YPF Roundup.

Guys? Reposting my photos with proper credit is fine, but please stop editing them. I'm uncomfortable with it.

Well, back in Florida! Those four words are kind of anti-climactic, aren't they? I remember on the last day of the 2010 festival, I killed time at the theater for like an hour after the show before leaving, on the idea that I didn't know if I'd ever come back. I was fifteen pages into an idea that didn't really feel very new or exciting and although I had begun trying to think of something else, nothing was really sticking yet.

I had a trip to the Museum of Jurassic Technology fresh in my mind, a google history full of searches about Russian Space Dogs, and a five hour plane ride in front of me. At 30,000 feet I popped open my MacBook and wrote down the basic idea for Like a Dog in Space: What happens to ideas when they are forgotten, and what do the ideas themselves do to avoid being lost? I had Ivan. I had the prototypes for Innovation. I had a frame story about a schizophrenic Astrophysicist and his little sister which will have to wait for another play to get used. I had Milena and Gennady.

I had no idea what I was doing. I took the idea in as a set of two for my Playwriting I class, and we decided it was the one I ought to pursue. And suddenly, with deadlines set and a professor waiting for me, things came together. The play got written. I had a complete first draft to show my family when I visited at Thanksgiving.

Four months later, I took a hacksaw to the play and in the course of four days cut four characters and thirty pages. A month after that, on the 50th anniversary of Vostok I, I got a call that I was heading to Blank YPF. You cannot make these things up. That's the timing.

So it's a play all about ideas, and about space and exploration and it's all very meta but it's also Pinocchio in Space and every time someone describes it to me as such, I get kind of happy because really, really, when you strip the meta stuff away it's about trying to discover, looking outside-in, what it is to be human. What about our experiences makes us so unique? And I think what the conclusion the play draws is that being human is a constant re-evaluation of what things are important to you, and what your goals are, and what's going to make you happy, and sometimes the things you think will make you happy are completely out of your reach and sometimes the things that would have made you happy... by the time you realize what you should have said, the moment is past. Ivan and Valeri meet once as bright young scientists on the dawn of one of the most explosive decades of human advancement.* They meet again, decades later, and it's no longer the right moment. They can't pick up where they left off, because they've become two entirely different people. And in that moment, Ivan wishes that he had stayed.

*[The timeline for this stuff is really, really amazing.

Sputnik is 1957. Vostok I is 1961. Apollo 11 is 1969. That's a beepy satellite to a man on the moon in twelve years. What's a little healthy competition between nuclear superpowers if it helps you step foot on another celestial body?]

So on Sunday, I hung around after the show for about an hour because, the fact was, once I left... I really wasn't going to be back. And some of these people had known me for four years now, had watched me go from Awkward Sixteen-Year-Old to Slightly Less Awkward Nineteen-Year-Old. I thought I was going to cry.

And then I didn't. Instead I, in no particular order:

• Talked to a couple from "Gale Harold's Chinese Fan Club," who said they'd come all the way from China to see him in the play? And they actually talked to me and took a picture with me and told me how much they enjoyed it, which is... more than can be said for more of the people who mobbed him every night. So, shoutout to Alex and [I am really sorry but your name escapes me] for being cool and world travel-y, and there is probably a picture of me on one of the fanboards, in Chinese.
• Enthused to the production costume designer about "Where the heck did you get ISS Mission Patches I mean seriously where are those from." Apparently army surplus. What. But apparently he's sending me some.
• Was serenaded that "you're nobody until somebody loves you." The song choice makes more sense in context but it was still in front of my parents.
• Was given a plush dog, who was promptly named Laika.
• Took lots of pictures. Most of them wound up blurry, because my mother bought her camera in a vending machine in the miami airport last fall. Here are a few that are okay.

There are a lot more relevant pictures on the official festival website, which I have to request that people DO NOT steal and claim as their own because the photographer is a really nice guy and you'd have to be a jerk to steal his work I mean really who does that. :|

And I'm back in Florida. Still a depressing statement. But it was a good week and I have my work cut out for me tackling the rewrite. Tomorrow I'm driving up to Savannah with my aunt to help clean out my cousin's apartment while she's in the hospital, and hopefully I will find at least /some/ time to think on the car ride. I've also been advised to bite the bullet and get a new phone because the iPhone 5s are looking as distant as ever. So that might happen soon.

Anddddd... we now return you to your regularly scheduled youtube link spam. On that note, here is a group playing the Doctor Who theme song on a set that includes a Didgeridoo. Only in Australia.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, and good night.