August 22, 2008
Reports From The Road by Nico Muhly (802 Tour, Day Six, 8/20)
On this tour, we have been variously staying in hotels and with friends - one of my favorite things about staying with people is when they have a dog. We have been very lucky on this trip: our hosts in Sebastopol, CA have a border collie/Australian cattle dog, Ace; our hosts in Portland have a frisky Weimaraner called Castle with googly eyes, and finally, our hosts Eddie and Willie (is there anything more fabulous than gay couples with matching names? I know a Nora and Laura in LA, too) have an eager pitbull, Rider. There is no better thing than being woken up by an eager dog's snout snuffling on one's person; I have been promised "big" dogs at our hosts' house in D.C. tonight and am very excited to see what that means. A Newfoundland, I hope! The tour was off to an auspicious start because Thomas's little sister came over to our rehearsals with her dog, Katrina Bartlett (see left).
We are all six of us hurtling from LAX to Washington, DC on Virgin America; I am stuck in one of those Rules and Regulations emotional disasters where my seat won't recline because it is directly in front of an empty exit row and the famous power outlets are on the fritz; I can't move to the empty exit row because the Nice Lady pursed her lips in a particular way and said that she "just couldn't let me sit there." I need to track down the exact quote, but I remember Gayatri Spivak once speaking (or writing?) about a ticket agent saying "I can't let you on board;" she wrote that a better way to phrase it would be "the regulations are against it, thus, we are both victims." Actually, here is the original.
Quite so: in a situation like this, I can either a) stage an Episode and make a scene or b) sit back (theoretically, rather than actually, as this seat doesn't recline) and pretend it's not happening or c) try to befriend the Nice Lady and hope that she will turn the other way as I claim one of the empty seats. Is there any merit to any of this circular thought? Am I going to end up poisoned by stress? Should I just order a canister of Pringles and a glass of white wine and shut my pie hole? All this has reminded me of is that I wish Gayatri would just blog; she is so wonderful when she deals with the anecdotal, the Barthesian Mythology rendered severely Marxist and Feminist. The para-psychological peripatetic shuttling of the aboriginal subcontinent is the kind of stuff that she and Terry Eagleton can fight out in the academy; I want her to blog about Heathrow and the Subway and Yoga Pants and shit. Maximum length, 450 words. 1,2,3 - go.
-Nico
(This entry was excerpted from Nico's blog. You can read the post in its entirety here.)