turn left after the giant headless rocking horse

Today I went over to the Barn, which is a workspace in Hunter's Point and home of the Giant Mousetrap, to help build the set for Undulation. Earring had emailed the troupe that we would be starting at noon, so I was there at noon.

Alone. No Earring, no other troupemates, and no sign that we had a work party/barbecue going on.

One of the other people who uses the space (Earring's boyfriend is doing our set, and he lives there) took pity on me and let me hang out while she got together some paintings for a show, introducing me to her little white three-legged dog (two in back, one in front, congenital not accidental) named, not surprisingly, Tripod.

I was telling AX all this as we took BART to see yet another play about the Russian Revolution, and when I got to this part he said you're making this all up, aren't you? and I had to protest that no, in fact I was not. I didn't even get to the part about what happens when Tripod, who weighs all of four pounds (not that having a fourth leg would make him much heavier, I wager), gets into it with Delco, Earring and Cowboy's much-larger puppy. Which I saw when Earring and Cowboy finally showed up, bearing raw chicken and Miller Genuine Draft. Tripod can run right underneath Delco without their pelts touching. But he doesn't; he prefer to jump up at Delco, yapping and snapping away at top speed and putting on a great show of small-dog machismo. He's going to snap his back one of these days, doing that, grumbled Samba, scooping him up from under Delco's broad, inquisitive paw. Tripod, stop it!

So I sat on a swing hanging from the rafters playing with Tripod while Samba and I talked about whether or not all Brazilian women get boob jobs when they turn 16. And then Earring and Cowboy showed up, and we sat in Cowboy's room talking about what needed to be done. First, he said, we need to smoke some dope. I declined, figuring it for a bad match with power tool usage. Cowboy used a half-dry blue kid's marker and sketched out a plan of attack on the back of a piece of junk mail.

We spent the next few hours not working especially hard. Earring and I painted some little areas, drank beer, and razzed Cowboy and his friend, who got a pie (lemon meringue) in the face last night in a bar. Apparently in celebration of his birthday, although that wasn't entirely clear. The most exciting moment had to be when Earring and I went over to Scrap to see if we could find anything to make some embellishments for the set, and as we were driving back in Cowboy's 1964 Dart, it ran out of gas and we had to push it out of an intersection.

It was fun because Earring intimidates the shit out of me, and I'd never really hung out with her before. It was nice to spend relaxed time with her in a different context than a class or a rehearsal, even if that context was sitting in a land yacht in a questionable part of town waiting for Cowboy to show up with a can of gas, listening to Earring curse his habit of only putting a dollar of gas in the car at a time. The sun was brilliant, and there was no traffic on the street we were on, so we stretched out on the bench seat (can I just mention how much I miss bench seats in cars?) and talked about how great it was to do something you liked with your time. Once we were juiced up, we returned to the Barn to find that Snufkina had made it over with her two shar-peis, who were busy wiping their snot all over Delco, so she painted some little spots too and then we left.

I still have some black paint under my nails. And I'm loathe to scrub it out. Today was the kind of day I quit my safe job to have, and I like having the reminder in dark filigree at the tips of my fingers.