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HELEN'S JOURNAL |
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| Date: 16th April
| Time: 6pm | Place: Clinton, Okla | |||
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My travel reading [not that I've had much time to do any, except on the plane from Heathrow to Chicago] is , not surprisingly, "On The Road", by Jack Kerouac. Jack's staple diet for a large part of his journey was apple pie and ice cream. I've just eaten the very same combination at Pop Hicks Diner, Clinton, and I would highly recommend it. It's been amazing to travel along down this road, watching the landscape change from the blossoming Ozarks of Missouri into the endless plains of Kansas and Oklahoma and knowing that the desert and ocean lie ahead. In my performance work I am constantly interested in exploring the contact made between audience and the individual performer. In this project I am both. Driving through the town of Chandler, we stop at a small, wooden shack to buy Lucky Strikes from Carolin. We take her picture and in turn leave her with a Polaroid of us. she seems pleased, thanks us and we leave her watching the picture develop. Will she pin it up somewhere amongst the coloured cigarette packets ? Will it forgotten and buried under a pile of reciepts ? Getting lost on the old Route as it eludes us for a momen, we stop in a quiet street. It is just a few houses really, in the middle of a vast expanse of Oklahoma land. An old woman in a bright red dressing gown is out getting her mail from her box at the end of her neat garden. She smiles as I approach and bids me good morning. Her eyes are perfectly made up and her lipstick matches her gown. She has half a green, fleshy avocado in her hand. As we drive off, I see her checking her garden, a small red dot in all that landscape. And now I'm sending that information about her house coat into the vast landscape of cyberspace.... The waitress in this diner has a small silver cutlery brooch on her stripy top. It reminds me of the same jewellery, though this time worn on sneakers from her boyfriend, of a waitress I saw in Texas in January. Am I thinking in Hyper text links now? We leave the diner to plant poppies - another splash of red. |
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