Rummaging for answers in the pages

This makes my week.

But yesterday wasn't bad, either. With only small amounts of total confusion and resorting to metropolitan transit maps, I expanded my knowledge of New York City's subway system into Brooklyn, when I went to Kingsborough Community College to see a Gould & Stearns show, "Fee Fie Fo Fun." (A little background. I met Peter Gould in my first year at Brandeis, and he was one of the first people who made me understand that I was a storyteller as well as a writer of stories. We've since performed together multiple times and he is an amazing person—a clown, a mime, a playwright, a director, an author, a storyteller, a singer, a teacher, and he plays a mean squeezebox. Stephen Stearns I've only met twice now, and this time he was asleep for most of the drive back to New Haven, but still he strikes me as fully as cool.) I'd seen two of their shows before, "Simple Gifts" and their award-winning play A Peasant of El Salvador, but never this one: a Jack-and-the-Beanstalk retelling where the audience keeps having to tell the characters how the story goes, the giant's treasure is a camera-shy goose that lays the golden eggs, and the beanstalk has a fear of giants. Physical comedy. Wordplay galore. Improvisation all over the place and serious, serious weirdness. The fourth wall went to flinders every five minutes and it was fantastic. Have you ever seen a fairy tale whose props included a rubber snake, a boxing glove, a tutu, and a bicycle built of birchwood? I thought not.

I had meant to come down early, so we could walk around Brighton Beach and the Russian neighborhood there—Smoked fish and dried fruit and black tea, Peter had promised. Tall thin Russian mafiosa women in spike heels and cheap furs—but I hadn't realized that the B Line runs only on weekdays and so wasted half an hour sitting around the Prospect Park station for a train that never came. So we only walked down to the boardwalk and looked out at the sea combing into the shore, but the sky was cloudless and brilliant and the wind came off the sea and tore down the streets smelling of salt, and it was beautiful. Somewhere in Brooklyn is still the pharmacy that my great-grandfather Bernie (of the story that gaudior had me tell) owned, where my grandmother played with beads of mercury as a child. I kept thinking Brighton Beach Memoirs. You could see Coney Island if you looked off to your right. Peter and Stephen were driving back to Vermont that night, so they agreed to give me a ride home to New Haven; and after the show, it was demonstrated to me that you can fit just about anything in the world into or on top of a Volvo station wagon, including (but not limited to) the entire set, five suitcases, a single tennis racquet, and an ironing board. We then promptly spent something like an hour in gridlocked traffic waiting to go over the Whitestone Bridge. But eventually we made it out onto the open highway, and listened to Carol Noonan, Déanta, and the Incredible String Band all the way here. (I suspect "Maya" makes much more sense if you've dropped acid first.) I had about as much space left for a seat as the room my laptop takes up on my desk, and bits of the set kept sliding over and trying to decapitate me when I was napping, but it was good.

I need to see more Gould & Stearns shows.

I need to visit Brighton Beach again.