I am the seagull

This is so friggin weird.

Over the last month, I've been going to rehersals of ART's latest production: Anton Chekhov's The Seagull. My Mom purchased this package at auction where she and a friend (or son) could go see the process from start to finish of staging this brand new translation. For those who don't know, the play takes its name from a scene where the young male lead kills a gull for no reason and gives it to the girl he loves. Note to self: Girls don't like dead birds.

For me, this whole process has been fascinating and has reinvigorated me with the love of theater (re?) I had in high school. It's been a bigger help that I've befriended the director Jon Kretzu, who is a little nuts and a lot of fun.

What I'm building up to here is this: The play opened Friday night and I went to see it. And here, Sunday morning there is a dead seagull that has apparently just fallen out of the sky and landed in my work parking lot.

Bizzare.

It's easy to forget how light birds must be. This gull looked so solid just lying there, almost like it was glued to the ground or weighed down as if all organs and muscles turn to lead in death. But when I picked it up (most companies don't like dead things in their parking lots. Discourages spending.) it was so light I dropped it out of shock. I obviously had my American Beauty moment taking pictures of it. Who am I to let that bizzare coincidence pass?

You know, this brings to mind an incident from last summer where I chanced upon a number of smaller bird corpses along Legacy Hospital in NW. There were four of them within a block, similarly dead with no sign as to why. Is this a bad sign for industrial air quality? I though bird flu was limited to the land dwelling avians, but perhaps... Let's not think of it.

Thank you for reading.