the timboucher experience

I was living with a friend in Baltimore, juggling every day in the park across the street, spending afternoons down by the river which cuts through Mill Valley. These little white flowers I’d been tracking, sweet-smelling, they bloom for about two weeks in June in moist soil areas. I gathered and dried them in clumps, sat on the rocks writing songs, endlessly cycling through, synthesizing and organizing old memories into new forms which could be expressed and exorcised. I’d eaten a bunch fo mushrooms a few weeks before and quit my job at the dog temple, my pet name for the canine daycare facility run by a wonderful bitter old lady who gave forty years of her life to the stage as a ballerina. Every day at four P.M., according to the schedule posted on the wall, we were supposed to lead the dogs around the room for twenty minutes in a parade. The days were very structured there in a way that I’m not sure matters or makes any sense to an animal or a pack of animals. Twenty minutes of structured play, ten minutes of “rest” in which we would try to get the dogs to lay down and stop humping each other. The mushrooms told me I’d had enough, when I saw shapes moving that night in the bathroom, twelve hours of dark terrors in a room I only dimly remember. No windows, but a skylight. I knew not what I was going to do next, and not for the first time in my life.

At a parallel point in my personal history, perhaps two years before, I lay asleep one night in Seattle – no drugs this time. Woken up in the night, at around maybe four P.M. by a voice which I plainly heard, but I wouldn’t describe as specifically audible. It came accompanied with images, of a road with a bend in it that I couldn’t see around. It told me - I believe it to have been my grandfather on my mother’s side – that my life was about to change in a way I wasn’t expecting. I went to sleep eased of whatever emotional burden I was carrying at the time.

This instance was in line with the above, but occurred more plainly in dream. It was the night of the Full Moon. I had been dedicating myself to Song and to the River in my waking life and in this dream world, I went away from all that to the wings of some stage I didn’t recognize. Fractal images of folded actions and compressed interactions revealed me going somewhere to help a bunch of people I didn’t know put on a musical production. My brain associated it with Godspell, the only theatrical production I’d ever been involved with. In highschool, I played in the pit band. Our brains tend to do that with psychic or premonitory content: it clothes whatever information is being downloaded from the future in the language of the past. It can be, for that reason, difficult to decipher. But these images were umistakeable, for upon waking I checked my voicemail to find literally six messages, three from my mother, three from my sister who was on Cape Cod with a college theatre company. Someone had dropped out of their tech/stage crew two weeks into the season and they wanted to know if I could come up right away and take over her role. I’m a creature of habit, and was reluctant to leave my own little sheltered world where I knew what to expect – even if I was becoming bored with it. But the insistence and clarity of the dream, combined with the insistence of my family found me a few days later on a bus headed north, with a few clothes stuffed into bags for the summer, my hat and my acoustic guitar – everything I needed for one more foolish venture.

• Small Town Theatre Restoration Project
• The religion of art
• Consumerist Theatre
• Spiritus - Psychic Theatre
• [Event] Gina Manziello in “Soul’d Out”