Editor Note: This is our thirteenth and final winning entry in our March- May My Ride Writing Contest, Katie Jo Dixon, also our week five winner.  We were asking for an autobiographical story about your experience riding a bike in Austin where previously you might have done so by car. Each week, Austin on Two Wheels will selected a winning entry with a $50 cash prize. In June, we’ll select a grand prize winner who will receive a contract to write 5 more stories for our site. Submit your story.

Theater on Two Wheels

by Katie Jo Dixon, Green Wheels Studios Blog

Theatre.

That single word alone conjures tiny shudders up and down my spine at the thought of my first theatrical experience. It was during one of those shaping-who-you-are years of high-school and I attended an opera on the UT campus. My literature teacher described the theater as a cultural and learning experience. I remember ladies’ toes peaking out beneath floor length formal dresses, and gentlemen were reminiscent of penguins in black and white tuxedos. I felt under-dressed in my cotton dress and out of place without a shade of black in my clothing. I left at the end of the show confused by all of the social nuances of attending a theater performance, and bored after 2 hours of sitting in a dark auditorium.

Pre-face the word theater with bike, and the result is the antithesis of opera in an auditorium. Instead, you get Bike Noir, theater via bicycle. I didn’t wear a floor length dress (it probably would get caught in the spokes of the bicycle wheels). And I didn’t feel under-dressed or out of place cause everyone else was fashioned with bicycles too.

There were other immediate differences between theater and bicycle theater that I noticed upon arriving to show. It was outside of the drama building in the central Texas humidity. I noticed beads of sweat on the foreheads of the audience as they pedaled up.

Walking amidst the gathering crowd and bicycles scattered on the grass, a woman with a badge and a stack of papers ensured that everyone signed a release form. We had to sign a liability release to participate. I equated this to purchasing a ticket at the opera. With the purchase of a ticket I was indirectly consenting to be an audience member at the opera. I scanned the form for a glimpse of  legal words: liability, release; and with a signature I released all my claims, and I thought, “I’m sure glad I brought my helmet.”

The play began. I won’t give a break down scene for scene. Here’s what stands out in my memory of the mobile theater:

- passer-by pedestrians on foot stopping  to observe the performance and unintentionally becoming part of the play  (the actors and actresses had a canny talent for improv and for incorporating the surrounding environment, including bicycles and people, into a part of the theater piece)

- the ever-changing scenery of the theater’s backdrops as we peddled to different venues for each scene. I wasn’t dim-eyed from low lighting, and I wasn’t bored because the mobile nature of the play kept me intrigued

- a bicycle tango dance, a fight scene with a bike lock and tire levers as “deadly” weapons, and a mysterious lost and found bicycle that remained unclaimed through to the end of the play (if you’ve ever had a bike stolen in the ATX, I think you would appreciate a lost-and-found mystery bike).

My pre-conceived notion that theater had to be gotten to by car, to be enjoyed indoors, and dressed in formal attire was re-formed by bicycle theater. I could show up sweaty, in shorts and a t-shirt, and watch the show from my favorite seat: my bicycle seat.