The advice I was given was to “come with many possibilities”. However, I think I didn’t have enough mental space to remember that I should also have come ready for anything.
The major unexpected element was that there was no one else in costume except my husband and all the mannequins. What was even more remarkable, and instructive on the Wilmington state of mind, was that each person got a goody bag with a mask in it. Only one person wore it, until much later in the evening and the drinks had been flowing copiously. I didn’t even realize that folks had a mask until later that evening when I had a chance to peruse the contents of my bag. Ergo there was none of the true element of Mardi Gras. The mood was much more of an office holiday party, where everyone is on their best behavior because the president of the company is there.
The major victory I think, was that I didn’t let all of the obstacles crowding at me deter me from actually taking this first step. It was a very small baby step, since just as I was leaving to go to the event, I received a phone call from my father. My brother was with him and believed urgently that he needed to go to the hospital right away. It defied logic, but for some reason my father didn’t want to commit to going to the hospital, until I came to his house. The Mardi Gras event was just a few city blocks from the hospital. ay caramba!
Instead of going to the Mardi Gras as my primary destination, essentially I popped in at the Mardi Gras on the way to the hospital. So Columbine only had the hour or so that it would take for my brother to drive my father into the city. If that knowledge wasn’t distraction enough, the cell phone rang every 20 minutes. Make a note: one should not travel with a cell phone when doing improv street theater. It took many more phone calls to penetrate my father’s denial of the seriousness of his condition.
It was rather strange overall in the extreme - it didn’t take much to totally overwhelm me, and eventually I plopped on a bench and tried to become just another one of the stuffed MardiGras mannequins.
