Natural disasters

Day two in Limbo. I should be in Nepal by now, but instead I wait. For how long, nobody knows. The travel agents and airlines promise again and again that they will call me back, but they never do. I try to make myself the squeaky wheel, to hassle them until they relent and work out how to get me on a plane, but they have a lot of people like me to deal with. I joke to my friends that I'm a ghost in Brisbane, stuck here because of Unfinished Business. I try and find loose ends to tie up. That letter I'd been meaning to send for the longest time, that library card, that birth certificate. Nothing seems to help, because still I wait. I've made lengthy, meaningful goodbyes to my dear friends, and now I'm afraid that they'll see me walking down the street.

 The last few weeks have been jammed with purpose and urgency. I returned from Bali just in time to see the end of an era. The house known as Ill Manor was being sold, and we were required to have an epic party to see it off. Ill Manor, a house that Esher would have loved. It was three-storeys high, or more accurately, three-storeys low, the ground floor being the top floor, the other floors sloping down the side of the formidable hill. One year ago, this house awoke me to Brisbane's charms, 6 months later I was to chase a girl to this city, and find myself living in her room in that same chaotic house. Brisbane remembers you, Ill Manor, so does Melbourne for that matter. That party was just as you imagined it, bands in the lounge room obscured behind a sea of dancing people. Here, someone else smashing a hole in the wall, there, someone spraying a tag on another wall. Over there, a housemate trying to explain to everyone that it's not a demolition party, his voice lost in the hubbub.

The food poisoning I had avoided in Bali caught up with me at last, after that party. Ill once more. Better again in a few days, just in time to pick up my old friend Skye from the airport. He landed on my couch, and we each spent a few days recovering, I from sickness and work, Skye from an international misadventure which left him penniless and a little worn down. Those first few days before we moved into the theatre space were strange and hard to recall, we got the internet connected in our house, how did we live without it? I drew a face on a balloon and shaved it with a cut-throat razor. It popped, with a little cloud of shaving cream in its wake. They gave us the key to the Sue Benner theatre, and we set out to make a show, from scratch, in one week. That week blurred into one long, long day. Sleep brought no respite, only the most vivid and bizarre dreams, in one of these I hung out with cousin Henry in some Aztec ruins. Towards the end of the dream I recalled his tragic death, and woke up crying. Skye was dreaming vividly as well, but was not sleeping as easily. I would be up and pottering about in the kitchen of a morning, while he was still lying half-awake in his couch-cocoon.
"Skye, it's time to get up!"
"Mmnnh... Play me Bill Withers!"
I loaded up YouTube, found Bill Withers' song, "Lovely Day". It worked like magic, like a snake-charmer's flute, and we walked into town, singing. Those half-hour walks to and from the theatre gave us time to talk and think, and as our shoes slapped purposefully down those same paths, the show explained itself to us. Skye told me about his problems with the term 'audience participation'. He explained that an audience is always participating, by the very fact that they are an audience. We talked about comfort zones, and why he avoided using narrative in his shows. We talked about form and content, about stories and emotional manipulation, and I told him a certain story from the voyages of Sinbad. We talked about so many things, and they all made their mark on our show in some way. I remember after our first show talking to two people who were very interested in the way the show explored masculinity, and I thought to myself "Wow, that's about the only thing that we didn't discuss". We made a show where the audience had to engage and think and act from the very moment they walked into the space. A show that sabotaged itself, a show that we were both proud of. And then, the next day, we packed it all up, filled up a skip with old newspaper, loaded up my dear Eye-van with old abandoned clothing, and went on our way. No time to pause, for that evening I had a fundraiser for my flight to Nepal.

I felt despair set in as I went to the venue, no time, no mental capacity to do this. My body screamed, "I just want to have a day off!" No chance, no escape, off to the outskirts of Brisbane. Rocketing down the road, allaying my despair by shoveling salt & vinegar chips into my mouth as I drove. Crumbs everywhere, who cares? There, in a place called Cooper's Plains, was a little warehouse space that seemed to be a bakery. I still have no idea what that place was, who that man was and why he gave me 10kg of Sourdough for the pizza bases, but it did not seem to matter. His zeal when he talked about the dough was inspiring. He leaned in close, and in a low, conspiratorial voice, murmured "It's alive, man!" That is who I want to be baking my bread.

The fundraiser was a success, pizza was delicious, my friends did a wonderful job putting it all together, playing great music, doing great performance. Even though there wasn't a huge turn out, we managed to raise almost enough money for me to pay back the fund for my plane ticket. All that was left was to pack up my room, say my goodbyes, get some circus skills booklets from Flipside, and then get to the airport. The sense of achievement was immense, putting on that show, then fundraiser, and then flying to Nepal, all in such a short time. But then as I got to the airport's check-in counters, and i saw a constellation of cancelled flights on the departure boards, disbelief, despair!. I remembered things I'd vaguely heard about a volcanic ash cloud.