Just finished enjoying some lovely weather in College Station, Texas, where GTC Dramatic Dialogues performed at Texas A&M’s main campus on Monday night. We returned just in time for some lovely weather here in Minneapolis yesterday.

The show was the “Sex & Drugs” show, which is a hybrid of our drug & alcohol show and our newly revamped sex-related show. Because the vast majority of our shows lately have been the diversity-focused “Strange Like Me,” I hadn’t done some of those scenes in ages. None of us had. In fact, Damian performed in the date-rape scene for the very first time Monday night. That role is usually mine or Ben’s, but it’s becoming a trend for the GTC actors to start learning each other’s parts. Sitting backstage, listening to Damian speak my lines opposite Jen, I felt rather cuckolded. The show was good, and the school treated us very well, but it was a tiny audience, most of whom were a little aloof.

Between our arrival at DFW and our show at College Station, we decided to stop for lunch in the Dallas area. Thinking back to my previous Dallas experience, I said, “When I was here in 2003 for a wedding and a Peter Gabriel concert, I ate at a really good little Haitian restaurant in a strip mall in a more residential area. The gumbo was fantastic. We should go there!” I’m a very helpful person to have on tour, you should know.

We ended up getting mediocre barbecue at a place we thought was promising — a little dive in Red Oak called “Bubba Que.” The girl at the counter was really cute and friendly, and there was a singing deer head on the wall (which thoroughly entertained a father and his young sons), but the food itself came in a distant third to these selling points. 

In the interest of continuing our streak of dining at restaurants with truly unsettling names, we had our post-show dinner here:

Fish Daddy’s. The sound of that just makes your mouth water, doesn’t it?

Jen, Damian, and I each ordered the crawfish combo, which, despite the tiny size of the individual crawfish, was a huge pile of food. In my enthusiasm about the opportunity to eat crawfish, I neglected to ask where they came from. See, some places use imported, frozen Chinese crawfish, which, as a Louisiana native interested in supporting Louisiana’s economy, is something I oppose.

The next morning, our boss Michael’s flight departed well before ours did, but the rental car was his, so we had no choice but to arrive at DFW extremely early. Jen, Damian, and I had about three hours to kill at the airport, which we did handily. Two gate changes helped pass the time. Jen lamented packing her poi in her checked luggage, because she could’ve spun them in the terminal, possibly even earning enough change from passersby to pay for lunch. (She’s learning how to spin poi for her next show, an all-female production of Titus Andronicus.)

On the way back to the airport, I noticed a billboard that said simply, “DFW is larger than the island of Manhattan.” That’s it. Was there some sort of anti-New York sentiment behind it? Were we supposed to congratulate Dallas on how big its airport is?

Nice work, Dallas. Your airport is huge. You win.

We still ran out of stuff to do there during our three-hour wait…which I don’t think happens in Manhattan.