Dear Dave,
I so enjoy receiving your emails and reading about my classmates from West High. Everyone’s lives have been so interesting! Over Thanksgiving my son Robbie and I visited my parents in Iowa City. It was a glorious late fall weekend: blue skies and the last colorful leaves floating down. Iowa City seems more sane, and beautiful each time that I visit.
Though I am still in Florida teaching at the FSU/Asolo conservatory in Sarasota, this last year has also taken me to Russia where I performed a play about Anton Chekhov and the women in his life and to Vermont where I taught Eginton Alignment, and Acting, with NYC’s Atlantic Theater Company School, and to New Orleans, where I presented by work in an invited conference at the American Theater in Higher Education national conference.
The play was performed at an international festival held at the Volkov Theater, which is the oldest professional theater in Russia, located in Yaraslavl, and then in St. Petersburg at the Dramatic Arts Academy. It was a wonderful experience. My son came too, and one of the highlights of the trip for both of us was a trip to the Trogsky Monastery, which dates to the 1300s. We were given a tour of important icons by one of the nuns, who is also a published poet, and lunch in the refectory. The monastery was returned to the Russian Orthodox in 1998, in ruins, but nuns and townspeople restored it and it is now home to over 100 nuns. Icons were returned from museums both in Russia and abroad. The monastery is completely self sufficient, all food and necessities are produced by the nuns. We also took two night trains, second class, to and from Moscow. Robbie liked the train a lot, and it was fun. The berths are bigger than on American or European trains and are made up with linens. At the end of each car there is still a samovar, and a car guard. I think Robbie’s favorite part of the trip was hanging out at the Volkov theater, in the dressing rooms and in the company’s canteen, and also, going to buy food all by himself in St. Petersburg. He enjoyed learning the cyrillic alphabet, too.
So, I am still adventuring… but looking forward to slowing down, too.
Again, I so enjoy receiving your emails…
all best,
Margaret Eginton