Lydia’s Blog

I just feel like writing. Hmm. What about. I guess I could write about the twenty-minute discussion I found myself involved in with this café’s owner, about how I should pay her to plug my computer in, despite the fact that I drop about twelve euros a day here, on average. Maybe I should write about my first original work produced by a big opera house, a reworking of a experimental pantomime I developed in Berlin in 2004—and how I found out today that it’s been scheduled during the house’s big opening concert. In direct competition with Calixto Bieito’s new staged version of a Zarzuela. Or I could expound on how I tore the head off a technician that wanted to invite me to lunch in order to discuss scenic plans that he already has, written out in excruciating detail.

Hmmm. No.

It’s fucking hot in Stuttgart. Not quite as hot as, say, New York—but undeniably worse. And here’s why: NO BUTTFUCKING AIR CONDITIONING—anywhere.

Picture a hot day in New York. You wake up in your air-conditioned apartment. You walk the seven scalding minutes and wait four more in the broiling piss-winds of the Subway. Then, you ride twenty-three minutes in cooled subway car, walk seven more scalding minutes, then finding yourself at your pleasant, air-conditioned destination. Maybe you even bring along a sweater in case it gets too chilly.

That’s a total of eighteen scalding minutes, one-way. Let me tell you about my one-way.

I wake up in a Lydia-shaped pool of sweat on a nasty, itchy, cheap sofa (which is also supposed to serve as a bed), having woken up several times in the night to re-soak a dishtowel with cold water in an attempt to cool my solarplexus.

The routine showering, shitting, and shaving occurs, after which I search for an outfit that will concurrently not cover too much skin, wick away sweat, not cling to my bulges when my pores begin gushing like geysers, and also prevent welts from forming on the insides of my thighs from the forest-fire-inducing combination of sweat and friction (so no skirts, ever).

I walk the two minutes to the bus, wait another fifteen minutes for it to get there, and ride the ten minutes to the main station, all in blazing heat. Then I traipse down into the un-air conditioned subway, wait up to twenty-five minutes for a train, and travel the twelve minutes to the middle of nowhere, never once feeling circulating or cool air. If I haven’t sweated every last garment on my body through by that point, there’s always our rehearsal space to provide the kicker. A factory hall full of unmoving, 103-degree air, with an uncoverable glass ceiling—just so I can be blinded by the sun whilst sweating out a quarter of my body weight over the course of a day.

Everything sticks to everything. My ass to chairs. The singers to each other. My fingers, and ankles look like hard, angry columns of shiny flesh. My feet don’t fit into shoes, so I live in flops. I don’t even bother with makeup anymore, because it’ll just melt down my face.
When I bitch to Germans about how backwards they are about temperature control, I get monologues about how air-conditioning is environmentally disastrous, expensive, makes you sick and prevents you from getting better. Maybe they’re right but I mean, Christ, this is ridiculous.

I am grateful for one thing, though. At least Germans are into deodorant. If I were in Italy, I’d be really fucked.

Wow. I guess that means that Stuttgart actually is preferable to something. Imagine that.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 26th, 2006 at 2:21 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.