This is the real secret of life — to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.
The stones are wet and the tide’s doing its thing through those organ pipes, some modernist’s fever dream of what happens when concrete meets the Bay’s restless mouth. I’m out here with Derek working sound, Lauren as the performer, Dylan’s costumes catching the wind, all of us breathing life back into dead words, fragments that survived because some medieval monk needed scratch paper or because fate’s a capricious bastard.
Sophocles wrote maybe 120 plays. We got seven. The rest? Gone. Burned, rotted, recycled, forgotten. But you found a piece, some ragged scrap about fate or hubris or the terrible weight of knowing, and Lauren’s speaking it at this bizarre acoustic monument where water becomes sound becomes something almost holy.
The Wave Organ doesn’t give a damn about your iambic pentameter. It’s gurgling and moaning with the Pacific’s rhythm, utterly indifferent to dramatic timing. Which is perfect, actually. Those Greek amphitheaters weren’t silent either. Wind off Aegean hillsides, birds, the shuffle of 15,000 bodies waiting to see what fresh horror the gods had cooked up.
Derek’s chasing the organ’s chaos with his mics. Lauren’s finding those Sophoclean moments when everything crystallizes into awful clarity. Dylan’s fabric moves like it knows something about tragedy. You’re all working words that maybe nobody’s spoken aloud in 2,400 years.
There’s something beautifully absurd about it. Performance as archaeology. Lauren’s voice against the tide’s voice. The fragment incomplete, the organ unpredictable, the fog rolling in like it owns the place. You’re not recreating anything. You can’t. The original’s dust. You’re making something new from the wreckage, right here where the city meets the water, where sound plays tricks, where ancient grief might echo weird and true through modern plumbing.