making the theatre

Six weeks after moving to New York, I left it to return, temporarily, to Europe. In February, Aoife approached me with a proposition. Remember when we used to do plays together? she asked. You were such a great producer, she said. Why don't you come produce a play I want to direct? We'll take it to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

This is the type of suggestion that normally I would respond to with a sad but dutiful, "I can't," but in this case, I could. So now I am.

In what was guaranteed to be a folly of gigantic proportions, at least monetarily, I made plans to come to Dublin for July, Edinburgh for August. So now I'm in Ireland for the fourth time in three years, producing a play. It's called All Dressed Up to Go Dreaming, and it is going to be fabulous.

I was scheduled to leave the night of July 4th, a great time to fly, I thought—maybe the plane wouldn't be horribly full. I had taken my last summer-school exam the day before, and was sitting in my room on the afternoon of the 4th, catching up on the old episodes of 30
Rock I coudn't access while in Europe and occasionally throwing a garment in the general direction of my suitcase. My flight was at 9:40pm; I was planning on leaving the house at about 6pm.

Then the airline called to say that my flight had been cancelled.

There was another flight at 9pm, the woman said, but it connected in Shannon, with about a four-hour layover. I had done the Shannon-layover thing before, and it resulted in me barfing on the plane for the first and, I can only hope, last time in my life; I wasn't about to sign up for that again. My other option was to try to catch the 5:40 direct flight. It was 2pm, and JFK is an optimistic 90 minutes from my apartment. And my suitcase was somewhere beneath a pile of unfolded clothes on my bed.

"You can check in as late as 4:30," the woman told me. "I'll see you there," I said.

By 4:15 I was waiting in the airport lounge, having spent about 15 minutes at check-in and security. The airport was quiet, and it was clear why my flight had been cancelled: no one else but me was on it. Even with all the other passengers bumped onto my new flight, the plane was only 1/3 full. If the lights above my side of the cabin hadn't been flickering on and off for about 4 of the 5 hours of the flight, it might actually have been pleasant.

I was supposed to get in to Dublin at 9am, and meet Aoife at Heuston Station at 10. I arrived at 4:40am, and even after holding out for the direct bus, found myself wandering, dripping, into the station only a little after 6am. It had started raining at about the time my plane touched down, but at this point I've come to expect that from Dublin. I took out my towel, spread it across my damp legs, and settled down to read.

A traditional Irish breakfast (bacon, cheese, and chicken panini) helped calibrate my internal clock, and as soon as the Butler's stand opened at 7, I allowed myself my first caffeinated drink in about a year and a half. (I say first, but that's probably a lie: more than once, after ordering a decaf mocha in what I knew to be correct Dutch, a familiar buzzy headache told me that someone had accidentally given me the real stuff.)

When Aoife found me at 8am (I had just enough credit left on my Dutch sim card to text her about my new schedule) I was dry, full, and wide awake. She managed to keep me moving and awake the whole day, no mean feat for a girl who had been up late herself, partying with the American ambassador and former Irish Prime Minister. Yes, Aoife knows everyone in Ireland.