seems to animate different people--how some are like mice or ferrets or komodo dragons--and at times yesterday was like a day at the zoo. Great fun. An arkful of eccentrics.

I'm not sure which animal another particular fellow was, but he stood out with his (seemingly intentionally) ill-fitting gold and black sports coat, oversized black horn-rimmed glasses and electric blue socks. I was told afterward that there's an an image among the British that the wealthy are particularly known for wearing bright (usually red) socks, and that this fellow is very well respected as an investor.

As a Minnesotan, it makes me wonder what this says about Garrison Keillor's portfolio (he of the trademark red socks)--no surprise that he's wealthy, but is his sock choice at all influenced by the current market? Someone will have to fill me in. Or for that matter, what would Brits think of the mayor of my hometown, who's known for intentionally wearing mismatched socks. If he were in politics here, would people read anything about his fiscal policies into what peeks out above his shoetops?