Further to the Curious Voyage produced by Talk Is Free Theatre, in Barrie, Ontario. My mysterious guide told me I would be picked up at my address in Toronto, Ont. On Tuesday, Oct. 23, at 12:30 pm sharp and taken to Barrie, Ontario about an hour north of Toronto.
At 12:15 pm I noticed a black pick-up truck slowly drive a bit past my duplex building and park. The driver didn’t get out of the car.
He was still there at 12:20 pm.
By 12:30 pm he had backed up slowly and parked right in front of my house. Puzzling. I went out and in clumsy sign-language ‘asked’ if he was the person picking me up. He came out of the truck. “Lynn?”
Yes, he was picking me up. I told him I saw him earlier and why didn’t he just knock on my door? He didn’t because my pick up time was 12:30 pm. He was early and punctual.
His name was/is Johnny. He wore a powder blue baseball cap with a straight brim over long black hair held in a ponytail. He was polite and gracious. He put my suitcase in the place behind the driver. I got in the front seat. He told me it was much roomier behind, like ‘business class’. I stayed in the front seat. How often am I going to be picked up for anything in a pick-up truck driven by a courtly man named Johnny? For some reason he looked familiar. I thought he might have been an actor. Nope.
The truck was neat. He was clean-shaven, wore a kind of stud in his right ear, was a fabulous driver and played classical music for the whole trip to Barrie. He offered me a bottle of water that was in the back and a candy he got recently from a Thai restaurant.
I got to the hotel within an hour of leaving my house, shook Johnny’s hand, checked in and waited for my next part of the voyage that was to begin at 2:50 pm. And that previous bit is the end of the amount of detail I’m going to tell you from now on.
While waiting in the lobby at 2:35 pm I noted two women with clipboards talking. With this kind of endeavor one looks at everybody as someone who might be involved in the ‘narrative’. One was part of the narrative.
She established the narrative of good and evil; what is good and what is evil; where is the line? What would need to happen to me to drive me to murder? Questions of morality were established. I figured this all would tie into the final event—the mysterious musical whose name I cannot speak until all the voyages are finished.
Aspects of the narrative were played out in various ‘experiences’ during that day. “What would you do if…?”…situations were posed. For instance you might be asked to break into a house. Would you? Or would you play ping-pong with a young man wearing a huge shark head mask? Would you listen with sympathy to a story of a date night gone wrong from the woman’s point of view or from the smarmy man’s point of view? Stuff like that. That could be your first day of your curious voyage. Now, aren’t you curious?