Bread

On Monday and Tuesday a singer rehearsed in the Petite Salle where we usually work so we had to move up to the Veranda. When we returned to the Petite Salle on Wednesday we found the place trashed. Cigarette butts, coffee cups, cigarette packs, little sacks of tobacco, napkins, coffee spilled on stage, microphone cords laying around, a horrible stale cigarette smell lingering, and a thick layer of dust on the wooden planks of the stage we work so hard to keep clean…
So I asked the guardian that day for a broom. He shrugged his shoulders and said: “Nassim is on vacation. He took the key to the broom closet with him.”

*

I often see people walking with bags and bags of bread near the bus station. This morning I went on a mission to find the bakery where all this bread was coming from. It’s Friday, the day off here…people go to the beach, men sit around on door steps and in parks and at cafés and observe the trees and insects and the occasional woman passing by…I found a line outside a nondescript bakery. I asked the last man in line “is this the bakery with the best bread in town? You are waiting in line for bread?”
“Yes, we are waiting in line for bread.”
“Well then I’ll wait in line too!”
“No problem.”
Then another fellow came over and said: “go inside the bakery. Women don’t wait in line here.” So I go inside the bakery and wasn’t sure what to do…suddenly I find myself at the head of a long time of old men wanting to buy this apparently excellent bread. And they are buying a dozen loaves at a time (big families see, who eat a enormous amount of bread). So I just boldly made eye contact with the older man behind the counter with not many teeth and asked for 2 loaves. He gives them to me wrapped in paper. “Can I have a plastic bag please?”
5 dinars more.
Clearly I am not from here.

*

The KFP is exactly where I wanted it to be at this time…we finished our 4th week with having dug deep into a variety of performance styles, I have been working hard on getting the women to start listening to one another on stage, pushing them to stretch themselves further, and myself as well. I finish our 3-hour sessions exhausted. We’ve been to 3 different villages and met with 7 different older women and have chosen 3 different folktales to create into our show.

And now as of Sunday I will start outlining a skeleton of the show and will ask the actors to fill in the blanks. I wasn’t totally sure how to go about the creation. Part of me was hoping that I could just hand a large part of it over to them…but after the end of last week on Wednesday I realized I need to guide them more than I thought…just to get a jump start, to steer the boat in the right direction, just next to the wind…