Okay. Amargosa Opera House and Hotel. How to describe this place?
Marta Beckett was a ballet dancer in New York. Not a prima ballerina, she was in the corps de ballet; she was too tall.
She had other talents - she was a painter, and a choreographer, with ideas for staging and writing and costuming and everything else.
Somehow, she ended up with her husband having a tire fixed in Death Valley Junction, and spotting a derelict compound that was built and used by a borax company. It had rooms, a dormitory, kitchen facilities - and a theater.
Martha and her husband moved into it. She renovated the theater, painted it beautifully, and gave solo and then duo performances of pieces she had written, for years, with or without audience.
The place is beautiful - semi-derelict still, with these surprising bits of trompe l'oeil around every corner. Our room has a headboard painted onto the wall, and cherubs. The plaster has chipped everywhere; there is rusted machinery and peeling paint and disused sections and cracked windows. It looks like the middle of nowhere in the middle of nowhere, and it is. But here an amazing woman lived a full and fulfilled life, dancing, as she says, on sand.
She just did it.
Tomorrow: up before dawn (BEFORE FIVE-THIRTY!!) to head out through Death Valley, and hopefully catch sunrise at Zabriski Point.
No comments:
Post a Comment