Minsk Journal: West Side Story - Images

Friday, September 16th, 2011

Minsk, Belarus

I'm trying to figure out how to explain the currency situation here. Unless you've been to a place where its seriously uneconomical to print paper below a certain denomination because, you know, its not worth anything, then I'm not sure how to put this into context.

Try this: last night I spent 34,000 Belarussian Rubles on a cheeseburger. That's not a typo. Jason Ignacio, our Associate Artistic Director and my collaborator on West Side spent 35,000 on a Guinness. Yes, he spent more on a beer than I spent on dinner (can you say exchange rate problems with imported merchandise), but, that aside, together we spent over 100,000 on two cheeseburgers, one beer, two cokes and bottled water. Ummm....

What, exactly, do you do with that? And two days ago the currency was devalued essentially by half. The official exchange rate went from 5,000 to the dollar to 8,500 to the dollar. In a day.

For me that all sounds vaguely funny. Try living here and the humor stops like a car going 90 into a steel wall. How, precisely, do you buy that which you have to have to survive? I couldn't even imagine what it must take to walk into a car dealership.

Yet, with that, people are so remarkably wonderful here.

On a Friday night in Minsk, deep in the worst kind of jet lag (assuming there's a good kind) I'm at the cafe in the hotel lobby and noodling around about heading out in search of music (there's a pretty good music scene here, and the restaurants are great). But tomorrow is a full rehearsal day and its the beginning of the very hardest part of West Side -- the Somewhere Ballet. Somewhere never made it into the film of West Side. Its a feature of the musical and as such is really rarely seen and understood. And its a tricky thing because the score makes it easy to fall into cliché. Add to that the fact that your stepping in and around Jerry Robbins and you better do your job well.

So I've been through the score, both in recording and sheet music, about 50 times and sat up last night (not that there was a choice) working through storyboards and ideas and a sense of inquiry about what the music was asking and what the choreographers notes (thank you Library of Congress and the luck of living in DC) were saying.

This iteration of West Side is strangely familiar in terms of the challenges that came up almost 55 years ago -- how do you get the best out of dancers who aren't singers, singers who aren't actors, actors who aren't dancers -- and how do you do it within something called the "Somewhere Ballet." Its there and its possible, but its not something to take lightly.

My initial answer is to bring together the best man in the cast with the best woman on a day off for everyone else and set about making a dance I understand and believe in, and then go from there -- what is the art that you need to make as oppose to the art that is in front of you. Forget the limitations - find what for you is the truth and then work your way down the trail until you find what everyone you need can do, and be challenged successfully by.

And that's a key that's easy to overlook I think in a musical situation like this -- one where the work has never been done in the country, and where you're in the middle of the first American musical ever staged here. Be sure that you are cognizant of the experience for the artists -- that, at the end of the day they are rewarded, challenged, and filled with possibility. Don't expect them to be anyone else but who they are with what they have the ability to do in six months. Not today, but down the road. That's the trick. This is a new place, a new space and a new experience for almost everyone here, and so its a different, but remarkable, journey.

Yesterday we had class -- for all 50 people in the cast -- in a small studio off the deck of the main stage (rehearsal, mercifully, was on the stage itself) and it was a crazy, crazy thing to watch Jason navigate it all (and do so brilliantly). Then, in the evening, it was "America," which, in the Broadway production is only for the women (the movie version with the boys is so infectious its hard to get it out of your head). Jason is really the lead voice in that dance, and he embraced the role....as the images below will tell you.

Jackie's quote

Minsk, Belarus

Thursday, September 15, 2011

In the midst of an engagement in a country which was the subject of an intense Op-Ed in today's New York Times, a piece which gives meaning and definition to the challenges faced here and yet of the value and impact of cultural diplomacy as perhaps the only tool of engagement possible a parallel piece in today's Washington Post reminded me of the power of culture in a different way, and from a different time.

Jacqueline Kennedy (and later Onassis) echoed the meaning, and potency, of an Administration which, unlike virtually every other one to succeed it in the US, recognized that art, too, is a tool of society, of diplomacy and of a country of enlightenment. On the fiftieth anniversary year of the inaugural of John Kennedy, in a country far, far from home on so many ways, a few of her words seemed worth sharing.

The restoration (of the White House) may be emblematic of Jackie’s best and greatest legacy, much more lasting than her sense of style, her pillbox hats and her breathy adoration of her beau. Her understanding of culture — and the power of culture — may have left the country something larger. Jack and Jackie both loved reading about great civilizations, she says at one point in the tapes. She believed that the cultural power of civilizations was more important than political power or military power in the lasting influence of those civilizations.

In her 20s, she was once asked what her ideal job might be.

“Art Director of the 20th century,” she said.

She just may have gotten her wish.

--from "The Root DC" on September 14, 2011

Minsk Journal: West Side Story - Day Two

Wednesday, September 14th

The Hotel Minsk lobby

The search for the perfect Italian restaurant continued in earnest here tonight. So far Jason Ignacio (our Associate Rehearsal Director) and I have found at least three in a three block radius from the hotel. Haven't quite figured out what the preoccupation with Italian food is here, but as a life-long Caprese addict I'm not complaining.

And the realization that the women in Minsk are the best dressed women I've ever seen outside of Italy just keeps getting reaffirmed daily. Serious style in this city everywhere.

As to the reason we're here....

How many times in life, and especially in art, have you heard the phrase "everything's been done. There's nothing new." It so easy to see it that way. But its wrong. Here, in Minsk, there's an opportunity to set a pace, a standard and a way forward for the creation of a musical theater community and culture that doesn't exist here yet. Never mind the one in New York -- you can't just transport 45th between Broadway and 9th Avenue. The one here, lurking under the surface like a stalk inching its way through the soil to the sunlight is fresh; unique.

The musical traditions, and the theater traditions, are so different that the pulling together of the separate cords of what makes a great musical great are being fabricated both before us and through us. From the "this is what a grapevine step looks like" to the flirtation/competition of the "Dance in the Gym," its all new here. The ideas of how to train to succeed in a musical are new. The chance to make it their own is present and it, too is new, because its a canvas they have to make for themselves. That's about courage, and there is so much of that --- and excitement. 42 dancers in the room today -- some of them true dancers, some actors, some singers -- but 42 people locked into Jason's every note and riveted on his footwork of his accent on the downbeat of the "5."

We set out to do some swing partnering, and it was the awkward high school dance all over again -- and that has to transform (and it will) into the elegant sexiness of an entire environment charged with it.

Too much fun.

And a Kazakhstan post-script

On Saturday, September 10th, just before Jason Ignacio and I left for Minsk, the Samruk Dance Company, a company I have come to adore and be endlessly delighted to work with, presented a program in the Capital City, Astana, of all-American choreography. Most of those dances were sponsored by the US Embassy. Rebecca Rice, a wonderful and elegant choreographer, premiered a work, "Uplift." I had the chance to see just the very beginnings of her dance, and it really resonated with me. Strong yet supple; smart yet accessible. Not easy to do those things.

For me, and for my colleague Kathryn Pilkington, it was a particularly remarkable night because of the four dances presented, three were by me or by she and I together. That's the first time that's ever happened. Its an odd thing to realize when you direct a dance company and have for the better part of 15 years. Yet CityDance, and now Company E's mission isn't my art -- its great art by many voices, and so I never imagined putting that much of my own art on stage in a single performance.

Yet, thanks to Gulnara Adamova, Samruk's courageous and visionary director, and the US Embassy and Consulate in Kazakhstan, that's what happened 10 time zones from DC.

Here's the image from the Embassy of the US in KZ's website.

Crazy. And a real honor...

Minsk Journal: West Side Story

Tuesday, September 23, 2011

Minsk, Belarus -- Cafe DeLuxe

First of all, who says there aren't great restaurants in Minsk? They're everywhere it seems. Especially if you love pasta and really good local beer. And at night this city is absolutely gorgeous. Temperature in mid September is perfect, the people stunning and sitting outside at a cafe pretty much heaven (you could say I love my job).

OK, that out of the way, lets talk Tony, Bernardo, Maria and Anita.

This is round two (of three or possibly four) for Jason Ignacio (Company E's Associate Artistic Director) and me to be in Minsk working with the National Musical Theater Company of Belarus on West Side Story. As I mentioned in a note in July, this is the first time an American Musical has ever been staged in Belarus, and the US Embassy, especially its Chargé Mike Scalon and its Cultural Affairs office (thank you Irina) have made this an elegant and exceptional opportunity to collaborate across culture, language and style. And what a musical to begin with.

There are so many sub-plots to West Side Story that fall, in their own ways, into the still-extant geopolitical craziness of this part of the world. Of all the post-Soviet states, including Russia, only Belarus kept the name KGB for its security services. That, by and of itself, should tell you that its a complex relationship here between official America and official Belarus. Yet, as is the case every single place we travel, once you get past the politics to people the relationships are elegant, engaged, exciting and extraordinary.

Underneath the surface of West Side Story is the whole question of tolerance, of understanding and the consequences of not -- lives ravaged and communities shattered. And when you look at the news it seems a micro version of a macro world. And in that way the very same questions that emerge at the end of WSS -- could and should it have turned out differently -- live on.

How much those questions emerge in the staging of this show will be interesting to uncover. What will make West Side Story real in Minsk? Its not the story of a Puerto Rican gang trying to find its way on the streets of Manhattan in the 1950s, that's for sure. Yet the music, the love story underneath it all, still resonate, as does the incredible opportunity for movement to take center. That's one of the reasons taking this assignment with State was so appealing. There are almost no other spaces and places in dance like the one Robbins carved out in West Side. The movement and the story live inside each other. Getting that into the bodies and spirits of dancers whose life experience is utterly different than those of the Manhattan I grew up in (albeit a few decades later) will probably be the most interesting challenge.

Tomorrow we take the material we made in the rehearsal studio today for the "Dance in the Gym" and start imparting it onto the bodies of the cast. The work really begins then -- the competition, the power and sexuality of the movement and the odd mix of power and insecurity that is at the heart of West Side....

Cannot imagine a more wonderful journey.....

Kazakhstan Journal - Tuesday, August 23rd

Almaty, Kazakhstan

Tuesday, August 23rd, 2011

There is a realization anytime I tell people where I am that Kazakhstan is a mystery in the States, and in many ways throughout the Western Hemisphere. Yet over the past 11 months my relationship to it has grown and grown through a series of opportunities to perform, to teach, to choreograph and to explore. Here, in Astana for the third time in a year, I'm in the last days of staging "Falling into the Sea," a 31 minute dance that has been evolving for eight years, changing with each iteration. Its the third dance of mine Samruk takes into their repertory, and the first time I've shared this dance with another company.

That is really just a part of the story of Company |E, and before it CityDance, in Kazakhstan. Our life here has taken on so many levels. Right now Jason Ignacio, one of Company | E's Associate Artistic Director's is in Astana, the Capital, working with another Kazakh Contemporary Company, Terra. To have two of us in Kazakhstan at the same time, in completely different cities working with different companies is really about as far from what a year ago I might have imagined as you can get. Yet the journey, like so many before it, has been rich, textured and full of life and surprise. How do you wind up with two people from one company in the same country 10 time zones away from DC at the same time, yet not working with the same people or on the same work? Crazy.

All this, really is due to the US Embassy in Astana and the US Consulate General here in Almaty. Through Jeff Sexton and Sue Kuester and the Public and Cultural Affairs teams we have been given a truly unique chance to share, in depth, what we do with these artists, and to build work, and bridges, which will endure for many years. My time here now lives outside State Department funding, supported instead entirely locally by Samruk, a step which is so much a part of our philosophy of building enduring partnerships which live past the time-frame that typically works for State. Yet none of it would have happened without them. Jason, for his work, has come at State Department initiative, and they're expanding the reach and scope to Astana, which was a dream for us.

Over the course of the next few days I'll have the chance also to share Jason's writings, images and thoughts with Terra, sort of a dual lens of working in KZ. Its the first time I've been able to share the writings of a colleague on this blog, and his ideas and musings are fascinating.

Here's Jason's first entry:

Day 1 @ Terra

"It was 3 am in Astana and I couldn't sleep, it was perhaps a mixture of unmerciful jetlag and excitement with my first day working with Terra Dance Company. I usually prep myself by researching the dance company's work beforehand but unfortunately Terra Dance Company does not have a website nor any publication available online.

Sometimes I like being left in the dark, it forces me to listen to what the dancers need as supposed to shoving a lesson plan that does not fit in the dancers' level. Terra Dance Company is a contemporary dance company housed in a beautiful theater called the Pyramid, which is literally a pyramid with an astonishing architecture from inside and out. The people from the US embassy and I arrived just in time for my 11 am class, I was greeted by 16 female dancers, all wearing dark leotards, tights and jazz sneakers (which I asked to be taken off before the class).

The class was held right at the vast space behind the stage, the floor is in good condition for dance but it was a little dim which I find very challenging throughout the class. Their strong ballet training was easily spotted in the beginning of the class, their spine is rigid and they struggle in standing with their feet parallel to the floor, which I find very common in dancers who don't have a regular modern or contemporary training. This gave me somewhere to start. Aside from helping them break free from one form of dance style, there is one mystery I needed to solve. The dancers were able to produce the movements exquisitely but somehow appeared disconnected, the question "why are they disconnected?" ruled my entire day. I tried series of exercises and activities to find out what's missing and I was able to locate the "disconnection" through the constructive improvisation exercise. They struggled in imagery and visualization, the movements kept appearing fake due to the disconnection of imagery, visualization and movement.

There are many factors associated with the inability to imagine and visualize while moving, most dancers are contented in just mimicking what the choreographer showed them and over time dancers lose their ability to think beyond counting and parroting shapes. I raised the question of "What motivates you to move?" as a performer I always look for a reason why I do things, a simple leg kick can mean so many things but why did you kick is the important question. Body language cannot lie and your body will naturally project what's in your head. Throughout this week I aim to draw a lot of things out from these gifted dancers from Astana, their strong potentials and spirit is inspiring me to do what I love to do…mentoring and teaching.

For tomorrow, I asked the dancers to write a personal story that will accompany the duet they helped developed today. I'm very excited to see the difference it would make to have a story running in their head while dancing."

Bodysnatchers (with thanks to Thom Yorke)

Over the Kazakh steppe inbound to Almaty

Sunday, August 14, 2011 2241 local time

The sense of time that air travel engenders is akin to a distance warp (as opposed to a time warp). It always seems entirely possible that you get into a box surrounded by green screens and on a gimbel and you don’t actually go anywhere. Life in the Matrix as it were.

On Saturday morning Nathan (the 12 year old in my world) and I woke in the quiet comfort of the Reykjavik Centrum hotel just off the main street in Iceland’s Capital. The sun had stayed up until well past 2200, and the light only really left the sky at midnight, glistening again about 4am. To a photographer that’s magic in indescribable ways. In summer the famous “golden hour” of light just before sunset lasts three hours, and the rush to catch the perfect tone on a woman’s face or a meadow’s sleek slope gives way to thought and framing spread out over minutes not moments.

The streets were empty at 0730 but the parties of the night before were still fresh on the sidewalk – cups, slices of lemon or lime, bits of pretzel, carrot and cucumber and the scent of Viking beer. Yet the air was cool and bracing as it poured in over the North Atlantic which hung low and impossibly blue just down the street and so the smells were not off-putting. The city itself hugs the ground, the result of living in a land of eternal earthquakes. In Iceland they rumble all through the day, though they largely remain imperceptible to us. Perhaps that has something to do with why Icelanders so love their music -- even through the double-paned hotel window I could hear hints of it – little earthquakes on the glass, drumbeats and bass lines vibrating deep into the night.

We’d come off a two-day trip by super Jeep (think jacked-up Pathfinder with tires as tall as you are – or standard transport for rural Texas) deep inside the Valley of Thor (Thorsmork in local parlance – though no one looked like Chris Hemsworth that we could see). You haul yourself up and into it by pulling just so on the door, balancing to the step and up and over, avoiding hitting your head on the halogen lights strapped to the side and overhanging the cab. “When your driving in a glacier-fed stream or river at dusk you don’t want any surprises, you know,” said Ingo, the driver/guide and soon friend on our SJ tour.

“You’d be amazed how easy it is to drive off the end of the world here.” However euphemistically he may have been speaking, the time in Thorsmork and up on the glacier’s melting face drove that point home. The pictures with humorous captions of an endless array of vehicles half-submerged in water, ice, ash and sand made that clear. “We love that foreigners contribute to our economy, though that’s not always the way we have in mind….”

Those Super Jeeps blast through everything, but they’re at their most entertaining in town, where suddenly you’re the center of an endless amount of attention, particularly from photographers and teenage girls (and particularly from teenage girls who fancy themselves photographers). The presumption is probably that only rock stars drive those – both the geologic and music types – and so your “cool factor” goes way up. To see a 12 year old clamber out of that thing was particularly fun – especially since he navigated it better than either Ingo or I did. Sort of Nathan’s introduction to a particular and particularly peculiar form of rock-climbing.

Just off the Reykjavik coast is an island habitat of the local Puffin population. Incredible birds (who are monogamous) they spend their summers nesting and conceiving, hatching and raising their one chick per pair and their winters on the open ocean. Yet in the last five years that population is in trouble. In 2006, 2010 and it seems again this year there are huge die-offs of the chicks, apparently of starvation. The small fish species that chicks can consume are missing – some say because of over-fishing – and the fish that the parents find to bring them are too large for the chicks to eat. They starve with the food beside them.

“The whole sea is being fished-out” someone next to us on a whale-watching cruise muttered.

But that’s something to talk about another time.

Our flight departed Reykjavik at 10am local time. We landed in DC just before 1700 DC local. By 2200 I was in the air again bound for Almaty. It was 24 hours exactly from the time I left Reykjavik to the time I flew over it again at 35,000 feet; daytime for the entire time. Summer is a strange beast that way. A 90 minute layover in Frankfurt to change planes and I find myself here, 45 minutes out of Almaty, at just before 2300 local time (1700 in Reykjavik, 1300 in DC). Either none of that makes any sense of it all does. Two days in four airplanes. Jet lag doesn’t even describe the disorientation – or maybe you actually get the better of it because there really is absolutely no sense of linear time. How often in life do you fly over a country you were in a day before?

147,000 Frequent flyer miles on United/Lufthansa since summer 2010 and counting. Since the beginning of May its been Israel/ the West Bank, Kazakhstan, Peru, Belarus, Switzerland, China, Iceland and now Kazakhstan again. All save Iceland were State Department projects and all as CityDance the dance company collapsed around and after the Peru tour and the new company took shape. Hard to reconcile so much success with so much transition – like stepping onto an airplane on a hot summer afternoon and waking 12 hours later on a new continent – like being body-snatched.

Almaty glows out the window to the right. Time to pack up and get ready for the next part of the journey.

Victoria Harbor sunrise: an iPhone video or two...

The magic of an iPhone at sunrise over Victoria Harbor in Hong Kong on a Saturday morning in July....

Jet Lag: Strange Magic

Hong Kong

Saturday, July 23

5:48am local time

If there is a blessing to jet lag it is found in sunrise. The inability to sleep, the narcoleptic roll of the eye and the strange lights that flash behind closed lids, the twitching muscles seeking to right themselves somehow from 14 hours and 32 minutes of continuous flight through an eternal day over Arctic Canada and the sum total of the Russian and Chinese Pacific are rendered a joy at daybreak in the right place.

6:20 on Saturday morning, the hotel window at dawn

The 42nd story of a hotel with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the magic of Victoria Harbor is one such place. A unique place, laced with imagery of times distant and near. The Kowloon Mountains thrust up just past the endless verticality of man, and the long shrouded-images of the China of my childhood, forbidding and forbidden, Maoist and menacing are recalled through the mists of what was then British Hong Kong.

"They'll never get it back" I remember my Dad saying of this tiny English colony in the early 1980s, meaning what were then the Red Chinese. Yet they did get it back, in 1997, nine years after the fall of the Soviet Union, another "impenetrable" fortification of totalitarian power. I remember the images of Prince Charles at the ceremony ending British sovereignty. 

Oddly, history suggests that it was the raising of the question of sovereignty in the New Territories by the-then British Governor of Hong Kong which led to the final return of all of Hong Kong. Hong Kong itself, and the Peninsula, were, under treaty, permanently ceded to the UK. 

Ultimately, of course, that was not how it happened. Victoria Harbor, the Harbor 42 stories below me, is one of the great ports of commerce the world has ever known. Through it, through the endless shipping that courses the Harbor, a harbor of deep green water the color of which scarce seems un-colored, vast amounts of what I knew in my childhood flowed. Everything was "made in Hong Kong" and now I see where it left the land and journeyed the sea to the port and store (usually toy store) in which I found it in mid-Manhattan. 

The way we terraform land, and bend it, will never cease to amaze me. Here is the map of Hong Kong harbor in 1845. Below it, a portrait view of largely the same scene, just higher in the air, today (the joy of an iPhone at 6am...)

In this moment we are just passing through, Jason Ignacio and I, from Hong Kong to Guangzhou to teach and talk at the eight Annual Modern Dance Festival in Guangzhou, now the largest contemporary festival in China --  a very different China from the one that wanders my childhood. It is one I have been curious to know all my life, and yet for all my travels I have never been to China. Technically I still haven't. That's for tomorrow. Today is for Hong Kong.  

Green water

Sunday, July 17

Bern, Switzerland

Its raining in Bern. A lot. But in the skylit atrium of the Allegro Hotel the jazz duo (sax and upright acoustic bass) are playing American standards with lyric lines about "blue skies" and "sunshine" -- and the tag line of "lets call the whole thing off." Its funny, because my first memory of Europe, after landing in Frankfurt after my junior year of college, was that there were jazz bands everywhere. The lingua franca of Europe -- or at least of German-speaking Europe, seemed then, and seems still, to be jazz. And its good jazz. Straight-up, right on the money jazz. 

Childhood allusions abound. Its all about trains here. And, as a child, I was all about trains (and dinosaurs) all the time. The brand was always Marklin -- the perfectly made, endlessly durable (even with me around) miniature scale railroads that ran the length of the apartment on 86th and East End. Lord forbid you close a hallway door and disrupt and disconnect the rail line that ran from my bedroom to the far end of the living room, with a determined stop kitchen-side to take on Ice Cream. 

Boarding today after the flight in from Dulles to Zurich and looking out from the second level window of the spot-on-time train was a walk into the notion that life really is a movie, and that it runs in the glass windows of your field of vision all the time, like an endless array of screens snapping you back-and-forth from today to yesterday, way, way back and, sometimes, way, way forward. 

The engines which dominated those model railroads of my yesterday were hard at work outside my window on the Intercity rail from Zurich Main Station to Geneva Airport. The tiny workhorse red diesels which now seem almost always to be marked "cargo," the strangely cigar shaped electric engines dragging long strings of passenger cars I coveted as a kid, the trestles and the tracks -- all of these were floating past the windows of my car (the floating part was probably just jet-lag at work, but, hey, its fantasy). 

Overhead the rain patters away at the glass like an oscilloscope -- reflecting and radiating the sounds of the sax and the plucking of the bass. Disney must have been in Bern in a jazz-soaked deluge when he thought of the "Toccata and Fugue"sequence for "Fantasia." The wait-staff, from the waffle-makers to the hostesses to the bus-boys walk with that snap to their step that says "I love jazz." 

Today and tomorrow -- my two brief summer days in Switzerland -- are about tour planning for October with the exceptional team at the US Embassy here. In a country known for its organization pulling a major tour together to take place about 75 days from now is not a small task -- but its a great one. Wandering the town is a bit impractical right about now barring a broad and wide umbrella, but the soundscapes and the scenery solves the problem of how to prepare and from where to draw inspiration. 

I remember the inspiration of those small red trains and those enormous tall trestles, the reinforced-with-lego-blocks and books and toy boxes trestles as they rose from the ground to the coffee-table, physics unheeded and the practicality of obliterating an entire living room in pursuit of the ultimate construction forgotten. 

One night, deep into one of my Mother's legendary all-night cocktail parties at 535 East 86th street, long after I was supposed to be asleep, I remember cranking up the power on track two, the track for that little work-horse red engine, and sending it forth into the Living Room just to see what would happen. Power on I snuck down the hall and took station behind the cement support column that stood strangely in the front hall (it was a 26 story building after all, so something had to be holding it up), my childhood friend and sweetheart Amy at my side, to see the outcome of a railroad at work in the midst of a five-sheets-to-the-wind gaggle of adults. 

We got to our post as the train rounded into the Living Room unnoticed. My Mom always insisted that if I built it she'd leave it, but that it had, as she said, its time and place. As the engine and its load headed up that trestle one thing was clear -- it would never survive the encounter with the glasses hard-on the track. But then that was the point, wasn't it? 

Cresting the top it went straight into the forest of glass and, as the first of them went over, the room got very, very quiet. Things went spilling, slopping and slipping onto the table, a little Noah's flood all my own. 

You could even here everything spilling -- it was that kind of quiet. And then, inevitably -- the same way as the sound of rain on the skylights in Bern, you heard the familiar refrain " PAUL! GOD DAMMIT!"

That was always the cue to scramble -- but as Amy and I bolted for the bedroom (why we thought that would save us I really never have figured out) I remember seeing something just pouring over the lip of the coffee table. We'd created our own little river by the rail bed. But the color was wrong. It was supposed to be blue. Or clear. This stuff, whatever it was, was green. "Wrong color" I remember I heard in my head. "Next time I'll have to fix that."

Today, on a great trestle high over a great full, flowing river on the outskirts of Bern, heading to two days of meetings about art and imagination, I looked down into that water and learned that we'd been right all along. 

Better than imagination lay reality. The river was running green.