Miami

July 20, 2008

Home from Miami. What we thought was a flawless set of flights ended in lost bags, but that seemed slight in the light of all that didn’t go wrong. News travels fast in an airport, and the parking lot guy asked us if we had found our bags."No," we said. Then he expressed surprise that we had not been flying Delta, as among airport personnel Delta stands for "Don’t Expect Luggage To Arrive."

Miami was a disappointment, hot, dirty, faded, empty, until we got out of the half-inhabited forest of hotels where the conference was, first into South Beach and then into Bayside Park, where there was something resembling real life. We did adopt a wonderful restaurant near the performance spaces at the Carnival Center, the Miami Arts Café, with French-inspired food served by a Hispanic matriarch and her each-one-lovelier-than-the-last brood. The food was perfect, and appeared, no matter how crowded the place was, within minutes. Best cappuccino ever. South Beach is a kind of high-consumption paradise. We went to a party at Nikki’s Beach, which turned out to be a dud, but we strolled up the street until we found an Italian restaurant with outdoor seating, where the food was excellent and the waiter so suave our own manners improved by contact. Though it was night, we sweat as we ate, and that seemed right, somehow, with the dramatic people and the dramatic colors of their garments and their skin around us. Everything needed to be sweaty and aqua and pink. The full moon rose over the sea as we ate. It was like Greenwich Village, but with the tops of the buildings cut off, and all the neon turned pastel. And very hot. The first night there we went to Jungle Island, where we petted snakes and cockatoos, but amid the partying of three thousand homosexuals, which changed the atmosphere utterly. I really didn’t know what we were supposed to do. We walked about and looked at each other, and drank the almost sinfully potent cocktails. The bartenders were saying, "Say when," and most of us took full advantage. There was a "No Talent Show" which fulfilled every expectation set by the title. Our last night in Miami, we wandered down to Bayside Park, which was bright and happy and clearly a foreign country, everyone speaking a language other than English and singing along to songs we’d never heard of. A crowd of kids were doing capoeira, a Brazilian dance inspired my martial arts moves. It was a splendid spectacle. The dance is intricate and graceful and physically demanding, and the people doing it were the most exquisite physical specimens imaginable, dark boys leaping like colts over one another, twisting in the air, throwing punches that never landed. In the crowd watching was every shade from inky black to my Celtic and MP’s Anglo-Saxon pallor. It was a most beautiful evening. It was what I hope America will be while I’m still alive to see it.

The point of going to Miami was to perform at the GALA Festival, and I think we covered ourselves with moderate glory. We may have been the smallest ensemble there, and surely we had come from the smallest town represented. I didn’t hear as many other ensembles as I did in Cincinnati, but still, I think, enough. We were told that we were outstanding for blend, intonation, and diction, but whether we were outstanding or our critics were kind cannot be known by one who was not in the hall listening. The Metromover failed as we were heading for our concert, and we had to jog ten blocks through the blistering heat, and arrived rather more wilted than we would have hoped, but it is possible that the cross got our minds off ourselves and improved the performance. I was happy to hear the ovation from the vast crowd out there in the air-conditioned darkness. I was, for a second, exultant.

I made all the mistakes in rehearsal and none in performance. I hope MP appreciated that.

Miami is hell for a tourist, the Metromover almost indecipherable (the locals were too confused themselves to guide us), the taxis apt to cheat you, the busses apt to stop forty blocks from the bus stop outside your hotel, without a word of explanation except, "end of the line" in Spanish from the already-slugging-down-a-beer driver. We went to the Miami Seaquarium and sweated and battled our way through droves of schoolchildren and watched the clown divers, and had exactly that abortion of bus service happen to us on the way back, after I’d already vomited copiously over Key Biscayne. Black crowned night herons waited for a stray fish during the dolphin show. I watched them because I couldn’t see the dolphins. The herons were what I needed, whether they were what I paid for or not.

Chased anoles and big greenish crabs behind the Hyatt Regency.

Longed for no one. That was strange. Though everyone there was there because of a sexual identity, the event seemed oddly sexless, or at least hugely more theatrical than sexy. The capoeira–now that was sexy.

I liked the people of Miami, however much I thought the city itself someplace I need never be again.

Returning involved an orgy of watering in the garden, of filling of bird baths and hummingbird feeders, of feeding fish in the water gardens. I can’t believe weeds could grow so in five days!

Bailiwick Theater of Chicago will begin its season with Anna Livia, Lucky in Her Bridges. We are scheduled to run on the main stage from September 11 to October 19.