And Thus it all Begins

Everything starts somewhere, although many physicists disagree.

But people have always been dimly aware of the problem with the start of things.  They wonder aloud how the snowplow driver gets to work, or how the makers of dictionaries look up the spelling of the words.  Yet there is the constant desire to find some point in the twisting, knotting, raveling nets of space-time on which a metaphorical finger can be put to indicate that here, here, is the point where it all began…

Hogfather, Terry Pratchet

For me it may have begun early this summer when Elena said: "Maybe you and I should do a show without actors.....", to which I responded: "I think that's usually referred to as an art installation."  Or maybe it began when she later said: "I'm serious about the whole Dave and I should do an art installation thing....", and I realized that one of the more scarily talented people I know wanted to do a non-theatrical artistic collaboration with me.  If you ask Elena about where it all began, she undoubtedly has a different set of answers, but that's the beauty of story telling.  Everyone tells the same store a little differently.

In any event, it ultimately began one warm afternoon in October, when Elena and I met at a Starbucks in Eastgate to discuss our prospective collaboration.  I'd been alternating between terror and euphoria with thoughts of an opportunity to display some art in public and thoughts of an opportunity to demonstrate my inadequacies publicly.  After jotting down about five pages of random thoughts, I approached the meeting with a certain amount of trepidation, unsure of whether Elena and I would turn out to be on the same planet, much less the same page.

Much to my relief, we discovered that we shared similar goals, and had similar thoughts on what we'd like to explore.  There is a long way to go, and a lot of details to work out, but the artistic collaboration "Stories about Dead People" has been officially born.  In the not terribly near future we'll be doing an exhibit involving visual art, and mixed media, and…  

Well, as I said, there are a lot of details to work out.

>>Elena Says... "It began for me when I started thinking about doing a 'show' with Dave, but without any actors. I was thinking- here's this great light designer  I love working with, why should I have to wait for a play (with actors) before we can do something. Then, of course, I had to start thinking about without actors, what would we light? So I mentioned it to Dave, and happily he supplied the answer, art. Dave and I have been passing visual art-in-progress back and forth via the Internet, so the seed was there. We poured a little Starbucks coffee on it and up grew ... Stories about Dead People, presenting ... Art. Filling in the blanks should be exciting. And fun. And collaborative. One of the things I most enjoyed in our first meeting, was I showed up with a few random ideas, and Dave showed up with five pages of random thoughts. I like a person who raises the bar. His notes were all good things we should think about. Next time I'm bringing notes."