Picture of the day: A self timer picture of me at the make up table.

At the Atlantic theatre my dressing room was called "the fortress of solitude" after Superman's hideaway at the North Pole. Appropriately named since I kept it as cold as I could. It is my nature to keep hotel rooms and dressing rooms as cold as possible without turning blue.

In contrast the old Arts Theater has no air conditioning in the dressing room. It is hot and with only an electric fan for comfort I open an old four- pane window for circulation. A wooden latch turns and the frame swings inward from the bottom held firmly by a rusty chain at the top.

The window looks out over the roofs and back sides of the surrounding buildings. It is an alien landscape of ancient moss covered bricks and antique pipes, shadowed from the direct sun and untouched by human activity. It is not the view one would consider beautiful. But beauty is sometimes in the tale told by the grotesque. This is exactly the view that Noel Coward looked out on when he was here.

That window becomes sort of a time portal for me. The smells and sounds that waft through are ageless. I hear the muffled voices of people speaking in accents right out of a Dickens novel. The odor of unfamiliar spices seep into my room from the restaurants below. Then the scent of London summer rain sweeps it all clean providing a new canvas for this living art to express itself once more.

The thing that seems to warp my sense of time the most is the trumpeting voices of a pair of Seagulls in the area. Their call would be drowned out by the city noise of the West End and Leister Square on the other side of the building.  But here in this unchanging back lot of my theater they are operatic stars.

Their call is not constant. Like the precision of Big Ben they seem to only chime at 6:45 in the evening, for about a minute, just as I am preparing for the show. A few familiar shrieks and they are silent until the next day. Their distance from me and the echo off the brick buildings creates a haunting effect. A Hollywood sound man would be jealous.

I assume they are not aware of this precise timing. It is most likely part of a human schedule like taking out the evening trash or the opening of a Seagull friendly restaurant. All I know is they are the heralds of another evening at the Arts theatre. It makes me smile and I forget about the heat for a second.
There are sounds at the theater sometimes even better than applause.
As you were,
Jay