Minutes before the curtain rose on the night we saw Between Two Knees, my husband Rand received a text from our friend Shaun, who is in the show.

“Sorry in advance,” Shaun wrote, with a crying-laughing emoji. Rand showed it to me.

“What do you think that means?” he said. I shrugged. Minutes later, the show began, and Shaun – who is of Blackfoot descent – gallivanted across the stage in whiteface and a blonde wig, a terrifying sort of grin on his face.

Between Two Knees (2019): Shaun Taylor-Corbett, Wotko Long. Photo by Jenny Graham.

His character had been circumcised in order to pass for white – which entailed a half dozen foreskin jokes, and opening up his pants to reveal a blinding white light emanating from his crotch (illuminating the faces of his costars as well as the meaning of his earlier text). My husband – whose ancestry is very, very Jewish (you can follow that thread on your own, can’t you?) – doubled over with laughter.

For the last month and a half, Rand has been nudging me to write a review for Between Two Knees, the new play written by Native American sketch comedy troupe the 1491s and commissioned by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Ostensibly, it should be an easy task. I enjoyed the show. The cast is talented and charismatic. The leads have wonderful chemistry. Plus my friend Shaun is in it, and he’s just delightful and so darn cute.

And so I have to be clear: my hesitation to write about Between Two Knees has nothing to do with my impression of the show – in that, I can be straightforward: it’s really, really good. Funny, sad, relevant, profoundly uncomfortable, ridiculous, sweet. But I’ve been avoiding a write-up because it’s also incredibly hard to parse. It’s an absurdist comedy about Native American genocide. Wait, what? How is that even possible? Like I said, it’s hard to parse. And as a white woman, I’m not exactly sure if I should.

But this play might be precisely the answer to the questions it poses. As Dallas Goldtooth, one of the show’s playwrights and a member of the 1491s noted in an interview with Oregon’s local NPR affiliate, “I think comedy is the most effective way to deal with issues of trauma and darkness, when it’s needed.  We need to laugh sometimes, and we need to allow ourselves the freedom to laugh, and I think that’s … I hope this play, Between Two Knees helps us accomplish that.”

Between Two Knees (2019): Shyla Lefner (Irma), Ensemble. Photo by Jenny Graham.

History is written by the so-called winners, which is to say, it’s written by mostly white people. Between Two Knees shows us what happens when that’s not the case – when there’s no white savior, no patronizing cliches, no easy answers. And the bad guys look like, well, most of the audience. It’s a harsh reality – albeit a riotously funny one – that some people aren’t ready to see. Instead, they leave at intermission (which has been a problem at Two Knees). Or register lengthy complaints with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival administrative offices. Or post one-star reviews for the show.

Perhaps that’s the biggest problem with Between Two Knees – the people who could benefit the most from seeing it are the ones who are walking out. But fault for that doesn’t lie with the show or its playwrights. It lies in people being unable to confront their own privilege and our collective ugly past.

Knees follows the tale of Irma Jean and Isaiah Snake (played by Shyla Lefner and Derek Garza), two young Native Americans who escape an abusive Catholic orphanage and travel across the country freeing their brethren. It’s a fairy tale, of course – the triumph of Irma and Isaiah’s escape shines so brightly because it contrasts so starkly with the reality of their contemporaries, who were similarly stolen from their families, abused and beaten, and stripped of their identities.

Between Two Knees (2019): Rachel Crowl, James Ryen. Photo by Jenny Graham.

Irma and Isaiah’s stories are tied two events at Wounded Knee: the massacre of the late 1890s (that left 300 Native Americans – mostly women and children – dead), and the 1973 standoff (when members of the American Indian Movement and the Lakota Nation occupied the town to protest systemic mistreatment and corruption at the hands of the federal government as well as tribal president Richard Wilson). Plotwise, their ties to those events feel at times tenuous, but it doesn’t matter: it’s simply delightful to watch them. They take on numerous roles, they have a Mortal Kombat style battle against a hoard of abusive nuns and a sadistic priest (which goes on a little too long). They tussle and dance with an exceptional ensemble cast, including Rachel Crowl, who is a damn chameleon as she switches between personas.

And when the tone of the play turns on the dime, moving from riotous comedy to utter grief so quickly you’ll get whiplash, they do as well. I watched tears streaming down Garza’s face as he holds a weeping Lefner, and realized: that’s how loss often hits you. Out of nowhere.

Between Two Knees (2019): Shyla Lefner (Irma), Shaun Taylor-Corbett (William), Derek Garza (Isaiah). Photo by Jenny Graham.

And as they move from a young couple to an older one – played by Wotko Long and Sheila Tousey – the transition is so graceful and beautiful, I cried. Seconds later, I was laughing again.

The 1491’s roots are sketch comedy, and it soon becomes evident in the play. The humor is sharp, quick, and biting, but at times feels like a collection of vignettes. For me – a member of the SNL generation (my attention can be held, rapt, for 2 hours, 4 minutes at a time), this wasn’t a problem. But for those expecting a linearity to the narrative, a clear storyline from the past that would somehow make sense of the genocide on which our country was built, or admonish those of us in the audience of our role in it (Because, you know, that was a long time ago and *we* didn’t do that) – this is not the show for you. No punches are pulled here. Characters break the fourth wall repeatedly to remind us that the audience is full of white people and there was a time when America wasn’t. That those of us sitting cozily in the theater might not have directly committed genocide, but boy do we enjoy the benefits of it.

Between Two Knees (2019): Justin Gauthier (Larry). Photo by Jenny Graham.

“I mean, do you even know how hard it was to cast this play,” the narrator (played effortlessly by Justin Gauthier, who shrugs his way through his lines as though chatting to friends) asks the audience, illustrating how complete the eradication of Native Americans has been. “One of the Indians is a Chinese guy.”

“Actually, Korean, but WHATEVER,” actor James Ryen (who is riotous and incidentally mostly shirtless in this show) claps back.

No spoilers here, but after even after singing sadistic priests and video game fight scenes and illuminated penises and a drugged out hippie wedding (that is a season highlight), the conclusion to Between Two Knees still looms large as a bit of deus ex machina absurdity. It’s nevertheless hilarious, deeply satisfying, and the only note on which this show could have concluded. Because for this narrative of Native American genocide to have a happy ending, you have delve deep into the realm of absurdity. And if you have a problem with that, don’t take it up with the show. Take it up with history.

More info on Between Two Knees at The Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Ashland Oregon:

Written by: The 1491s

Directed by: Eric Ting

Cast: Rachel Crowl, Derek Garza, Justin Gauthier, Shyla Leftner, Wotko Long, James Ryen, Shaun Taylor-Corbett, Sheila Tousey

Runs through October 27, 2019 in the Thomas Theater (ADA accessible seats available)

Tickets: $55-$135 (discounts available if you sign up for the OSF’s mailing list)

Matinee (1:30pm) and evening (8:00pm) shows, with no performances on Mondays

Appropriate for mature teens and adults willing to confront their own privilege

—————

My trip to Cambodia feels so long ago – more than five years – that I have to remind myself that I was there. I look at the photos, and see myself looking so damn young that it almost startles me. I went to Cambodia with Nicci and we rode bikes to Angkor Wat and she would shout what vehicles were coming upon us and I would caution her about the monkeys that sat on the side of the road and we ate gelatinous fruits in air so damp and hot it felt like we were inside a sauna.

We went to Tuol Sleng prison and we visited the Killing Fields in one day, and it felt like there was nothing left of us after that. Even as spectators, as tourists, as white women with expensive cameras, even with all the veils of privilege and distance to insulate you, the history of the Khmer Rouge will leave you feeling like a hollow shell.

I remember how the tiles in Tuol Sleng still appeared to be stained with blood (I couldn’t – and still can’t – say definitively if they were). How a rusted bed frame sat in one corner of the room and someone explained that this was the same bed that prisoners had been chained to and tortured on. How of the more than 20,000 people to pass through the prison, only 7 survived.

This cell was only about three, maybe four feet wide at most. I remember thinking it looked no bigger than a closet.

I may be remembering incorrectly (it’s been so long) but I think I read that the metal box once held scorpions used to torture inmates.

Later at the fields, we saw grounds that were sunken in from the decomposition of the bodies in the mass graves, and were instructed to stay on the paths less we disturb the remains. We were told that every time it rained, bits of cloth and bone and teeth would come to the surface and the groundskeepers would gently gather them up and put them in cases.

A tree at one edge of the fields bore a sign indicating that this is where children had been murdered (dashed against the trunk) in order to save bullets.

Monks walked the grounds, and butterflies fluttered in the heavy, still air. It remains one of the most terrifying places I’ve ever been.

I didn’t write too much about that trip to Cambodia. I started to, but it was hard to wrap my head around the experience, and returning home was so jarring, even though I’d only been gone for two short weeks divided across there and Vietnam. More and more time passed, and I neglected to talk about Cambodia. I wrote a book instead, with nary a mention of that trip.

The Killing Fields.

Perhaps it was deliberate – it’s easier to block it all out, to go on with the privilege of being comfortable and oblivious. The Khmer Rouge committed mass genocide, slaughtered millions, and destroying the country’s collective cultural, scientific, and artistic history. The U.S. played a critical role in their rise to power and securing their legitimacy and place on the global stage (we gave them weapons and money, we voted to give them a seat at the U.N., we helped to create the power vacuum and instability that enabled them to rise to power in the first place). I know these things without looking them up but somehow, in the intervening years, I’d allowed myself to forget.

Earlier this month, Rand and I were once again invited down to Ashland for the opening weekend of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. One of the shows we’d be seeing was Cambodian Rock Band – a musical. It had been described as heartbreaking and funny and uplifting, and I’d noticed that the positive adjectives outweighed the negative, and paired with my own self-denial that was enough to convince me that this play would not ruin me.

It did, of course. I should have seen it coming, but I wanted so desperately to rewrite history.

The characters in the play feel subject to this same force. We know how the story ends, we know who dies (virtually an entire generation), and yet we are given the illusion that things might somehow turn out differently. The tension is almost too much to bear. I told Rand that if I was watching it all unfold on my television screen, I’d have changed the channel. But plays and real life have that much in common – usually, you can’t escape it. The only way out is through.

The play centers around Neary, a young American woman working for an NGO that is trying to bring Duch – a high-ranking officer who oversaw Tuol Sleng prison – to justice. Without warning, her father, Chum, shows up in Phnom Penh for a visit – his first time back in the country since he managed to flee the Khmer Rouge 30 years earlier. The play bounces backwards and forwards in time, from before the genocide, to the heart of it, to (nearly) present day. There are musical interludes (with tracks by Dengue Fever) that help to cut the extreme tension. But as soon as they are over, you are thrust back into the heart of it. (The symbolism was not lost on me – art offers us an escape.)

I don’t want to reveal too much about the plot – there are parts that you can anticipate as a viewer, but that’s a hard thing to avoid when a play is so deeply rooted in real-life horrors. Like I said: you know how the story ends. You simply have to watch the path unwind to see it get there. It’s agonizing at times.

The second act is peppered with the sort of violence and gore that you’d be accustomed to finding in a work by Martin McDonagh. But unlike McDonagh’s work, it isn’t violence for violence’s sake, but rather based on facts. It is the parts of the play that are ripped from history that are most disquieting. The tiles of Tuol Sleng are perfectly recreated. Even the main antagonist – Duch – is a real person, and not some contrived bogeyman. He is currently still alive, and would be the only member of the Khmer Rouge to face an international tribunal for his part in the Cambodian genocide. Abandoning your suspension of disbelief won’t protect you from this play. The details may not have happened, most of the characters may be fictional, but the large scale horrors are all real.

The performers in Cambodian Rock Band are excellent – transitioning from musical numbers to intense dramatic performances and comedic scenes with a sort of ease that leaves you reeling (but that is something I have grown accustomed to with the OSF).  The show holds similar space in my heart as my visit to the prison and the Killing Fields did: I’m glad I went. I would tell others to do so, with the caveats that it is an intense and terrifying experience, one I will likely not repeat.

There is a part of me that wants to push it all into the recesses of my memory and focus on lighter things, like the other wonderful shows we saw that weekend. But I’ve learned that ignoring history doesn’t change it. And sometimes the best way to honor the dead is to remember.

This is how I mark my visits to Ashland – by the shows that weave themselves into that chapter of my life. And so now I cannot think of Medea/MacBeth/Cinderella without thinking of my brain surgery, and I cannot read Hamlet without feeling rain on my face, and Shakespeare will forever be Bill DeMeritt. Don’t @ me.

It is too early to say what this season will mean to me. I know the shows will be stellar – they always are (and if you wish for an objective review, go elsewhere, because this is my favorite place in the world) – but how will they tie into the narrative that I am constantly writing with this twinkly eyed fool who hasn’t seemed to realize that he’s far, far too good for me?

We went down for opening weekend. The air was full of nervous energy and falling snow. Four plays opened the start of season, of which we saw three – Destiny of Desire, Sense and Sensibility, and Henry V (we skipped Othello, since we have tickets for it later in the season, and we long ago learned that four plays in two days doth break my brain.)

I have seen the film version of Sense and Sensibility countless times. I know the story by heart. Because of this, and the fact that we’d just seen another Austen play a few months ago, Rand suggested we skip it.

In response, I politely threatened to burn all his underwear. He was able to read nuance; we went to see Sense.

In between acts I would list an actor’s entire resume for him. This time it was Amy Newman, flitting across the stage as Fanny Dashwood, every line that left her lips a mix of acid and sugar.

“She was in the Odyssey,” I told Rand, “and Merry Wives of Windsor. And Roe.”

The shows do not exist in a vacuum for me anymore. Actors I recognized now carried with them the histories of characters from seasons past. When Nancy Rodriguez and Armando McClain – as Eleanor Dashwood and Edward Ferrars – finally kissed, I cried, because I had not been waiting two hours for it – I had been waiting years.

Left to Right: Nancy Rodriguez, Armando McClain, and Emily Ota. Photo: Jenny Graham.

“I find myself … wondering why the fuck things can’t just go right (FOR JUST ONE DAMN SEASON) for Nancy Rodriguez.” – me in 2016

Also, a small complaint: Marianne’s dismissal of Colonel Brandon is a lot more believable when Colonel Brandon isn’t incredibly debonair and has a voice that sounds like you somehow made a souffle out of velvet and sex.

Marianne (Emily Ota) listens to Colonel Brandon (Kevin Kenerly) and my husband had to stop me from screaming “GET IT GIRL.” Photo: Jenny Graham.

I flipped through the program, squealing like a kid discovering a long sought-after trading card whenever I saw an actor had returned to the company after years away at other theaters.

“Do you remember him?!”

“Umm … no?”

“ARE YOU KIDDING ME? HE WAS THE LEAD IN PIRATES OF PENZANCE.”

“That was seven years ago.”

“YES AND NOW HE IS BACK.”

I saw past the mustache and recognized Eddie Lopez immediately when he walked out onto the stage in this year’s telenovela-inspired Destiny of Desire. The play was delightfully self-aware; the audience and the actors seemed to share a knowing wink about how over the top it all was. And just when I was ready to dismiss it as a ridiculous, farcical comedy, an actor would emerge from offstage and deliver a line about the sociopolitical realities of life as a Latino in the United States.

It is absurd for a nun to reveal a sequined evening gown beneath her habit. It is absurd that every day, a person dies of thirst trying to cross the border between Mexico and the United States. We just don’t usually see that absurdity side-by-side.

Ernesto (Eddie Lopez) cradles the body of his daughter, Victoria Maria (Ella Saldana North) in what I swear is a comedy. Photo: Jenny Graham.

Good theater is not about the binaries of black and white, but about all the things that exist in between. It’s comedies that make you think and tragedies that make you laugh and villains that make you weep for them and heroes that infuriate you.

And at the end of the show, a mariachi band played.

Age cannot wither my love for this place, nor custom stale it.

Still – I won’t lie – I walked into Henry V with a dose of trepidation – we’d not seen Henry IV Part 1 or 2, and histories are not generally my or Rand’s favorite. But the OSF was able to breathe life even into the Bard’s old words, and thanks to a talented cast and a Henry who was young in face but already weary of the world, it felt new again. Even as the battle dragged on, the play did not.

And even in a story about war, I found myself delighting in a brief but achingly romantic scene between Henry and Katherine.

This could have gone on for an hour and it still would have felt too short. (Jessica Ko as Katherine and Daniel José Molina as Henry. Photo: Jenny Graham.)

I don’t quite know how this season will feel when it’s through. Perhaps I will remember this year as the one where things fell into place. Where the two leads I’d been hoping would get together finally did. I think of the moment when the couples in all of these radically different shows finally kissed, and everything was, for a little while, absolutely wonderful.

Maybe when I look back on this year – one that marks the tenth anniversary of being married to the love of my life – I’ll find that those romantic moments, some unexpected, some long-awaited, are what have stayed with me. We’ll just have to wait and see.

Give me humanity. Give me flaws. Give me an enormous bell with a massive crack in the front of it. One that I still hadn’t seen, despite all my trips to Philadelphia. On my last visit back east, I remedied this. I went to see the Liberty Bell.

If you go in the off-season, this is a very easy thing to do. There will be virtually no line, and you can walk straight to it. You can even get a photo of yourself standing in front of the Liberty Bell, with someone else crouching awkwardly in the background.

These are not perfect tourist photos. Philly is not about being perfect. It is not about having a chiseled jaw and a supermodel wife or five Super Bowl rings. No. Philly is about having photos that sometimes look like iconic pieces of American history are pooping out humans and that is fine.

The Liberty Bell was originally commissioned in 1751 by the Philadelphia Assembly to mark the 50th anniversary of the state’s constitution, and would arrive from London the following year. It was so brittle, it cracked almost immediately after being rung. This wasn’t the famous crack that we now see today on the bell – that would happen later (though it’s unclear when). The bell was recast twice more by two local metal workers (Pass and Stow, whose last names appear on it) in an effort to make it stronger and to make its ringing more pleasant to the ear. Success was middling.

Look, we’re all sort of fragile sometimes, okay, placard? No need to get judgy about it.

While virtually everyone is familiar with the bell, I realize that its significance was lost on me. When my niece asked about it a few weeks later, I fumbled for an answer.

“It’s … you know … it’s a big bell? With a giant crack in it? From the Revolution.”

“Did they ring it when we declared our independence from the British?”

“That sounds entirely plausible, so let’s say yes, but please do not ask follow-up questions.”

The truth is a little murkier than that. The legend is that on July 8, 1776, the bell was rung to announce the first public reading of the Declaration of Independence – an account that, while heartwarmingly patriotic, is pretty unlikely. By 1776 the State House steeple was crumbling – there’s no way that the bell could have been rung without bringing the whole damn thing down. But it likely rang in the years before then, to call people together for special announcements or important news, and oftentimes stuff that might have pertained to the revolution.

After independence, it fell into obscurity until it graced the cover of Liberty, an abolitionist publication, in 1837. It soon became a widely known as a symbol of the anti-slavery movement, and took on the name The Liberty Bell (before then it was simply known as The State House bell). It’s hard to say when it got its signature crack – but it was most definitely there in February of 1846, when attempts to ring the bell in honor of George Washington’s birthday failed because of the zig-zag shaped fracture.

The bell was not recast again. Measures were taken to make sure the fracture didn’t spread further. And now it hangs, silent and broken, with Independence Hall watching over it in the distant. And this is a good home for it, because imperfect things and wonderful things are not out of place in a town like Philly.

Also, I really hate Tom Brady.

This was my initial reaction to Livraria Bertrand – the oldest operating bookshop in the world, established in 1732. I looked at it from a distance, through glass, and thought “how remarkable”, the way one would any other work of art. You marvel at it, but you do not touch. You certainly don’t step inside. But Rand was not limited by such strange hangups, and seeing that he was able to walk in without being yelled at by some unseen authority figure, I quickly rushed in after him.

Plus he’s super cute and his eyes are like, CRAZY twinkly.

The Bertrand smells faintly of old wood and vanilla. Sloping archways connect room after room after room. The inner rooms look modern and recently renovated, but every now and then there is a pillar, or an exposed stone, or a strangely uneven piece of floor to remind you that when this shop opened, humans thought our solar system ended at Saturn.

Pedro Faure – one of many French booksellers who began arriving in Portugal in the early 18th century – opened the shop in 1732, but it was destroyed in the earthquake of 1755 (which decimated much of the city). The shop was reopened not long afterward in its current location, and has remained in operation ever since, hosting poets, philosophers, Nobel prize nominees, artists, and, of course, writers.

It was enough to wander through and simply breathe it in. It was as quiet as church, and for a lapsed Catholic like myself it offered even more of a religious experience that any of the cathedrals we visited. If there is a God, she is here, in the pages of a really good book.

I’ve always enjoyed novels that are love letters to books themselves (Like Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore  or The Borrower, which are both delightful reads), and Lisbon feels like the city equivalent of that – an entire town made of tiny shops piled high with dusty tomes. In this respect, Livraria Bertrand is not unique – it is one of many, many bookstores. But it is the oldest, and there is a sort of ancient magic in its walls. You feel like you might round a corner and find yourself someplace wondrous. And then you realize – that was true the second you stepped in the door.

I asked the internet how I should spend my time, and the recommendations were all the same: go to the Walker Art Center and Sculpture Garden.

Endeavoring to write about art, I am met with the same hesitation that I always feel – it is, to paraphrase some brilliant uncredited soul, like dancing about architecture. I won’t dwell too much on the individual pieces at the Walker – by the time you visit, they will have changed, anyway. I will simply tell you to go, because the space is wonderful and the collection will make you feel alternately contemplative and sad and angry and joyous, and all sorts of permutations of those things.

I must have been in a romantic mood on the day I visited, because everything was heartbreakingly beautiful to me. When I showed this photo to Rand, I commented on how sweet and sad the sentiment was.

He nodded.

“You know it’s surrounded by butts, right?”

No. I did not.

Oops.

If it is rainy or cold or snowing, then you might want to simply stay inside the Walker, but if the weather is slightly more amenable, then consider wandering around the sculpture garden.

The collection is a little more permanent, because it is much harder to move a giant blue chicken than it is to, say, move a painting.

Admission to the Walker is only $15, which feels modest compared to many galleries in the U.S., but the sculpture park is free, since it’s remarkably difficult to put giant things outside and then somehow demand that people pay to look at them.

There were a few pieces that didn’t entirely resonate with me, though I’d like to think that I understood their message. For example, this sphere clearly has a vagina.

(Right? I mean, that’s clearly what’s going on here.)

My favorite pieces were these paranoid stone benches. It’s like someone heard my thoughts and then engraved them onto a huge slab of granite.

Minneapolis is underrated; a few short hours there won’t feel like enough. But even if your time there is fleeting, the Walker is worth it, if only so you can return home and say to your beloved, “I found a bench that understood me more than most people do.”

I have simultaneous loved Anderson’s work and resented it; it resonates with me in a way that feels like I’m somehow being manipulated. When The Royal Tenenbaums came out, my brother called me and we had one of those sparse exchanges that can only take place between people who have known each other their entire lives. He asked if I had seen it. Yes, I told him.

“Royal,” he said.

“I know.”

“Dad,” he said.

“I know.”

2009. One of my all-time favorite photos of my father, in which he manages to look pissed off while eating ice cream.

Therein lies Anderson’s brilliance – he creates characters who are often miserable and yet they are fine. Things are simultaneously bad and okay. That is a world I know.

I was angry that Anderson could pinpoint me – and so many others – so well. I’d like to think I was less predictable than that. My response was reactionary – I tried to resist his work. As years of Halloween costumes attest, this endeavor has not been successful.

Sam and Suzy from Moonrise Kingdom.

–

Steve Zissou and Margot Tenenbaum.

Rand tried to keep our visit a surprise, but I eventually learned of it. He asked me if I want to see photos beforehand, but in the same way that I refuse to watch trailers for Anderson’s films before they are released, I shook my head.

“I want to see it for the first time in person,” I told him.

A small part of me didn’t want to go, scared it wouldn’t live up to my expectations. Or that it would, and that the world then would seem dull by comparison.

The bar was on the edge of town, a 15-minute drive even from the Duomo at Milan’s center. We took a cab, and found ourselves in a industrial district, full of long white buildings and factories. Bar Luce resides in one of these, the only indication of its existence is a small neon sign along the front that reads “BAR.”

As we walked in I imagined that I could see us from afar, moving in-slow motion as music played.

My biggest grievance about the worlds Wes Anderson created was that they existed only on the screen, and I could never step into them. Even when I paid a pilgrimage to the house from The Royal Tenenbaums (up in Harlem), I could only stand at the curb and stare, the delta between his work and reality feeling bigger than it ever had.

I thought Bar Luce would change that. Alas.

Every piece of it has been crafted by Anderson. It is perfect execution of his vision, but it is not perfect – his work never is. Pants hemmed too short, rusted out cars, a penciled in mustache – there is always something intentionally amiss.

Above a sea of terrazzo, there are islands of Formica the color of Easter eggs.

The shelves behind the bar and the glass dessert cases look like they’re filled with props.

But the cake was real, and I couldn’t really ask for more than that.

The cafe was empty when we arrived, and the staff looked like they were suffering from a terminal case of ennui. We were unaware of the rush of people that would soon come through the doors, and so the sheer number of waiters and baristas looked excessive.

We sat down and ordered. I scanned the menu for a butterscotch sundae, eager to placing my order in heavy, bored Italian, but there wasn’t one. Instead, I got The Royal, a sandwich made with culatello, and literally nothing else.

This is the cafe’s signature cake – vanilla pan de spagna with a light chocolate cream and covered in pink fondant.

Supposedly Rand ordered it.

(He didn’t get to eat most of it.)

At some point I demanded that we abandon our lives back in Seattle and move to Milan and, specifically, to Bar Luce.

“We can’t; we just bought a house,” Rand said.

“Let’s sell our house.”

“No.”

“Please?”

“YOU ARE THE ONE WHO ASKED ME TO BUY YOU A HOUSE.”

“And now I’m asking you to sell it so we can move to Milan. Please?”

“No.”

“But it takes so little to make me happy.”

“That is patently untrue and you know it.”

He was right. But for a few fleeting moments, I was excessively happy, in a way that Wes Anderson’s characters never are. I endeavored to hide my delight from everyone because it felt thematically off.

Once again, I was not successful.

Along the back wall of the cafe sits a jukebox that mostly had Italian songs from the 1950s and 60s. It had a bunch of Rita Pavone, but no tracks that I was familiar with. So the songs were obscure even if you were familiar with the obscure genre.

Next to the jukebox was a pair of pinball machines.

Rand got up to play one of them, and came back to the table, his eyes wide.

“It only takes lira,” he said.

We laughed.

“I’m not kidding.” (100 lira coins are available from the counter – 4 for a Euro.)

This superfluous detail stuck was exactly what I had hoped I would find here. These little elements serve no other purpose than to you bring you into Anderson’s world. We met every little idiosyncrasy with, “Well, of course.”

This pinball machines features Jason Schwartzman. The other one had Bill Murray on it. Because of course they do.

At times it became hard to shake a feeling that this wasn’t a cafe designed by Wes Anderson, but rather what fans imagine a cafe designed by Wes Anderson would look like. It gave me everything I wanted and more, right down to the meticulously designed bathrooms.

But in doing so, it almost felt as though it bordered on parody. In Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, which is often thought to be the bard poking fun at his own tropes, every single Shakespearean cliche is thrown at the audience: lost princesses disguising themselves as boys, buffoonish villains, an exodus into the forest. It’s an absolutely ridiculous play because it is so over-the-top Shakespearean.

Bar Luce had that same sort of feel. It feels like almost too much from a director who plays in subtlety and nuance (right up until somebody snaps and crashes their car into the house). Maybe that’s the problem. Bare Luce exists. And so it can never truly be a part of Wes Anderson’s world because it is a part of ours. We have cell phones and credit cards and top 40 songs that we all hate but still know the lyrics to. We do not walk in slow-motion. Alec Baldwin does not narrate our story.

I say this not to disparage Bar Luce – I loved it, and our visit. But as a devout Wes Anderson fan, it brought up a bit of an existential crisis: I’d always wanted to step into Anderson’s cinematic universe, not realizing that part of the magic lay in the fact that I couldn’t.

There are many things that I should tell you about Gibraltar. It’s a strange place: it’s a territory of the U.K., but it’s literally attached to Spain. The Spanish want it back, but the Gibraltarians are pretty happy being subjects of Queen. In a recent vote, less than 1% of the population wanted to return to Spanish rule. It all goes back to the 1700s and the Treaty of Utrecht where the Spanish ceded Gibraltar to the British and I will get to all of that in another post BUT FIRST MONKEYS.

Yes, monkeys.

They are all over Gibraltar.

Another thing that’s all over Gibraltar? Signs telling you not to feed the monkeys. There are even drawings which illustrate, rather graphically, what will happen if you feed the monkeys. The food can be harmful to them, and it makes them both far too trusting of and aggressive towards humans. The point is, feeding the monkeys is bad for everyone.

So guess what a bunch of people do the second they see a monkey in Gibraltar?

THEY FEED THE DAMN THINGS.

As you walk around Gibraltar (which is, as the Prudential logo promises, a giant monolith extending out from the sea) you will see a lot of monkeys. There are about 160 Barbary Macaques living on the rock. They are sometimes called “Barbary Apes” because they don’t have tails (they are still monkeys, though). They greet you almost immediately upon your arrival, and the entire experience is a bit startling – you are high up on the rock of Gibraltar, the views are dizzying, and there are monkeys.

They are fat and seem quite content provided you don’t get too close to them. That’s usually pretty easy except sometimes you’ll be walking down a path and there’s just a monkey just sitting there.

You suddenly hear the Clint Eastwood western showdown music in your head. Conceptually monkeys are like the coolest thing ever but when you actually see a live, wild one in close proximity to you, it’s quite unsettling. They have sharp teeth and are profoundly strong, yet there is something uncannily human about their appearance, and all of that is just a little bit terrifying.

Our friend Rob, and the monkey that wasn’t quite on his back.

Given enough time, though, and things cease to seem all that strange. This massive rock, sticking straight out of the ocean doesn’t seem that odd. The views cease to be so dizzying.

And the locals become a little less scary.

(But you still shouldn’t feed them.)

Los Alamos sits on a mesa, surrounded by the burnt umber of the Jemez mountains, under blazing blue skies. The drive up is lonely, and as the elevation rises the air grows cooler while the sun seems to grow more intense.

There is a single road that runs through town, and on either side there are a few sparse strip malls that house cafes and shops with names that suggest Los Alamos’ past: Bathtub Row Brewing C0-op, The Manhattan Project Restaurant (recently shuttered), and a half dozen others with the word “atomic” in their name.

In the early 1900s, the only thing here was a well-regarded ranch school for boys, which boasted graduates like William S. Burroughs and Gore Vidal. At a time when illnesses were treated with exposure to fresh air and sunshine, wealthy parents sent their sickly young heirs to the New Mexican mountains to enjoy a rigorous curriculum of study and outdoor activities. In 1942 the government took over the site, purchasing it from owners who had little say in the matter (who had, in turn, taken the land from indigenous people who had little say in the matter), and rushing a final graduating class of students out the door.

The U.S. government had been scouting for a site for The Manhattan Project, and Los Alamos met their exacting specifications – it needed to be 200 miles from an international boundary, isolated from the general population, with easy access to water and plenty of sunshine (this latter point wasn’t simply an indulgence – researchers needed clear skies so they could see the bomb’s detonation). The school’s location would prove an ideal site – high on a mesa, all entrances to the facility could be secured, and the dormitories could be repurposed as shelters for scientists and staff (though others would be built to accommodate Los Alamos’s growing population). The more well-appointed dorms had bathtubs and became known as Bathtub Row.

As physicists and military personnel poured into Los Alamos, the town began to grow. People who were assigned there brought their families. A school was built. Because there were so many single men working at the facility, young women were hired to perform clerical work in order to build a better social dynamic while people were working on the atom bomb.

That’s the thing about Los Alamos – there is this strange mix of the mundane and the extraordinarily terrifying. The deaths of more than 200,000 people resulted from this place. And they also held dance parties.

The Los Alamos National Laboratory now functions as a museum (The Bradbury Science Museum), one that largely skirts around the implications of the dropping the bomb. In their attempts to offend no one, the placards are shockingly dissatisfying.

There are questions that remain unanswered – like how Truman’s directives that the bomb not be dropped on civilians, and that the Japanese be warned of the impending bombs – were ultimately cast aside.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki had some military importance – but as I noted in a previous post, they were largely chosen due to the fact that they hadn’t been bombed yet – and so they could showcase the weapon’s destructive capabilities more clearly. The result was heavy civilian casualties.

Some flyers were dropped on Japan, warning of additional bombs *after* Hiroshima had already been destroyed.

I found the flight log from the bomb drop on Hiroshima to be particularly startling in how clinical it is.

The museum itself doesn’t shy away from taking a distinct position about the bombs – it describes the women and men who worked on The Manhattan Project as heroes.

Most were oblivious to what they were building. They understood it was some sort of government project as part of the war effort, and when they were asked by outsiders what kind of work was “going on up there” their answers were vague or flippant. One woman who was only 16 when she worked at the post office of Los Alamos told people that they were installing windshield wipers on submarines.

As for the physicists, few, if any, considered their work heroic – for most, it was simply necessary, a request from the government to which they could not say no. Einstein said that if he’d known the Germans would fail in their endeavor to build the bomb, he’d never have advised the President to start building one. Oppenheimer, who was the lead on the Manhattan Project, claimed that “I carry no weight on my conscience”, but seemed to go through his remaining years a haunted man. While witnessing the explosion of the Trinity Test, which preceded the bombings, he quoted the Hindu scripture of the Bhagavad Gita, saying, “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

Of the many physicists mentioned in the museum, it was Richard Feynman who stood out to me more than the others, perhaps because of his age. Feynman was 27 in 1945; during his time working on the Manhattan Project, his wife suffered from tuberculosis (she would die a few weeks before Japan was bombed). He wrote about his time in Los Alamos with a sort of light-hearted detachment, and his later years would be characterized by an over-the-top personality. Many suggest that this was a facade – his contributions to the creation of the atomic bomb and his regrets surrounding it were profound. They claim his quirky persona was an affectation born from a man mired in grief, one who could not handle what he’d done.

He was charming; he had been madly in love with his wife. He was a chauvinistic asshole and a misogynist. Remember: People are not simply all good or all bad. They are murky and strange and complicated.

It’s not that I think the museum at Los Alamos is willfully misleading visitors – I simply think they have a particular narrative that they wish to tell, and it is one among very, very many. To this day, the ground underneath Los Alamos’ vivid blue sky remains toxic from nuclear waste. Like everything else here, the truth is far more complicated that what we can see. It’s a much harder to story to tell.

I find this charming. It’s fun to be interrogated at farmer’s markets with the same pointed questions you’d get if they opened their pantry and found out you were living in it.

You are a travel writer. You go to fancy places. And right now you are not in a fancy place.

“Listen, dear one” I say, as I stand in a dirt lot surrounded by animatronic dinosaurs. “You do not understand how miraculous this place is because you have seen it too many times. But I assure you, it is.”

If you spend too much time somewhere, it grows stale. I suppose that’s the advantage I get of being on the road so often. I’m able to see things with news eyes and so all of it remains delightful. Everything is new.

Everything at the Richmond Night Market certainly is.

Last weekend was our second jaunt to this technicolor carnival, which sits dormant on the outskirts of Vancouver, B.C., for most of the year. It is only from May to October, on Fridays through Sundays that it is open, and as the name would suggest, only in the evening. And even on our second outing, I noticed that it was slightly less shimmery than on our first visit. Newness is magic. But Wil and Nora had never seen it, and they stood, wide-eyed, while we calmly explained to them that everything we were going to eat had to be either deep-fried or on a stick (no bonus points would be awarded for deep-friend and on a stick, because that was just best practice).

Also, the above image of my husband reminded me of George Peppard on the A-Team so I spent 20 minutes creating this DON’T YOU JUDGE HOW I SPEND MY TIME:

It’s hard to know where to begin, so I recommend doing a reconnaissance pass around the market and carefully evaluating your options and JUST KIDDING – GO DIRECTLY TO THE ROTATO STALL BECAUSE YOU ABSOLUTELY WANT A ROTATO. It is what happens when you combine a potato with rotation. 

The rotato recently entered the zeitgeist after it appeared on Food Republic’s absolutely bullshit list of french fries, ranked (it appears under the name the Potato Tornado, which I find offensive, and yet that is the keyword that I am using to optimize this post). It is a spiral cut potato, created in a sort of alchemy that requires a drill, which was rather surprising, as I thought incorporating power tools with junk food was exclusively the domain of Americans.

The rotato comes with your choice of powdered toppings, everything from a brilliant orange cheese to ketchup. The future is now, friends: we have powdered ketchup, so I assume that colonies on Mars are forthcoming.

Here is Nora holding her ketchup rotato proudly.

While I love her dearly, if you ask me to define hell, it is being surrounded by skinny women eating fried food.

In truth, it was hardly dissimilar to a regular french fry, except for the dusting of msg-laden powder, the effects of which are somewhat psychotropic and addictive. I loved the rotato, I hated the rotato. I cannot stop thinking about the rotato. I can’t believe how many times I’ve typed the word “rotato.”

At some point, Nora apparently insulted Rand’s honor so they had to have a duel. Rand had chosen a mini-rotato, and so he embarked on the endeavor poorly armed.

Honestly, these two couldn’t even hold it together for the fraction of a second required to take a photo.

This is making my chest turn straight into a series of heart emojis.

OH MY GOD I LOVE THESE NERDS.

I absolutely adore the look of disdain this woman is giving them.

Girlfriend has mastered the “WTF are they doing” face.

My man in the coral polo shirt gets it, though.

He burst out laughing at them approximately .4 seconds later.

And there was takoyaki, which I can write an entire post about (and may, soon). We had them in Japan – little fried balls of dough with pieces of octopus inside, dressed with sauces and topped with bonito flakes. Oh, and also, I cut my hair (let’s focus on that and not on the fact that my backpack is pulling down my dress and you can see half my bra).

It is hard to tie the market to one specific country. Most of the stands are heavily influenced by flavors we encountered in Asia – we saw many of the same foods we encountered while walking through Osaka or Kyoto. But there are elements of Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, and French cuisines (the latter two often paired together, the long legacy of colonization available in gastronomical form).

There are many, many vendors, and supposedly the amount of food that a human can eat in a specific period of time is finite. But I feel like that fact is for quitters.

Wil has this tendency to not eat for an entire day (note: if I did this, there would be casualties) and then when he does, he puts away an entire cow. I find this strangely endearing. Also endearing? You absolutely cannot tell how he feels about something from his facial expression. Wil’s “this is delicious” face is identical to his “this is absolute” crap face.

He stared at his treat with a look that screamed, “Why do I have to deal with this shit?”

Or maybe that was because of something else.

(Also, this is apparently Wil’s “Holy shit this is delicious” face. Who knew?)

And because no visit to an outdoor fried food orgy is complete without a chance to hurl it all back up: CARNIVAL RIDES!

We did not go on these because we are not 11 and therefore we are well aware of the consequences of our actions.

And fair games where you can win anatomically correct stuffed toys! Wait, wat.

Note: I did not see a single person in the entire market walking around with a prize, but I’m sure the odds aren’t deeply, profoundly stacked against you or anything.

And … dinosaurs? The Canadians have dinosaurs?

THE CANADIANS HAVE DINOSAURS. AND SOCIALIZED HEALTHCARE. AND TRUDEAU. THEY HAVE EVERYTHING.

We stopped by the churro stand before leaving, because at that point we’d thrown caution and humankind’s millennia-long practice of eating vegetables to the wind.

Perhaps a place becomes less luminous after a while. Perhaps if you see it too many times, it loses its sparkle. But then counterexamples so readily present themselves. I have seen this face nearly every day for almost 16 years now. And when he swears he didn’t bite this churro in two, and is OBVIOUSLY lying through his teeth, his eyes reflect the colors of the setting sun, and I decide to keep him around a little longer.

It’s hard to tell what makes an experience wonderful. It might be the newness of it.

But I’m inclined to think that the company you keep plays a part, too.

–

If you head to the Richmond Night Market:

• Check their calendar! It’s Canada, so it’s not like outdoor venues are open year-round. Also, they might be closed because of some weird French or English holiday that we’ve never heard of? Le Tour de Boxing Day or something?
• Bring a bottle of water – it’ll be cheaper and easier than trying to find one once you’re inside.
• Get a fast pass and skip the line! The queue to get into the market wound around the block and moved at a glacial pace. We were able to skip all of it with a fast pass (vendors sell them while you wait in line – the thing is, it seems like a scam, and so no one was buying them). The pass costs $25 and gets you admission for up to seven people (considering that regular admission is $3.75 a person, you could actually end up saving money if you have a big enough group).