Showing posts with label lost. Show all posts
Police rejected Lindsey.
Free falafel smells.
- Last night à la haiku
PART I: PILGRIMAGE
And so it came to pass that this weekend many of the young, curious theatre students at BADA decided to make the pilgrimage to the Globe Theatre to see Shakespeare as It Was, as It Is, as it is Meant To Be. And for £5, you can have the extra-authentic experience of seeing the show standing near the stage as a groundling.
An artistic depiction of the historic groundlings.
According to this website, groundlings were theatergoers too poor to pay for actual seats, and frequently partook in activities such as
fist-fighting,
gambling,
drinking,
prostitution, and
bear-baiting.
Classy. Cheap. Perfect.
The shows currently playing at the Globe are Richard III, Henry V, and Taming of the Shrew. Taming, in my opinion, is clearly the coolest of the three, but this weekend we could only really see it at midnight on Friday night. Saturday, technically.
Which, whatever. It's not like I'm ever asleep by midnight anyway. We have 11pm shows at Northwestern. Midnight show at the Globe, no big deal, right?
Let's re-examine:
A three-hour performance. Standing. Outdoors. In London. At midnight.
And the Tube stops running at around 2:30am - meaning we would have no way to get back to Oxford, and would be left to either pay a lot of money to stay for a few hours at a hostel, or not sleep after the show.
So I was like, okay, it's not meant to be. Maybe I'll go see Henry V on Saturday and hear about the young Phoebus fanning instead.
But a bunch of my friends from BADA decided that they were gonna do Taming at midnight, and throughout the week I kept hearing about it. And I was doing such a good job of being responsible. I really was. Every time someone brought it up, this would happen:
Me: Nah, I don't think I'm gonna do that.
Me: I love Taming, but I don't want to pull an all-nighter in London.
Me: I'll just go to London in the morning! Whateverrr.
And as the week progressed:
Me: I want to, but... bad decision... I... rmgmhmrrhrmm
Me: I'll just see Henry V! Really, I'm just as excited about that. The young Phoebus! Fanning!!!!
Me: STOP TEMPTING ME THIS WAY.
Finally, on Thursday night, I was hanging out in Josh's room. He had decided to do Taming at midnight, and so had our friend Angie, who knocked on his door to talk about plans.
Angie: Juli, are you going?
Me: No, I aslkdlsak;l; I mean idk the young Phoebus
Angie: COME ON IT'LL BE AN EXPERIENCE!
Me:
Me:
Me:
Me: Okay.
And that's how I wound up buying a £5 ticket to see a midnight production of Taming of the Shrew.
PART II: PROBLEM-SOLVING
The issue, of course, was that Josh and I were going to be effectively homeless for the hours between the end of the show and whenever London wakes up. Angie had booked a hostel for more than either of us wanted to spend, and our friends Zach and Lindsey were looking into staying with a family friend of Zach's. So the two of us immediately began brainstorming
1. Find park. Sleep in shifts.
2. Find 24-hour McDonald's. Sleep in shifts.
3. Go to club in hopes of being adopted by attractive strangers.
4. Go to Olympic Village in hopes of being adopted by attractive Olympians.
5. Find church. Sleep in pews. (This led to me Googling "sleep in churches legal london?" And it is, but good luck finding an unlocked church.)
6. Stay at the real St. Mungo's.
7. Wander streets. Find mattress store. When mattress store opens, say we are studying mattresses with an Undergraduate Research Grant. Request to sleep on them for educational purposes.
8. Wander streets. Find movie theatre. Buy tickets to first showing. Sleep during movie.
Sleeping somewhere in shifts was looking increasingly likely until about two hours before we left for London, when Zach and Lindsey mentioned that one of their BADA teachers, Kelly Hunter, had offered to let us all stay at her house for the night. And just like that, our crazy theatergoing experience started to seem a little less crazy.
PART III: PLAY
The Globe is on the south bank of the Thames, and you have to cross the river to get there from the nearest Tube station. The easiest way to do that is via the Millennium Bridge, one-time victim of a Death Eater attack, so naturally that was a moment. But it was also a moment because it was a perfect night - clear and not too cold, an almost-full moon overhead, the water below us illuminated by the multi-colored lights on the bridge and some badass floating Olympic rings. The Globe was in front of us, St. Paul's Cathedral behind us, and over our shoulder was the Tower Bridge.
Bad iPod picture makes perfect thing imperfect. :(
And then it was almost time for the show.
Stepping into the Globe for the first time is striking. Especially when you've spent years hearing about it and reading about it as a theatre kid. And even though I recognize the historical significance and everything, I couldn't help but think, oh my God, I'm standing on the set of Shakespeare In Love.
Party like it's 1599.
And the show was incredible. It was so refreshing to see a Shakespeare play performed without a gimmick or concept. All of the actors were impeccable, of course, but without being slaves to the text the way so many students of classical theatre are. And seeing a midnight show as a groundling is honestly the closest you can possibly get experiencing a Shakespeare play as a rock concert. Characters jumped off of the stage and exited into the crowd, appealed to the audience, encouraged us to clap along to their songs. It was dirty and ridiculous and there was an actor who looked like Orlando Bloom, so it was basically the best Shakespeare experience ever.
PART IV: PASSENGERS
But by the final bows, even Orlando Bloom couldn't keep us from feeling like we were going to fall over. All of us were exhausted. I think I was dehydrated. Angie left for her hostel, and it was time for the rest of us to catch a cab to Kelly Hunter's house.
So we struggled back across the Millennium Bridge, parked ourselves on a street corner, and tried to hail a cab.
For the first half-hour, every one that passed us either already had passengers or was impossible to flag down. Finally, we managed to get one to stop.
Driver: Where are you going?
Us: Teddington.
Driver: Teddington?
Us: Teddington.
Driver: Zone 6? That's too far. I was about to head home for the night.
For those of you unfamiliar with the layout of the city of London, it vaguely resembles this:
Certified accurate and to scale.
So yeah - Zone 6 is far. In a fit of desperation, I went, "We'll tip you!" but he was already driving away.
And then it started to rain.
At least another half-hour passed, and it was looking more and more likely that we would need to revert to one of the ideas Josh and I had brainstormed when we thought we wouldn't have anywhere to stay. It was getting colder and rainier and closer to daylight, and our only companions on the street were a group of very drunk women dressed as Pink Ladies and the guy running a small falafel store that was inexplicably still open. At this point I was less invested in cabs and sleep and more just basking in the inevitability of human oblivion and the smell of Middle Eastern food. But Lindsey was still motivated, and decided that she would stop the next police car we saw to ask for the best way to get a cab to Teddington.
A few minutes later, a police car rolled up to the red light. Lindsey ran over, waving, and just as she reached it, the light turned green, and it sped off.
Even the constables didn't care about us.
It began to rain harder.
I tried to remember if there had been any viable nearby options on stay4free.com.
Sunrise approached.
The rain continued.
Finally, at a quarter past four, we acquired a cab.
I don't really remember getting in the cab, but I do remember all of us collapsing in laughter because we were in a cab on the way to our teacher's house in who-knows-where, London, after standing for over an hour in the rain after standing for three hours at the Globe. And I do remember going, "I should totally be drafting a blog post," and pulling out my Shakespeare notepad and writing this as neatly as I could in a moving vehicle:
"No, no, sun, you stop that, you go back down." - Lindsey, 4:20am
WHY AREN'T WE HORIZONTAL???
And at a quarter to five, we made it to Kelly Hunter's house. Kelly Hunter, if you ever Google yourself and find this blog post, please know how eternally grateful we all are to you. Josh and I don't even know you, because sadly you are not one of our BADA teachers, but you saved us from sleeping in shifts in a park, and you also have very comfortable pillows and a wonderful collection of DVDs.
We all pretty solidly passed out by five, and at 8:20, we were awake and ready to journey back to the West End to buy show tickets for another titillating day of theatre.
But that's for another blog post. Because Aaron Carter just came on shuffle, and it's been a really, really long 48 hours, and I should probably go to bed or something.
Sleep sweet, blogosphere.
(This post to you brought by Kelly Hunter, male gymnasts, sympathetic taxi drivers, and Jason Mraz.)
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Why you should fly British Airways
1. The stewardesses are classy. They wear red pumps.
2. I'm pretty sure the plane that took me from Boston to Heathrow was double-decker.
2b. And even though you probably have to pay an astronomical sum to sit on the top deck, it's still effing cool that there's a top deck.
3. You can watch The Hunger Games on demand! (Along with How I Met Your Mother, New Girl, Love Actually, documentaries on the Olympics, and a million other things.)
4. The in-flight meal was actually not awful.
4b. The in-flight muffin was even better.
4c. The in-flight muffin was from a brand called "Me, Myself, & My Muffin," which is either charmingly British or just really really awesome or both.
5. The blanket they give you for overnight flights is soft, not itchy and gross like on American.
6. Everyone has a cool accent.
7. If you're not a broke college student, you can sit in the class above economy and get "club seating," which is basically your own little cubicle. And you get to face backwards if you pick the right seat.
In all seriousness, though, I've been on a lot of planes in my life, and this was one of my favorite flying experiences. I was sitting next to a fifteen year-old boy with fire engine hair who mostly mumbled in a British accent. I think he was probably a Weasley.
But the best part of the trip by far was that I serendipitously wound up with a window seat on an overnight flight where we were literally traveling through the night. When we took off I watched Massachusetts disappear, and soon my home state was replaced by endless ocean. It’s always cool for me to come back to New England and realize that the body of water I’m looking at is a real ocean, not just a massive lake pretending to be one (ily Lake Michigan, but you're a poser. A really, really beautiful poser). I blinked, and we were so high up that I couldn’t tell if the currents beneath us were the Atlantic or clouds being waves, and the next thing I knew we were flying over a sunset. The length of 21 Jump Street later and dawn was breaking in the distance, and the next thing I knew, we were over the British Isles and it was morning.
The Weasley gave me a weird look whenever I took a picture out the airplane window, but whatever.
Then I was at customs, falling asleep in line as the rest of London was waking up. Also, I'm pretty sure the guy who checked me in at the UK border thought I was, like, 14:
Me: Hi! Here's my passport.
Him: Where did you come from?
Me: Boston.
Him: You’re on your own?
Me: Yes.
Him: No family or friends with you?
Me: No. (Seeing he was perplexed.) I’m a student visitor – here, I have a letter –
Him: That’ll help. How old are you?
Me: 20.
It was obviously not the answer he was expecting. He actually read my whole BADA letter in detail, and then took a long time impressing his stamp into my passport. The entire thing felt very climactic.
Then, as he handed it back to me, he said, “So you’re studying drama?”
“Um, yeah.”
“So you’re going to be in films, then?”
“I mean, that’s the goal.”
He took a long look at my landing card, then my face. Finally, he smiled. “I’ll try to remember your name, then.”
And even though I found this hilarious, I went, "Thanks."
A couple of hours later and I finally reached Oxford. Tonight I'm staying with the daughter of a woman my dad works with - random, I know, but she's very nice and it's free - and I passed out for about five hours before I decided to go into the center of the city and buy a phone. Then I made a series of bad decisions.
Bad decisions, part 1 of 2
1. Not changing out of my skirt and sandals, even though I knew it was sixty degrees and drizzling.
2. Not eating anything before I left.
3. Not caffeinating before I left.
4. Not paying close attention to the location of the bus stop in relation to the house where I'm staying.
5. Getting off the bus early so I could walk all the way to the phone place and get what I thought would be the real Oxford experience.
6. Attempting to buy an actual phone for my UK phone (luckily, the phone guy heard my accent, looked at me, looked at my sandals, realized I was broke, and told me to buy the cheap one. Thank God).
7. Sitting on the ground in the mall, attempting to figure out how to work my UK phone (pro tip: mall cops here yell at you for this).
It was somewhere around the mall cop - constable? - yelling at me that I realized the rain outside had escalated into a full-on downpour. So I went to Primark, which is a sort of Forever 21-type place, and bought three pairs of tights and, grudgingly, a pair of jeans. Since I of course didn't pack any. I have no need for pants at home!
Then, even though it was pouring, I made yet more bad decisions:
Bad decisions, part 2 of 2
1. Not changing into my pants.
2. Deciding to take the scenic route back to the faraway bus stop YET AGAIN, despite the fact that it was FREEZING and RAINING.
FREEZING. RAINING.
I managed to get myself on the bus and back to the correct stop, and it was only after deboarding that I realized I had no idea how to get back to the house. The woman I'm staying with lives on this very tiny street off a fairly major road - the problem is, no one knows where the very tiny street is. I realized that after walking at least two miles in the wrong direction and asking several strangers for help. By this point, the paper bag holding my pants had completely disintegrated, so I was standing on a street corner in God-knows-where, Oxford, drenched, shaking, hopelessly lost, using a pair of pants as an umbrella.
But the adage that it's always darkest before dawn held true, because it was then that I made my first good decision of the day:
Good decisions, part 1 of 1
1. Walking back the other way.
So I dragged myself back two miles to the bus stop, saw a place called Nicholson Road, and thought I like Jack Nicholson, maybe the very tiny street is this way.
And it was.
And it was.
And now I'm wrapped in a blanket, drinking tea, enjoying the free wi-fi, and about to go the f#@% to sleep. See? It does get better.
BADA tomorrow and I can't wait!
