Impossible Vacation by Spalding Gray

to sit around me in chairs offstage while I conducted them like some demented symphony orchestra in the jangling of silverware and the striking of empty glasses. I was to give them cues for laughter as well as maintain a constant improvisational mumble of “rhubarbrhubarb rhubarb” or “peas and carrots, peas and carrots.” All of this had to be orchestrated around Konstantin’s and Nina’s onstage lines. What was worse was that I agreed to do all this. So there I sat backstage during each show conducting all these ridiculous, meaningless sounds while Brian as Konstantin spewed and strutted his badly performed sensitivity for all of Houston to see.
    Good God, what was I doing? I wondered. Maybe I was trying to punish myself for something. It seemed like I had run away from Mom’s insanity to come to an even more insane world. The whole situation was producing great anger and rage in me, but for some reason I could not express it. Instead I judged it as being bad and tried to purge it by going on what I thought would be a purifying diet of soybeans. Trying to escape Dad’s corrupting legacy of meat, I was eating soybeans morning, noon, and night, and those soybeans were causing enormous intestinal gas. Wherever I walked I was leaving those silent but deadly slow hot burners. But I was not taking responsibility for them. I just kept moving and wafting and letting them drift in, reeking hot invisible waves behind me. You see, I’d not learned how to express my anger through the proper orifice yet.
    The only time I held back, and with great pain, was when I was conducting the backstage sound effects. I was afraid I would be discovered as the volcanic source of those perverse stinkers, so there in the wings while conducting Russian party sounds I would squeeze my sphincter tight against those hot winds.
    For the entire four-week run of
The Sea Gull
my rage grew. Then at last on closing night I had a chance to vent it fully. The closing-night party was held in Galveston, a short drive to the gulf from Houston, at an authentic Greek restaurant where all the Greek merchant marines came and danced when their ships were in port. We drove down in three fully packed cars and I ended up with Brian, the New York actress who played Madame Arkadina, the actress who played Nina, and Thelma, the director. The woman driving the car was a Houston native who ran the theater box office and often went dancing that old Greek grapevine dance with the sailors who had just come into port. It was her idea to have the party at the Greek restaurant, and everyone else followed.
    As she drove, she gave us all a preparatory lecture for the upcomingevent, how to act or not act around a bunch of horny Greek sailors who had been out to sea for months. And somewhere in the middle of her precautionary notes she said, “Oh, by the way, just before we get to Galveston we’re going to pass through some very sloppy lowlands, and I have to warn you that the smell is quite intense. In fact, it’s almost overwhelming. So just before we get there I’m going to warn you all to roll up your windows.”
    I felt the car seat burning under me. I couldn’t hold out any longer and let out the longest, hottest, most silent slow burner ever. As soon as that cloud reached the sweet little turned-up nose of our lady driver, she cried, “Oh my God! There it is! I didn’t know we were there yet. Roll up your windows! Everybody, roll up your windows!” And up all the windows went tight, real tight, while everyone wept and gasped and cried, “Oh my God! Oh, help! Step on it, let’s get out of here!” I sat still, weeping with the silent angry laughter that was buried so deep. There I sat, tears rolling down my cheeks, with no idea that this was a fun version of Mom’s soon-to-come exit from this world.

    A FTER THAT closing-night
Sea Gull
party, I knew my relationship with the Alamo Theatre, or maybe all theater, was over, but I felt too inadequate to walk away from