Day 7

We only have two more days of the festival. This is both a reason to celebrate and mourn.

The show is definitely hitting a stride, even though we fell back a pace or two on account of me being selected to start off playing the dog. Yep, I did three nights in a row in Milwaukee, the first night here, and since then, five nights in a row, it’s been Andy. Now me again. But we didn’t fall back to last Friday – there’s ongoing development. The big trick, I’ve been thinking, is keeping some kind of momentum from this experience going into August in Minnesota.

Last night was Big Club Night, in which Andy partook and I didn’t. Club Lávka is the biggest dance club in Central Europe, and according to one of the volunteers who chose not to go, not a place she’d feel comfortable sitting on furniture. Still, some 20-30 folks made it there last night, and Andy rolled in around 5:30am. I didn’t notice. My morning errand was sussing out how to pay the difference on our apartment that we were mistakenly not charged when we moved in. No, there’s no scam, just sloppy work on their part. After many many hiccups, we’re sorting it all out tomorrow.

Then the action started at 10:30am. Jarda from Brno texts me: Rozinka can’t make it, something’s come up at home. See you at 13:30 at Florenc, yellow bus. A good deal of running around later, I meet Brbla as he gets off the bus. No Jarda. Didn’t he text you? Someone stole the security camera from the back of the theater – for the second time in two weeks. He’s meeting the police. Shortly after, Jarda calls, he’ll be in at 4pm. Got it. Brbla and I have lunch, hang out. He orders a coffee and a shot of rum. Pours the rum in the coffee. Drinks. A Czech specialty, he tells me. A Brbla specialty, Jarda later corrects him. Jarda is delayed even further, until 4:30, and I still have to drop them off at the theater, get to the flat, turn around and get back. Everything works out with only the slightest of elevated heartrates, and I leave Jarda and Brbla to their own devices.

We had our biggest house yet, just over 30 people. I spent the rest of the evening continuing with Jarda and Brbla (the latter smoked three packs of cigarettes over the course of the evening – not the day, the evening), as they were taking a 12:30am bus back to Brno. You couldn’t find nicer guys, they’re not getting in until 4am or so.

Brbla is on the left, dodging the camera. Jarda is on the right.

And they gave us the best compliment that I could have imagined. Now, they don’t really speak English, but they can understand it pretty well, though we do speak pretty fast. They definitely got all of the cursing. They said that the story was visually clear, they loved the back-and-forth exchange of characters, and that (here’s the good part) it reminded them of the work that Goose on a String used to do. Spare, more of a focus on action.

Couldn’t have made me happier. They didn’t even think we were disgusting.