::Tom Waits
4:05 p.m. - 2004-08-27
It took me all day to get to writing this!!
I met Tom Waits last night!
It's awesome, and I can't really believe it, but it happenned. I saw that ACT was producing a musical play with music written by Tom Waits and the libretto written by William S. Burroughs. It was directed by Robert Wilson, and it was STRANGE - no question. But it was frickin' amazing! Here's the website: http://www.act-sf.org
When I saw that this play was being put on, I immediately called to see if I could volunteer usher and see the play for free (I used to work for ACT as an usher, and so I knew that this was an option). I managed to get assigned to the opening night, and my hunch was that if Tom Waits was going to be there any night, that would be the night. Well, I was right! I have this picture from a magazine that a friend gave to me as a going away present when I left the midwest - it's neat actually and he framed it for me. Tom Waits is standing on a rusty old railroad track singing into an old can on top of a tall stick - which cleverly looks like an old fashioned microphone. When he gave it to me, he said "Since you're going home to California and he lives back there, maybe you can get him to sign it." Well, since I knew if I was ever going to meet him anytime, last night would have been it, I took the picture out of the frame and rolled it up on a wooden dowel so it wouldn't get wrinkled, and then I put a rubber band around it and put it in the side of my boot. (I put a sharpie in the other boot.) I figured that I'd be prepared if I did see him! It's probably completly dorky to so all of that, but, hey! I met him, and he signed my picture, so what can I say? :)
It was a really bizarre play. It was the story of the magic bullets - the same material used for the opera Der Freischutz, except that in this verson the young wife actually dies. The costuming and sets and makeup were breathtakingly eerie, but magnificent to look at. The music was unmistakibly Tom Waits although some of the scoring sounded a little bit minimalistic - it worked brillantly. I felt like I was looking into a cross section of his mind that I never could have expereinced before. It was like the stange music had come to life in vivid color and shape. It was pretty damn cool.
