Pick-A-Day

February 2011
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It’s a Culture Kind of Month.

After finishing work in Bloomington I headed north to Indianapolis—not that I like Indianapolis at all, but I needed am “Adam-Time” away from it all. I ended up spending my Friday afternoon looking for something in Indy, and not finding it – the biggest problem with Indianapolis is that there is no there there, and that it really is India-no-place.

I went out alone Friday night – over the course of three hours drinking two Rolling Rocks and having fun watching people.

Unfortunately this resulted in me having the mother of all hangovers on Saturday – my birthday. I can’t tell you how awful I felt: I slept for most of the day, thought I was going to have a simultaneous digestive emergency in combination with vomiting. It was really bad—I hadn’t felt that awful in years.

In fact, it was so bad I though I would have to cancel my evening plans, which was to see “Animals Out of Paper” by Rajiv Joseph, a play being put on at the “Cultural HOT SPOT of Beech Grove” by the Spotlight Players. For those of you who are confused, Beech Grove is an Indianapolis neighborhood.

Ultimately I felt better and went off to dinner with my friends.

The play, itself, was interesting. The theater is a small community theater with a leaky ceiling and a large trash bucket to hold the falling water—which I sat next to. During the first few minutes of the play, the heroine answers her apartment’s door buzzer to hear a man complaining that it is raining out and can he please come in. Certainly with the dripping water next to me, I could understand that it really was raining.

Without running it too much, the play is about a female master origami artist who has lost her ability to fold. A fellow origami artist/high school teacher shows up in her life and he falls in love with her, and, eventually, she with him. However the teacher brings along a rough student who can make amazing origami art without planning anything. Naturally chaos ensues.

For a community theater in Indiana, I felt that the actors did an excellent job: Kristi Wilkinson Gross was excellent as the wayward origami artist and James Gross did an excellent job pursuing her. Nick Heskett, who did a convincing job of using street language that one might find offensive, portrayed the high school student. Heskett is just out of high school, spending a year at Ivy Tech (Indiana’s community college system) before going to Ball State (a university in Indiana).

After the play I was dropped back at my hotel where I promptly fell asleep—waking in time to pack, head to the airport and catch my flight back home.

Less than 48 hours after arriving back in Berlin I found myself back at the airport, this time to meet my brother. He’s in the midst of his Berlin adventure – here for a few more days. He’s big into the art galleries, and I, unfortunately, am suffocating under a mountain of work – but I did take the time to go with him to the Robert Mapplethorpe retrospective exhibition at C|O Berlin. Snooker in Berlin joined us on this adventure.

The Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition is well worth the time – it is a stunning collection of fascinating photographs from somebody who, as I understand it, never really had formal training in photography. He somehow knew, instinctively, how to shoot people and objects in such a way that they would, naturally, look fantastic.

Naturally I am envious of his ability to shoot such fantastic photographs – even with his initial Polaroid camera.

I am also envious of his ability to convince many smoking hot and gorgeous men to strip completely naked and pose for him.

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