Thousand Thousand Slimy

How I long to return to the graveyard:  not the words of a misanthrope or exhausted vampire at all.  See frogma’s gallery here.  She has both graveyard and lifeyard pics of ships, as well as one of tugster afloat.

But for now, this is the final weekend to see Polybe + Seats production of A Thousand Thousand Slimy Things performed at the Waterfront Museum and Show Boat Barge, a sixth boro treasure featured numerous times before sometimes referred to as Lehigh Valley 79.

Final weekend for the play:  see a full review of the play here from the Brooklyn Rail.

For my part:  I bought a pair of tickets because I was intrigued by the following mixture:  the real-life setting of Weeki Wachee Springs State Park (WWSSP) and

its struggle to remain financially viable as a roadside attraction featuring mermaids  (Click here to see the real WWSSP mermaid roster.),  and

spacey electronic music and wild costuming inside the exquisite barge built in 1914, and

the rich language of Samuel Taylor Coleridge   “Alone, alone, all, all alone,    Alone on a wide wide sea!   And never a saint took pity on     My soul in agony.
The many men, so beautiful!    And they all dead did lie;      And a thousand thousand slimy things Lived on; and so did I.”   along with a smattering of Herman Melville, Rachel Carson, and Henrik Ibsen‘s Lady from the Sea, and

creative staging using objet-trouves of the very material that makes up the North Pacific gyre as studied by Charles J. Moore‘s Algalita Marine Research Foundation, and a crazed solitaire traveling on an iceberg named Jake, and

superb dancing and line delivery, and

what more can I say about the performance other than that it mesmerized me with 90 minutes of magic!  See a trailer and buy tickets here.

And after it was over, I got a glimpse of Rich Samuelson’s show called “Tugboats and Waterfront Scenes.”  Artist’s reception is on the barge Saturday, May 22 from 3 til 7.

And it’s all in Red Hook, historic port of yore.  And if you can linger near the barge, go across the street to

Sunny’s Bar and relax.  Believe it or not . . . a cobblestone street in NYC where grass grows between the stones!

And remember . . . the mermaids of Coney Island will come ashore and parade in just over six weeks.    You know who you are . . . keep that Saturday free.

All fotos, Will Van Dorp . . . who needs to learn to take better indoor shots without a flash.  :[

Here’s a previous post showing the interior of Lehigh 79.

Unrelated:  Here’s the info for Working Harbor Committee‘s first tour.