My first car was a 1994 Honda Accord. My first boyfriend was a tall redheaded Romanian who smoked too much pot and didn’t like me very much.
 
My parents could have gotten me a car, or given me one of their old ones, but they didn’t. My dad said I needed to earn my own way in the world; this was a learning experience for me. He told me he would match whatever I saved and we would buy the car together. I earned something like $1,600 at my minimum wage deli job after school and on weekends, gave it to my dad, and he bought my little Honda from one of the ladies he worked with in New York.
 
It was so beautiful, this car. It was pinkish gray with dark maroon cloth interior and a radio and a tape deck, on which I played mix tapes with Joni Mitchell and Dave Matthews Band and The Smiths and Guster (pretty much an equal mix of respectable and embarrassing artists).
 
I bought feminist and anti-war and environmentalist bumper stickers and a fuzzy steering wheel cover and a leopard-print ball that was made to sit atop the antenna. I used the car as a canvas on which to paint my identity. It was the physical manifestation of who I believed my adolescent self to be.
 
My first boyfriend was originally my best friend’s boyfriend. She wasn’t that into him and I was crazy about him and I would flirt with him on AIM while they were together. When she finally dumped him, it was all I could do to wait a few weeks before I tried to make him mine. And I did, eventually.
 
We dated for a month. Pretty much as soon as he became my boyfriend, the interest started to dissipate. We had almost nothing in common. I told him we should break up over the phone and he said, “Yeah, I was going to dump you.” He was a real charmer.
 
When I went off to college, my brother drove my car to high school and to work and to see his friends. He drove it into the ground, being a teenage boy who hadn’t saved his money to buy it or lovingly decorated it with bumper stickers and antenna balls that defined him. He broke the driver’s side door handle and never got the oil changed and when I came back from college we would fight viciously about who was allowed to use it. He had a distinct lack of appreciation for the perfection that was this little Honda.
 
When my brother went off to college, my mom sold the Honda for $500 to a nice lady who, apparently, fraternized with some unsavory types and it was confiscated in a drug bust.
 
Both my first car and my first boyfriend were things I used as mirrors. I liked the boyfriend because through him I could be pretty and cool. I liked the car because it was my carefully constructed display of values. It made me feel pretty and cool, too.

But cars and boys do not make a person pretty and cool. And also, being pretty and cool are not that important! Having a boyfriend and a car did not make me kind or smart. But I was a teenager.
 
I didn’t know that the best reflection of my true self would ultimately be a short, brown-haired software engineer and a Kia Soul with a convertible infant-to-toddler car seat, a trunk that fits groceries and a stroller, and a towel that smells like a dog’s asshole on the back seat.  Nothing pretty or cool about it, but it’s perfectly me.

Jess wrote a play for three actors, but she added two additional characters: the cars. The cars in Hard and Fast: a love story are a huge part of the story and how to represent them onstage was the major challenge for me as the scenic designer for this production. We knew right away we didn’t need or want to have realistic cars onstage; instead we wanted to create something a little more abstract and flexible. That said, we still wanted to express the specific characters of these cars to the audience. The main cars in the show, the Austin Healey 3000 and the Chevy Fleetline, have distinct front-ends that really look like facial expressions.

My research for the design led me to the work of Damian Ortega, a visual artist who takes car parts and suspends them in space to create a floating, ghostly abstraction of the vehicle. [Images attached] Since our cars needed to be able to move around the space, I designed streamlined metal frames on wheels to suspend the parts rather than hanging them from above. I pared the cars down to their essential elements—things like headlights, grille, hubcaps, etc. The design for the rest of the space developed organically around the design of the cars.

Today was load-in for Hard and Fast: a love story at--the day the designers and technical people and actors and director and don't forget the playwright all move from the rehearsal space to the production's actual venue. In this case, we're at The Stanford Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts.

Hard and Fast: a love story is our first show of our second season, and today was like going home again because we're in the same space that we produced our first show ever, Turtles a year ago.

Hard and Fast: a love story, opens this Friday. Get your tickets by clicking on the button on the right.

See you in the theater.

I’ve been asked to write a blog post on car guys, which is a major theme in Jess Foster’s play, Hard and Fast: a love story, our upcoming production, and which I, admittedly, am not.  I don’t think I’ll ever own another car again. Now a truck, that’s different. Trucks are country songs and dogs and bottles of whiskey in the glove box. Trucks are good heaters on a winter’s night. Trucks are not caring what you throw in the bed, cause you can just hose it out when you get home. Trucks are not ever coming out of a store wondering where you parked your truck, cause you always park it in the far corner, with all the other trucks.

I’m on my second truck. Once a bright red, it’s now a faded and beat-up 1997 Ford F-150 Super Cab coming up on 200,000 miles, with a long bed and the biggest V8 Ford had at the time. It has more dents, dings, and scratches than a 50-year-old humpback has barnacles, and most of them weren’t put there by me. Assorted children, ex-wives, and wives have wrapped the bed around poles, minivans, and God knows what else. Once, my ex-wife backed her Volvo station wagon smack into its side.  Just broadsided it. What’d you do that for? I asked, though in the back of my mind I knew she had about ten good reasons for doing it. It didn’t hurt it, she said. There are three long scratches on the hood where I cleaned it off last winter with a snow shovel.

I love this truck, I once said to Jimmy Abdon, the mechanic who works on it in Quincy. I know you do, he replied, with traces of sadness and pity as he struggled to loosen a headlight frozen to the grill. You’re going to have to bury him in it, Jimmy said to my wife, who drives a hot little black Saab. Just about everything is rusted on tight or has rusted off. The spare tire damn near fell off when the bracket holding it against the gas tank rusted through. So I just slung the spare in the bed. It’s not worth stealing, so I feel safe about that. I use silver metal tape to patch up the running boards and fenders. I just keep layering it on until there’s more silver tape than there ever was original metal.

Nobody bothers you when you’re driving this old Ford. If I want to turn left I just ease through the intersection, and if I want to change lanes on the highway, I just hit the blinker and slide over. People get out of my way. Nobody behind you honks if you sit a second too long when the light turns green. I imagine people think you got a gun or something hidden under the seat somewhere. God knows what kind of outlaw would drive something that decrepit in broad daylight, they must be thinking, in plain sight of women and children. On nice days I roll down the windows and crank Gillian Welch or Mary Gauthier. Chris Knight or the Black Lillies.  John Prine.
 
You can have a lot of friends, if you want, when you drive a truck. I once saw a bumper sticker that read, Yes, this is my truck, and no, I won’t help you move. That pretty much sums up a truck guy, right there. I’ll tell you something else about truck guys: There’s a whole little secret world out there where we let each other make turns, give little nods to one other, inspect each other’s rigs. Mine may not be the prettiest, but it’s bought and paid for. It’s like seeing an old dog; they know I’m nursing this Ford along, keeping it alive as long as the engine can turn over on a cold morning, like they hope to do for theirs someday.