Newfoundland.
I’d been so obsessively busy with my trifling little movie project that I’d not written an honest blog entry in nearly a month. Our trip on the road this time was really only about a month and a half, when you factored out the nearly two weeks we spent in Winnipeg. It’s hard for me to blog when I’m standing still in one place.
We’ve been on the road in Newfoundland for roughly three weeks, essentially hitting a town, performing our show then driving out to the next town. We sleep in a motel, get up early, rig up our set and perform again, alive for the moments of waiting, anticipation, in the dressing rooms of theatres or just behind our projection screen in school gyms. As actors we are sometimes the most dead to the world when we’re standing on stage, reciting our lines and reacting to everyone elses. We pack our set up, load the van, say goodbye to the crews we’ll never see or think about again and hit the road once more. We pass shitty little houses in Newfoundland, we hydroplane in our van through melted snow puddles the size of lakes. We trod around into a Tim Horton’s and order soups and hot drinks.
I keep starting each paragraph with a dash. This is the danger of habits formed while writing movie criticism.
Newfoundland is filled with shitty houses and the more of the little shit-barns you see the more you grow to like them. They’re best when they’re odd colors, hot pinks, neon greens, and rooster reds. St. John’s has row houses that tower thin and high. I imagine hearing your neighbors through the walls for three or four sheer stories up. You can hear them when they’re across the room by the opposite wall they’re so thin. You can probably almost even hear the neighbors next to them. A mere 50 feet holds 4 or 5 neighbors worth of people. A whole neighborhood is crammed into each city block in St. John’s.
The frozen over lakes look like science fiction tundras, empty and wan. We pass spindly trees and caribou warnings. We crashed our van. Most of you might not know that. We haven’t really been talking about it much. It’s been long ago now and we’re close enough to finishing that I feel appropriate about bringing it up.
The roads weren’t appropriately plowed if you want my opinion. The road looked clear of snow for a wider distance than it actually existed. If you drove over onto the shoulder, well, you’d simply drop off, because the shoulder wasn’t real. It was a booby trap of untamped powder. Like those leaf covered pits you see in cartoons and comics and, come to think of it, probably real hunting scenarios. So the yellow line, indistinguishable by all the white, led our driver to the right side of the road. We dropped off ten feet with an utter simplicity. The girls screamed as we tipped over onto our side, a 45 degree-angled-aquarium-performing-beluga-whale of a van. It was a similar feeling to the initial drop in Pirates of the Caribbean in Disneyland. We all slightly hung by our seat belts. Susie was sitting next to me in the back and she instinctively grabbed my hand. “are you okay?” “ya are you okay.” “are you okay?” “I’malrightiseveryoneokay.” We were all okay. We had to clamber through the driver side door because all passenger doors were buried in snow. I honked the horn by accident on my way out. My arms and legs were shaking more than I thought they were.
The Tow truck broke at least 3 tow lines trying to pull our van and all its gear out of the frothy bank. ‘Fooooook’ is what the tow truck drivers would say when their lines would break. “Ah Fook.” We finally got it out and spent a few days eating Pizza Delight in Hawkes Bay. Since then we’ve been snowed in in Gander. This past week was our first Mon. to Fri. we performed each day. We don’t have any more shows left in Newfoundland now. We’re on our way out. En route via Port Au Choix to Port Au Basques. We’ve had Paul Simon’s greatest hits chugging along thus far. The Ipod doesn’t have song titles besides ‘Track 1’ and ‘track 6’ and ‘track 13’. These greatest hits cd’s always have a lot of songs.
Photo Copyright Redbubble.com
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