So we woke up early Sunday morning and took 288 south instead. 288 is one of those secret roads I didn't know about for my first few years in Houston. Of course, it's no secret to the thousands and thousands of people who use it every day. But it was secret to me, until I found it, pretty much starting a few blocks from my doorstep, and leading past Brazos Bend's alligators, the refineries, and canals, all the way to the beach. I took it all the time then to see those alligators, but this Sunday morning we drove past them and on through those pastures of cows grazing in front of the science fiction landscapes of steel tubing and chimneys pumping gas out of trucks, out of the ground, and out of Texas. In Surfside we turned left at the beach and headed towards the San Luis Pass bridge.
My friend Charlie told me how he once rehearsed a Beckett play under that bridge, so it seemed like a good place to stop. There were a few fishermen there, but the ocean side of the pass was nearly empty. We pulled our cars up close to the water. The sun broke through the last few clouds, and it became one of the most beautiful days of my entire stay. Once everyone arrived, we handed around the totemic American wood carvings and sex toys, suited up in our ethnic costumes, and started shooting.
There's a thing that happens when you're working with good artists. They surprise you. The best ones do it every time. You can tell yourself, “That guy or gal is GOOD,” and you can mean it in your heart of hearts and feel it to your core. But if that artist is really that good, then they will STILL surprise you when they start making their art. Surprise you with just how damn good they are. Everyone had a surprise for me that day at the beach.
I've seen Kyle so many times on stage that I can't count the times. Still, when he turned his face on for the camera, it surprised me every time, so that I laugh out loud, like a baby with a rattle. And when Tek did that thing with her smile... same thing. And then Christian, a guy I hadn't worked with all that much, rose way above my expectations to steal the show with a couple of moves and expressions I just couldn't have predicted. That guy was GOOD. We got everything we needed in three hours and headed to a burger place for dinner.
The top of my head where I'm balding was sunburnt, and the pain reminded me just momentarily of that Mount Olympus amnesia, but really a February sunburn from a Texas beach was not anything I could complain about, thinking of my wife and friends, who had only recently started digging out of the snowdrifts of Kosovo. I sat in the passenger seat and drifted in and out of that satisfied post-beach sleepiness. The landscape was populated by more cows, billboards for lawyers offering to sue other lawyers, and live oaks that were a hundred years old or older. Their branches as thick as a man arced out and then sloped down to the ground before rising back up again, the same way that—despite their heaviness—those silver tubes running circles around the refineries made half loops in the air and refused to move in a straight line. There was enough room there for all this extra motion. The sky in Texas was as big as I remembered it. Bigger than any I had ever seen before. My friends in Kosovo sometimes asked about Texas, and I knew that they had an idea of what it looked like in their minds. I wondered if it looked like this.
- t
p.s. I love you, Ex-Yugo pop. The title of this song says it all. Yugoslavia won 1989's Eurovision with this entry by band Riva. Skip to 1:51 for the song, but start at the beginning for all the Eurovision pomp.
p.p.s. I love you too, Houston.
And one more little extra: some shots from last night's rehearsal.
