Script

A Broadway theater actor does eight shows a week, Tuesday night through Saturday, with a matinee on both weekend days.  And yet, somehow, they great ones keep it fresh, as if they’re saying their lines for the first time, every time.

A schoolteacher typically teaches the same subject, year after year, same content, same questions, September to June throughout their entire career.  And yet somehow, the best educators make their subject matter come alive no matter how many times they’ve covered it before.

And pity the poor IT help desk person: how many times are they asked the exact same question from another person with the very same computer problem they just solved moments before for someone else?  And yet, somehow, the really helpful ones manage not to be snide when suggesting that the offending CPU be powered off and on just in case.

The same sort of principle applies when it comes to Thursday night rides.  

After all, you may be following a route followed many a time before, complete with the requisite spin around the Seattle Center “ghettodrome,” a spin up to the nearby parking garage rooftop pea patch, the standard massing up by Seattle’s fanciest restaurant and the usual sunset crossing of the scary bridge that’s way less scary en masse, but even while doing so, it’s important to find new wrinkles that make the usual unusual, like riding higher than ever before in the bowl of the fountain, or taking a more roundabout route to the top of the parking structure than is typical, or for once, not spreading out into a long thin line, but rather, staying pretty packed together as you cross over Fremont from above.

And never before was it that if Derrick don’t come to the ride, the ride comes to Derrick, the result of which was an oft-visited firepit hosting a blaze started in a way it never is anymore.

And what’s old is new all over again.