An update from the road.

C flew in from New York and met us in Santa Barbara, and after the show, she joined us on the bus to San Francisco, about a 5-hour ride. We took the back lounge, which sounds nice, but it turned out to be a bad idea. The lovely back lounge is the noisiest and bumpiest part of the bus; we got very little sleep. I was worried that our drowsiness would mess up the plans for the upcoming day off — a bike ride with Dave Eggers, Danielle, and her boyfriend around Tiburon Peninsula — but we were OK. It was a beautiful day and we circled around the peninsula. A pregnant Vendela and young October joined us later for sandwiches and salads.

The next day, Jenni organized a bike trip to Muir Beach and Muir Woods and then a lunch at the Pelican Inn over there. It was gorgeous, even if Muir Woods are a teeny bit crowded at times.

A representative for Specialized, the bike company, generously lent us 4 bikes here in San Francisco to complement those that we’re carrying — so, no one in our group is without one. The hills (and our hotel is on top of one) are a bear, but one can get around the other areas of town relatively easily.

At sound check the next day, Miranda July and members of the Extra Action Marching Band joined us — not at the same time. I had an idea about our dancers teaching audience members some steps and phrases, and Miranda seemed like she would instinctively know how to structure something like that, having done something vaguely similar in a performance piece I saw last year. I was right about her instincts; she instantly emphasized that it would be important to put the audience participants at ease, not to make them feel like they’d end up being made to look foolish.

The marching band is, as far as I’m concerned, a San Francisco institution. They’d joined us on a few dates a couple of years ago (Hollywood Bowl, Fillmore) so when they contacted us recently, I immediately suggested they pull out their horn charts for “Burning Down The House” and that we rehearse it together at sound check. (Before this went into motion, it had to be cleared by the symphony hall folks, as the marching band would enter from the rear lobby. It being SF, the hall was game.)

Kelek (one of the Extra Action pom pom gals) suggested they teach some of their routines to our dancers, which seemed like a perfect idea to us. Lily, Natalie, and Steven were issued regulation silver pom poms (and skimpy sequined outfits the second night!) and it went off, well, incredibly. Jon P turned on the house lights illuminating the whole theater when the song kicked in and the entire symphony hall was on its feet, dancing wildly.

John Waters came backstage afterwards and said he saw a rather large elderly lady shaking with shocking abandon. Jerry Harrison and wife came backstage too. We were planning on having drinks afterwards, but he said he was feeling under the weather.

The marching band crashed a nearby restaurant after the show but by the time I got done saying hellos backstage and went over to see how it was going, most of them were out on the street, wandering around in their spangles and hot pants. The restaurant was pretty fancy, so maybe they were done — perhaps playing on the bar was not welcome at that place.

I, Nero

Every morning the San Francisco Chronicle and The New York Times give fresh reports of the spreading financial and economic collapse now spreading to Europe. It feels at times as if we’re fiddling while Rome burns. I suspect the repercussions will spread out a lot further before this thing settles down. Some CEOs are still bailing out with hundreds of millions in bonuses — for lying and fucking up — it’s disgusting. They get rewarded for bilking millions and doing a lousy job. There is no shame.

Iceland, the country, has just gone bankrupt (their banks invested heavily and ended up in serious debt). I wonder how Russia and China are weathering this crisis. I know Russian politicians have been gloating as the US economy falls off its pedestal, but the ripples and fallout are spreading fast, so we’ll see how long they can keep laughing. If they and China (and, who knows — Brazil, Dubai, Venezuela and others) can get through this relatively unscathed, then the era of US world hegemony will be incredibly short lived. Russia and China will be the two giants still standing, with the oil monarchies holding the rest of the world’s feeding tube, at least for the time being.

While billions a week were being spent on a “War on Terror,” the US, and the whole world, were becoming increasingly vulnerable to this economic collapse and no one in power sought to regulate or put a stop to it. I feel that though the link is not linear, the connection between the Iraq invasion and the collapse of the US economy is inescapable.

The next afternoon C and I biked over to 826 Valencia, bought some pirate supplies, and went to Ratio 3 gallery to see a Barry McGee show he has under the name of Lydia Fong (some great ball point pen drawings, but out of our price range). We stopped at Darcy’s Heartfelt store in Bernal Heights and had a pork taco and tamarind juice at La Taqueria on Mission Street, which was wonderfully fresh. I know Mission taco fiends all have their favorite places, but this place has to be up there.

The 2nd show at Davies Hall went just as well as the first night. We tried out the Miranda gag, which worked, but we’re not all sure it adds significantly to the show. Maybe it just needs some refining. It wants to pull the audience into our creative process somehow, at least that’s what I imagine it could do, and be entertaining as well.

Afterwards some of us made our way to Place Pigalle, a nearby bar, where the marching band was also headed. By the time C and I got there, they were in full swing. In the close quarters of a bar, the band is even more transcendent and most of us ended up on the dance floor with pom poms in our hands.

Biking back to the hotel burned off what remained of the adrenaline from our own show and dancing to the Extra Action crew.