Seeing New Things

Lately, I’ve taken to biking around the Charles, starting at the Anderson Footbridge (just by Fair Dunster on the North shore of the river) and looping all the way around the Science Museum and the Eliot Bridge (L and D on this map). Biking is a much better way of exercising around the river than running was. I haven’t really run by the Charles since freshman year, for several reasons: running wears me out, the shores of the Charles near Harvard are not particularly nice to look at, and I gained a significant amount of weight right after freshman year. I never really tried biking until now, though—I didn’t have a bike until a year ago, and then my trajectory was almost always northward: to the train at Porter, to Clayton’s apartment near there, to Mary’s apartment by Inman. And my bike was out of commission pretty early on—I only finally got it fixed this month. My first day out I noticed something that I hadn’t ever quite seen before. Boston, it’s well-known, is the City on the Hill. But I never actually realized that you can see the hill. Biking down the Charles on the Cambridge shore, I looked over, did a little double-take, and discovered that, yes, in fact, you can see it, all of the brick buildings of Beacon Hill pushing in toward each other and up to the golden-capped pinnacle of the State House (sort of like this, only with a bunch of skyscrapers behind it).

Well, I thought, there it is.

I started this post a while ago, and since then, CRISIS! One of the higher ups at the A.R.T. mistook our opening date to be the start of our residency in the theater (even though we put in production forms with our show dates in weeks ago) and has allowed the A.R.T. mainstage production that’s in build right now to overtake the Ex. This is not good. We will be able to start build in the Ag, but it’s still Not Good.

I will be going into the trenches tomorrow to figure out how to get us out of this mess, and will report from the field with updates.