Treat Yourself to a Rustico

So I will let you in on a little secret. Marya and I are actually on the Isle of Islay in Scotland, where we've toured three whiskey distilleries and one brewery. We just checked into a swell hostel after 3 rainy days of camping, took our first showers of the week, and washed our clothes. We have not eaten dinner yet, so forgive me if I wander a bit in this blog. It's the single malt talking.

So! After leaving Austria, Marya and I made a brief but exceedingly lovely stop in Milan, Italy for an art museum and a two course Italian meal, and then swooped into Verscio, Switzerland. Verscio is a tiny mountain town in the Italian speaking part of Switzerland. It is the home of the Dimitri School of physical theater (NOT a clown school!) and, for the last two years, of our friend David Melendy. (NOT a clown! Though I did meet him in clown school in SF. And he was a clown on Circus Bella for a year. And he is going to be the “character” on Circus Monte next year... ok, he might be a clown.) Anyway, we are swooping into Verscio to visit our old buddy David. To continue the tradition of transcribing text messages, I present you with the full transcript of our texted directions:

So, there's only one main road in Verscio and you'll be on it for sure when coming from Locarno. The Verscio piazza will be on the right, it's small. Post office, fountain, closed pizzeria, scuola dimitri all located here. Find Perri's Panetteria on the corner next to the street. Walk up the tiny alleyway Caraa di Leoi. First left into “courtyard” with solid stone/grape awning picnic table. Find door beneath balcony with many bikes in front. My house! Good luck

We got about as far as the picnic table before we were greeted by friendly voices calling out, “American friends of David!” Yeah, Verscio is not huge... We had a tearful reunion with David and for the next four days, we lived the high life of a recent graduate of clown schoo.. Ah, no, I mean theater school.

David and his lovely housemates really showed us a good time. They hooked us up with some free tickets to see a couple of shows at the Teatro Dimitri, including a really nice performance by this year's graduating class. David led us on an expedition into the “magic valley” where we took a long hike, following directions from a map that encouraged us to “Give yourself a rustico!” We jumped from a 30 foot high cliff into the crystal clear water (OK David wasn't there for that, but he was there in spirit.) And before we knew it, it was time to leave the beautiful sleepy mountain town of Verscio and head up to Lenzburg in the German speaking part of Switzerland, where we were engaged for a weekend festival.

We hiked up to a church above Verscio.

Handstands in David's front yard.

On our walk in the magic valley

A town we reached on our walk.

Marya reads Bridget Jones's Diary to prepare for England.

Lenzburg is a smallish town with a cute little pedestrian Old Town (big surprise there!) We were put up in a rather nice little hotel very close to the center and the festival organizers turned out to be very friendly and rather, well, organized. We were happy to be reunited with our performing buddies from Hamberg, the Fire Fairies (which sounds cooler in German) and with Tina Green (aka Emma, from Australia) and The Sideshow Charlatans (now accompanied by their Direwolf of a dog.)

Another highlight was encountering some people from my early performing days in Boston. (I used to do a juggling and tall unicycle style street show in Boston when I was about 16.) We ran into Alkazam, who still lives and works in Boston, and met Laura Dilletante, a stunning accordionista and vocalist from Germany who happens to be dating Brendan The Pretty Good, who was a friend of mine in Boston 10 years ago. Street theater is a pretty small world.

We had some really nice shows in Lenzburg, though the crowds were generally on the small side for the whole festival (Maybe because it was about 100 fricken degrees.) Marya and I also had the honor of receiving our first award. The critics judged us to be the 4^th best show at the festival. It was nice to be recognized, but we both felt a little bit bad about the way the judging was conducted. If you happened to have a bad spot or a bad time when the judges were there to watch your show, you were out of luck. Also, what do these judges know about what makes a good street show? I felt they favored the big, formulaic shows over interesting or unique shows. In general, I don't think I am a fan of competition in street festivals. We took the money anyways.

After Lenzburg, we made a quick side trip up to a weird little town in Germany where we ate Subway sandwiches and convinced a bank to convert all our Euro coins into bills (because you can't change coins at a currency exchange, only bills, and we had 50 pounds of Euro coins threatening to come with us to Scotland...). Success!

Then we zipped down to Zurich for a nice day of site seeing, camping, car cleaning and drinking wine in the park. We unceremoniously dumped our faithful friend Little Pepper Pilkington in the hands of some random guy at the Zurich International Airport who claimed to be from Renault, and boarded our British airways flight to Edinburgh. English speaking world, we go there! I mean, uh, here we come!

Zurich. We saw some beautiful stained glass windows made by Chagall and tried to hide from the heat.