Day 96: Plum Island

Broken record alert -- I've said it before, I'll say it again.


Cambridge is great.

But so is getting out of it to, oh, you know, other, greener places that are nearby.

Today began early for a Sunday, with me leaving my house (coffee in tow, obviously) just before 9am to pick up D. and E. for our first Sunday-in-Georgetown practice for Rumors (Act 2 only, today).  We had almost the full cast there today and honestly, it went pretty well.  The blocking for Act 2 seems pretty darn straightforward and natural.  Funnily, most people (including my character, Chris) are on-stage for nearly all of Act 2 (Chris is there for the whole she-bang) -- but only something like a fifth of my lines are in Act 2, meaning there is a lot of downtime.  WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO WITH MY HANDS?  Honestly, there is so much going on to react to that I don't think it will really be a problem. As long as I hold back on the coffee on performance days.

Georgetown is about a 45-50 minute drive from Cambridge, and it is pretty darling in and of itself -- but another plus is that it's about 25 minutes or so from the beach.  Given that no one had brought any beach gear, this seemed like a pipe dream until D. suggested Plum Island, which I had never heard of but which apparently a) has 11 miles of beach which involve lots of beach plums in most summers; b) was long ago featured in a map drawn by Captain John Smith and described by him as having "many sands"; c) has oodles of walking paths and observation towers and some "hellcat interpretive" trails and lots of poison ivy and loads of honeysuckle; and also some black cherries and D. even found one stray blackberry (not for Sal).

Other adventures on Plum Island involved some not-skinny-dipping (totally jumped in with my clothes on) and visiting some sort of soap shop attached to a private residence that smelled magical -- seriously. Soap-making seems to me to be a whole lot like potion-making.  Plum swell day (get it?....).




Sorry.

Day 76: Nubble

A colleague at work recently told me about a beach spot not terribly far from Boston that I checked out with E. and V. this afternoon.  We had a bit of a late start, as I had to run some errands this morning and then I missed the turn-off from the freeway no fewer than three times (putting us at 5-10 miles till the next exit each time), but by late afternoon, we were cozily exploring the Cape Neddick Lighthouse, or, as it is also called, Nubble.  I don't know if I've heard a more New England-sounding word than Nubble recently, so we'll go with that.

It turnout out that not only was the lighthouse adorable, but that it was actually situated on York Beach, just next door to Ogunquit, where some friends and I had visited last year for S.'s birthday.  Honestly, I found that York beach was nicer -- quiet families and couples dotting the large expanse of really nice sand leading into a shallow bed of ocean.  Shockingly, the water was even verging on _warm_ -- must be all of those 90-some degree days last week?  And also the fact that it was so shallow?

After we explored the lighthouse we headed right to the beach, grabbed some grub from the beach shack just next to the water, and were plopping down into the sand.  After a bit, we decided to abandon the rest of the food for a quick foray into the water.  We debated whether it was safe to leave our things on the beach, then realized we were probably being too anxious about it all, and the three of us headed in.  We did glance back once in a while to look at our things, and after only a few minutes in the water, we realized that some predators were indeed attacking our belongings -- except, only the the belongings of the fried-dough variety, and the predators were sea gulls!  After a comical chase, E. did manage to retrieve the bread, of course only to give it back immediately.  But good for him for teaching those free-gans a lesson.

The rest of the afternoon was spent without major to-do.  I took a walk alone at some and had a ball drawing in the sand with my toes.  Definitely going to give this beach another shot before the summer is over.