Solo Brown Pelican

Anne has fallen under the weather this weekend, a parting shot from those runny nosed gutter snipes. She’s off for the summer now and as soon as she is feeling better again, I’m sure that she will begin reveling in the three best things about teaching, June, July and August. I had to fly solo today, because Anne had a couch stuck on her back. I did a Trailnet ride, my first of the season. A modest little affair, it was one of their community rides, this one was the Art of Riding ride. We’ve done this ride before, it features local artists and is some leisurely fun. This ride was more performance art oriented than the others. The performances started before the ride began, at registration. Two banjo players, in a group called Gaslight Square, serenaded us while we waited for the stragglers to arrive. Our first stop was at COCA, where we all performed improv. There were three one-minute rounds. In the first one all you had to do was is speak in the present tense. I was paired with two women and none of us knew the others. The first round was difficult. For the second round, you had to stay in the present, but you also had to disagree with everything that the other people were saying. I found this round incredibly easy. For the final round disagreement was switched to agreement. You had to say, “Yes…, and…”, both agreeing and elaborating. This was probably the best round of the three. Our next stop was down Delmar, with its newly minted trolley tracks. One of the women that I had just improvved with went down on these tracks, when her front wheel got stuck in them, but she was OK. Our next stop was an artist’s collective, where Bryan Payne presented his Doodle Stones artwork. Although there was physical art at this stop, it was as much performance art as the others. Payne geo-caches his Doodle Stones and for him other people finding them is as much of their story as his painting. The ride went on, but I had had enough by then. I was hungry. I headed home and found Anne still alive on the couch.