Travels with Billy

Abusive misuses of classic Steinbeck memoirs notwithstanding, I am being offered an opportunity here I'd never really expected, one I would love to talk to you about: I am a travelling performer.

I arrived in mid-July with no expectations.
That is a lie.  I expected genius, i expected fervor and passion beyond compare, i expected immediate professional accolades from every possible angle.  I also expected to have started this damn blog by now, but that's not to be fixed.

What else can you expect from a gig you put so much stock in?  We do what we love for money, but we do it mostly because we love it.  LOVE.  And i love it so much the more because i'm new (liquify that 'u' sound for me, wont you?) to it.  Bright eyed and fuzzy-tailed, i'm here to Build the foundation to a lifetime career.  I hope.

Anyway.  Two months and change and we've mounted three travelling productions; worked up a catalogue of workshops; and mapped out a tour route that looks something like the charted path and pattern of a Duncan Yo-Yo that forgot to take it's medication.

Now, load a dozen enthusiastically dynamic personalities into two passenger vans and one cargo van and get to driving.

And so we have done, and shall continue to do.

we will move from town to town, hotel room to b&b, theatre to auditorium to community center and back again.  The rolling green and brown of Virginia countryside will give way to the more industrial sprawl of suburban Baltimore and Bethesda and then up and around again.  Vermont to Sarasota, Austin to All-Over the Bloody place.

The longest stay we'll see will be something around a week and then we shall to the road again, churning asphalt under our dozen spinning brains conveyed by our dozen spinning wheels.

We will share with each other what we might fail to share with anyone: our best and our worst.  The sobering reminder that 'this is just a job; i love it but it is still just my job' will serve us at our best and completely evade us at our worst.  we will play the gypsy by day and live the Play by night.

All the while the odometer ticks and grinds us further and farther away from ground 0; from where we started and all this was but a dream and fruitless vision.  The reality of our going and coming, the return for the holiday season and the neo-exodus to the road again will be every bit the catalyst of inspiration as it might be a nail in the coffin in the fantasy of what this world is; are we to live on, loving the work and the fight and the toil, or will we walk away jaded of our passion and looking to a cubicle and a 401k?

Tomorrow we start the longest stint of absence from our borrowed beds and homes here in Staunton, VA.  6 weeks later we're here again and more work to be done.

Check in again and see where we go, who we meet, what we do, and (melodramatically of all) who we are.