Shortly after I arrived here in Portland, Ore., for the current run of Ben Franklin: Unplugged at Portland Center Stage (through Nov. 22), I wandered off during a break in search of coffee-making equipment. (I hadn’t brought my Melitta stuff from Berkeley.) At the popular Stumptown Coffee Roasters I became entranced with the idea of … Read more
In the city of Kochi, along the shore of the Arabian Sea, fishermen are famed for using age-old techniques derived from China (and, I learned, from Portugal as well). Encouraged by Ragini Gupta of the U.S. Consulate to check out these fellows (despite my exhaustion on that busy day), I headed toward the array of … Read more
Earlier in this trip (I’m writing to you from Mumbai, the fourth of six cities in this India tour), when we were in Chennai, one of our hosts, Ratna Mukherjee of the U.S. Consulate, woke us relatively early so we could visit the famous Kapaleeshwarar Temple. Outside there is a vestibule where everyone takes off … Read more
This was really fun! I was conducting a storytelling workshop with a group of theater students in Bangalore — in the lobby of the magnificent Ranga Shankara theater, where I had performed Citizen Josh the night before — and one of the students mentioned that she’d had to give a presentation on the evolution of … Read more
Here’s a little video from a workshop I conducted with theater students at a public university in the southern Indian state of Kerala. They had first served lunch to me and my stage manager, Bob, and had laughed a lot over my inability to pick up their style of eating. You mix the rice, at … Read more