Seeing Several Shows in Salt City

Today was the first city exploration day of the trip, and it set a high bar that is going to be tough to beat. I mean right off the bat, going from waking up to having a McDonald's hash-brown in under 4 minutes is already pretty peak.

But after that euphoric experience I had some computer work to get done. So I sneaked my two huge battery banks into a coffee shop and hunkered down for about 4 hours.

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Part of that time was spent researching things to do in Salt Lake City, and boy howdy did I get lucky. There happened to be a Great Salt Lake Theater Fringe Festival going on this weekend. I also learned that a signature food of Salt Lake City is a pastrami burger, so I indulged in a 8/10 burger and washed it down with some signature 3/10 Utah dirty soda. (Sorry Swig, it was just not doing it for me. It was like drinking liquid cotton candy)

After a short and scorching walk down a hip neighborhood of SLC; featuring a giant whale and getting turned away from a cat cafe for being a dog person, I made my way towards the first show of the Fringe Festival.

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Show 1: The Variants - A show about an adult family's experience during lock down. Very fun premise and execution of showing a family of 4's Zoom calls. Plus being on Zoom meant each of the actors got to hold a laptop or ipad the whole time, which I am sure helped the actors 'learn' their lines. 50 minute of great acting, especially by the 70 year old mother, and exploring the tension when beliefs and values held by one member of the family doesn't match with the rest.

Show 2: To Be Frank - Yo, my fellow LT Theater kids: It was just Too Much Light Makes the Baby go Blind! It was directly inspired by the Neo-Futurists (the creators of Too Much Light) and featured 25 independently written ~2 minute bits that were performed in a random order by numbers being called out by the office. Made me jealous that I wasn't up on stage with them, reminded me of very found times.

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Show 3: Dramapocalypse - A non-descript suburban high school theater council get trapped in the prop closet after one of the characters says "Macbeth" while in the theater. The ghost of Willy Shakes shows up and threatens to kill all of them if the one who said the name of the Scottish play doesn't fess up. It was 50 minutes of me laughing my ass off every time the Jock turned Thespian character opened his mouth. A very well written, blocked, and performed play. I still am not sure if those actors were actual high schoolers or not, they embodied the awkward theater kid energy so well. 11/10

I ended the night by trying to raise my home bartender skill by going to the highest rated cocktail lounge in the city. On the menu was a cocktail made with Malort. And if you've never had Malort before: it is a spirit made from wormwood, and it tastes exactly as appetizing as the word "wormwood". But somehow despite the handicap, Clark served me a wonderful drink. I also had a nice chat with a fellow Dallasite, who used to live in The Village Gate (my previous apartment complex).

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Fun Fact: The Village Gate was the home to the Dallas nurse who treated patient 0 for Ebola in the US, and later contracted it herself, making her patient 1. I found a Walmart parking lot and called it a night.

TLDR: Once a theater kid always a theater kid.