Sometimes it’s just good luck!
From Berlin I was to travel to Rome via, I was to discover later, the Czech Republic.
Fortunately, as apparently happens often, the trains were on strike.
I say fortunately because I hadn’t realized that the train I was booked on detoured into Czechoslovakia and I had none of the necessary papers. I did, however, have a Eurail Pass so tossed up whether to just go for a train ride to Barcelona instead and give Italy a miss or to got to Rome as planned but via Zurich and to stay there for a time.
Zurich won out, but I wasn’t too rapt, as I had no desire to travel to the home of banking gnomes and yodelling and knew nothing about Zurich whatsoever.
It sounded incredibly boring.
By then I had been on the road for almost three months, eating sparingly and walking everywhere. I had lost a lot of the weight that years of junk food rehearsals had hidden the real me inside. It was good to go from being just a loser to being a big (and positive) loser. There could be a reality TV show in their somewhere …
When I reached the hostel I had booked I found it had the best bathroom I think I’d ever seen – circular with excellent lights and mirrors. For once in my life I liked how I looked, so I stopped hiding – I stood naked in front of the battery of mirrors for an unreasonable length of time turning and turning in the diffused winter sun.
No one disturbed this contemplation so the experience was complete and unsullied. The flesh had melted ~ and I was as never before.
I walked the town the Sunday afternoon I arrived, sightseeing and checking to see if there were any theatres performing that night.
I found one but the box office was closed despite all the advertising saying that they played on Sunday evenings.
I found an open side door, wandered in and, hearing voices, headed up a small flight of stairs. Whatever had been happening ended and the German speaking voices said their farewells and a man passed me on the stairs going down. He spoke to me and, when I indicated I spoke no German, he replied in English. I told him who I was and what I wanted – simply to book for the evening performance. He escorted me downstairs to the box office and spoke to the attendant who had just arrived and then bid me farewell, shook my hand, kissed me on the cheek and left.
The box office attendant told me to come back at 5pm to get the tickets as she wasn’t open yet.
This I did.
The tickets were waiting for me along with a programme and advice as to where to eat if I wanted a meal. I did as she suggested and it wasn’t until I’d finished my solitary meal and wine in the restaurant next to the theatre that I realized it was all paid for, as were the tickets.
I went into the theatre and looked through the programme.
I understood little of it but the photographs indicated that I had spoken to the artistic director of the company and that he had arranged comps and my meal.
I was very moved by this, even more so when the production – Hamlet and all in German – proved to be (and remains to this day) the best Shakespeare I have ever seen. Having played in Hamlet four times and directed the play twice I know it quite well and the language proved to be no barrier.
It was quite simply superb.
Since travelling to Europe, Canada and the US that first time in 1998 and taking, for the first time in my life, time to reflect, much has changed.
Travelling alone for those four months not only provided me with the opportunity to reflect and thereby change, it seemed to insist on it!
I often refer to a health scare I had in early 1999 as the seminal moment when I decided there were certain things I needed to come to terms with if my life was to continue – my sexuality, my gender issues, my relationship with my parents, my experience of sexual abuse, the drug use, the self harming, the suicide ideation and attempts and the self-loathing that was the by-product of all the rest – but in fact this was just a signpost and the process had begun while I was traveling alone in Europe and America with time to think and reflect.
It was only the moment of decision that needed to be polarized.
Addressing the issues is one thing, living at the address that process takes you to is quite another as you can only know what it is you know until you learn something new.
And new can be scary, obscure, perplexing, downright dangerous.
It can also be liberating and it has proved so for me.
And it can be put down to milestones and signposts – not necessarily recognizing them at the time, but being open to them, understanding that they are there for all of us, and being prepared to shed the skin that is past its use-by date.
Sitting, blubber-like, in a pool of terrified sweat while experiencing turbulence over Fiji on the outward journey became, within 16 hours, a total excitement at landing in Toronto in the snow. Fear of flying as I left Christchurch turning to vivid joy as I took off for New York in a snow-storm in an Air Canada rust-bucket with graffiti on the walls and toilets that didn’t flush barely 24 hours later.
As always, it seems to be art that does it for me and from which I gain my deepest insights.
No mind of my own?
Quite possibly.
Paul Simon puts it best for me, the cynicism of a life lived on the edge of experience. I used to think that this was me, now I think it’s a pretty tune about someone else.
It’s a still life water color,
Of a now late afternoon,
As the sun shines through the curtained lace
And shadows wash the room.
And we sit and drink our coffee
Couched in our indifference,
Like shells upon the shore
You can hear the ocean roar
In the dangling conversation
And the superficial sighs,
Are the borders of our lives.
And you read your Emily Dickinson,
And I my Robert Frost,
And we note our place with bookmarkers
That measure what we’ve lost.
Like a poem poorly written
We are verses out of rhythm,
Couplets out of rhyme,
In syncopated time
Lost in the dangling conversation
And the superficial sighs,
Are the borders of our lives.
Yes, we speak of things that matter,
With words that must be said,
“Can analysis be worthwhile?”
“Is the theatre really dead?”
And how the room is softly faded
And I only kiss your shadow,
I cannot feel your hand,
You’re a stranger now unto me
Lost in the dangling conversation.
And the superficial sighs,
In the borders of our lives.
But I also know that if I get smug, the whole thing could dissolve in a puff of smoke.
dykiegirl 