Adventures in Driving

A couple of weeks ago, T and I drove down to Baltimore for a viewing of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. A friend, J, had rented out a private room at the Senator Theatre for the screening, with socializing, munching, and drinking arranged to amuse us from 6 to 7:30, when the movie was slated to begin. I hurried home from work – stressed and tense because I’d left later than I had hoped – changed my clothes, and T and I were on the road by 5:25.

We made excellent time, hitting no traffic and veering onto 695 E toward Towson, like the Mapquest directions advised, by 6:35. As T’s car zoomed along and we talked oh-so-intellectually about our opinions on the afterlife, I noticed our exit just as we passed it.

“Oh, we were supposed to get to off there,” I said with a chuckle. T got off at the next available exit, turned around in a hotel parking lot, and merged directly back onto the highway in the same direction we were already going. After more chuckling and “Ah…idiots” musings, we got off at the next exit and quickly drove past the ramp to get onto 695 in the correct direction. T turned around again and aimed to get on 695 West.

“Wait! Don’t get on there,” I said, with growing paranoia. “Weren’t we just coming from that direction?”

T indulged me, and pretty soon, because I was wrong and T should have just ignored me, we were turning around in the exact same hotel parking lot we were in when we got off the highway the first time. By this time, my brain was getting more and more scrambled, and I started saying “I don’t know” to any question T asked about the directions.

We managed to get back to the original exit we had missed, and as we approached the top of the ramp, T asked me which direction we should turn.

“I honestly have no idea,” I said. “I am so confused.” He picked left, then I insisted we follow the signs for Charles Street, then I announced happily that we were approaching Bellona Ave., one of the streets listed on my Mapquest directions. We turned right, because that’s what my directions said, and wound our way through a residential area, coming to Joppa Rd.

My intuitive awesomeness kicked in to say “Wrong direction again, ass,” and so I called my friend J to ask for advice.

“We’re at Joppa and Bellona,” I said.

“Yeeeeah… You’re in Towson,” J said. “You want to be in Baltimore. What direction are you headed?”

I have no effing clue, I thought. “Um… we’re going… straight? On Bellona?”

“Well, you want to go west on Joppa,” J said.

He might as well have said, “Well, you want to florb the flimcrackle Joppa.” My internal compass sucks. I informed J of this, and he recommended just retracing our tracks, getting back on 83, and taking that into Baltimore.

I told T that this was the new plan, and his head exploded.

Actually, he just turned around with minor grumbling. Back where we started, we realized that we had been heading the wrong way on Charles, and suddenly my scribbled directions made sense. With renewed determination – and a lot of relief on my part – we forged ahead. And ahead. And ahead. My relief turned to uncertainty. We found York Road, on which the Senator is located, and I called information to find out the number of the building. “It’s either 200 or 2000,” I confidently told T as I dialed, then sheepishly turned to him after my 411 call. “5904,” I said.

“Wow, you couldn’t have been more wrong,” he replied.

We turned around on York Road, since the numbers were going down and we needed them to be going up. Somewhere around 1900, I noticed that we were really close to the neighborhood where J used to live, which is in Cockeysville, not Baltimore. Then the numbers jumped to the 10-thousands, along with my blood pressure.

“What the fuck?” I cried. “Did we pass it?”

I was verging on hysterics by this point, having grown increasingly edgy as we started passing familiar Cockeysville landmarks, sure signs that we were not anywhere near our city destination.

“It’s okay, we’ll just turn around,” soothed T. “And we’ll either pass it, or find out that it doesn’t exist and this was all an elaborate joke.”

10105…10100…Twilight Zone…1940…1930…

We gave up and turned around YET AGAIN to get to 695 to 83, and we were finally headed in the right direction. As we drove, I told T that the overall price of our tickets was $12, not $3 as I’d mistakenly told him.

His laughter faded as he looked at my face and saw that I was earnest.

“Wait, you’re serious?” he asked incredulously.

(Side note: It’s not that $12 is outrageously expensive. It’s that on top of driving in circles for an hour after a 70-mile drive to Baltimore to see a movie that’s certainly playing where we live, there’s an even bigger gap between $6 and $24.)

As I took in T’s incredulity, I started to giggle. And giggle. And giggle. Until the chuckles turned into full-on hysterics, complete with tears.

“Yeah!” I laughed and cried. Gasping for breath, I asked T if he just wanted to turn around and go home.

“Hell no,” he declared. “We are getting to that movie even if we’re an hour late!”

We were only about 10 minutes late. Dudley was making out with a dementor when we arrived and took our seats in the pitch-black private room, perched above the main theatre.

We saw our friends for a few minutes after the movie ended, ate some Twizzlers and Bertie Botts Every Flavor beans, then drove home. Uneventfully. And the next time I drive to Baltimore, I’m buying a damn Garmin first.

Two Weeks

I just need to get through the next two weeks. Then I have a vacation. A blessed whole week off from work, in which I will go to the beach, turn 26, possibly go to NYC, and take care of all of the life-managing that I’ll be neglecting over the next two weeks.

In the beginning of June, I auditioned for a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which opens on August 9, a week from Thursday. The auditions were fun, I liked the director, and I hoped to get cast. After my last callback, I went about with anxiety bubbling in my stomach as I waited to hear what part I’d get. As more time went by and I still hadn’t heard anything, though, I started to look forward to having my summer free. Not getting cast meant no rehearsals and therefore more time for relaxing with my boyfriend, dinner with the parents, and traveling to see far-away friends.

I think I’d all-but-convinced myself that I didn’t want to be in the show when I was notified that I’d been cast as Tom Snout, one of the Mechanicals. Fine, I thought. That’ll be fun.

And it has been. But now, with two weeks of rehearsals left before we open for our four free performances, I really, really wish I'd had that free summer instead. If I had been aware of how much would be going on at work, too, I may not even have auditioned. I don’t want to feel this worried about getting everything done, about not neglecting my loved ones while I embark on 14 days of non-stop activity and obligation and have-to-dos.

Plus – the performance space sucks. Everyone knows it. And really, the sole reason that it sucks is that it’s the end of July and there’s no air conditioning in the building. We’re performing in a converted gymnasium in a government-owned building, and I don’t care that there’s a basketball hoop hanging over the top of the set, or that the space is so huge that the actors’ shouts reverberate before being swallowed. I don’t even care that barbed wire snakes ominously around the perimeter of the grounds.

But the no air conditioning thing? Wow does that suck. And it’s not like when you were a kid, and there was no air conditioning and so your parents just opened all the windows for circulation and it was bearable. The heat in the gym is an oppressive, sticky, stuffy heat, the kind that makes all the actors and crew pretty sluggish and half-dead about 40 minutes into rehearsal. This is the kind of heat that produces indecent sweat, potential swooning and excessive crankiness. It’s like someone grabbed a tank-full of hot, muggy swamp air and released it into the building, shut the doors, left it to fester, then opened the doors two years later and said “Welcome, theatre group! Welcome to hell!”

For the past 13 years, this theatre company has offered Free Shakespeare in the park, where even if it was hot and muggy, at least there was a sky above you. If it’s outdoors in the summer, you expect it to be hot. And even then, the sun goes down and you get that wonderful, velvet summer night air. In the current space, when the sun goes down, you just get to go outside and wonder how in the hell you’re going to force yourself back onto the sauna-stage.

So. I’m just willing myself to keep going through these next couple of weeks, and then I get a break. In two weeks, my stories for work will be written, my proofing of a tedious reunion newsletter for work will be done, my volunteer editing for a really, really badly written book will be further along, and I’ll have endured the hot, sweaty rehearsals and performances of Midsummer.

Vacation vacation vacation vacation…