THE PROMPT
The lovely Margaret Malone and Kathleen Lane invited me to come as an artist to SHARE recently. Previously, I had attended their showcase and been quite overwhelmed by the amount of cool stuff in progress around the space. Mark Russell was nice enough to be my plus one, but when we got there, we discovered the happy accident that actually the regular SHARE is a participant-only space. For two hours, everyone in the room is creating. You get the prompt when you come in the door, which this time was FORCE, and you just go. Mark is a writer too after all, so we decided to collaborate.
Our process was that we started from the idea about force as a rule or change forcing you to do something. Mark began to write satirical airport rules so I started to think of a narrative that would play off of the airport setting, and then we juxtaposed the two pieces without looking at what each other were writing.
THE PIECE
Italics for Mark’s piece, regular font for mine.
The night before I went home to the US, Matt and I got to the Budapest airport completely out of cash. It was a boxy white space with high ceilings and concrete pillars and looked Communist. It looked like it would have rules. We had enough cash to stay in a hostel when we got to town but had decided it would be more fun to stay up all night drinking, so now we had to sleep in the airport. It’s the kind of thing you do when you’re not really getting along. Going out had been Matt’s idea but got no argument from me. If I held a plastic cup of red wine and coke in a dark cellar bar blasting the Pink Floyd, it was easier somehow to ignore the way his brown eyes never seemed to meet mine, the way he always seemed to be looking away from me.
On behalf of the Federal Aviation Administration, welcome to the United States. Please remove any metallic objects, belts, electronic devices, toiletries, shoes or prosthetic limbs and place them in the eight ounce cup provided to your left. Please note that as part of the new American Culture Preservation Initiative, a fine of forty-eight dollars will be assessed on anyone discussing the Broadway production of Spiderman, sporting a tribal armband tattoo or reading a Harry Potter book if you are over the age of thirteen. I mean, really people.