After our great days in Baltimore, we had another early morning as our group prepped our RVs and got on the road toward Boston & Harvard University. We already miss the Baltimore house, but we certainly don't miss the rain and the mud in the RVs... you would laugh if you walked into one of our RVs, because we have piles of muddy shoes on the inside steps!
We had a great surprise today. While driving through Connecticut, Zelda Fichandler (one of America's living theatre legends) called Amy and Brad on the phone. Zelda co-founded (and for over 40 years was the Artistic Director of) Arena Stage in Washington, DC, which was perhaps the key pioneering theatre of the regional theatre movement.
Zelda (who is now in her mid-eighties) is a vital target for our project because of her wisdom, passion, and experience, as well as her encouragement for the next generation to take her legacy and evolve. It's sort of like... if you were calling for a change in the US government and you discovered that Thomas Jefferson was still alive, in his mid-80's, and writing about what those changes could be. Zelda to us is a vital link to our past and key inspiration for our future.
After gathering around Amy's cell phone and excitedly listening to her message as a group (yes, we're sometimes funny like that!), Amy was able to speak with Zelda and start a dialogue for meeting her.
It's hard to imagine that so many of the systems we now take for granted in the arts were once just ideas being imagined and explored- and not that long ago (Margo Jones in 1947, Zelda in 1950).
While we were in LA discussing our next steps as a company, it was several of Zelda's inspired articles calling for action that inspired us to take this trip across the country. Check this out.... she writes with such clarity and artistry, even her articles seem worthy of performance.
After hours of windy driving we arrived in Bellingham, MA (we can tell it's colder here!). We met up with Amy's brother Brian and his girlfriend Juli who were both specialists of ours during our project in Mexico last year (Brian a specialist in Neuroscience and Juliana in Psychology). Brian has been in Boston building his own company with his friend Wesley Clapp, check it out, it's pretty inspiring!
It's a cold night dark night at the RV park in Massachusetts, but we're excited for tomorrow; a trip to Walden Pond and our meeting with Harvard's Edward P. Clapp!
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