Theater Weekend or Perfect Setting

Yesterday my daughter, her friend and I went to visit our friend's son in his acting camp.

The area is beautiful.  Catskill Mountains, New York.  I have a lot of sweet memories there.  Many years ago our friends lived there.  We went to visit them almost every weekend.  It was the time full of hopes for our brighter and of course better future.  

Now looking from that future back into that time I can still feel how excited I was going there.  Anyway, the acting camp we were going to was something like a performance boot camp with multiple theaters and a lot of plays that were going on at the same time. I loved the choices for the plays. Our friend's son was in The Conference of the Birds.  (Persian: منطق الطیر‎, Mantiqu 't-Tayr, 1177)  which is a book of poems in Persian by Farid ud-Din Attar of approximately 4500 lines.  In the poem, the birds of the world gather to decide who is to be their king, as they have none. The hoopoe, the wisest of them all, suggests that they should find the legendary Simorgh, a mythical Persian bird roughly equivalent to the western phoenix. The hoopoe leads the birds, each of whom represent a human fault which prevents man from attaining enlightenment. When the group of thirty birds finally reach the dwelling place of the Simorgh, all they find is a lake in which they see their own reflection.  (from Wikipedia)

I was thrilled that my daughter and her friends were able to see plays like that done  by such young actors at  such awesome level.

I have to admit I was really ready to enjoy and I was so happy I was not disappointed.  During a break in the performances we decided to explore the area a bit..

My friend had a recommendation for a place and we drove there.

It was a house/restaurant on the river with an outside grill and a promise of  live music 

The owners were a Russian artist and his American wife with eyes that had sparkles in them.

The building had a sign that there is a gallery on the second floor and we went there.  The show had some old and very Soviet style objects combined together as pieces of art.  All of them had mirrors as part of these objects. When you look at them, you are in fact looking at yourself ....inside the Soviet Era.  

I can not say that we had any nostalgia but it was so surreal that I felt that the whole  thing should have been video taped as a movie.  The moment I had that thought a young boy of about 8 years old who was mixing Russian and English words and sentences showed up.  He was enthusiastically trying to film people promising them he would put his video on YouTube.   I thought that videos need a lot of editing and planning.  Will this one involve that too?

Surreal. 

We ate right next to the river, talked.  It was relaxing and sweet and then as if again it was not sweet and relaxing enough two older Italian men started to sing.  They were professional musicians who retired and had a restaurant somewhere close.  They came to celebrate this restaurant's 4th year anniversary.  

These Italian singers with their Italian music and their gorgeous Italian voices were taking over this place in the middle of the woods with blue skies and a gentle river.  Their music and the art work from former Soviet Union had NOTHING in common and none the less  everything and everyone was in perfect harmony.  

It was easy for us to enjoy all this because it is a theater weekend after all and everything is possible in a theater.  It was a perfect setting for a perfect theater weekend and I thought that after all Life a theater and we are all actors, right?    Who said that?  I can not remember now...

Amazing harmony of non-combinable things struck me again and again when I was looking at the scene  and I thought to myself: Life does not need editing, it is perfect the way it is.