Trampoline:
A trampoline is a gymnastic and recreational device consisting of a piece of taut, strong fabric stretched over a steel frame using many coiled springs to provide a rebounding force which propels the jumper high into the air. In a trampoline, the fabric is not elastic itself; the elasticity is provided by the springs which connect it to the frame. It is also very very very very very very dangerous.
first, a little trampoline history
Now back to the cautionary tale,
Lars is the "coach", it is a nickname we gave him several years ago in Gottingen (note that Gottingen should really have an umlaut over the o but the constraints of my North American keyboard limits the languages I can type in). Lars is the the Gottingen Comedy Company who put on the improv festival there and it is always good fun. Lars also is the person who first got me "into" zombies, though for right now, that piece of information is not really important.
We arrive in Gottingen and everything seems fine, although it is not Lars picking us up at the train station. We find out that it is because he is in the hospital. It turns out that Lars had a little bit of a trampoline accident. It also turns out that it wasn't a little trampoline accident at all, it was quite a large one, at least in impact. Two weeks ago Lars was enjoying his new favourite sport, the sport of trampolining. He had done, what at the time was not a particularly high jump, or difficult jump, or even an eventful jump. That is until it turned out to be just that, an eventful jump indeed. Lars had landed on one of his legs first (his left) and his knee had given out, more correctly it had bent like a knee bends, just it the complete wrong direction. He was beside himself in pain, while is bottom leg was beside himself in physical geography. He had been rushed to the hospital and told that he might loose his leg. Mission one was of course to save it, which they did. Then they got to work on saving the knee, which they did. So two weeks in the hospital, with an operation every couple days, another two weeks left, and many boring hours and hours spent lying down, was the life of Lars.
A quick visit to the hospital brought smiles and a couple of beers. He told us that the beer helped him sleep. He looked as bored as anyone would be, his leg attached to a large metal rod. It looked like rebar was sticking out of the concrete of a demolished building. He said that he read a lot. We wished him well, and he wished to us that he could play in the shows we were going to do.
We thought of him when we played. The shows were funny of course. We played with the Gottingen Comedy Company after all. We were also there with Theatre Narabov and Isar 148 who are always fun to play with as well. We thought of the good times we had jumping on a trampoline not two years ago while at a festival in Antwerp Belgium (it is in fact one of the happiest pictures I have ever seen of Lee, somehow though the picture is missing, perhaps it never existed and the memory was created). And we vowed, in the name of Lars, to never jump on a trampoline again. We also thought to buy Lars a book to read while he lay in healing, a book about a zombie invasion.
