Walking in his footsteps

Shout out to Annie for starting her own blog. Her geographic location alone guarantees that it’ll be more interesting than mine.

This Time Last Week I was doing work. Poor Monica had to suffer through 5 hours of classes, so I accompanied her to UBC and worked in her office while she partook of the learning. It was raining that day, real, heavy, fat drops of rain. What I saw of campus didn’t impress me as being majestically beautiful or anything. I’ve been told that spring is the best time to see the campus, that’s when it’s at its most beautiful. I saw a building (library, I think) that is used for establishing shots on Smallville. I also saw the clock tower that was on an episode of X Files where digital displays were telling people to kill. If I was 14, that would have been so awesome, and I would make some comment about treading the same ground as David Duchovny…but I’m over that. (Aside, after 6 days there I totally understand Duchovny’s wanting to leave Vancouver after 6 years).

Friday night we saw a play. I found out about this play while tripping around online. It’s last performances happened to coincide perfectly with my trip, and I emailed Monica all frantic and asked her to get tickets. The play was Life After God based on two of Douglas Coupland’s books: Life After God (short stories) and City of Glass (non-fic about Vancouver). It was essentially a series of monologues held together with a plot about a 15 year high-school reunion. I recognized the typical Coupland themes in the play, and there was one line that I remember specifically from the book. It was about how as children they “floated in swimming pools the temperature of blood and the colour of the earth seen from space.” That line has always stuck with me. Water was a recurring theme throughout the play (it is Vancouver, after all). I don’t think the play would work if performed in any other city; it’s too Vancouver-centric. They talk about the Grouse grind, the city-wide health-and-fitness obsession, the movie industry, living on the hill, the mountains. There was also a fair amount of nudity. I didn’t think it was gratuitous. In one of the scenes, I assumed they were at Wreck Beach (a nude beach), so that made sense. What really surprised me was the dancing. Monica asked beforehand if there was going to be dancing and I laughed and said, “No!” But there was dancing, and it was interpretive dance, which I really don’t care for. I felt that the dancing took away from the play, rather than added to it, but what do I know?