Geek travel.

A little over a year ago, I met Katie Hathaway in a song-writing workshop, and we were going to write a musical together about wrecking a car. About a month after that, I got a travel prize from New Dramatists for a Mary-Shelley-themed adventure in Europe. After the travel prize came through, I said to Katie, "You know what? What if we did a Mary Shelley musical instead of wrecking the car?" She said yes. So we started writing songs. I booked plane tickets and forgot to learn any languages and time kind of got away from me, and now it's a year later and here we have seven songs, three scenes and a sketch of the whole show (thanks to residencies at New Dramatists, Overturn Ensemble, and the MacDowell Colony) and it's time for me to go on that trip. So far, the bulk of our work has been on Act One, which is Mary's childhood & teen years in England - scribbling by mother's grave, courtship with Percy, and imagined Creatures in the Skinner Street attic. I said I wouldn't think about Act Two until I'd been to Europe and back again. My plane takes off in a week, but I have been packed for two days. (Except books, I can't decide which books to take.) My good ten-year-old suitcase has been sitting by the laundry closet all weekend. Old suitcase. This may be its last trip.

Rough plan:
A) See the spot in Geneva where MWS wrote the novel.
B) See the spot in Rome where Percy is buried.
C) Learn to make pasta and hunt truffles during culinary tour of Abruzzo, Italy.
D) Think real hard about Act Two of The Romancers, our musical.


Granted, item C is a bit off-topic. I do think it's in the spirit of the Shelleys to trek off into wilder, older Italy with a bunch of strangers and learn how to harvest saffron and whatnot. It will certainly improve my vocabulary. New Dramatists' Executive Director Joel Ruark says I am allowed to have a good time and learn to cook as long as I get material out of it for future plays and fulfill the "New Frontier" subtitle of the Lippman Family Award that made this trip possible.* So, going truffle-hunting in Abruzzo counts, even if there's no literary footnote.** In fact, it might count better than looking at old places where dead people once were, since a lot of those old places have since been turned into suburbs.

Playwriting is pretty weird a lot of the time, and then every once in a while there's a gorgeous moment when it does feel like the movies and you go "oh, that's why I'm here." This month's one of those months.

*Lippman Family "New Frontier" Award. Created as a memorial to the late John Lippmann, a much-loved and respected New Dramatists board member, the Lippmann Family "New Frontier" Award seeks to assist playwrights in opening up new frontiers of the imagination, through travel and adventure.

**Well except there is one footnote. The last stop on the culinary tour is Sulmona, birthplace of Ovid, for a honey-tasting and lunch. Thusly, Ovid:

My soul would sing of metamorphoses.

But since, o gods, you were the source of these

bodies becoming other bodies, breathe

your breath into my book of changes: may

the song I sing be seamless as its way

weaves from the world's beginning to our day.