How I got the idea for Dumpster Diver the Musical

Hi, I’m the writer (book/score) of Dumpster Diver the Musical.  Originally, I began writing this story many years ago when I lived in downtown West Palm Beach, Florida.

At the time, I was living in this big run-down warehouse inhabited by a revolving door of artists, musicians, drifters and dreamers.  This warehouse, a big quonset hut actually, was a kind-of “Bermuda Triangle” for the fringe artist scene.  It sat in an area, Flamingo Park, that was being cleaned up.  As the real estate investors circled the area, the code enforcement people start making regular visits to the warehouse.

On one side of the warehouse, literally, 20 feet from my room, sat the railroad tracks, and yes, they were active.  On the other side of the warehouse, was the gentrifying neighborhood.  We were surrounded on all sides, by progress and commerce.

Living there, I was in the midst of interesting people and I began keeping a journal, documenting the activity.  I sifted through my notes and started to write a play called “Plato’s Cave”, as a nod to the offbeat philosophers that drifted through the space.

Around this time, I was introduced to dumpster diving, from a friend, who lived at a collective space in nearby Lake Worth, Florida.  I took the notes from “Plato’s Cave” and thought, “What if there was an entire group of drifters and dreamers, who were dumpster divers, in a future where dumpster diving was illegal?”  That was the seed of an idea that was planted in my imagination that would later grow into the tree, for Dumpster Diver the Musical.

Thinking about it now, this idea was likely shaped by the situation that was unfolding around me at the time, at the warehouse, as we were a group of renegades surrounded by a progress that would eventually see the warehouse shut down, buried under a mountain of code violations, so much so that the owner, Alan Patrusevich, forced with paying a huge bill and the continual harassment by code enforcement, would sell the property.

The dust would settle.  As it had before. And the artists, poets, musicians, dreamers, writers, who’d left the treadmill of nine-to-five to navigate their way through this hamster cage of the disenfranchised, would eventually drop anchor at other overlooked and abandoned islands, with their run-aground ships and forgotten caves.

Those who don’t feel at home in this world will find their home among the invisible territories.  Like giant magnets in the sky that can only attract what they do not destroy, their journey will rewarded.  The sound of time is the music and the muse.  The seduction of the equator is their reality.

Kris Kemp
writer (book/score) Dumpster Diver the Musical
347-557-5487
bicycledays@yahoo.com