Excerpts from the Travel Journal: Day Seven--Charlecote AND DAVID TENNANT

[earlgreytea68]

The next day we drove back into Stratford to duck into the Internet café. We also tried to buy meat for the pot roast I was making at dinner, but the little store in town didn’t have it, nor did the toy store next door have any fun DW toys. FAIL. jlrpuck ducked in for coffee, which took forever, because they were not so into working quickly, then we drove to the bigger Tesco to buy the roast.

The plan was to have the roast as a Sunday dinner type of thing but our one-pound roast took hours to cook. We finally gave up on cooking it in the oven and stuck it in the microwave. Also, we had no salt. Turns out salt is pretty vital to work with. The best that can be said for the mashed potatoes is that they tasted like potatoes.

After dinner, jlrpuck and arctacuda were trying to do a load of laundry, a process that seems to take approximately seven weeks and three days in the UK. (We also had to keep boiling water to get hot water to wash dishes with. “It’s like living in Amish times!” I exclaimed. Btw, I am not a fan of those electric kettles. They’re very loud, and yet, when they’re done, they made the tiniest click. You’d never hear it unless you were right on top of it. It was impossible to leave water to boil in the kitchen and go out to the living room.) So we took a walk around the grounds.

The grounds are terrifyingly beautiful,

with a waterfall (or cascade)

and mill ponds.

We got up close to the pig-cow-goats (“Definitely not sheep,” proclaimed arctacuda) and to the deer. Did you know deer make a grunting noise? Well, they do. They also, in England, have these weird, swishy tails.

We walked along this path marked by deer’s antlers to St. Leonard’s, the small parish church where Judi Dench’s husband is actually buried.

After the walk, we decided that yes, we were going to do the stage door thing. It was a bit of an adventure getting out of Charlecote because some oblivious idiot was sitting in front of the gate blocking it, chatting on her cell phone. “Here’s where I go be an obnoxious American,” I remarked, getting out of the car to ask her to move.

We were absurdly early for the stage door, arriving before the play had even started. We did, however, find another great parking space. The parking on that street is right up against the wall, so arctacuda and I get out and stand on the sidewalk while jlrpuck parks. We were watching jlrpuck when some woman drove up, slowed to go around her, and shouted at me through her open window, “Idiots!” I was so stunned I couldn’t even react. Weird.

We killed some time wandering around the town, deciding that it looked as if it had good restaurants but would probably have too many tourists, then found out where DT signs autographs and settled down to wait.

We’d brought our Hamet programs thinking it would be a Hamlet night, but it was LLL. Thinking we might get non-DT cast members, we went and bought new LLL programs. And I have to give credit to the RSC. The LLL programs an the outside promotional posters for LLL are adorned with a stylized circle of dancing people. The poster you can buy at the RSC? Has DT on it. Way to move posters, RSC.

We waited hours, drinking tea and eating chocolate. It was cold, and it rained for a bit, but, as I commented, “Strange how I don’t notice the elements when I’m waiting for DT.” I sat and wrote fanfic, enjoying the irony. Although no DT characters appeared in the section of the sequel I wrote that night, which I’ll point out to you when I post it. Finally they set up the barriers and other people started arriving. I met a Stratford native who knows a scary amount about DT’s habits. I asked her how she liked Stratford, and she said she was sick of tourists and hated Shakespeare. She said she’d never seen a Shakespeare play until Tennant’s, and I understood anew what people mean when they say Tennant is introducing a whole new audience to Shakespeare. There were also a bunch of Australians there, and everyone wanted to know about the election. It’s so simple, so obvious, to everyone else. They don’t understand how anyone could vote for McCain. The whole abortion/gay marriage obsession is just beyond them. Nor do they really understand the full extent to which the U.S. is basically to separate countries at this point.

Eventually, someone came out the stage door: the bartender who’d served us at Hamlet. “I’m not famous,” he said, slipping past the barricade. “You can sign my program if you want,” I said, which was his opening. He remembered me immediately, that he’d forgotten to open the bottle of my friend’s interval drink (we were scattered along the barriers, so arctacuda was a little distance away from me. Or a chasm, depending on your pov.) He asked if I was excited to see DT. I said I was trying not to get my hopes up in case he didn’t show. “Oh, I suspect you won’t be disappointed in your encounter with DT,” he replied, and then told me that he’d served DT tea once and that he was very nice but quieter than he expected him to be. We chatted for a while longer, and he was disappointed to learn I had no future theater tickets. Arctacuda and jlrpuck said he was clearly leaning toward me and I should have gone for a drink with him.

Anyway, after he left, and the play ended, there was a mad dash of people who’d been at the play, then a handler came out and then, yes, David Tennant. He was dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt over another shirt, and he moved with the speed of a greyhound. It was almost comically clear he wanted the whole thing over with, and yet he was absurdly gracious and charming. “Thank you so much,” I said, as he scribbled his signature on my program. “Thank you for coming,” he replied, with his Scottish burr. I’d like to say he looked at me meaningfully but he’d already moved onto the next program. Someone told him his performance was better than Barrowman’s. “Oh, I know for a fact that’s not true,” he rejoined. “John’s performance in Love’s Labour’s Lost?” “No, Aladdin.” DT paused and made the DT eye-rolly face. RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME. “Well, you can’t compare the material!” “You didn’t come out last night!” someone shouted at him, accusingly. “I can’t come out every night!” he protested. “I need a break sometimes!” In his haste, he was signing the darkest part of everything. “Can you sign the white part?” someone asked him, and he actually laughed, “I’ve already scribbled on the black part,” before obliging. And then it was over, and he waved and dashed back inside.

I now firmly believe that DT would not have signed autographs that night if we had not dramatically sat outside for three hours in the cold. He was clearly tired, and was doing it as quickly as possible, and the rumor is Georgia was in town, too. The RSC staff must have been talking about the three pathetic American girls—why else would the bartender have come out that door, with his cryptic message? He was the only person to exit that way until Tennant made his appearance. So yes, I think DT heard of me and pitied me.

We went home on the most tremendous DT high, and made nachos and drank wine while watching Ferris Bueller, which we’d bought during one of our market trips out of desperation. I was sexy-drunk and completely scattered and I think I woke up hungover on DT. (Hey, it’s possible! As I said to jlrpuck and arctacuda, you kind of wish he hadn’t turned out to be exactly as you’d imagined. But he was. And, seeing how his life is, I’m amazed he stays so good-humored. It’s weird living in America, because you can’t really grasp DT’s true celebrity. Here’s a man whose fame is so huge he apparently wears disguises to move around Stratford and needs a bodyguard to protect him from the press of fangirls desperate to see him. And no one in America has any idea who he is.)

Comments

[earlgreytea68.livejournal.com]

Wellllll, I don't know if he's a workaholic. Or maybe he is. I actually think he loves being an actor, I think it's the stuff that comes with being an actor--like the squeeing fangirls at stage doors--that really exhausts him.