Strange Brains: March 2010

Monday, March 29, 2010

memoirs # 1 : kangaroo in chicago

In 1995 Collin and I went to Chicago to star in the hit broadway musical, Riverdance. One day before rehearsal, we were looking for a place to buy rare coins so we stopped and asked a policeman. He gave us directions to THE guy in town to go to for rare coins from the bronze age. We had to make a lot of turns so I remembered all of the left turns and Collin remembered all of the right ones. At one point, one of us got it wrong and we found ourselves walking down a long wet cobblestone alley between tall buildings so that the sun couldn't get in very well and it was kind of dark. Up ahead the alley ended into another alley perpendicular to the one we were walking down. I said, "let's go left here." We had no clue where we were so left was as good of a direction as any. That took us to a place where it dead ended into a wider area with a dumpster and some old wooden pallets in it. I had to pee so I was heading for the back side of the dumpster and just getting ready to unzip when a monster hissed from behind it and kicked at me in a blur. The sudden terror and shock made me make a noise out of my throat that I've never made before as I was knocked backwards from the kick. Then I saw what it was. I don't know why it was loose in a Chicago alley but it was a 5 foot kangaroo. It started to charge Collin and he ran behind a stack of pallets and pushed over another pile of them towards the kangaroo, which then ran off down the alley we had just come from. Somehow I managed not to pee my pants. We found our way out of the alley and never saw the kangaroo again. I found out later that I had a small fracture in one of my ribs from the kick so I couldn't be in the musical. How retarded were we to think that one of us could remember the right turns and the other could remember the left ones and we'd find the place?