HighWaterLine

All gone in a puff of smoke (or car emissions)

A number of people have asked me what I feel about the fact that the line is gone so quickly. Admittedly, mostly I am just fascinated by the changes that the line undergoes as traffic (cars, buses, foot, bike, strollers, etc) passes over it. As a car goes through it, a puff of chalk rises in the air, and the chalk splats into a star. The bigger the car, the bigger the puff of chalk and the larger the smear of the star. The car also gets marked with some blue on its tires. It’s always interesting to retrace the path of lines drawn throughout the day.

But sometimes, just every once in a while its kind of sad. I stood on the island in the middle of the 8 lane (yeh, 8 ) Ocean Parkway where it intersects with the Belt Parkway and watched as the cars rapidly deteriorated the line. And I thought about all the work that has gone into the project (the almost 11 months of planning) the long hours of writing grant applications, the physical aspects of moving the bags & buckets of chalk. The time spent mixing the pigment and chalk. The mapping of the line. And, then, in a puff it is gone. Most frequently erased by one of the very things which is the reason for its existence. That can be sad.

But that’s the kind of existence that any performance has, there are months or years of planning, writing, building, rehearsing, promoting, and it’s over in sometimes a matter of a few days. The exhilaration of the performance is the reward. And the impact on the audience is the lasting impression.