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Because I was telling in 90 minutes a story that unfolded over years, I had to skip a lot of stuff in Life in a Box, whole episodes that someday maybe someone will excavate in the Y’all archives (which will be available to researchers soon! I’ll let you know). The film goes straight from our decision to break up into a wistful and sad ending sequence. In reality it was about 6 fairly traumatic months of unraveling, with the Edinburgh festival near the end of it.
Every August, coverage of the festival brings it all back. I remember how beautiful Edinburgh was, how much I loved every trip to Scotland with Y’all, and how exciting it was to see so much cool theater day after day. It’s pretty thrilling. I think I’d love to go again, but as a theater-lover, without the pressure. But I wonder if it would bring back too many painful memories for me to enjoy it in the moment, all these years later.
I won’t go into a lot of detail here, but by August Jay and I and Roger weren’t talking much to each other. It wasn’t angry silence. We spent a lot of time apart, but also together. There was love, but it was also just so very very sad, and we were trying to get through the days in whatever way we could. And then doing our show every day, which was all about our love and our big dreams, knowing that in our real lives we’d given up our dreams, that it was all winding down. (The theater itself was a large high-ceilinged classroom in an old school, completely shrouded in black and dark blue velvet curtains that sucked the sound and light and life itself out of the room—even with house lights it was so dim you had to squint to find your way in and out. You can’t imagine a more cheerless space.)
Early on, we were invited to perform in a sort of late night variety show in a bar, where people would do a bit of their act to try to create buzz and get audiences. The competition for attention at the festival is fierce. As I remember, we sang Fancy Pants, a fast, funny song that our audiences loved, but Jay was so wound up he took it like twice as fast as usual. I couldn’t keep up with him, and for whole stretches of the song, his downbeat was my upbeat. It was the most intense, surreal, terrifying 2 minutes I’ve ever spent on a stage. And it didn’t work. Our show ran all month, I think 5 or 6 shows a week, and we never had more than 6 or 8 people in the audience and that was a good house. Usually it was more like 1 or 2. I’m not exaggerating. It was brutal.
Our plan was to stay together for the rest of the year—we had gigs booked well into the fall—but in Edinburgh we decided to make our New York show in September a farewell show, and to do our last performance on a live radio program in Ithaca which was in September I think, maybe early October, and cancel everything on the calendar after that.
