I Am So Popular: Dancing Trucks and Grilled Cheese Moments

“She makes good grilled cheese sandwiches,” he said.

Just remembering that, typing it up, makes me weepy all over again, so much does it resonate for me. Folks who did not grow up with an angry parent often just cannot connect with those of us who make proclamations, as I have for decades, like, “My dad just didn’t like me.”

I’m not here to try to convert the disbelievers, not today anyway. But I do want to share the one really good memory I have of my father and to tell you about a recent event that took me back, nearly forty years, to that moment.

Last week, every chance I had, I spread the word that Allison Orr, founder of Forklift Danceworks, was about to unleash her latest performance, The Trash Project. I first experienced the world of Orr last year when I reviewed SKATE: A Night at the Rink, a performance at a roller rink where she brought together passionate roller skaters and her dancers, offering an evening that was uplifting and nostalgic and just all around effing awesome without ever being cheesy. Orr is able to see the ballet in everyday life and then find a way to present her findings to the rest of us. Her gift goes way beyond dance— she understands something on a very intuitive level about connecting people from different walks of life and fostering a deep appreciation for things we might not otherwise pay attention to.

So when I heard about the Trash Project months ago, I put it on my calendar right away, predicting—rightfully but not surprisingly— that it would be one of the most magnificent performances of the year. Well, okay, I was off a little. I can now say, even with three months left, the Trash Project was the absolute best performance of 2009.

What Orr did this time was spend a year working with City of Austin Solid Waste Services workers. She rode their routes with them, interviewed them, and found the beauty in waste disposal. She then choreographed a performance, involving twenty-five sanitation employees and sixteen trucks— from street cleaners to trash trucks to recycling trucks to the truck that goes around picking up dead animals— that was offered up free, one night only, on the tarmac of the old airport, over at Austin Studios.

What a glorious, glorious evening. Despite the fact it poured rain most of the day, the show was on. And why not? Sanitation workers don’t get the day off when it rains. So what are the rest of us? A bunch of candyasses afraid of melting? Apparently not since they finally had to shut the gates and turn away a large and vocal bunch of latecomers begging to get in. There had to be at least a thousand folks out there, many sitting in puddles on the ground.

The rain, it turned out, just added to the show. It let up right at start time, with the darkening sky full of silvery clouds and the wet sheen of the tarmac adding drama as the lights of the big trucks reflected off the water, working in glorious tandem with lighting designer Stephen Pruitt’s pre-planned spotlights.

Graham Reynold’s stunning musical score, which incorporated insightful and touching interviews with the workers, kicked in and out rolled the trucks, seemingly from nowhere. This was when I started to cry. I was crying for all sorts of reasons. A big one was this: I have always held that trash collectors, nurses, and teachers should command the highest salaries in our country. These are the folks who do the hard and daily work that holds us together and keeps us going. Maybe Orr will work with the teachers and nurses in the future. Saturday, she did her best to showcase just what those folks who drag all of our shit away do, and how well they do it. And boy did she do a magnificent job of it.

The applause was near constant throughout the one-hour show. As well it should have been. After the opening, with all trucks and workers front and center, the performance broke down into individual pieces showcasing one type of truck or another. Mechanical can-lifting arms now transformed into something else entirely as they swept toward the darkening sky. Workers demonstrated not only deft skills at maneuvering cans and bags of trash and the ability to stop their trucks on a dime— they also revealed hidden talents: rapping, dancing, harmonica playing. At one point, they lined up and simultaneously demonstrated the hand signals for directing trucks to move forward, reverse, and stop. Can I say it again? The crowd went wild.

Perhaps most heart aching were the amplified recorded interviews with the worker whose job it is to retrieve deceased animals. Of his discovery of a little girl’s lost dog, and how he was able to offer a little bit of closure by letting her family know that he’d found the pup, recognizing it by its little pink collar.

In the end, the soggy audience leapt to its feet offering a sustained ovation, after which they swarmed the workers, posing for pictures in front of the trucks, thanking this too-often unthanked group for so much hard work. I asked one worker, the only woman out there, if she got a kick out of making us all come out in the rain. She just laughed and nodded.

But maybe my favorite moment— though it’s so hard to pinpoint just one—came post-performance, when I watched one worker’s children rush him and jump into his arms. He led them over to a big truck and honked the deafening horn, eliciting simultaneous winces and enormous grins.

Which got me thinking about that one happy memory I started to tell you about. I have this weird relationship in my head with trucks. My father was a truck driver. He started out driving on the road and eventually switched to working in the rail yards in Pennsylvania. I never got to go to work with him—as the only son of nine kids that was my brother’s special privilege. But as I understand it, my father worked, in all elements, lifting the truck trailers off of rail cars so that they could be hooked up to the cabs that would then drive the cargo-laden trailers to their destination. Whenever I am out driving long distance, surrounded by nothing but eighteen-wheelers on long stretches of interstate, the ghost of my father haunts me as I imagine all that might have been and all that was not.

But there was this one time. My grilled cheese moment. I was very little—Was it second grade? Fourth? I can’t recall precisely. My father showed up at the house one day at lunchtime. This was unheard of, as we lived in Jersey, far from his workplace. But there he was, driving the cab, sans trailer, of a huge truck. These were the days when we came home from school for lunch, and so, as the time drew close for me to head back, he popped me up there in that cab and drove me to school.

I was high, high above the crowd, above it all, looking down on the world, my typically terrifying father chugging along in some low gear through the narrow streets of our tiny town. This was stunning to me. And though the ride only lasted a few blocks, the memory has lasted my lifetime.

As we pulled up to the elementary school, the other kids gathered round. I knew, in that moment, no other thrill could have been greater for them. Not if my father had been an astronaut, a movie star, the president. That truck was so big and so badass that it commanded instant respect. My father, if only for the five minutes it took for him to pull over and help me down, was not some anonymous blue-collar worker. He was an awe-inspiring hero to my peers.

This came rushing back Saturday night, me in a puddle, on the ground, weeping at the trash trucks and the folks who drive them. Thank you, Allison, for dedicating your life work to showing all of us so much otherwise unseen beauty.

Spike Gillespie blogs at KnitBuzz and spikeg.com. She is taking a much needed vacation next week but hopes you’ll remember her when she gets back. She’s teaching a writing workshop in October. Email spikegillespie@gmail.com for details.