Philly

Last Saturday morning, I overslept: Randy woke me at 6:30, asking what time did I need to get on the Philly bus. "6:45," I moaned, "I'll never make it." He insisted that I try, and somehow I managed to shower and dress (I'd set out my clothes and packed a bookbag the night before) in record time; Randy drove me over to campus and I was on the bus before our scheduled 7:00 departure.

Our first stop was the Philadelphia Art Museum, which I enjoyed immensely, and then we hopped back on the bus to catch "Pillow Man" at the Wilma Theatre Project. A really fine performance. I miss going to plays (Houston was a great theatre town, with both the Alley and Stages Repertory Theatre, not to mention the campus productions at the University of Houston, where Edward Albee still teaches).

The rest of the evening--about four hours--we were left on our own. I wandered the South Street area, where we'd been dropped after the show, waiting for a call back from a Philly acquaintance we've only met online, but he never showed up. Found a pretty decent Thai place for dinner (eating dinner alone in a strange city always makes me feel pathetic, invisible; I project attachments onto every cute waiter and then silently chastise myself--it's a ridiculously predictable internal melodrama) and, later, a great diner with awesome carrot cake and very good coffee (which I've pretty much given up, but this was good enough to tempt me into reconsidering).

Nothing terribly exciting, but it's the first city I've been to since I think March. Even the bus ride was interesting: listening to my little MP3 player, the song tracks overlaying the slanted reflections of lit buildings in the bus window as they seemed to slide past, glancing up occasionally at the too-orange projection of "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" on the DVD player--a movie I haven't seen yet, so the random image sampling added a nicely surreal element to my mood.

[photo: stained glass panel from the 15th (?) century]