I’m headed back to the island tomorrow, and a concurrent return to regularly scheduled programming. But here’s a brief recap of what’s been an exhilarating, exhausting, and pretty much thoroughly awesome detour.

In the last ten days I have visited the world’s most disorganized McDonald’s, sung Marine Girls songs through a Poconos traffic jam, and marched caffeine-fueled miles through the hallucinatory heat of Manhattan in July. I have been betrayed by the 2 train and vengefully taken up with the Q (“the sexy train”), only to have the Q, too, turn traitor at 1 AM in deeper Brooklyn. I burst into tears when I saw my college roommate’s baby for the first time. I freaked out over the fantastic Adding Machine. I ate some staggering pork buns at Momofuku. I saw my best old friends. And we, all of us, put up a show.

Throughout the whole week served as an interesting tour through the intersection of place and identity. I lived in New York City for five years in the early 90s, and while I’ve been back a couple of times since moving to Chicago in 1995, this was the first time that it really felt just so right to be back. I chalk this up to the fact that I was for the most part really busy, which helps make anyone feel like a New Yorker. But it wasn’t just that I was busy, it was that I was busy doing exactly what I was busy doing 15 years ago (technical theater) and seeing some of the people I was busy doing it with, or who were around and important at the time.

Now, there are many reasons I don’t want to be 24 again. One unnerving side effect of this excursion was to remind me of every stupid thing I did in my 20s. But for a week it was fun, if discombobulating, to take a trip back in time.

One of the last nights I was there I got back to my friend Rachel’s apartment far after midnight (see above re: trains to Brooklyn). After taking a long, cold, necessary shower I lay on her couch with a beer and turned on WNYC, just in time to catch the opening phrases of a piece of music. Hmm, I thought. This sounds kinda familiar.

What it was was Steve Reich‘s “Music For 18 Musicians.” And as I lay there on the couch and let its buzzing, pulsing, shimmering movements build and crest, memory crashed over me as well. Fifteen (?) years ago, I spent a lot of time with this piece of music (fwiw considered a seminal piece of modern classical minimalism)–but my memory of it is all about ramps. Giant triangular and trapezoidal ramps of wood and metal and vinyl–18 of them, if I’m not mistaken. They were the set piece for a duo of ballets by Eliot Feld, whose Feld Ballets/NY performed regularly at the Joyce Theater, where I, equally regularly, worked as an electrician and general stagehand.

Aurora I and Aurora II were lovely, loopy modern ballets where the dancers wore sneakers and slid, rolled, and posed along a concave agglomeration of grey ramps that spanned the stage. Our job was to set the entire unwieldy thing up, a process that involved a dozen people making a chain from the truck parked on the street outside the theater (there being no storage space inside) to the stage. For three weeks, twice a year, these ramps were hauled out of the truck, puzzled together, and locked into place with a hex key. Every seam was taped down and every Marley surface was spritzed with alcohol, to keep them clean. Jokes about Slip ‘n’ Slides were in no short supply. Then, when the dance was over, we’d take it all apart again and pack it out into the truck, often in full view of the audience. Feld wasn’t a big believer in the downstage curtain.

I have not thought about Aurora I and II in years. But it’s all still there, and I swear if you put me in an 18-foot Ryder truck with a schematic and a crew, I could put the whole thing together again, during a 15-minute intermission. Which left me, once the late-night DJ came back on and I slipped out of my memory fugue, wondering just where I’d been all this long time.