Weekend in Colorado

Following closely on the heels of my trip to Seattle, I flew out to Colorado for some meetings at the US Olympic Committee.  The USOC is based in Colorado Springs, which is only an hour south of Denver.  Naturally I took advantage of the adjacent weekend to explore the area and play with Amanda and some of her friends.  It was great to see her and enjoy the mountains in early spring.
 

Dawn over the plains
(it's all downhill from here to the Mississippi)

I spent most of Saturday with Amanda in Denver.  We drove around town so she could introduce me to all the cool neighborhoods, and we stopped for brunch/lunch at tiny restaurant called Bang!  We split a French toast and finished off with more sensible lunch fare. 

Orange and cinnamon French toast with fresh fruit

cobb salad

the sign speaks for itself

After visiting the neighborhoods, Amanda and I met up with her sister Rachel and a group of Amanda's friends for dinner and a movie.  We saw Monuments Men at the Alamo theater and then (per usual) talked for way too long outside in the freezing cole parking lot.  It was good to see Rachel again, and I enjoyed meeting Amanda's friends after hearing so much about them over the years -- it almost felt like I already knew them.  Needless to say, this was a group of smart, interesting women with whom I'd definitely want to hang out with more if I ever ended up in Denver on a longer-term basis (and even if I don't). 

On Sunday I was back in Colorado Springs for my flight home -- but the flight didn't leave until mid-afternoon, so I had time to explore Nature. 

Pikes Peak
I decided to drive to the top

Sadly, the road was closed due to snow at about 11,440 feet elevation.
Never made it all the way to the 14,000 foot summit.

Views from the turn-around point.

View of Colorado Springs from the foothills.

During my meetings with folks at the US Olympic Committee I asked them if there was anything I should do/see while I was in town.  Inevitably the response included something like this:

"The Incline.  You should definitely hike up the Incline.  Except, wait.  You're from the East Coast, so you'll probably die.  Maybe just drive around."

Of course this meant that the first thing I did after getting down from Pikes Peak was to climb the Incline at Manitou Springs.  Originally a gondola ran from the center of town at Manitou Springs to the top of a nearby hill.  Now, with the gondola gone, it's essentially an insane staircase of doom up which all the locals run/climb/stagger on sunny weekend mornings. 

The trail goes straight up the mountain,
climbing 2,000 vertical feet in 0.88 miles

I made it to the top in a respectable 40 minutes (the only person who passed me was
an insanely fit Air Force cadet).  It was definitely not the easiest thing I've ever done.
About 2/3rds of the way up I realized that if I lived in this town I would quickly be
in incredible shape.

The rest of the story:  My calves were in pain and agony for the next four days.

Weekend in Seattle

The other day I flew out to Seattle for some meetings at Amazon and managed to tack on a day after the meetings to explore the town.  I hadn't been to Seattle since I was in high school, and I'd forgotten what a cool place it is.  The first day, when I was in meetings, was gorgeous -- sunny and warm -- and the next day, when I was wandering around, was typically cold and rainy.  But I embraced the weather with what I assumed to be Northwestern equanimity and had a great time.
 

The view from my hotel room

At the top of the hill, in Volunteer Park

The very cool Seattle Public Library
(designed by Koolhaas)

The Seattle waterfront

Seattle Olympic Sculpture Park

Space Needle

Brunch at Tilikum Place Cafe
(brioche French toast with plum compote and sorghum whipped cream,
with a side of bacon and fresh-squeezed grapefruit juice)

The Chihuly glass museum

boats with blown-glass balls

this sea-themed tower of blown-glass was probably 20 feet tall

The Frank Gehry-designed EMI Museum
(in which is also housed the Sci-Fi Museum)

"As you wish!"
The Princess Bride's wedding dress
and Westley's Dread Pirate Roberts costume

"Exterminate!"
A dalek from the original Doctor Who series

Seattle's monorail connects the Space Needle complex to downtown;
a convenient way to get back to the hotel.

Shakespeare, deep in the heart of Virginia

One of the problems with trying to see all of Shakespeare's plays performed is that some of them are, well, kind of weird and not all that good (and may not have been written by him in the first place) -- and as a result they are rarely performed. 

Take Timon of Athens, for example.  Shakespeare's authorship is dubious and the plot fairly flat:  Timon starts off as a wealthy man who lives way beyond his means and uses lavish gifts to establish an uneasy hierarchy between himself and his "friends".  Eventually his debts catch up to him, his creditors take everything, and he ends his days in the wilderness raging misanthropically against humanity.  (He also somehow manages to bury himself and erect an inscribed tombstone after he dies.) 

Some of the scholarly articles that I found in my Shakespeare anthologies were able to tease out some interesting themes about the relationship between love and money, and to situate the play in a historical context where the rising mercantile economy in England was uneasily replacing medieval systems of personal loyalty with more legalistic mechanisms for money-lending.  But at the end of the day, it's just not that great of a play.  No one performs it, and no one really wants to see it -- except, of course, for the crazies like Melanie and I who do want to see it.

Fortunately for us, we aren't the only crazies, and some of those crazies actually have access to actors and a stage and enough of a budget to bring the play to life. 

The American Shakespeare Center is a small Shakespeare company in Staunton (rhymes with Scranton), Virginia, a tiny town in the Shenandoah Valley about 2.5 hours from DC.  For some mysterious reason, they've got a marvelous theatre that is (they claim) the only full reconstruction of the Blackfriars Theatre where Shakespeare's company performed back in the day.  An unassuming building from the outside, the inside is very cool:

In addition to their theatre, the ASC also has a program designed to promote the performance of random Shakespeare plays that otherwise would never be performed.  Each year they pull together a company of actors and tell them to self-direct themselves in one of these plays with only a couple days' rehearsal and essentially no budget.  It makes for rough-and-tumble theater (we were warned  at the outset that there might be "textual fluidity" -- a line prompter (never used) sat off in the wings waiting for slippage...) but gives actors the chance to peform, and audiences the chance to see, plays that they otherwise would never be able to perform or see.  In fact, they acknowledged as much in their pre-show announcements:  "This is probably the only time you'll ever see this play," they said. "We hope you enjoy it!"

And we did enjoy it -- perhaps for no other reason than we'd driven 2.5 hours to see it and knew that, at the end of the day, we'd be able to cross it off our list.