Tapping

I stepped outside my studio tonight, about a pot and half deep into a coffee overdose, to find a steady drumming noise rattling around the stadium. At the top of the bleachers on the home side dances a lone man in the middle of the night. It's always odd to find people in Santa Barbara behaving outside the expected. We get a lot of runners up and down the stadium steps, but this guy was just tap dancing. In proper shoes atop the platform used by the occasional television crew when they cover soccer games here. There was a lone mercury flood hanging just over his shoulder and he was making the most beautiful rhythms. Pa-tat pa-tat, clickety clickety clickety, then he would jump from the platform and rattle around the metal bleachers and stairways kicking and tapping and making the whole stadium ring. Simply fantastic. I am about three weeks into a video project that should have taken me one, and I needed the break, I needed the moment of outside, I needed to be pulled from my own head and my own work. This guy was doing his own work and pushing himself. The winds tonight are blowing up the coast and through our stadium at a good 35 mph, but he just kept kicking and rattling. Smiles for miles.