Everything in Perspective

I've been Dublin Theatre Festivalling all week, and while that is exciting in itself, it's also a great way to occupy my evenings, which are usually rather quiet. I saw DV8's To Be Straight With You last night up at the O'Reilly Theatre in Belvedere College.

Image source: voiceofdance.com

On a map, Belvedere College looks far away from me, but it's really only a 20-25 min walk, so I killed time after dinner so that I would leave around 7:15, take a very leisurely walk, calmly take my seat, and do that thing I'm not used to: be just a bit early. (Dinner, by the way, was composed of smoked salmon and pre-made carrot-parsnip-turnip mash, because my stove/cooker blew yesterday and I had to blindly buy things from the prepared section of the grocery store. I'm not so good with prepared foods).

So, 7:15 rolls around, I leave the flat, I return 30 seconds later for my umbrella (this little farce is standard practice - I'm still not in the habit of bringing it automatically), and when I step back outside again, the misty rain has stopped. I double check my wallet to make sure I have the ticket (and the wallet, LOL, because I 'lost' it on the way to London last weekend, but that is another story), and then I glimpse the ticket: Start time 7:30pm.

Check phone. Current time: 7:24. OK! Time to hail my first cab! I frantically run across the bridge to the north side, because the traffic flows east along the Quays on the north side, and I have to go a bit east before going north (these are directional indicators that don't mean anything here, but my brain is hardwired for Never Eat Shredded Wheat). I jump in, and the guy says "Hello Pet, where can I take you?" and I blurt out something about thinking the show started at eight but realizing it starts at 7:30, and he's like "Oh sure, I'll get you there in time." Which is vey nice of him to say, but his driving revealed otherwise, as he leisure wove his way up to the theatre.

Arrival. Check phone. Current time: 7:33. I go inside and there are about thirty people standing around chatting, and I'm thinking, boy, aren't they casual - shouldn't they be inside right now? Until I ask someone, and it turns out this is the group of late people. They finally let us in, but they did little to guide us to any available seats, so I ended up following a bunch of women who were hiking up their skirts to climb over the front rows to available seats farther back. I admit that it was fitting, as DV8 is a physical theatre company, so it sort of put us in the mood. The show was a kind of testimonial/doc theatre piece about politics and social dangers of being gay in the world, all supported by beautiful movement, but talking about it in any detail feels like work, so nah-uh. It appears that DV8 are travelling to TO for World Stage, so you can see it yourself if you're interested.

I tried making friends in the lobby (Hello! (said like Carm), I was at the theatre, for a show about homosexuals, so you think I'd have a lot of people to talk to), but that didn't work, so off I trotted home, down O'Connell street, past a million Spars and Centras and Londises, past the Spire, along the Quays. I've been experiencing an acute bout of loneliness the last couple of days - it's the beginning of flu season so perhaps I've caught an emotional strain - and moments like the walk home are particularly hard, because as I leave the theatre (or cinema, or talk, or resto), the illusion of belonging created in that space slowly fades away, and I remember that I am going home to my cool pad -- my cool, empty pad. Cue the violins.

I decided to walk over the Ha' Penny Bride, 'cause is sure is purty, and it's lit up quite nicely at night, with the period lanterns at the top of the arches reflecting brightly off the shiny white paint below. This bridge is always really busy, with people stopping to take photos, or pausing to look down the Liffey in either direction. And there are often a number of people sitting in sleeping bags, trying to gather some change, and, I think, stay safely out of the dark and pissed-filled back alleys of the city. I think I have some kind of internalized bougey middle class guilt, because everytime I see someone who appears homeless, I feel terrible. But most of the time, I do nothing about it. And then I feel more terrible, and I really have no idea what the whole thing is about, but aside from giving people change every now and then, I do not interact. I want to interact, but I don't. And I don't like myself in these moments. But being in a new place, and in a remarkably new and porous headspace in general, all I could think is - cripes, if I am feeling low and lonely, how must these people feel? Talk about isolation. I walked by one young woman who was huddled in what looked like a damp sleeping bag, and I looked down and smiled, but I kept going. I got down onto the sidewalk, and just stopped. What was my fear? I felt like I wanted to connect, but there is something in me that tells me to shut off that feeling - to preserve something. Feck it, I went into the convenience store (not sure which one, but certainly a SparCentraLondis variety), bought two bags of chips with markedly different flavours, and headed back to the bridge. As I approached her, I felt I had to make as if this wasn't planned - I just happened to be walking by with two bags of chips, and I happened to think about offering her one. What is this BS? Why the performance? I don't know.

So I kind of paused, held out both, she scanned the labels, and chose the plain one (good choice, the salt and vinegar ones nearly took the roof off my mouth). I crouched down, and we ate the chips, chatting casually about nothing, the way one does with strangers on a bridge in the middle of a city. Except I was probably saying dumb and obvious things like "do you have somewhere to go," etc. But here is the thing that killed me. I pulled 5 Euro out of my pocket and handed it to her, and she looked at me with a perplexed face and said "Are you sure?" And all I could say was, "Yes, yes, I am sure," thinking how little 5 Euros really was to me, and absolutely taken aback by her question. I don't know why she asked me that. Was it, "Are you sure you can spare this, because it's so much more than the 20 cent coins I usually get," or was it "Are you sure you really want to give this to me - is it worth it?" Or something else that I haven't thought of. But I was really moved by the impulse, and so so so glad that I finally stopped to chat. I eventually got up and wished her well, and as I walked home, my head was ajumble with thoughts of my theatre-going and her bridge-living. My funky leather jacket and her damp sleeping bad. My loneliness, and whatever it is she must be feeling. It's never going to make any sense to me, so I came home and did some research, and I just sent off my application to volunteer with Simon Community. It's about frigging time.