Campusity

I used to take the school bus from Orchard Park.  In the parking lot in front of Los Rancheros, it waits rumbling in the mornings.  After a bowl of Banana Nut Crunch or syruped Eggos, I hop in the Volvo and flip on NPR.  We wind down Spalding Drive, a corridor lined with trees, subdivisions, and lawns coated in early morning dew.  Keep right at the fork and pass flowers strewn in memory of that high schooler who died in that car accident.

The drive from the northern Atlanta suburbs through concrete to College Park takes about forty-five minutes.  As we approach the Virginia Avenue exit just after the "Don't like the odds?  Don't have sex" billboard, we merge with the Woodward Academy traffic—regiments of yellow buses, Lexuses with a WA sticker on the bumper, and Ford Explorers with shaggy haired teenagers hotboxing inside.

The sticker was in the shape of a football.  And when they upgraded the sticker in '01, it was a singular white W on a black background.  That year, the Bush campaign also issued a sticker with a singular W on a black background.  Except that one was Palatino, one was Garamond.

For twelve years, I donned my Woodward Academy garb—polo shirt, tie, blazer, trash-bag grey slacks—and made the journey from the northern suburbs to the former military academy, south of the city.  When I was younger (1st to 6th grade), I would ride down during sunrise and return in the afternoon traffic.  As a teenager, however, I would steal to the theatre in Richardson Hall after the last bell and pull into the garage well after sunset.  Although the painting studio comes close, that stage carries more of my waking life than any other space I've inhabited.

I live in a city now.  Outside, there are motorcades blasting nationalistic music and waving pomegranate flags to rally people to vote for Amin Gemayel on Sunday (he's running against Michel Aoun for the vacated seat in the Metn in the Northeast Lebanon).  I take an old Mercedes service from Tele Liban which, like the majority of buildings in Beirut, boasts a number of bullet and rocket wounds from the civil war.  From Talet el Khayat to Hamra, there are no lawns or subdivisions but rather bundles of apartment buildings, the Center for Druze Social Welfare, the TWENTY-FOUR HOUR CANDY SHOP, construction cranes, Masjid Aicha Bakar, blown-out buildings canvased in images of political characters (dead or alive), Zara, manouche joints, and Gold Rush (a super night club).  Tanks and bored soldiers hang about the residences of politicians. The sidewalks are full of tight jeans, white sneakers, flashy sunglasses, and cigarettes.

I need to find the painting studio.  I need to find the rehearsal space.

This past weekend, I returned to Beirut after spending a month in hotels from Hama to Capetown to Cairo.  Two days after the whirlwind graduation experience at Yale, I was in line at JFK to board my flight to Lebanon.  Upon arrival, there was a horizon: presenting my paper at the conference in South Africa and producing the concert and party in Cairo.

Okay, so that's done.  And now there's no horizon, and I'm so disoriented.

I eat/sleep/shit/buy in a living organism. 
I do not work. 
Ostensibly, I'm researching and making theatre.
Theatre is a space that the city inhabits before itself.
The city precedes the theatre.
In order to enter the terrain of the theatre, I must first inhabit Beirut.
And that is quite a challenge.