Chapter 9 A house full of water.

We are to start puppet training in the next few days. One of the shows has several “fish” puppets in it so we need to rehearse. We are handed sticks to practice with and pretend they are the fish until the puppets arrive.

It has now been awhile that we have been living in the Bahamas and we are used to their customs. It has its own vibe and way of working. Nothing works out the way that it should. The locals laugh when they see our frustration and say “Welcome to the Bahamas.” There seems to be two speeds to island life. Slow and off.

Days later a slightly unwashed crunchy granola puppet lady arrives to help us put puppets in the show, unfortunately the puppets did not. It seems that they will be held in customs for months because the Bahamian Government doesn’t understand why we need giant fish puppets to make our show work.

One of the meetings we hear through the grapevine didn’t go very well. No one knew the details but it wouldn’t be until several days later that the screaming and yelling would start. Then we would know the full extent.

Before I arrived in the Bahamas I had choreographed two pieces for a showcase in New York. One of these pieces was photographed and appeared in Dance Spirit Magazine. The other had been bought by the city of New York for a performance for First Night.

I hired a friend of mine to work out all the details and make sure that first night was a success. Unfortunately, I would spend a lot of my free time calling and if I was able to get through, e-mailing NYC to make sure that everything would be alright. We were not supposed to be returning to NYC until the next year.

My friend had mailed me a copy of Dance Spirit Magazine with the picture of my piece in it. Excited, I brought the copy of Dance Spirit to rehearsal, there I showed the director and he said "Oh, that’s nice, I didn’t know you had a brain in your head.” I chuckled to myself for two reasons. One was because I don’t know what having a brain in my head had to do with a picture in a magazine and two because his eyesight was so bad that he had to turn the magazine upside down and around to look at it.

"Damn it!" ”How many times do we have to tell you that you're dancing in the pit?” the Choreographer scream’s at us during today’s rehearsal. We are a little confused because the entire space of the stage is now covered with carpet that is supposed to represent stairs, beds, bookshelves and a large wooden box. I understand that they need to be creative because they don’t have tools at their disposal. But using carpet cutouts to represent the set? I don’t need to tell you that carpet on top of linoleum on top of cement made for a great treat. We would land on the carpet and go sliding by.

To be continued…………..

Geoffrey Doig-Marx holds all written and electronic rights to his writting "Not Only Magic Floats". It can not be reprinted in part or whole without his written consent.