All posts by happywaffle

What’s French for “Poof”?

Twice before, my sister Margaret has called me over FaceTime with no advance warning. The first occasion was to tell me she was getting married; the second was to tell us she had cancer. (She’s fine!) So when a third FaceTime came in last month out of nowhere, I knew instantly that the news would be either very bad or very good. I could’ve made a thousand guesses either way, but “her movie got into the Cannes Film Festival” would not have been on the list.

Now, Margaret is my favorite person in the world. She’s already quite accomplished, improbably making it from a rural Texas high school to the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU—then later, all the way to Dublin for a master’s in playwriting.1 That being said, I’m not always sure what my sister’s *deal* is. Some artists apply their creative talents with laser-like focus. Margaret is more like a creative fire hose. She’s worked on everything from a radio drama to a one-woman stage production to a short documentary about cow costumes. She’s lived everywhere from New York to Nashville to our Granny’s old house near Fort Worth. At some point she and her husband Stephen moved to Louisville KY, and I would need to pause my writing and go ask them to remind me why they did that. 

Apropos of nothing, here we are circa 1981, drunk AF.

So it’s both surprising and unsurprising that she’s lately drifted toward filmmaking, writing a sci-fi short and then directing her first-ever production—a little ten-minute movie called “Poof.” As is typical with short films, Margaret’s producer submitted “Poof” to a ton of film festivals. To everyone’s absolute shock, out of some 5,000 short-film submissions, hers was one of the dozen or so to be selected to Cannes.

Traveling to Cannes on a few weeks’ notice is wildly expensive, but to miss it was out of the question. We yelled at booking.com to shut up and take our money2 and on Friday the 26th took the two-hour flight to Nice, my first visit to the fabled South Of France™. There was a minor tragedy when we realized we wouldn’t arrive until after Margaret’s official screening on Friday afternoon. But we had a consolation prize: Margaret had been invited to a special ceremony for women filmmakers, and so could offer us her tickets to that night’s gala screening, complete with red carpet and formal-wear dress code.

Like a Star Trek convention, the Cannes Film Festival is both impossible to describe and exactly what you would expect. This small French town on the coast had been temporarily overrun by selfie-takers like it was the Influencer World Championships. (Of course, much like my favorite bumper sticker—“You’re not in traffic; you ARE traffic”—we, in our bow tie and velvet dress, were part of the circus.) 

On the red carpet we paused for the dozens of photographers, only to laugh very hard when we realized NONE of them were taking our photo and continue up the steps into the theater. Since we were using Margaret’s festival-nominee tickets, our seats were just ridiculous, fourth-row center and DIRECTLY in front of the film’s cast and director who entered to sustained applause.3 The movie was a biopic about French national hero Abbé Pierre; very well-made and well-acted, but schmaltzy and overlong. It hardly mattered—the movie could’ve been terrible and the red-carpet walk would have made it worth our time. 

We paraded out of the theater. In any sane universe, that bizarre experience would be the high point of our entire year. As it turned out, it wasn’t even the high point of our night.

At a beachside bar we rendezvoused with Margaret, Stephen, and a few others to debrief our respective evenings. Within moments, we realized we had the less interesting story; Margaret’s involved Kate Fucking Winslet, who cornered her after the ceremony and gushed about how great “Poof” was. This is really Margaret’s story to tell (or not), but suffice it to say, we were dizzy with excitement for her. Just like the Cannes selection in the first place, I felt prouder and happier than if it had been my movie getting all the praise. (I don’t even have a movie! And I’m the one with the film degree!)

The awards ceremony was the following evening. Kiki and I watched the YouTube broadcast and spotted Margaret among her fellow short-film nominees on the red carpet (slotted in the procession between Wim Wenders and Orlando Bloom), then met Stephen and some other “Poof” cast and crew in a hotel bar to watch the rest.

Compared to the Oscars, the Cannes awards are mercifully short. Alas, “Poof” didn’t win the short-film award. We could hardly be more biased, of course, but everything so far had been such a fairy tale that I felt genuine surprise that it didn’t. I mean, why WOULDN’T it, ya know?

To add to the improbabilities of the whole weekend, Sunday was Margaret’s birthday. We went with two of Margaret’s friends for a nice dinner down on the water4 and then walked back into town, sunlight fading over the hills as tourists lingered on the beach and workers under spotlights began to disassemble the film-festival infrastructure.

In all of the insanity we somehow still hadn’t actually seen “Poof,” and so our final stop on the trip was their Airbnb, where Margaret opened her laptop and showed it to us.

It’s hard to write a review of a ten-minute short film in which I’m so emotionally invested. The various luminaries had it right, though: “Poof” is a charming and thoughtful short story with brilliant comic timing, quirky characters (Catherine Curtin channeling Jennifer Coolidge; Andrea Rosen channeling Shelley Duvall), and verbal and visual jokes that gave me several belly laughs. I’m excited to see it again, and if/when it becomes broadly available, we’ll of course share it widely and loudly.

As Kiki and I walked back to our Airbnb for a few hours’ sleep before flying back to Amsterdam, I suddenly chuckled. “Of course it doesn’t take anything away from how great that was,” I told Kiki. “But I can’t believe all this”—I mentally waved my hand at everything from Abbé Pierre to Kate Winslet—”came from that little movie.” 

Of course, that was a lie. I could believe it. Movies are powerful things.

“Avatar: The Way of Water”

You can’t prove this isn’t it.

You’ll see a dozen movies better than “Avatar: The Way of Water” this year. But you’ll see none that are more worthy of taking a trip to the movie theater.

That’s my main point; you can stop reading if you want. As a movie the second “Avatar” doesn’t merit a lengthy review, especially if you saw the first one (and statistically, most of us did). It’s still blue aliens vs. capitalist mecha-robots. It’s still overlong, overwrought, and underwritten. As a story, this sequel doesn’t innovate much more than “2 Fast 2 Furious.”

Not only that, but “The Way of Water” arrives at a really awkward time. COVID and the streaming wars have joined forces to deliver a deeply compelling argument against the entire movie-going experience. Why should we drive to a theater to experience the hell of other people—with their germs, their voices, and their glowing phones—when we can pause Netflix and grab a beer from the fridge any time we want? Have you seen the size of TVs these days? 

But betting against James Cameron has been a sucker’s bet for his entire career. “The Way of Water” is his rebuttal to the Netflix argument, and boy, is it a doozy. In all its 3D, high-frame-rate glory, “Avatar 2” reminds you of the power of film on the big screen. Not in the “shared experience” with the audience; not in the nine-dollar popcorn; but in the social contract that, for the next 192 minutes, the lights will dim and the images in front of you will be your entire world experience. 

What an experience it is. More than once, I found myself grinning like an absolute idiot at how fucking gorgeous this movie is. Whether it was a menacing fleet of spaceships or an alien reef teeming with invented fish species, the visuals had my ADHD brain in their firm grip. As visual effects, they’re so perfectly executed that they disappear—I can’t recall a moment where the movie looked anything less than filmed footage, even though it’s hardly less CGI than a Pixar movie. (The occasional human actor pops up, like Eddie Valiant visiting Toontown.) James Cameron famously waited a decade before making the first “Avatar” so that technology could catch up to his vision; the additional decade’s wait until this one has paid similar dividends. It’s just stunning.

I don’t give these compliments to minimize the film’s flaws. There’s a bunch, and many are the result of a rich white man telling an indigenous-peoples fable. 

A tiny aside: sci-fi can, and should, rhyme with reality. If you’re going to depict future-humans hunting a whale in space, it’s not only valid but compelling to match the beats of real humans hunting a whale on earth. Science fiction is allegory.

But! If you’re depicting alien indigenous cultures, the shortest route to cringe is to have them resemble human ones. When seafaring aliens don facial tattoos and stick their tongues out menacingly like Maori warriors in blueface, it’s embarrassing as hell. Smaller details, like the feral white boy sporting an impressive set of dreadlocks, don’t help one tiny bit. It’s a blind spot that’s roughly the size of the entire damn movie.

And it’s not only cringe—it also speaks to a lack of imagination, which is fucking bizarre for a movie that’s so imaginative in other ways. James Cameron will invent an entire planetary ecosystem—right down to the biomechanics of the aforementioned space whale—only to have his teenaged aliens call each other “bro” and “cuz” with hilarious frequency.1 You wonder whether he even *realizes* his film is set 200 years in the future.

So in short, “Way of Water” can make your jaw drop with its beauty in one scene, and its clunky casual racism in the next. “Avatar” contains multitudes.

I’m still recommending it. While I wish he hadn’t self-exiled to Pandora for the latter third of his career, James Cameron remains one of the great action-movie directors. The climactic battle amidst the floating mountains in “Avatar” was about as good as Hollywood action set pieces can get. The equivalent battle in “Way of Water,” with its more-than-slight resemblance to “Titanic,” is almost as gripping. And the ensemble cast—including Sam Worthington, our Most Forgettable Movie Star2—turns in solid acting performances despite never showing their human faces. (That feels surprising to type, but really shouldn’t—Gollum was over 20 years ago!)

But, just to end where I started, the big-screen experience is essential. This isn’t the only movie begging you to schlep to the Cinemark—movies these days can feel demoted, in a straight-to-VHS way, when they can only be viewed in your living room (“Greyhound” comes to mind). Once upon a time I was a film major, and it was refreshing to be reminded that theaters still have a useful, beautiful purpose.

Kevin & Kiki’s Flight from Egypt

I’ve never fled a country before.
Well, besides the US.

This post describes a traumatic experience, and I dealt with the trauma by writing about it in exhausting detail. The result is an overstuffed blogpost that you really do not need to read in full. I’ll even help you cheat with this bullet-point summary:

  • We were in Cairo to perform at a cultural festival… 
  • But it was poorly run and the organizers put us in a nightmarish hotel… 
  • After enough grumbling, we were finally upgraded to a very nice one… 
  • But then we saw a play that depicted such brutal misogynist violence that we decided to cut our trip short and come home… 
  • And then a scary encounter with Egyptian morality enforcement caused us to race to the airport in the middle of the night and buy the first tickets home. 
  • We’re home safe now, and won’t be going back.

That’s the short version. If you’re so inclined, read on for the gory details.

Extremely Obvious Foreshadowing

Kiki and I felt ambivalent when our friend Laura asked us to join her improv group, the Lelijke Eendjes, on a trip to Egypt for the “Cairo International Gathering for University Theater.” The invitation was very kind, and performing in exotic locations is exciting, but we wondered if we were tacitly endorsing Egypt’s icky track record on women and human rights by participating. But we know the Egyptian people aren’t the same as their government, and this was a great chance for a cultural exchange with people who’d largely never even heard of improv. Our show format was “Fantastic Women of History,” which offered a progressive message about women while still following the Egyptian rules for performances (no kissing or sex, no mocking of Islamic governments, etc.)

So despite the apprehension we booked flights, scheduled rehearsals, and refined the cast list to a troupe of six improvisers: myself, Kiki, Nardje, Laura, Guru, and Bart. A French improv trio called The Fraltons joined the festival too, making us a Tolkein-esque group of nine.

Dibs on Gimli.

Early in the trip planning, we ran into a big hiccup: Egypt has laws against unmarried couples sharing a hotel room. But we had it on good authority that non-Egyptian couples who said they were married weren’t scrutinized too carefully. We procured cheap wedding rings and a fake Dutch wedding certificate for show, but were assured from multiple quarters that it wouldn’t be an issue. You can guess where this is going.

Bad omens about the trip began to emerge. The festival organizers were cagey about key details, most notably about which hotel they’d be putting us up at. When part of our group arrived in Cairo a day early, the penny dropped: we’d been placed in an incredibly shabby hotel. We were anxiously searching for better options as we waited to board the plane, never a good way to start a trip. “I don’t want to go,” Kiki told me in utter seriousness as our plane rolled up to the gate. I sympathized completely. And I should’ve listened.

On Second Thought “Indiana” is a Perfect Name, ZING

Nardje, Kiki, and myself landed without incident in Cairo. The wild variety in cultural costumes made it a striking experience from the moment we stepped off the plane—women in hijabs and burqas, men in extravagant uniforms, tourists in shorts and baseball caps. We met a festival volunteer who walked off with our passports (not a fun feeling!) but returned with tourist visas and took us to a hired car, which drove us into the rambling maze of the city. 

Like Graceland or a Star Trek convention, Cairo is somehow both exactly what you’d imagine and impossible to describe. Its famous traffic is a good example: cars, buses, motorbikes, and pedestrians flow like a school of fish, passing within inches of each other at high speed, punctuating every moment with hundreds of horn beeps. Wanna walk across a busy highway? Just walk across! It’s terrifying for visitors, but since the chaos requires drivers to be hypervigilant, things end up moving kinda smoothly. (Kinda. On our second night, one of our festival guides was bumped by a taxi while demonstrating how to cross the road. He was fine.)

Cairo itself was the closest thing to “Blade Runner” I’ve ever experienced (admittedly, I’ve spent very little time in Asia1). Glowing billboards competed for space with enormous guarded compounds of unclear function. Hundreds of nearly identical sand-blasted towers stood in various states of construction or decay. A bizarre number of them seemed to be completely empty, and we encountered more than one that housed a colony of enormous bats. 

More bats in this photo than people, probably.

The car got us into the city center and across the Nile to the cursed (and oddly-named) Indiana Hotel, where we met our friends and some disinterested staffers. Having failed to find any place better online, we were doomed to spend at least one night there. After some haggling with festival staff—no, we would NOT share a room with other performers we didn’t even know!—we got a key and took the rickety elevator to our room.

It’s difficult to know where to begin in describing the Indiana Hotel experience, though the fact that the stain on our bathroom wall was “probably not blood” might do. The handle to the bathroom door had been smashed off, as had the towel racks; the bedside lamp was unplugged, with no outlet to plug it into; everything hanging, from art to mirrors to wall sconces, was so consistently crooked that it felt deliberate. There was no phone. There were no towels. There were no SHEETS ON THE DAMN BED.

We begrudgingly passed a single, restless night laying clothed on top of our sheetless beds. The next morning we noped out of there without even informing the staff and checked into a two-star hotel on the opposite side of the Nile with acceptable cleanliness and friendly service. The Wi-Fi was still spotty (a country-wide problem) and we were paying out of pocket, but we had sheets on the bed and were situated for the moment. We visited the Egyptian Museum (SO MANY MUMMIES), found a great Lebanese restaurant, and made the best of our situation.

Meanwhile, Laura was doing a phenomenal job negotiating with the festival organizers for a fix: “Sure would be a shame if we didn’t perform,” basically. Her hard work paid off when we were moved to our third hotel in four days, a four-star resort hotel out by the airport with a fountain in the lobby and a pool out back. The *absurd* jumps in hotel quality from one day to the next to the next only made the whole trip feel more surreal. 

After a nice filling lunch and a half-hour lounging by the pool, our myriad problems with the festival genuinely seemed to be behind us.

What could possibly go wrong?

Nardje, Kiki, and myself boarded a chartered bus back into town to watch the first show of the evening, and I was charmed by Cairo all over again as it swam by the window and the sun slowly set. This was my first unqualified good mood of the trip.

You can guess what happened next. …No, that’s not true, you can’t possibly.

We Thought the Late Start Would Be Our Complaint

We got to the venue at 5:15—45 minutes before the play’s scheduled 6pm start time—and in an especially egregious example of Egyptian time-keeping, loitered in the lobby until after 7pm.2 Finally they let us in, with a striking announcement: the performing group was requesting that men and women use separate entrances to the theater. (We grudgingly obliged, and then sat together anyway.) The performance was a two-person play depicting one long argument between a man and his wife. Being in Arabic, we could only guess as to the particulars, but our running joke was that it was “Arabic Marriage Story.”

Then things got serious. I feel like I need a trigger warning here for misogynist violence: because you have a soul, the next paragraph will be uncomfortable to read, and you genuinely might want to skip it. 

The 40-minute scene crescendoed with the husband, increasingly unhinged, tying his wife to a chair as she screamed objections. Then he doused her in gasoline. Then he lit her on fire and burned her alive. Then he stood on a chair over her dead body and addressed the audience in a shouted monologue. And this is what elevated the moment from horrifying to traumatizing: as he did, at least a dozen audience members, including one man seated directly in front of us, enthusiastically applauded and whistled. 

(I weirdly want to clarify that this is what happened in the *play*, not in real life. Absolutely insane that this doesn’t go without saying.)

The three of us—almost the only white people in the audience—sat stone-still, suddenly feeling like we were in genuine danger. If the audience had reacted to this moment of baroque violence with silence (or preferably booing), then this would *still* be one of the more disturbing things I’d ever seen. But the rabid cheering put us in a very dark place. To use the banal truism: knowing these kinds of things happen is one thing, but seeing them depicted and cheered at a cultural event is something else.

In stunned silence we boarded the festival bus to depart the venue, exchanging shocked glances with a number of other attendees—no, we weren’t the only ones who were repulsed. But who was who? The man who had applauded the onstage murder in front of us was on the bus too, cheerfully chatting with others. I can’t speak for Nardje, but Kiki and I both felt panic-attack symptoms coming on. I was almost involuntarily imagining scenarios resulting in our deaths. (Remember, our show the following night was meant to praise and elevate women.)

The bus took us to another venue where our friends Gael, Cédric, and Morgan were about to perform as The Fraltons. We decided not to tell them about our experience moments before their own show, so instead we sat in the second row (panic attack symptoms and all) and had the polar opposite experience: a silly, delightful, hilarious performance that was JUST what our traumatized brains needed in that moment. This is a strange moment for me to offer a hot take, but The Fraltons is one of the best improv acts in the world.

Back at the hotel, we gathered the European gang and tearfully shared our story. Kiki and I were finished with a festival and a country that, as Kiki put it, would allow a man to burn a woman onstage, but not to kiss her. We got the kind blessing of our castmates to find our way home and feel no obligation to be at the show.

And for the record we don’t judge our friends for performing—presenting a positive message for women is courageous and important in the face of such reckless misogyny. But we couldn’t perform ourselves while in fear of our audience.

After hugs all around in the hotel lobby, we said good night and finally got back to our room shortly after 2 AM. Kiki brushed her teeth while I looked up potential flights home; it was fucking maddening how I was googling for last-minute travel options from beginning to end of this trip. Then there was a knock at the door.

The “Argo” Sequel Nobody Asked For

In the hallway were a trio of hotel employees whose professionalism disguised their menace like friendly face paint on a killer clown. As Kiki aptly put it: “If you want to check on something, you send one guy. If you want to intimidate someone, you send three.” The time was 2:30 AM.

They explained that “visitors were not allowed” in the room we’d booked, which made me think there was a genuine mixup. I told them that we were a married couple (a lie, but one we’d been telling consistently the entire trip). They then asked for “proof” of the marriage, and for the first time in the trip I got out the fake marriage certificate we were told we wouldn’t need to show.

The root cause for this dust-up was apparently the fact that we’d swapped our two-bed hotel room with Nardje, who had a single bed. I surmised that even married couples are assigned rooms with Bert-and-Ernie beds, and two people sharing a single bed wasn’t permissible under any circumstances. Unclear if this was hotel policy or Egyptian law, but either way, we were being hassled about it in the middle of the night.

The staffers said they were satisfied and left, but not before taking a photo of our forged certificate. We’d already been committed to leaving the country very soon, but the moment we closed the door, we agreed in unison to leave right fucking now. With something nearing panic we packed our things and called an Uber; there was a 9:50 flight to Amsterdam and we were determined to be on it. At about 3 AM we fast-walked out of the hotel, carrying our bags instead of rolling them to be as quiet as possible. The Uber had us at the airport in 15 minutes. I told Kiki: “I have never in my entire life wanted to see the Great Pyramids less than I do now.”

Because fleeing a country is never a simple operation, we had to pay for our changed flight in cash—13,725 Egyptian pounds extracted across four ATM transactions and counted out by the EgyptAir cashier like casino winnings.3 We waited in the terminal for three hours until check-in, not even thinking of sleep, imagining unlikely but not unrealistic scenarios where the hotel staff notified the police and the police red-flagged our passports. I withdrew another 2,000 pounds in cash (about €100) in case I needed to offer a bribe. Even when we got past customs and security with no issues, I spent the remaining time thinking of the phrase “detained while attempting to board.”

But our run of bad luck was finally at an end. Right on time, and precisely five days earlier than scheduled, our 737 headed out over the Mediterranean. Heck, we didn’t even spot the pyramids from the plane! I’m sure they’re… great.

In Conclusion, We Can Kiss in Public Again

After this experience you might expect us to embrace a whole bucket of negative stereotypes about Islamic countries. I want to state clearly that we don’t. Yes, it’s deeply troubling that people who cheer a woman’s violent murder would be welcome at an arts festival. It’s also troubling that Nazis are welcome at Trump rallies. Garbage people abound across all languages and cultures. But the festival is responsible for its content, and we’re in no mood to forgive it for that, or for the hotel clusterfuck.

We’re safely at home now, reunited with Percy and enjoying our vacation-turned-staycation. Our friends apparently did a great job onstage without us and we were bittersweet about missing it. But I haven’t had a moment’s pause about getting the hell out of Egypt, and I HATE flaking on things. With only a few changes, the story of this trip might’ve been wildly different; but we got the worst of the worst, which is a damn shame.

Thank God it wasn’t “Joey”

(Having a place to live is a privilege. Being able to buy a home, even more so. Owning one as nice as this, ten times more than that. Everything that I describe below, especially the parts that sound like complaints, I do with the understanding that we are astonishingly fortunate people.)

Let’s start with the names, cause they’ll certainly be the first thing you notice. The row houses along Reinwardtstraat in east Amsterdam were built in 2003 (practically yesterday, in European time) and are architecturally unremarkable. But some Y2K-era architect decided they could heighten the street’s curb appeal with… names, installed in different fonts and colors, one per building. It’s super corny, and it limited my enthusiasm for the Reinwardtstraat apartment when we first saw it.

The opposite of curb appeal.

Still, once we got past the front door, we warmed to the place almost immediately. It’s over 100 square meters1, compared to the 582 we’ve been working and living in for the last two years. It’s in the Dapperbuurt neighborhood, half a block from an outdoor market à la “Notting Hill,” and only one block further from a gorgeous park. It’s half the distance to my work and a three-minute walk to train and tram stops, effectively making most places in the city much more accessible.

We’d barely begun our home-browsing process when our realtor sent this listing. It checked all of our boxes, but we kept our expectations realistic: in this crazy market, stories of placing dozens of unsuccessful offers over many months are routine. “We’ll find the perfect place,” I had assured Kiki, “and then somebody will buy it before us. Then we’ll find another perfect place, and we’ll lose that one too. But at SOME point, we’ll find the perfect place and get it.”

Yeah, no. This was the second house we visited, the first offer we placed, and after two days of roller-coaster haggling, it was ours. Imagine waking up early one morning, packing your lunch, applying sunscreen, and setting out for a long, zen day of fishing… only to pull a giant flopping marlin into the boat on your first cast. You’d probably scream like we did.

Continue reading Thank God it wasn’t “Joey”

2 Fast 2 Rijbewijs

Identiy the midpoint of the intersection. You have half a second.

My previous blog post detailed the Sisyphean ordeal of passing the theory exam to get my Dutch driver’s license—navigating a terribly-written, horribly-translated textbook and website to pass an exam with questions so arbitrary or unfair that they sometimes read like absurdist literature.

It was all so patently ridiculous that I figured the practical portion of the process—where I actually drove a car—would be simple by comparison. The free trial lesson at my neighborhood traffic school didn’t dissuade me of this notion: I hopped in a nice Audi SUV with a cheerful instructor who navigated me around the neighborhood, kindly pointed out my mistakes, and identified the old habits I’d need to unlearn. It was an encouraging first session.

My friends, this is what we call a “bait and switch.”

Continue reading 2 Fast 2 Rijbewijs

Tacos at Dawn

I can claim to be a hipster about a few different, mostly very un-hipsterish things. I was friendly with Adriene Mishler back when she was running free yoga classes in the lobby of Salvage Vanguard Theater. I actually wrote a blog post in 2010 recommending Ben Rector, a full twelve years before he collaborated with Snoop Dogg (really)

But my favorite “knew ‘em before they were big” example is Kristin Moore, a painter whom I met at the East Austin Studio Tour five years ago. Something about her little Instagrammy square panels grabbed me, and I bought one in 2018. A few months later I bought a second one that I mailed to Kiki, so she could visit Waffle House whenever she wanted. Reuniting the siblings was a special treat upon moving to Amsterdam.

They’re always arguing in the back seat, though.

Now, I don’t know anything about art—although, to quote “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” nobody knows anything about art. Kristin’s Artist Statement does a much better job than me at describing what her work is “really about.” But besides evoking wanderlust and so forth, the visual juxtapositions of endless soaring skies over vanilla retail buildings—all of it, both majestic and mundane, rendered in painstaking detail—feels supremely American. Which means that, now that I live abroad, I appreciate it even more. And quite apart from “stirring the soul” or whatever art is supposed to do, it’s also just super well-made—have you ever tried blending acrylics?

Continue reading Tacos at Dawn

It’s pronounced RYE-be-VISE

When I got to the Netherlands I had to learn many important new skills: speaking Dutch, biking through rush-hour traffic in pouring rain, making my own tortillas. What I did not need to learn was how to drive. Like any native Texan, I’ve been doing that since I was 16, and anyway owning a car in Amsterdam is an active inconvenience. Still, we rent or borrow cars now and then for errands and day trips; and so I needed to exchange my US license for a Dutch rijbewijs. 

Sadly this was not a simple swap at the government office. I had to go through the entire process, starting with passing the driving theory exam. Thus did I make the acquaintance of the CBR—Centraal Bureau Rijvaardigheidsbewijzen1, or Central Driver’s License Bureau—which held the keys, pun intended, to my driving privileges. I’d heard that the process for getting a license was onerous, but they offer the test in English, and I’ve got 27 years of driving experience. How bad could it possibly be?

Continue reading It’s pronounced RYE-be-VISE

I read now. I’m a reader.

It’s the most unqualified success among the goals I gave myself upon moving to Europe. My courthouse book is an eternal work in progress; my painting hobby is advancing glacially; the improv career is, like so many other things, limited by COVID. But (thanks largely to that very same pandemic) my plan to read more has been a grand slam. In the before times, I’d be lucky to finish three books a year, ticking through 10-20 pages per night as I drifted off to sleep. Last year I finished 37 books1, just over three books a month

501605-bookit.webp
I’m ready for my Pizza Hut now. (Fellow 80s-90s kids, did you know that program still exists?)
Continue reading I read now. I’m a reader.

One Year in Amsterdam

Within my first weeks in The Netherlands, I’d already stopped noticing how many darn bikes there are. After a few months I was used to the gorgeous view along the Amstel River next to our apartment. I’m in one of the great cities of the Western world, surrounded by history and architecture, with Stolpersteins underfoot and buildings around every corner that would stop you in your tracks if you saw them in Austin.1. And yet, now it’s just home.

Here’s an experiment: take a look at my typical route to work—which I bike once a week or so, sometimes for a meeting, usually just for a change of scenery—and drop the Google Maps street-view guy anywhere along it. Within a couple of tries you’ll probably land on some beautiful sight. That’s my goddamn commute! I hate that I’m getting used to it.

Of course, once in awhile something catches your eye. (Aldi is a supermarket.)

December 14th and 15th are the anniversary of my Big Move.2 Every day, the last few weeks leading up to it, has included a whole lot of “one-year-ago” moments: turning in my badge at Apple, visiting the Blanton Museum, taking my final courthouse road trip, marking the days off my big countdown wall calendar, staying at the Driskill Hotel, and selling my car almost literally on the way to the airport. The first weeks in Amsterdam weren’t a bit as eventful, thanks to lockdown, but after literal years of a long-distance relationship, being with Kiki almost 24-7 was just what the doctor ordered.

Time passed; the lockdown ended; I got a job; I began to explore and learn the city. On September 15th, my nine-month Amsterversary, I was the cool substitute teacher for Improv 101 at Boom Chicago. It was my first improv class in precisely 18 months and two days—the previous class was a free intro for Merlin Works, and if you had told me on that night when and where my next one would be, I’d have been utterly mindboggled. The improv has picked up since then, with occasional shows and coaching gigs (and, weirdly, hosting videos for an elevator company). Most exciting was the return of Pints & PowerPoints, which emerged on the Boom Chicago stage in November, TWENTY MONTHS after its last appearance back in Austin. 

And our slow makeover of the apartment continues. I wish I’d done a video tour of the place when I arrived, cause it’s almost unrecognizable now. Recently installed: a set of light-blocking curtains that make it possible to watch TV in the daytime. Still delayed: our fancy new bed, which was delivered after a two-month wait only for the delivery guys to realize the bedframe wouldn’t fit up the stairs.

Fuck.

Of course there was the weather. As I gripped my sword and stared stonily into the middle distance, the cold returned, and with it another lockdown. It’s not gray and rainy ALL the time, but the days are short as hell—on the winter solstice, we get seven hours and 41 minutes—and when the sun comes out it stays low in the sky to the south, stubbornly hiding behind buildings and providing little warmth regardless.

But that comes with the territory—literally. The things I enjoy about Amsterdam greatly outnumber the things I don’t. Every day I feel a bit more integrated, a bit more comfortable, a bit more Dutch. My Duolingo streak is over 1,200 days. I do typically European things like buy bread at the bakery, use two-button toilets with comically small sinks, bike through freezing rain like it’s no big deal, and walk out of the doctor’s office without paying anything.3

The pandemic gave all of our lives a slower pace, with free evenings greatly outnumbering busy ones, but the Big Move has made my life slower still. On a recent Friday night I found myself lounging on the couch, sipping whiskey and reading my Kindle, with Percy purring on my lap, watching planes inbound to Schiphol through the window. Three years ago, such a quiet night would have felt like an unusual luxury.  Now, it’s just life; and life is good.

Don’t sleep on Percy’s bowtie.

Into the santaverse

I never noticed that they are speaking Dutch phonetically.

It’s not accurate to say that The Netherlands has two Christmases. December 25th is still Christmas (Kerstfeest in Dutch) and a good number of kids still expect presents from de Kerstman (literally “the Christmas-man”), who looks like an American would expect. Normal Christmas stuff, in other words.

But… *Yoda voice* …there is another.

Here’s the deal, as best as I can make it out: back in the 4th century in present-day Turkey, St. Nicholas was a real person renowned for his generosity. Fast-forward a few centuries, and Christian children in various places were getting presents on Nicholas’s feast day, December 6th. Fast-forward a few more centuries, and Martin Luther encouraged people to give the kids gifts on Christmas instead, cause Jesus > saints, amiright? 

But all he succeeded in doing was to create more holiday gift-giving fellows. All across Europe, like a bunch of Spider-Men popping out of the multi-verse, new Santa characters evolved with their own back stories and traditions.

Oh, Martin, what… have… you… done

In Nederland and Belgium the local version is called Sinterklaas. He’s still from Turkey. His holiday is still December 6th1. Instead of arriving from the North Pole on Christmas Eve via flying sleigh, he arrives from Spain (Spain?!) in mid-November via steamboat. Instead of a bunch of toy-making elves, he has an awfully, terribly racist helper character2 He rides a horse named Amerigo to get around. Instead of candy in stockings, it’s candy in shoes. And so on. 

“But they dress completely differently!”

My downstairs neighbor, when I told her about my confusion between the two white-bearded Christmas men

The craziness does not end with the Turk-on-a-steamboat business, because like all Santas, Sinterklaas delegates the actual gift-giving to regular folks like you and me. And Sinterklaas—the holiday—is a pro-level Secret Santa. Once you’ve been randomly assigned your recipient (mine was Kiki’s sister Mima) then you’re tasked with three labors:

  1. The present
  2. The wrapping, which is called a surprise3 and is meant to reflect the interests or personality of the recipient
  3. A poem about the other person that they read before opening the present

The gift itself was easy enough: Mima got a nice pepper mill. For the surprise, Mima got a giant ball of yarn; lucky for me, there are literally dozens of online tutorials to be found, and the directions for this one were simple enough. The poem was also pretty straight-forward, though it reads a bit like an 80s rap.

My name is Sinterklaas and I’m here to say / My horse Amerigo eats a lot of hay

My Sinterklaas-giver was Kiki’s mom Kien; she gave me a nice book about Dutch water infrastructure, a charming poem, and a surprise of a little doll riding Air Force One like a cowboy on a horse. Kiki got socks and a scented candle hidden inside an honest-to-god gingerbread house.

All in all it was a successful Sinterklaas, even if it was over Zoom (such a common way of gathering these days that I almost forgot to mention it). Now, God and COVID willing, we begin prepping for a trip back to the USA, where our Christmas traditions are COMPLETELY NORMAL.