The last full day in Cape Town was the warmest. Mid-70s, sky so clear you’d think you could see the stars. I found myself back at my preferred local dive, slowly sipping a beer1 as the open windows allowed in the air and noise of the afternoon, and—weirdly—a six-year-old boy seated next to me nursed his hot chocolate and occasionally showed me drawings from his Shopkins book. I’ve had weirder barmates.
I spent the afternoon with my fellow Americans festival-goers climbing Lions’ Head, a mountain adjacent to Table Mountain with a spiraling trail to the top that was more like a climbing route for the home stretch. Cape Town beneath us to the east. The Atlantic, impossibly huge, to the west. Dozens of sailboats drifting close to shore, with a cargo ship loitering on the horizon. Once, a trio of paragliders zoomed into view, each of them passing within ten feet of the trail before soaring off to the distant beach. Ground squirrels and songbirds stalked us at the top, hoping for snacks.
Once I got back to the Airbnb, my trip hit the fast-forward button. A brief shower.2 The crushing realization that I didn’t have time for a nap. The festival’s instructor showcase, which evolved into a narrative about a coup at a Catholic girl’s school. One final mixer show. Last visit to the local dive bar. Four underpriced vodkas. The penultimate History Under the Influence, which went very well. Festival afterparty. Nice chats with interesting people. Hugs and farewells.
The walk home was serene. I’ve been warned to stay vigilant on the streets here, and I did. And my heightened senses reported back nothing but the sound of my steps bouncing off the pavement of the narrow street and the security walls to either side; the faint hum of the orange lights overhead; the whisper of highway traffic somewhere in the abstract distance. Orion watching over me, upside down, like he was doing a handstand.
I finally figured out just the right jiggle to unlock my Airbnb’s security gate—the last time I’d ever need to; don’t it always go that way?—and let myself in.
PS: I’ve said precious little about the festival itself! I had a great time teaching my workshop. The performance highlights were Lusty Mannequins, two instructors from Second City Toronto; and La Teatre Andre, a spectacular trio from Oslo.3 The locals were, as always, fun to be with on and off the stage. To any improvisers reading: if you have the means—for the plane ticket; it’s stupidly cheap once you get here—I do recommend applying.
I subjected myself to the second modern-art museum on this trip—the Zeitz, opened only last month—not least because of its startling architecture: it was carved from a grid of 100-foot concrete silos to create hypnotic geometric spaces.
I liked the museum even better than the Tate in London. Maybe the fact that African culture is so unknown to me helped me to appreciate the enigmatic weirdness of its modern art.
Next I walked a couple hundred meters to the famous V&A Waterfront, only to discover that it’s a giant shopping mall and tourist trap. And that’s all I have to say about that.
After an equally uninteresting wander through downtown—Cape Town’s CBD is long on office buildings, short on local dives—I finally stumbled across a pub that served me something called Portuguese Chicken on a sizzling platter. Yummy. Including beer and tip, I spent over $10 on lunch! (I spent $11. This place is cheap.)
The Uber back to my neighborhood1 coincided unfortunately with rush hour, but gave me a chance to examine Cape Town more closely as we crawled eastward out of downtown. Salons, tyre shops, and incongruously posh restaurants; one private bus after another competing with cars and motorbikes and daredevil pedestrians for room on the street, the painted lines on the street merely decorative; a lifetime’s worth of carbon monoxide through our open windows.
To get from London to my stopover at Dubai, I boarded an Emirates Airlines Airbus A380, which felt like the biggest thing I’d ever seen. It’s two stories from tip to tail, like something a child might draw. As we rolled down the runway, I trusted they had done the math to ensure this monstrosity could actually take off.
Take off it did. The cartoon airplane took us over the heart of Europe, then Turkey, then Iran (taking an awkward detour around Iraq). I gawked out the window at cities I’ve never heard of, trying to discern their structure. Tourism in the dark at 85% of the speed of sound.
Finally we flew across the narrow mouth of the Persian Gulf (floating oil platforms; cargo ships anchored by the hundreds) and approached Dubai. Unluckily, I didn’t get a proper view of the famous skyline, either landing or departing.1 But even the areas around the city were otherworldly. Geometric subdivisions separated by inexplicably large gaps of desert. Glittering compounds that might have been power stations, or tourist attractions, or both. Highways to god-knows-where, stretched like orange ribbons across the black, literally disappearing in the distance.
I was on the ground in Dubai for literally an hour, scampering from one Emirates jetliner to the other, at 3 in the dang morning. I’d like to see the city some day, but this wasn’t it.
Then I slept most of my way across the African continent, at some point crossing the equator for only the second time in my life. Fall became spring outside my window. When I woke it was day again, South Africa coming up at me from below.
The plane shot out over the Indian Ocean—my first glimpse of the Indian Ocean—then turned back north for a landing. Cape Town came into focus, subdivisions and shantytowns. With hardly a glance in my direction the customs official stamped my passport. I ignored two dozen taxi hype men and made my way outside, where the festival producer Tami was waiting. The weather was fucking perfect: mid-60s, warm sun, blue skies. Time to begin.
My first-ever visit to London1 would have been a whirlwind even without extraneous factors. It was a mere 56 hours between my arrival from Austin on Saturday morning and my departure to Cape Town on Monday afternoon. That’s hardly enough time to visit a couple of museums, take a couple of selfies, and get hit by a bus cause you looked the wrong way while crossing the street.
And yet, there *were* extraneous factors. This was a glorified stopover for me, but by wild coincidence, there were TWO enormous improv events happening in London: the Slapdash International Improv Festival and the 50-hour Hoopla Improv Marathon. This meant I had shows to see and perform in, and a wild number of friends in town. Improv, I just don’t know how to quit you.
I landed at Heathrow and took the tube to my host Phil’s neighborhood, with markets and cafés and double-decker buses and a peculiar number of barber shops. London’s concentrated diversity was everywhere—races, accents, and languages in abundance that’s hard to find outside of New York City.
I dumped the bags and headed back downtown. My first and biggest stop of the day was the British Museum, where 3,000-year-old sarcophagi lay in front of me, nothing but the honor system stopping me from placing my hands where some anonymous stoneworker placed theirs, over a hundred generations ago.
The magnificence of these ancient civilizations persists. Look upon my Works, ye mighty, and despair, the enormous statues instruct the gawking tourists. What of ours will tourists stare at 3,000 years in the future? Given how little stonework we do these days, I figure, not much.
A dedicated gallery displayed large portions of the Parthenon, which I would’ve expected to see when I visited—ya know—the Parthenon. The British Museum’s open dirty secret is how many of its greatest hits are straight-up plunder. One ancient Egyptian obelisk was labeled as a “gift from King George III” and I’m PRETTY SURE HE WAS NOT THE ORIGINAL OWNER, GUYS.2
Without consulting a map—intentionally so; I was happy to wander—I left the museum and walked roughly in the direction I figured the Thames was in. I managed to miss it entirely, but I did stumble upon Trafalgar Square and finally found a bridge at Big Ben. I’d forgotten to switch to my comfy shoes. The blisters were a-comin’.
After strolling along the southern waterfront (and discovering I was in the wrong neighborhood entirely), I finally got to the Slapdash venue, where I found an astonishing number of improv friends both expected and unexpected. It was like a family reunion. The highlight of the night’s shows was Decibel, a silent-improv trio featuring my friend Jacintha from Finland.
I stayed at the afterparty way too late, then doubled down by cabbing over to the Hoopla Theater, where they were midway through their 50-hour marathon. I watched improv to the point of true delirium (improvised Rick and Morty?!) before finally heading back to Phil’s place for a few hours of sleep. Sunday morning we headed right back to the theater; it was time for the antepenultimate3 History Under the Influence.
Jet lag + a few gin-and-Sprites make Kevin a silly boy. My cast performed wonderfully as we documented the Russian Revolution, the dissolution of the monasteries, and Margaret Thatcher’s rise to power. (“Did you guys see Ratatouille? It was like that, with an evil butterfly.”)
Thankfully, and as per plan, I hadn’t gotten so drunk as to waste the rest of my day. I took a 20-minute cat nap in the pub downstairs from the theater, then walked 10 minutes to the Tate Modern, the second of my two big museum visits.
Now, look, real talk: I’m not a super modern-art guy. But I only rolled my eyes a few times. There was some great great stuff, including the requisite Dalis and Pollocks and Rothkos, and entirely new discoveries.
Next I walked on the Millennium Bridge across the Thames.4 Looming in front of me was St. Paul’s, the overpoweringly enormous cathedral finished in 1720. I arrived during the informal changing of the guard, as Sunday-afternoon parishioners filed out and Sunday-afternoon tourists filed in. I examined crypts and sarcophagi and statues that were ostentatious AF; the bus-sized tribute to Lord Nelson is truly ridiculous. I then sat for a few minutes under the tremendous dome, neck craned back, staring at the frescoes and finding fascinating details everywhere.
Here’s a fun historic anecdote: on September 10, 1940, a German bomb crashed through the roof of St. Paul’s and failed to detonate. The bomb squad quickly conducted what was surely the highest-stakes defusing job of their careers, then hauled the bomb into the countryside and exploded it, creating a 100-foot crater. That’s how close we were to having lost this thing.
I took a couple of hours to rest my foots at Phil’s place and watch Phil’s Netflix, before finding dinner at the nearby kabob stank and making one last improv pilgrimage to the final hour of the Hoopla marathon. The night ended with drinks and stories at Phil’s kitchen table. I was in bed at something like a reasonable hour.
Off I go in a couple of hours to Heathrow, then to Cape Town, by way of Dubai. (Go check out a globe if you don’t realize how out of the way that is. Including this stop in London, my route from Texas to South Africa would make Indiana Jones scratch his head.)
I slept terribly on the overnight flight from JFK to Reykjavik, occasionally peeking out the window in hope of seeing the northern lights. There was an orange smear of sunlight growing on the horizon when our 737 dipped into a thick layer of low clouds over Iceland. Seconds before touching down, we emerged out the bottom, and I got my first glimpse of the country—mottled soil and rocky coast, all shades of gray this early in the morning.
As a tour bus drove me from the airport into Reykjavik, I had a better view: unkempt fields of green and brown and gray, sprinkled with broken black boulders, fading into mist on the horizon. There were still some smudges of snow clinging to life here and there. Very few buildings in sight; very few roads besides the one we were on. Already, on the ride from its biggest airport to its biggest city, Iceland seemed so beautifully empty.
Finally the city began to emerge around us—heavy industry, apartment buildings, hills and pine trees—and we joined the Thursday morning rush hour (such as it is in a town of 100,000). I listened to the final episode of S-Town so as to drown out the easy-listening music on the bus’s radio. I’m too jet lagged for ya right now, Phil Collins.
I checked into my Airbnb (a charming little room on the fourth floor) then immediately set to work wandering the city. First came Hallgrimskirkja, a tremendous spartan iceberg of a cathedral less than a block away. Then the Settlement Exhibition, more quirkily known as “871 ± 2,” where I saw the archeological remains of a Viking longhouse built sometime between (you got it) 869 and 873. Then at the Saga Museum, I learned about the history of the country, thanks to the goofiest set of wax figures I’ve ever seen.
I just censored a wax figure’s nipple. That is the dumbest thing I’ve ever done.
Lunch was at a famous hot dog stand. The Icelanders are mighty proud of their hot dogs, it turns out, but they dress them in stuff like gravy, mayonnaise, and fried onions. I know what you’re thinking: That sounds gross. But I’m here to tell ya… Yeah actually it’s a little gross.
The kind of food porn you regret looking at
After recharging my gadgets (with electricity) and self (with a nap), it’s now 4:00 in the afternoon, meaning this is really a first-half-day report. I’ll catch a few more tourist spots before seeing some friends at the Iceland Improv Festival. Tomorrow I’m going in on a car rental with a few of them—two Brits, two Swedes—and driving the famous Golden Circle.
Hmm, I should probably shower at some point.
ICELAND FACT OF THE DAY: Iceland was one of the last landmasses on earth to see permanent human habitation, only 1100 years ago. (New Zealand takes first prize; aborigines settled there less than 800 years ago.)
In 2012, I decided that I would visit Iceland in 2017. Yes, that’s ridiculously far in advance. I like planning things. Just ask my parents about our trip to Disney World in 8th grade—there were dot-matrix-printed spreadsheets.
But, five years is enough time to plan a serious trip. And now, sure as the Mayan apocalypse, the time has arrived. I’m flying to Reykjavik on Wednesday morning, spending the weekend at the Iceland Improv Festival1 in between sampling the tourist attractions and local cuisine.
Local cuisine. This is an actual photograph.
Then on Sunday morning, I’m renting a ramshackle camper van and spending the next ten days driving the Ring Road (as it’s called) around the entire country.2
Iceland is about the size of Indiana. It’s got about 335,000 permanent residents, but 60% of them live in and around Reykjavik. The rest of the country is mostly empty, wild, weird space; “it feels like someone put the American West in a blender.” It’s played a zillion different planets and fantasy-lands—the glacier from Interstellar is right next to the ice pond where Qui-Gon had a sword fight with Batman, and just down the road from Galen Erso’s farm from “Rogue One.”
I got the outfit at REI. The doll is homemade.
There’s a waterfall, beach, gorge, lake, volcano, or cave around every bend in the road. There’s a Museum of Icelandic Sorcery and Witchcraft, “The home of the Necropants.” There’s a Phallological Museum, with the excellent URL phallus.is. There’s something called “Interdimensional Hopscotch” (stay tuned on that).
My keyboard is programmed to type bizarre Middle-Earth-looking letters like Þ and ð. I have tips on the best hot dogs and thermal baths. I’ve bought and marked up a giant folding paper road map, like it’s 1986 or something. I’ve got the optional “sand, gravel, and volcanic ash insurance” on my rental car. Just like Disney World, I have carefully-crafted spreadsheets and itineraries—and Iceland’s famously capricious weather stands ready to blow them both to smithereens. (As I type this, a significant chunk of the Ring Road is closed to all traffic.)
Actual webcam image. It’s called Iceland for a REASON, people.
It’s going to be a wild time. Watch this space for more.
Today is the 11th anniversary of the most successful April Fools’ prank I ever pulled. Thought I’d document it here for posterity.
I was (really) visiting friends in Cambridge, MA, and my flight landed in Boston on the evening of March 31st, 2004. The next morning, early on April 1, I sent the following email to all my friends back in Austin:
Howdy folks,
Landed in Boston alright – it is miserable crappy weather here, which will make me oh-so-happy to return to Austin in a few days. Otherwise we’re having fun making crepes at the moment, headed to the aquarium later today.
But first! Got to tell you about my celebrity encounter.
So I get on the subway at the airport yesterday afternoon, headed into downtown Boston, and this cutie sits down next to me. I’m nose-deep in “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” (thanks Sonali) so I don’t pay too much attention til she looks over and tells me she likes the book. I start flirt–uh, “chatting” with her about the book, and suddenly I realize I’m talking to
NATALIE
FUCKING
PORTMAN!
Being the smooth operator that I am, I immediately began sweating and jumbling my words. Didn’t want to shift the conversation straight from love-and-philosophy to wow-you-were-in-Star-Wars, but I managed to acquit myself quite well. We continued yakking all the way from the blue line to the green line to the red line (these are subways, people) Finally I got off at the MIT stop, and in the most bad-ass moment of my life, asked if she wanted to get a beer later. “Gimme a call, I think tomorrow might be better,” she said. And Natalie Portman gave me Natalie Portman’s Phone Number!! JEEEEEEEEESUS!
So later today I’ll be placing a call to what I HOPE is Natalie Portman’s phone, and we will see if this all comes down. Whether it does or not it was quite an encounter. I’ll let you all know if I get the hookup with Queen Amidala. More later–
-K
Absolutely EVERYBODY fell for it. (To put it in context, Natalie Portman actually was a student at Harvard at the time.) I got back responses like, “Good luck man, I’ve got my whole office rooting for you.” Over the course of the day, a few people sent follow-up messages after suspecting a rat, but many others were waiting with bated breath to hear how it went.
On the morning of April 2nd, I sent the follow-up:
Hey all,
So I finally plucked up the courage and gave old Natalie a call, and I met her at this Au Bon Pair café near Harvard Square. We still got along just fine; she got the roast beef, I got the chicken. Turns out she does improv, how wacky is that? Not too impressed by my Lego habit, though. Oh well.
Then Miss Natalie asks if I’ve ever seen the whales in Boston Harbor. I’m like “uhh, no, and I’m not likely to in this weather.” She smiled at me. “You scared of a little rain, Texas boy?” “Depends on the company, I suppose,” I fired back. And suddenly she had flagged down a cab and ordered it to the pier.
Bear in mind, it’s like 8:00 at night by this point.
The cab arrives on the shoreline, and this young tart leads me through a couple of gates, past a security guard, and out to her family’s yacht! The thing is like a 40-footer, called the Queen Amidala. I guess it pays to have a movie star in the family. She’s got me untying lines around the ship while she fires up the motor, and before I know it we’re piloting out of the harbor in the 40-degree, rainy darkness. I couldn’t figure out if it was really romantic or really weird. Maybe both.
We get to the point that we have a full view of the Boston skyline, which is really pretty through all the haze. Like I said, it’s utterly frigid, so Natalie wraps my arms around her. It was real nice; I had gotten over the whole my-God-you’re-a-movie-star thing, and we were just two kids having some fun. I’m just thinking about kissing her when she says “I’m real glad you could make it out here, Kevin.”
“Well, you sort of dragged me out here,” I remind her.
“That’s not what I mean,” she said, and turned to me. “I’ve been waiting for you for a long time.”
Is this about to get a little too romantic? Am I going to have to tell NATALIE PORTMAN that “she’s a real sweet girl but”? I try to keep it playful. “Oh have you?”
“Yes,” she answers, and takes a step back. “We all have.”
It’s then that I realize the sky has cleared overhead. Stars are peeking down at us. It looks like they’re spinning; then suddenly I realize that the BOAT is spinning!
Natalie looks at me, and fire leaps up in her eyes. “You thought you could escape, Agent Ploo, but we found you. Now you are going to pay for all the Flimopps you killed on the moons of Tauridius III.”
I look around, panicked. Another Natalie Portman climbs over the side of the boat. Then another. Then another. I’m surrounded by Queen Amidalas. It’s a little disconcerting.
“Time to die, Agent Ploo,” says the original Natalie, and she raises her hand; before my eyes it changes to a Flauvian Phase-Matter Generator.
That’s when my survival instincts kicked in.
With a single kung-fu move, I spun one of the Natalies in front of me and she caught most of the Phase-Matter. With my other hand I reached for my Hyper-Pulse Rifle and levelled two others. Three more Natalies tackled me from behind, but I was ready for that; I dispatched two by knocking their heads togather, and threw the third overboard.
That left me with the main Natalie, the one who ordered the roast beef. She was growing tentacles as I watched, and her voice suddenly dropped several octaves.
“Most impressive, Agent Ploo,” she said, rearing high above me. “I suppose you think a mere blast from a Hyper-Pulse Rifle is enough to kill me? Ha! I eat Hyper-Pulses for breakfast!”
She reached for me with one of her tentacles. I pulled out a lighter and a can of hair spray.
“Eat this, bitch.”
FOOOOOOOM! The Natalie queen lit up like a Malatov cocktail. She flailed around the deck of the ship, and with an expert kick I sent her off the bow. She got sucked under, and the propellers spewed out nothing but red seawater.
So I was kind of stuck at that point, cause hell if I know how to drive a damn yacht. Fortunately a Coast Guard ship was just scooting by to see what all the fuss was about, and they gave me a lift back to the shoreline. I shared the whole story with Wilbur, a bright young Coast Guard coxswain.
“I guess going out with a movie star ain’t all it’s cracked up to be, huh, Ploo?”
I laughed good-naturedly. “Call me Kevin. And it’s not so bad, Wilbur; Natalie was a good kid. She was just born on the wrong side of the asteroid belt.”
“Yeah.”
The ship cruised back to the safety of Boston Harbor.
My second-favorite response came from Ryan, who said:
You had me up to “yacht,” at which point I said “fuck you” about ten times.
My first-favorite response came from Sonali:
Hahaha, you really got me. Can’t wait to hear how it really turned out!!
The first leg of my roundabout trip to Nashville had one interesting aspect that I forgot to mention in the previous blogpost: I shunpiked. This is a word I just learned, but it’s perfect. In the hopes of a more interesting drive, I deliberately skipped the direct route (in my case, Highway 290) and for long stretches used its predecessor, Highway 20.
Shunpiking is a fun way to travel an otherwise boring route if you’re not in a hurry and your car’s suspension is in working order. The latter becomes evident almost immediately as you bounce like a moon buggy along a neglected two-lane road, some of it dirt or gravel, the modern highway often visible only a couple of hundred yards away.
Trees hug the sides of the road (some of them surprisingly colorful; take that, upstate New York). Buzzards the size of Cessnas occasionally swoop past. Importantly, the old highways actually travel through the towns that the new ones were designed to bypass. The forgotten downtowns typically include a half-dozen historic brick buildings, one or two of which have been turned into antiques shops, either or both of which has itself gone out of business. And the rest is left to decay. It’s either exhilarating or depressing, or both. Continue reading 17 courthouses and a couple of babies→
I’ve got an interesting Thanksgiving week ahead. Goes a little something like this.
1. Driving to my mom’s in Nashville, and visiting my aunt and uncle west of Houston en route. If that sounds circuitous, it is: I’m taking a deliberately-roundabout route to get there so I can knock off 17 Texas county courthouses on the way. To wit:
2. Spending three days in Nashville. My mom and her wife always have a Big Gay Thanksgiving for a bunch of their friends, so I’m looking forward to some fabulous turkey.
3. Driving back from Nashville to Dallas on Sunday night. Spending the night with my high-school buddy Mike and his family. Knocking out five more courthouses en route:
4. Waking up early Monday morning—when I should be back at work—and driving back east, to Texarkana, to give the deposition for my upcoming lawsuit. (Going to court! It’s ironic! In the Alanis Morrisette sense.) Yes this back-and-forth is a titanic waste of gas, but I get to see Mike and family, and it’s preferable to leaving Nashville at 4 in the morning. Plus, hey, more courthouses!5. Finally, some time Monday afternoon, heading back to Austin. And yes, hitting as many courthouses as I can on the way back before the sun goes down—hopefully the ones in Daingerfield, Pittsburg, and (appropriately enough) Quitman.
There’s the plan. I’m leaving momentarily. Wish me and my car luck.
I’m not proud of it, but it’s nothing new—even as a child, to the frustration of my mother, I used my Lego sets as model kits to be assembled, not tools for pure creativity. Today I’m a true aficionado of Legos* and although I constantly marvel at the creative output by Lego fans around the world, my own collection sits largely unused, carefully sorted into an enormous card catalog. Others might find all of this rather surprising, given my unconditional love for the little bricks.
Pictured: Me
All this is to say that I might be the perfect customer for Pley, the Netflix for Lego sets.** Pley’s business model is straight-forward: pay a monthly fee and they send you one Lego set at a time. Build it, play with it, keep it as long as you like, mail it back, and they send you another one from your queue.
Certain potential customers might immediately disagree with the entire premise. Who would want to acquire a Lego set without actually owning it? Who’d pay money to a company just for renting toys?
Well, me, for one. I enjoy the simple act of starting with a big pile of Legos and ending with a spaceship (or truck or whatever, but come on, you know I mostly want spaceships). I think Lego designers are enormously talented and produce some really innovative designs that are a joy to construct and then swoosh around the room (SPACESHIPS!). Most crucially, I have more than enough Legos to my name, and no space or desire to add more. But being able to build, appreciate, and return sets? Fantastic.
Bam!
So a few months ago, mere hours after learning of Pley’s existence, I forked over the cash for my first month. Pley offers three membership tiers: Fan ($15/month), Super Fan ($25), and Mega Fan ($39). The sets available at each price level would normally retail for $10-15, $20-30, and $50-500, respectively. It’ll surprise nobody that, once I was assured that this wasn’t an elaborate scam, I quickly upgraded to Mega Fan.
First step was to select Lego sets for my queue (called the “Pleylist”). Pley offers almost 200 sets as of this writing, divided across the three tiers. (If you’re a mere Super Fan then you can’t select the Mega Fan-level sets, though you can add sets from a lower tier.) Pley is rather insistent about keeping “at least ten sets” in your Pleylist at all times, for reasons that’ll become clear shortly.
Sets arrive in a bright red envelope or box, with the set’s pieces zipped into a reusable mesh bag inside, along with the instruction book and a return label. (More than one delivery guy, upon hearing the rattle inside the box, thought I’d ordered something that was now terribly broken.) Pley encourages you to keep and play with the set as long as you like before returning it for another. There’s no charge or penalty for missing pieces upon return, which is obviously a relief, but might also be a bit of a liability (see below).
The bricks and instructions are almost always in good shape. Pley claims that they clean and sanitize the bricks between renters, which is comforting when you imagine some anonymous fellow member prying bricks apart with his teeth. I’m not sure the cleaning happens every time, though, since sets sometimes aren’t fully disassembled. More than once I’ve found a still-assembled cluster of Legos in my bag, then faced the odd moral conundrum of whether I should take them apart so as not to deprive myself of building the entire model.
Pictured: my version of the Trolley Problem.
Sadly it’s in putting the models together, Pley’s raison d’etre, that I found the single most irritating aspect of the whole experience: missing pieces. Lego is famously fastidious in its quality control, and missing pieces in sets are extremely rare. Scouring my brain, I can remember missing a piece out of the box exactly once in my decades of Lego purchases. That’s a fantastic track record.
Not so with Pley sets. In five of the six sets I’ve received, at least one piece has been missing (usually either one or two). Early in my membership they would include a small bag of 10-20 “frequently missing” pieces, but alas, the grab bag never matched up with what I needed. Pley also has a useful webpage for you to select and order Legos from the inventory of what came with the set. But then the site displays an icky warning that it’ll be a long while before the missing pieces arrive in the mail, and politely suggests that you might simply return it or play with it as-is.
I took their advice, and substituted the missing parts from my own carefully-sorted collection. It seemed to be the rules of the game, so to speak. The worst offender, however, was a tow truck set that lacked over 50 of its 800 pieces, including two of the large wheels, which left the completed truck looking in need of a tow itself. Given this, the overall build experience was frustrating, even more so than you’d think. Any experienced Lego fan knows well the momentary panic of thinking that a crucial Lego is missing, and then the relief in finding it hidden under another piece. With Pley sets, the stress is real, and often repeated. It’s advisable to have a personal Lego collection to supplement missing parts as I did. But then you need to keep track of what you’ve donated. Again, it’s more of a hassle than it seems.
It’s hard to know how Pley can correct this problem permanently. Since Legos can weigh as little as a tenth of a gram, they’d need very careful measurements of their sets upon arrival to even detect a problem, and then they’d have to inventory the entire set to find out what’s missing. So the obvious response—charging or penalizing customers for not returning the full set—can’t possibly be made cost-effective. Still, though, I’d think they could have at least realized that my tow-truck set was 10% light before shipping it out. Even more obviously, they could allow you to report missing pieces without requesting that they be sent, for the benefit of the next member. (Pley states that they’re planning this feature.)UPDATE: As a part of the ongoing website/branding relaunch, Pley just introduced Pley Detective, which lets you do exactly that.
After enjoying and displaying my sets for a few days, I tear them back down (almost as much fun, for some reason), drop them back in the bag, and mail the set away. Then comes my second-least-favorite part of the process: the unpredictable wait for the next set. The shipping itself can be slow, sometimes painfully so (a good transaction might take a week from shipping one set to receiving the next). And Pley is completely unpredictable as to which set from the Pleylist they’ll be sending you. Though you can sort your list by preference, I’ve received sets that were as far down as 10th on my list—the nicer sets are in high demand and low supply, it seems. Those at the very top of my list, like the $400 Death Star, seem frustratingly hard to get.
DEPRESSING UPDATE: I mailed off a set the day after posting this review, and was informed via email two days later that the new set being sent to me is the 17th on my Pleylist. …Out of 17 sets. Dead last. Adding insult to injury, this set is at the Super Fan level, meaning that for the current rental at least, my $39/month is paying for something I could have gotten at the $25 level. Discouraging, to say the least.
Update 2, just for my own record keeping: the next set was the UN Building, 9th out of 16 sets. It was a Mega Fan set, at least. New policy for my Pleylist: no more “nice to have” sets, only ones I’m actually excited to receive. It’ll be interesting to see if the list gets pared down to its bare bones as sets are sent to me faster than I add new ones. I’m also curious whether I’d have better results if my list *only* consisted of the hard-to-get sets, but I suppose I’ll soon find out.
Update 3, since this post is still getting some attention: My queue basically went out with a whimper. I stood my ground, and eventually I had about 10 Mega Fan sets on it, none of which were being shipped to me. After a month of waiting, I cancelled my membership. And that was that.
*sniff*
Investment in their inventory would surely help. 190 sets in their current catalog sure seems like a lot, but I really only had 20 or 25 that were of interest to me. On a related note, I receive no notification when new sets are added to their collection, and there’s no way in the current website to sort by “recently added,” making the search for new sets feel like rummaging through a used-DVD bin.
These all might be growing pains. Pley is an interesting business concept and it’s certainly in its “plucky young startup” phase, down to finalizing its name and branding. And it certainly picked the right year to open up shop. As linked previously, they’ve got a page up at http://pleygo.uservoice.com where users can submit suggestions. They’re also running miscellaneous giveaways and other contests, and inevitably heading toward social media by inviting you to upload a gallery of your creations.
So I’m sticking with them to see how well these wrinkles get ironed out, and what else they have planned. Even with flaws included, they still solve a very particular problem for me, which is the highest compliment I can give any product or service. I hope they stick around for a long while.
Update 3: Alas, I reached the end of the line. As mentioned above, I began deliberately allowing my Pleylist to shrink, so that it only consisted of top-tier sets that I genuinely wanted. What followed was two long months of nothing. Not a single set shipped to me. I was reminded multiple times that Pley recommends more sets on one’s list, but for $39 per month, I shouldn’t have to add mid-level sets just for the pleasure of receiving them. Thus ends my experiment, in frustrating fashion, since I really rooted for Pley to succeed. But their time simply ran out.
*Yes I call them Legos, just like every other red-blooded American. I say “y’all” too.
**They were called Pleygo until halfway through writing this review, when they relaunched with what seems to be a much-improved website. One imagines they’re not only steering clear of Lego lawyers, but positioning themselves to offer other types of toys in the future. Either way, I like the change.
