The Aftermath of Disaster

Today I went out early to try out my new light, strong weed-whacker and I wept. I didn’t cry at the efficiency of the machine or its ability to cut clean swaths through my over grown acreage. No, I cried because I had snipped a snake in two.

The temperature dropped and it rained hard last night, not ideal circumstances for a reptile, but great for a middle-aged gardener who likes to work hard when it is chilly. The snake was one of my favorites, a ribbon. He was green with light yellow ribbons running all round his small lithe body. I saw him and he was in half.

I stopped and bent over him, there was nothing I could do so I returned to clipping, perhaps a little more carefully. And then I started to tear up, then cry and before I could even identify what was wrong I was collapsed in the garden chair sobbing, with my Maine coon cat galumphing to the rescue.

My daughter and her 25-year-old French boy friend had been visiting us in the in country three weeks ago. They were cute, he is lively, silly an artist and a wild thing. One day he helped me clean the haymow in the big old barn and when we finished sweeping and carting the hold hay, he leaped form the loading door in the mow and down to the lawn. Maybe forty feet. It was thrilling and scary as so many of those stunts are. I laughed and my husband upbraided him. “Never do that again here, do you understand?’ The boyfriend quieted, as do all the boys when faced with my husband’s stentorian tines. He agreed.

The next day we went on a drive to see the local goats and the boy friend took his skateboard. He had asked my daughter to take him to a big hill earlier in the day and he had skate boarded down form the historic house Olana, built on a precipice of the Hudson River. She drove behind him and said he was going nearly 45 miles per hour. No helmet, no pads, shorts and a tee shirt.

On this trip home he hit a rock, pothole, divot and the next thing we knew he was on the street. We raced back and found him quiet with blood pooling on the pavement trickling out of his ears. He began breathing a heaving rattle. Terrie fed I took the car to the neighbor, as of course I had no cell phone reception. They called the ambulance; it came. I convinced the driver to allow my daughter to ride with as the kid speaks little English and in a crisis I know second languages go fast. They left; I followed the tortuous 30 miles to the nearest trauma hospital.

We spent days in the E.R and then the ICU. We had to call his parents in Nice. The arrived and we all translated and intervened. endlessly. We drove back and forth, we slept fitfully, we interviewed and befriended doctors, nurses and aides. He lived. The brain bleed stopped just as they were going to operate. He lost tons of weight, has a cane, is exhausted and jokes that he lost three days. His parents go home tomorrow. He follows in two weeks after the Neurosurgeon gives the OK for him to fly. And I will stay here changed.

I am terrified, and quaking at cars, roads, motorcycles, barking dogs. I made it through September 11, rescued my kids, wrote a book, volunteered and carried on. But this is the first item that someone I know, I like, I am in a way responsible for has gotten this hurt on my watch. I imagined the worst and I fantasized a jubilant return home for the cute, artist boy. I slept next to my daughter and we patted each other every night for weeks, when the nightmares came. I still find myself shaking my head like a wet dog, in an attempt to clear the images that leap in.

My friend Susan who studies the brain and alternative healing says that when an event like this accident happens the memories are logged in the limbic brain. In a way they by pass normal feeds of memory are logged right where they can crop up more easily and unpredictably. And they do.

SO today when I unwittingly sliced into the snake and sniveled, I know full well I was crying provoked by this new memory and sense of incredible fragility that it has installed in my very own reptile brain.

Enough wallowing

I decided enough wallowing and wailing and weeping.

After all, it is the Epiphany. Thousands of years ago, wise men in long dresses schlepped through the desert using a star and found their way to the manger where a baby named Jesus lay with his surprised mom and dad.

And so we took this day as an auspicious one, and the name Epiphany morphed over time to mean a great awakening, a happening that changes us. And it happens once a year. So I decided rather than leaving my blog and tossing it away, I would attempt rebirthing myself with a sense of wonder.

I have been working furiously for the past two days, not making money, but taking chances and doing multiple reach-outs. Some things will stick and now I feel as if I am out of the closet on stealing jewels and making amends, and am moving toward being valuable. I feel, after so many folks read the posting and took time to write to me, I feel they are right that we all have things we have done where are deeply ashamed and yet we attempt to incorporate it into the fabric of who we are and move forward.

So today I made the Epiphany cake, the same one my mother made for the nearly fifty years that I knew her and probably before that. In some cultures it is called a KING'S CAKE and my mom, an Italian who spent the first seven years of her married life in France, borrowed liberally from those two cultures to make a family tradition.

The cake looks like a crown; it is not a layer cake. It can be adorned with candied fruit to make the top of the crown more enticing. And here is a must: there has to be a prize or a coin hidden inside the cake. In New Orleans, it is a plastic baby, in our family it was a special coin. Whoever gets the prize will have especially good financial luck all year. My mother used to attempt to get my father to eat slice after slice so the family wouldn’t sink. My kids have a technique that they believe gives them an edge to finding the coin.

The cake our family makes is handed down from a good friend from the old Washington Heights neighborhood, Otta Maligold, and it is an old-fashioned Jewish sour cream coffee cake. My mother -- the erstwhile anthropologist -- loved the juxtaposition of a Christian holiday marked by Jewish pastry.

Here is the recipe; it is simple and delicious.

Epiphany Cake
A la Elizabeth Piccirilli and Otta Maligold

Pre heat oven to 350

¾ cup butter
1 ½ cup sugar (Reserve a small amount to dust the top of the cake and inside layer. Add cinnamon to this reserved sugar)
1 ½ cup sour cream
3 eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla
1 ½ teaspoons of both Baking Soda and Baking Powder
½ teaspoon salt
Cream butter and sugar WELL
Add Eggs and sour cream
Then add vanilla, salt, baking powder and soda then add flour little by little
Put one half of the batter in a ring pan, the more it resembles a crown the better.
Then sprinkle in half of the cinnamon sugar you saved.
Next layer the remaining batter. Do not STIR.

Cook for 40 to 60 minutes until a knife comes out clean.
Turn out onto a cake plate
Let cool, decorate with the remaining cinnamon sugar or candied fruit to make the crown

Keep eating until you get the PRIZE.

Now go out and make lots of money and share it with all those you love and those in need.

Be happy, be joyful, be generous and know that life is glorious.

And that is your Epiphany.

The Day After Christmas

I suppose I keep waiting for the day when I feel clam and safe and whole. I know it is never coming. I am the only one who can dispense with the fear, the dangling shoe waiting to fall and unseat whatever morsel of fearlessness I have cooked up in my kitchen.

Here it is again. The holidays, and I have been searching for work: in the arts, teaching, upstate or in the city, but to no avail. Then twin occurrences rock my core: the incredible NY Times writer who did the piece on me and the opera in September, called to say she was hurt that she had to find out about the “scandal” when readers sent the article from NY Magazine to her, scanned from their collection, aging for 16 years. I was sorry to have hurt her, to have let her feel that I had been less than intimate but there is, or was this fine line between wanting all of “THAT” to go away and believing that all good works, bright deeds and forward motion would allow me to put that giant misstep behind me.

Now I know otherwise. Well, that conversation shook me to my foundation, because I had inflicted pain on a good woman, and became she said, "Didn’t you think that the reason I didn’t call you back, was because I found out? “

"No," I blurted, “I thought it was because you have baby children and an enormous job.”

But now I will think that. I will think that every unreturned phone call, every rejected story idea; every job where I am passed over is always because they found out. And in fact this past week, the eve of Christmas Eve, I got the second phone call from a potential employer, one where they had already offered me the job. A position that was running a small arts organization in disarray, and where I would be paid a fraction of what my experience and education should command. But I was going to take it for a challenge and to bring myself back into more full time working in a tough environment.

Here is this phone call. “Do you have a scandal in your past?”

And so I tell the story. And the phrase the Times’ writer said I should employ,
“There was no indictment, no charges, and it was 16 years ago, so it is a non- story.” And further I worked as a stock broker where the FBI investigates your past giving you a green light or tossing your ass out. But this is the arts and innuendo and gossip are key elements. I answered his questions in as calm a voice as I could muster and then I climbed the stairs in my hallway to call my husband, who was in our bedroom. I called him because I did not want to have my daughter, even as a near grownup at 24, to hear me break down yet again.

I had given her too may sleepless nights, and days of fear. She had recently shared with me that my very high and low personality was tough on her and I vowed then and there to share less and attempt to be more even. So I called from the stairwell near the roof, and cried.

“Do you want me to come to you?”

“No I want it to stay normal down there until the girl leaves for Christmas tomorrow so early, then I can break down, right now I need to hold it together. People are coming for dinner and there is laundry and clean up to do. I will be right in.”

I called two friends, both wise in different ways. One a composer and former porn star, who wants to aggressively pursue the purveyors of gossip and pummel them; the other, a spiritualist from San Francisco, wants me to dissolve the dark cloud through thought and forgiveness and also wants me to promise to never go looking for a job in the arts again. At least not in NYC.

So that’s it. I have sworn off the non-profit art world. And I pledged to find a job where I can offer my skills to a non-profit that attempts to help battered or abused woman. Because in that environment I can be open about my past, the fact that I was so terrified and beaten down, and that I did a terrible thing, can become a pledge to assist other women, who might be more voiceless that I am.

I don’t know if I can continue to come here to this blog thing.

It feels lonely and as if I am trying to do good or prove that I have a modicum of value, when often, of late, I feel empty and valueless. As devalued as this crazy economy.

So I am attaching a chapter, one from my unpublished book, called MID-LIFE MAMBO; the chapter is entitled Stealing Home. What the Time’s writer said is that I need to publish the story as a book, a memoir and then no one can ever again say, “Hey why didn’t you tell me?” cause it will be out there.

So this is a clumsy attempt to have this story out there in some form other than the tabloid tellings. May the truth really set me free, because of late I am festering and in the dark place and during a time when the world is attempting to bring forth great light.


Light and peace to all.



Stealing Home
Chapter 4
Wickham Boyle

When I was 42 years old, newly separated from the abusive father of my children, terrified, and ensconced in a secret affair with my ex-brother-in-law, I went to the home of a rich friend and stole her jewelry.
I never thought I’d be able to write that. After more than a decade, I never believed I would have the clarity, forgiveness, and inner strength to just say it. Age and time are wonderful healers.
This morning I sat watching a torrent of rain pour into my window boxes, inundating the six small cypress tress I planted to give myself a sense of Christmas cheer. As I meditated, I begged my mind, my higher power, a goddess, the universe, or the watching cats, to give me the vision and gumption to write about stealing and forgiveness.
I had stolen things before. During my final years in high school my mother returned to work after a twenty-year hiatus. Our family was pretty desperate for money. My alcoholic father’s career seemed to be in a tailspin, and my bi-polar mom took it upon herself to save the day. She lacked the clothes to be a modern businesswoman, and for my mother the outfit really made the woman; so as the first child, the hero, I came to the rescue.
I went to Bloomingdale’s in the mall, and I shoplifted pantsuits. I then bestowed the suits on my mother. I told her I purchased them with baby-sitting money. I was a champion baby-sitter, but there weren’t enough kids in Poet’s Corner, our suburban neighborhood, to support these extravagant suits. But my mother, chief enabler and household master of denial, was always ready to incorporate any story, no matter how far-fetched, into her lexicon of truth. So she welcomed this wardrobe windfall and traipsed gaily off to her new job.
I continued to snag suits for her for years until she fell ill. She was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. Since my mother placed such a premium on appearances, she decided that her tremors were too awful for anyone to see, let alone trust her to excel in a job. She quit, and the pantsuits languished in her closet. My father retired from NBC, and they moved south to Durham, North Carolina, where he took a job running a small news station. They restarted their lives in a ranch-style house where my mother didn’t have to climb stairs or be seen by folks she knew.
This was pretty much the end of my brilliant career as a thief. I had never thought stealing for myself was an option. Theft was something I could do for others. I didn’t feel guilty about taking the outfits for my mother from Bloomingdale’s. I rationalized that it was a conglomerate store, my mother needed this stuff, and I provided it for her. We all tell tales to justify what we do—from stealing, to sneaking the extra brownie, to having affairs. Life’s choices, opportunities, and even morals seemed to me to be dictated by compromises.
Later, with my grown-up life in turmoil and my children grown to the point where they could stand up for themselves, I finally made the choice to leave their father. I decided that I couldn’t take the abuse, neglect, and mockery. (Let’s call him Dick, since it describes one of his chief characteristics.) After I told Dick I was finished and he had to leave, I began an affair with his brother. My therapist said instead of just moving out of the house, I burned it down metaphorically, so there would be no possibility of ever moving back in with Dick. In a sense, having the torrid affair with Frank, did inoculate me from any future relationship with Dick or his family.
I had been in an abusive relationship for almost fifteen years. I am appalled to write this. I am stupefied that a strong, educated, outspoken woman put up with the kind of physical and emotional abuse I endured. I was so devalued that I came to believe I had no worth. I had fallen in love with Dick, who was handsome, aloof, under employed, a philanderer, and a full-blown narcissist. Dick was what I had learned in my childhood to be model husband material.
Dick never married me. He said he’d be damned if he would give me the opportunity to be “a fuckin’ princess for a day.” And yet we stayed together because a part of me felt I would never find anyone else, anyone better, and I wanted to have babies. So I called him my “husband” and got pregnant with my sweet daughter—a child whose spirit, I believed, was just waiting for me to welcome her into the world. Then three years later, although Dick rarely worked, we had another baby, a boy. My fantasy family was complete; I had what my mother called “The choice of kings, le choi des rois, a boy and a girl. I also had a man who cheated, belittled me, spat at me, shoved me, and tossed me down a flight of stairs while I was pregnant. Dick always said, “I never hit you.” Moral hair splitting. Since I produced theater for a living, I continued spinning illusions with my personal life. I worked endless hours, pretended everything was fine, and yet I was miserable and terrified. I had no idea where to turn. After creating this elaborate fantasy, I couldn’t admit to any of my friends how degraded I was.
Dick and I were in therapy where he disclosed how his father had sexually molested two of his sisters and how this fact illuminated the roots of his emotional withholding. I was convinced I could save him. Since being the rescuer was my childhood role, however, neither of us managed to transcend our broken beginnings. I was always the angry, disappointed mother, and he was an angry, fuck-up of a father. We made a perfect pact of complicit insanity. We stayed locked in this baleful world where I begged for attention, affection, sex, financial assistance, any bone he would toss me; and he gleefully withheld and played the uptown gigolo. It was pathetic.
It was my daughter, then eight-years-old, who came to my rescue. One early morning, as I was picking up clothes, washing dishes, calling my assistant, and getting the kids ready for school while the man of the house slept in the big feather bed, my angel whispered, “Mama, when you are the woman, does it mean that you do all the work, earn all the money, and pick up after everyone, and the man yells at you? And why do the kids have to pick up clothes if papa doesn’t have to do anything?”
The circuit in my badly wired brain flipped; it was as if my internal sanity signal, which had been stuck in the off-position for decades, suddenly switched on. This farce of a relationship would stop; I was done. I began to formulate an exit strategy. Even if I couldn’t take care of myself, I was not going to doom my children to a life where they learned abuse.
I canceled our family summer vacation—the one where I would pay for everything and Dick would complain and berate me. Instead, I took the kids away to visit friends in the south of France. Before leaving, I sat down with Dick at our kitchen table and told him I was finished. I wrote out my speech on a scrap of paper. I had scribbled it over and over in my journal trying to find the essence of why I could no longer go on. Imagine, I felt compelled to find the right words to express why I was leaving a man who had never supported our family and had been stone cold mean to me for years. Dick told me I was totally negative and there was nothing redeeming about me. I told him I couldn’t listen to those characterizations any more.
Dick didn’t object or even negotiate staying. He moved out ahead of schedule on July fourth, right before I went on vacation with the kids. I was 42 years old and about to have a real independence day. Even after he had agreed to leave, while we formulated his exit strategy, we fell into a bitter fight. Dick ran after me trying to beat me with a set of crutches he was using for a severed Achilles tendon while I threatened to call the police. When he left the house, it was cold and final.
As much as I wanted to believe in magic, I was so broken that I imagined no one would ever love me again. I would be that lone woman in the diner with no partner, no sweetheart. My sexuality had been so degraded by the years of enduring Dick’s affairs and insults, including calling me a fat pig, that I sought to restart my erotic engine by having an affair with his brother Frank.
Frank and I had always been drawn to each other; we shared a raucous sense of humor and very judgmental spouses, who disdained us and castigated us, often in public. The affair was wrong. I know that. Frank had a wife and two little kids. But I knew he had been having affairs for his entire marriage, and I rationalized that I needed him and the rest be damned.
It was the same sensation when I stole the jewels at a friend’s Thanksgiving breakfast. They were there on the bathroom counter, and in a drawer. I put my hand out, filled my purse, and left with my kids. I believed this stolen jewelry could save my children, save me, and even—this is so stupid—save my neighbor across the street who was in the process of attempting to leave her abusive husband. I rationalized that I was Robin Hood.
The universe and my destiny had a different scenario in mind. After the theft, I called a society woman, who I assumed was a friend, and asked her how I could sell some jewelry in order to raise funds to finalize my separation from Dick. She invited me to her Upper East Side home where she had set up a sting operation. The family from whom I had stolen surmised I had done it and evidently contacted people we knew, putting out the word. When I arrived uptown, there was a former prosecutor, and the husband of the woman from whom I had stolen the jewels. I was caught. It was mind-boggling. I kept saying, Please don’t take my kids from me. Please, I am so desperate, please don’t take my kids. I will do anything you ask. That’s all I can remember, except that I felt as if there was no air. And outside it was raining and cold, just like it is today.

I have to stop.

Ten years have passed, and still I can’t escape the sickness in my muscles as I write this: the shame, the terror, the horrible notion that I blew up my life and hurt others. I risked my children’s future all because I believed I had so little value, so little hope, that I had to steal.
My life began to go into free fall. I can see now, in retrospect, that this explosion set me on the course to find my real path, but in the middle of the crash, the dust and debris were daunting. The woman who conducted the sting, Trixie, called my ex; she also called many of the benefactors of my non-profit theater, and she called the press. She did this even though the people from whom I had stolen signed a pact specifying no one involved would talk about this, ever. In return, I agreed to seek professional counseling, and we would all move on with our lives. It was incredibly generous on their part, but Trixie had other plans.
Within weeks of the confrontation, right before Christmas, a tabloid paper ran the story of my thievery, featuring Trixie as the savior. My affair with Frank was there, my separation from Dick, who it turned out had been having affairs with many society women. He was portrayed as a poor beleaguered patsy. I was conjured as some sort of seasoned nefarious thief.
I saw my life evaporate. I panicked. I could not see my way out. Maybe I could be a waitress in a fast food restaurant; I could do that. I would move, start again and build a tiny, clean, untainted life for my little family and myself. The press was calling my house, and then my ex would call to gloat and threaten to take the children away from me forever. He chanted into the phone, “I will destroy you!” Dick had found a way to continue his abuse, and I had handed him the tools.
I took Nyquil every night after I put the kids to bed and cried myself to sleep. I awoke in the morning groggy with sopping wet pillows. I made strong black coffee, forced a smile and got back on the path. I was psychotic every time the children had to visit Dick for a weekend. I was convinced I would never see them again. All the grants for my theater dried up. I considered killing myself, but I couldn’t possibly leave my darling children with Dick.
I called Kass, my best girl friend, my heart, and my partner in the little theater I began downtown after leaving LaMama. Kass worked a second job as a concierge in a fancy uptown hotel. This was the first time I had admitted my culpability to anyone other than the prosecutor involved in the sting. To the outside world I attempted to brush this off as gossip initiated by a vengeful ex. Like a child afraid of bad dreams, I felt if I kept denying that any of it was true, it would go away. Kass was on duty at the front desk, and as she checked in Prince, over the phone she simultaneously read me the riot act: “Under no circumstances are you to consider killing yourself. You are not your mother. You are too strong for that. You must never let Dick win. You stole stuff; that’s bad, but there are no charges. You will rebuild your life better than before. Believe me. We will make this work. You have to go through fire now. You were a piece of pottery and the fire is at your heels. You have the opportunity to become porcelain if you make it through without cracking. I have confidence in you and fuck the rest of them. I will call you back.”
Kass hung up the phone, and I sat for hours in the same chair, frozen in place. She called back, and we planned to shut down our theater in the new year and to put one foot in front of the other.
The stories in the newspapers didn’t stop for five years. Every time I got a job, there would be another story, and it would be sent to my boss. I changed careers, moving into the financial services sector where an FBI background check was conducted and prospective stock brokers have to pass rigorous qualifying exams. I passed and was building a business, but still the hounding continued. I began to look for jobs—with my bad press clippings in hand—and I even landed some, but then Trixie or Dick would call and harass the bosses until I was fired. I felt mired in shame and terror.
When I lived with Dick, I felt unsafe because of the battering and assaults, but even with Dick out of my home, he continued to pursue me. Dick sued to take the children away, even though he had no apartment and no job. By the time of the hearing, I was a vice president in a brokerage firm, living in the children’s original home. As Dick’s accusations were not substantiated, the court awarded me full custody. But his abuse did not abate. It was up to me to find my own safety in the midst of the continued onslaught.
I cried, I smashed things, I cooked and cleaned, and I called my friends, who counseled me to believe this crisis was I all part of a plan and promised life would improve. They prescribed forward motion, continued therapy, and forgiveness. The last part has been the most difficult because too often what I wanted was revenge.
I enrolled in a small Buddhist school where I learned meditation and yoga. I was introduced to the teachings of the Dalai Lama, who preaches that we need to offer forgiveness to those who have hurt us most and accept their venom back as a neutralizing process. I wrote letters of amends to some I had harmed; I tried to get up every morning, do good work, help people, be kind, and believe in action as a great healer. I had good and very low moments.
I fell in love with a wonderful man named Zachary; I told him everything. After I disgorged the story of my theft, he took me by the hand to the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Fifth Avenue, and in front of the Temple of Dendur, he said with great rectitude: “Look at all this shit, all of it was stolen.” We left, enough said. He loved me, proposed later in the year, and we got married. Zachary adored me and supported me when I was fired and broken. He encouraged me to be a writer, which had always been my heart’s desire. He said, “Baby, you need to know that when the phone rings and someone asks to complain to the boss, you can say, she’s right here.” Rather than fire myself, I needed to forgive.
I struggled, I worked, I volunteered, I mothered, I laughed outrageously as I strove to forgive myself for the abuse I welcomed and for the lack of faith I evinced in my own abilities. I began to admit that I had not lived an exemplary life—I had been mean, less than generous, manipulative—I could do better. I tried to forgive myself for resorting to thievery rather than believing that there was help available. I focused on forgiving myself while I reveled in writing, the work I always wanted. I now regard the past decade with a wide-eyed sense of wonder.
I left a relationship where I was abhorred and worked in jobs that gave me low remuneration and terrible esteem. I rebuilt my life out of the rubble. I fell in love with a man who refused to judge me, who was present and supportive to my every transformation. I have used my transgressions as a teaching tool, a cautionary tale, reminding my kids that there is nothing from which we can’t recover. I have told them everything. I remind them that since I have been honest with them about my big misstep, they should know that there is nothing they can do that will appall me. I will listen; we will learn and do better.

In the rubble of my life I found good building materials for forgiveness. What facilitates forgiveness still stymies me. Perhaps it is the cessation of rushing hormones flanked by the simple passage of time or the realization that holding hate is a great toxin and one I am free to release. I may not have become the precious porcelain my girl friend predicted, but I am on a path. I fell down and broke, but I remembered to take all the pieces; and with love, with friends, and with forgiveness I am piecing it together.

Where the hell did I put that?!

I am of an age when one begins to forget. I am not old, I know that, so don’t go complimenting me for all I do and achieve, it is not about that. This is reality. People forget, and the more you do and whisk through, the greater the chance of moving on automatic pilot. And that means losing things. This infuriates me and turns me into a raging harridan. Not pretty.

Then my son, daughter, or husband has to try and locate things, calm me down and stop me from railing and ranting that I am losing my mind. Oh, so not pretty. So this morning I started a notebook marked:

NOW WHERE THE HELL DID I PUT THAT?

Simple. I clean, I decorate for the season, I file things without thinking so that surfaces are clear and I can write, but then I have done it all in a haze of, “I must find calm, and create. . . must find clarity."

And then weeks, hours or months pass and I recall the gesture and desire, but not the locale. Hence this new notebook idea.

Last summer when I rented the house, I put some fragile things away, there were three hand-made, lemon nesting bowls. I recalled carefully placing them somewhere and then only one month later, they were gone gone and I tore the house apart. Finally Zachary found them in the bottom drawer in a rarely used hall credenza. So this year as I am cleaning, to supposedly write, but really to think about decorating for the winter holidays, I took them back to the credenza, but I took out the notebook and wrote it down. I also noted where I squirreled away a few hundred bucks as I keep losing and finding that. The losing is horrible, but every re-find in funny and exciting.

It scares me--this loss of vigor in my brain and body, although my soul seems pretty much enlivened by age, the other faculties are dimmed. And so I am hopeful this notebook will get me in good habits before I am as wacky as my late-eighties friend, Beati, to whom I gave a notebook. But as she says, “I forget to write in it, then I forget where I put it.” So I started today to note the lemon bowls and tiny envelope of money. I promise to write down after the holiday where decorations have landed so we don’t have to go on an annual scavenger hunt to find the wreaths upstairs and the lights under the coats in my son’s closet.

As long as I believe that every age has a lesson, I can keep forging ahead. Now where did I put my boots, because I need to get out into the sunshine and air out my brain and flex my old legs?

Who's the jumper and who's the pusher?

I learned long ago how to jump-start cars. It was a byproduct of owning classic British cars that were touchy in rain, sunshine, cold or any other meteorological contrivance. Or at least that was the excuse to which we ascribed their fragility; after all, a racy British car with a snarl for a grill and sleek fins could not be badly made, there had to be a reason.

So faulty Lucas electrics, or ancient wiring, or damp garages, whatever the cause, these cars were mercurial and I got good at popping the clutch and starting the car when the battery was dead or the starter was moist. It was almost like a party trick. I could start a car with a millimeter of hill, or push it myself while running alongside and then jumping in, ease into second gear. I put the key in the “on” position and the clutch to the floor, gas down, then pop the clutch. The engine then, roars, or sputters into ignition and drives away to the amazement of all. Especially men.

It was a nearly flawless way to pick up gents, way better than blond hair or a push up bra. And yet alas, as most cars have morphed from standard (actual shift cars) to automatics, this trick has been less possible to flaunt. Until today.

I purchased a 1976 MGB, a red roadster, for my husband as a 50th birthday gift. I knew his brother, who had passed away, taught him to drive on such a car and I knew that my lovely Zac lusted after cars, snappier than our Subaru as we drove on the highways.

This man is the stepfather to my children, but really their only daddy. He taught them to ride bikes, to dance, to laugh uproariously, to appreciate the Four Tops and other back in the day groups, and he told them that it was “a parent’s privilege to pay for college” when their birth father hired a fancy lawyer who got the courts to rule he was not responsible for a nickel for their Ivy League education, Zachary stepped in to foot the bill. I bought him the car as a tiny thank you for all he does for us.

He is our rock and we all adore him. So today when his baby wouldn’t start after a week of crisp fall days I talked to him about “jump starting” the car. I had done it before without him, but he wanted to try it this time. I pushed it down the hill with him at the wheel and he tried a few times but no POP. I got into the Subaru and pushed him up and down the street in front of our house. NO POP.

Finally I said, “Hey, let me try, okay?”

I got in the seat, which no longer slides up and he is over six feet while I hover at a proud five-five. I got in, held myself up by grabbing onto the wheel and depressed the clutch, found second gear, got the creaky key into position and he started the push and I popped it out right away. Zoom it coughed and sputtered into drive. I gunned the gas and took off up the hill, made a u –turn and stopped the car on the downward slope of the hill, just in case, and got out to switch.

I was a puffy peacock, all pride. “I don’t think you are doing it right,” I crowed.

“Well, I gave you a very fast push,” he retorted. He got in the car and roared off.

Why did I have to be the one to save the day? Why can I be so edgy?

I was not going to solve that half-century conundrum, but I could call and leave a message on his phone.

“I’m sorry I was bad-tempered. What I see is that we need both the jumper and the pusher; life is all about seeing which position suits us best.”

I do feel this way. I recognize he maybe better at getting the car to go fast with a big push, but I am great at leaping in at the right moment and popping that car to life. So once again, not only did we get the car to start, but also we remembered that we are a great team because of our differences.

Mending

Does anyone mend anymore?

I have a note on my refrigerator that says only: MEND

I know that it means I have to stitch up the tear in the old cashmere blanket before it bisects and I have to use the sewing machine. I guess that's where the Ben Franklin aphorism, “A stitch in time, saves nine” emanates. I may now need more than 30 to staunch this rip.

And I have a nightie that is unseemly due to missing buttons, but I don’t have kids home now, so sometimes I just wear it gaping. But I know it needs buttons. There is a quilt cover with a safety pin that upbraids me with my laziness because I have not replaced the buttons. My husband has a sweater he wears on weekends dotted with moth holes. I know how to darn, and sew, mend and close up seams, but does anyone know these things now who is not over 50?

My daughter is about to be 24 and is living downtown with us in the loft she grew up in while her apartment is sublet so she can do an unpaid internship working on a film about Hunger in America. (How can you not help support a kid doing that kind of work?) She said the other day, “I really need to sew buttons on this skirt.” I know she means, I really need you, mama, to sew these buttons on. But instead I said, “We need to plan a mending night where we take out all the ratty stuff and renovate it so it closes, and looks better.” But it seemed so old fashioned.

Maybe that is where we need to go as a country and as a family.

We need to return to mending our fences, our sweaters, our nighties and our relationship with the world.

Maybe our finances need some old fashioned savings and a moratorium on purchases in favor of rummaging through closets and cleaning out drawers to see what treasures lurk in those dark untapped places.

I started saving every five-dollar bill that came into my hands at the beginning of the summer and I now have nearly 500 dollars, that’s a hundred crumpled fives stuffed into a big jar. I was going to start a savings account, wait until I got a thousand dollars and then buy a CD, but I think I may use what I saved to give us a little bit of a Christmas. Still it was a fun exercise to see that little bits do add up.

I like the idea of mending. Mending a fragile friendship, mending a crumbling stonewall that just needs the tumbling pile to be reorganized. I love mending the sweaters, closing holes and crocheting a new edge to the fraying cuffs. It makes me feel as if I saved something and I might have a little bit of value left in me.

Perhaps we can introduce mending nights as the new thing across America. Everyone brings a small project to the table: fixing broken table legs or that gaping nightie. I don’t want to be the only one doing this, but I bet with the economy in continued free fall, the virtue in mending may begin to seem mighty again.

Meltdown

I recall back in 1987, my daughter was three years old and witnessed with us the biggest one-day stock market crash, which looks quite pale by comparison to this eight day descending market. A group of grown-ups sat around the dinner table discussing the market crash in terrified tones, when my smart girl piped up, “And the super market, did that crash too?”

It was a joyful realization that some things remained in tact.

But now when countries are failing, banks and businesses, and it is hard to breathe, sometimes waiting to find a job and consider myself safe, and I know this spills over to all of us, but all of us are desperate to find ways to find safety. This economic terror seems less to me that the explosions and threats, as they can be labored through and this terror seems to ask for hunker time.

My husband went to the still-standing super market in the Hudson Valley and bought a giant bag of rice, 50 pounds, and cans of beans and bags of beans and all I can say is that a hunker might prove very gaseous. But still I am making a big pot of chili for tonight, and still steaks remain in the freezer. But honestly, what should we all be doing?

That is where the terror lies. I know that America, and I have gotten too fat and soft in the last decade. I know that I have to say NO to the idea of giving myself a loan to buy what I think I need. I know I don’t need it . . . . Just fill in the blanks. But still I need, really need to pay the mortgage and college tuition and will there be loans for that?

In times of fear I want to read, to escape, or I want to hit a ball or chop down trees or grass or watch a good movie. I am tired from the opera and from continuous weeks of sharing my feelings on this blog about an event that I thought might wave a magic wand and change my work life for the better. But that curtain dropped and, yes, there is small work to follow, but the magic ended on the stage and the real world with its economic craziness that has left the tiny amount of money I saved and squished into Apple stock or Johnson & Johnson -- all good companies -- turned into dust. So it is as if I wished for a magic dust to change things and I forgot to be specific enough and what we got is this.

I know I am not responsible. I know that even when I put on my magical thinking cap to say, “Okay, would you wish for Obama in the election, the economic situation to turn around or for the job to come to you?”

I know I say "OBAMA."

Because I believe if that happens, then maybe the other pieces will fall, ever so slowly, into place. Oh the things that wishing makes you ponder.

The Day After

I had a big flowery birthday, with the cast giving me a bouquet on stage and they sang to me, I HAVE NEVER HEARD HAPPY BIRTHDAY SUNG LIKE THAT. And Henry was there and came on stage with me and later over a great dinner at the local Japanese place Zutto, he told me loved the piece and further so surprised me with his attention to details to discuss. My friend Susan flew in from SF (OK on her way to hike in Morocco, but still I got a drive by)

After dinner we went home to the loft where Zac, who I now call my big Keebler Elf, had baked the biggest, out of control cake--must have been 4 times the recipe and he had tivo'd the debate. We had cake to sweeten the distaste of this horrible political season in our country.

When I work up this morning, with a terrible sugar hang-over, nothing to do but give in and have a little hair of the dog, sugar style, but after Monday, I am going cold turkey healthy-wise. Nice to have Henry here, and Susan rushing off to a next engagement before her real jaunt.

I ran off to pottery, hoping to see some of the pottery gaggle that came and clapped and brought a beautiful orchid for me last night. Of course the little plastic pot fit like a glove into one of the nicer pots I had thrown and glazed.

Tonight, it is roast chicken mashed potatoes before the show, and the big cast party at Michael and Liz Pappas, they call parties at their house PAPPAS HOUSE OF PAIN.
I hope I am up to it, as I know I am a lightweight when it comes to booze and party hearty. I am bringing Henry, who can party til dawn and still make the 8a.m. train back to college. Zac wants to pack him up with cake for the apartment mates but Henry seems reluctant to travel with cake. I know we can find takers.

Tonight is the penultimate evening show and I am both a little melancholy and excited to attempt to get on with a better financial version of my life, although the entire country seems to be suffering from a deep financial malaise. I suppose I am with my girl Willi wanting to know where I stand if the REAL JOB is on or off. And then I jump back in, but can anyone really be going on “go-sees” for work after they have had four interviews and a test on the computer and is awaiting the hour-long virtual talk with the shrink on Monday.

The timing could be good, but then again I just read that Mercury went into retrograde. Scary as I thought it had been there all long and I happily blamed interplanetary discord for the ills of my life and the world.

Oh well, I will have to find other reasons, but the harmony on birthday DAY was healing, heartening and totally wonderful.

58 in 08

Okay, disorganized, but here goes. It’s my birthday and raining. I remember that for 20 years it rained every year on my birthday. Then I met this man, my love, to whom I am now married, and it stopped raining. So now when it occasionally rains, that is fine by me.

A great good friend Susan Burks jetted in from SF on her way to trek in Morocco and my lovely big son, all lank and sleepy eyes, trained in from the foothills of the Adirondacks and college. Susan is off at tea and Henry has been sleeping happily in his childhood bed, on a soft rainy day. He will eat copious amounts of fancy cheese bought by my love and his dad before he jaunts off to the theater with Susan to see the show.

Zac is staying home to secretly, like an elf, bake a giant birthday cake, although I can see all the fixin's on the table arrayed like gifts themselves. And my daughter called from the south of France and we got to gab at length this morning while Zac brought me a strong dark cup of excellent coffee to wake me up.

Yesterday was a horrible though. I had to do the battery of tests for the potential “Real Job” and they were math and crazy spelling where you had to find the opposite, the antonym, of the word presented and they gave you the word jumbled, and then you had to pick the final letter in the word. So for a dyslexic it was:
Opposites
Reordering letters
And spelling finding the last letter

It was awful, and they had wanted me to do it in a chartreuse room with no natural light and no windows or air on a PC computer I had never used before and--lo and behold--I had a major panic attack. My therapist friend says this had happened to me because of PST from 9/11. Perfect that it happens while I am mounting this opera that I hope provides some assuagement from all the panic. But in that little dark, airless room, boy did I get super scared with my heart threatening to leap from my body.

I did finally get permission to take the computer to my house to do the test. Endless personality questions.

TRUE or FALSE
I have never had any hair on my head?
I can look at rivers for hours? Wait, do I have hours or am I being a slacker?

Many of the questions begin with
I NEVER or
I ALWAYS and really, is there anything much that one can say never or always to other than for most of us at some point we have had hair on our heads.

I often feel as if I am being watched.
I know what others are thinking before they say anything.

Kind of an acid test for aliens.

But the test is over and now on Monday I have to speak to a shrink via phone from LA. As the therapist friend said, "You can just scream on Ninth Street in Manhattan and a shrink will step out the door." But they had to hire one to talk by phone.

But I divert, this should be about me having the opportunity to celebrate my 58th birthday with a show I conceived, wrote, directed and produced, thank god I found someone to write the music, a great collaboration. I am overjoyed at the timing and the marvelous, magical friends I have been seeing at the shows.

It makes me see how rich my life is, how varied, and how lucky I am.

Birthday Week/Country Blog

In my family, we attempt to celebrate what we call a birthday-week. Mine started this past Friday, and it ends this Friday with my actual birthday, a show and a party given by child-wonder Madison Pappas’ equally wonderful mother, Liz.

But for the next two days, I am celebrating in quiet fall splendor in the country. Right now my celebration consists of sitting in a café waiting for my car to be serviced, for new brakes to be added and a tune-up to be administered to my old station wagon so that it can keep going until my kid is done with college.

I am also walking while looking in windows thinking about buying a new flannel nightie, mine is 15 years old this year, a pretty good run. I read the things I write sometimes and I think, they make me seem so crazy, or cheap or both but. . . any private behavior we have when exposed to the light of public scrutiny makes us look wacky, right?

I think that is what so much of the political season is about--taking small private things, or big ones, and exposing them to bright light in an attempt to discredit the ideas or experiences. For me, now it is beyond the “silly season” in American politics, a phrase I heard Obama use during an interview. But this is the dangerously silly season and it has me very unquiet in my mind.

The political climate has me missing some of my moments of happiness with this incredible operatic endeavor, or my personal silly season: a birthday. What I don’t miss is the happiness in the moment of unexpected people showing up at CALLING. I have jokingly said that it feels akin to the experience of a back-in-the-day show, called This Is Your Life. A quick recap for youth of America, as I remember the show, hapless folks came on with the pretense of some other show and instead the show trotted out an array of acquaintances and key players from the constantly weeping “stars” life. So far in my version of the show appearances have been made by teachers, former bosses, ex-boyfriends, neighbors and co-workers, whose support is unexpected and so heartening.

So here is my disjointed post , typed at the noisy café in Rhinebeck NY. The one cup of coffee has stretched and lasted for 2 hours now, while I added and sent the final payroll to the LaMama office in the hopes that after this final weekend we may have enough money to cover the tiny amounts we promised to pay the incredible artists who have populated this opera.

I am off to pick up my car, buy a big round pumpkin and maybe the flannel nightgown in the window of the poky store in town.

The Day After Opening/ Lucky 13

Last night was beyond astounding. Packed house, really full, me telling the box office to sell tickets that were not there--I mean not printed, and we used programs as tickets.

People sitting on folding chairs on a balcony or stair. The New York Times photographer snapping as folks arrived and the reviewer sitting in the aisle.

FINGERS STILL CROSSED.

Energy through the roof. The singers hit the notes, the highs and lows, somehow they found consonant and vowels. Who knew that vowels are easy in opera, but words like GLUE turn into GOO. Or PILE becomes PIE. Since I have no idea what goes into an opera and I just blurted out LET'S MAKE AN OPERA, this entire process has been a hapless wonder to me.

And fair warning readers , my house guests from the South, who got up at 11am, to find me at work on my Guggenheim grant application, due Monday, (oh the universe has a sense of humor), asked, “Can we take you to a wonderful lunch?”

“How wonderful?” I asked.

“Whatever you want.”

So I called Chanterelle, really the best anywhere, but it is around the block from me and they have helped so much with Calling. You know they took us right away and treated us royalty. We had champagne and wine. This is in the middle of the day, mind you. I came home at 3:30 believing I had missed the Sunday matinee; please recall that it is Saturday... oh my god, that lunch seemed really long and magical.

Oh the discussion among a Jungian mother and her daughter with me as the interloper when weaving between marital sex, an opera about September 11 and how to promote healing, the distancing that sons MUST DO WITH THEIR MOTHERS, and food, travel, art, literature and jewelry. That’s really all I can recall and it was marvelous. After lunch they went to buy champagne for after the show and then jumped into a cab to run to the Guggenheim before it closed. I asked them to bring back good luck from there for my grant and I hugged the couch and cat and took a well-deserved nap.

Why was last night so wonderful? Because the cast had gelled, the fear subsided, (before last night we had run the show only twice, really) and with this diminution of fear came boldness, not recklessness but the confidence of professionals. The stage manager was on time, the lead little girl had pigtails and not a salon “do”, and the light board operator ran the lights, not the designer. The fans that click and clack were turned off. And although the theater must have been 500 degrees (okay 90) it was calm, save the late comers seated and wedged with children into the balcony. But that is, as my mother used to say, “an upscale problem.” I wish us too many in the audience every night.

My roommate from college, Nina, was there with her sister, Deb, and we hugged, acknowledging our 40th anniversary. The very pregnant and gorgeous Rebecca Asher Walsh, tan from the summer in East Hampton, was prettier pregnant than her normal radiant self and was squired by Dr. Chuck, who is the cutest soon to be dad in our circle. Christine and Carter came--bigwig music and art couple, and I believe they really did love it. Neighbors came, the friends whom I met in Morocco last summer came from Birmingham and Pensacola to support and fete me.

At the curtain call everyone who worked on this baby from any point on came to the stage and we held hands and bowed. And my teary eyes saw my husband who had begged off coming as he had work and a biz trip this morning. But there he was in the back of the theater, smiling and clapping for me the second night in a row. He had even ridden his bike in the rain, He does not like rain the way I do.

So Zac and I didn’t go out with anyone. We biked home to snuggle and wait for guests and I just wanted my “normal life.” On occasion now when I find myself uttering, par hazard, phrases that crop up in the opera, I feel like a parody of myself, but I need to remember no one sees this but me so I need to relax.

Oh wait, that’s another line.

Ok back on the bike, (another line) and off to the theater.

Break a leg.

Paragraph Depeleted

What I mean is that I don’t feel as if I have the brainpower, or mind space or some good computer term that would indicate how fried I am. So I thought maybe I would resort to lists to express how the first invited performance went last night.

This is in the order the thoughts come to me, and I wish I could send this out without spell check or spacing check or insanity check, but alas I’d like to cling to the few writing jobs I have and if they saw the true mess I am, even those would be gone. Here is what happened last night.

The stage manager arrived at 8pm. I kid you not--the curtain is at 8pm--so I acted as the stage manager until the final moments.

I asked the electrician to do one task and that was turn off the electric fans that are poorly mounted to the ceiling so they clack incessantly. He did not.

The lights of tribute were amazing because it was so overcast it was as if you could climb them into the sky. Especially transformative after champagne, exhaustion and stepping from an overheated, but incredible party into cool air.

My friend from Brownies, from when I was 8, the age the two little best friends in the show are now, well, Nella came to the show with her husband, a blues musician, I called him a blue grass musician, saw that was an insult and thought, well the word 'blue' is in it right? Oh no. They loved the show and I loved them for coming.

Diane and Dick came down from Salem, Mass. I met them on a press trip I took to the Galapagos Islands. Such lovely folks... meant the world.

The gaggle of gorgeous young volunteers, led by event wizard Hattie Elliot and Grace Samson, who took over the lobby and the bike shop and made magic.

I gave books to everyone in the cast.

My great, good girlfriend Thalia flew in from Milwaukee and cried sitting next to me the entire time.

My friend and lawyer Tori came, she almost never leaves work.

My upstairs neighbor, Terry Berkowitz, who designed the book and has expressed over and over how much she hates opera, came.

My financial advisor Lisa came, my pal Dave came--he also hates theater, and he was the editor for the book. He dragged his girlfriend and his stepbrother.

My kids' cousin from the wretched baby daddy's side of the family came, WE LOVE HER, and she cried and hugged me. Her sweet boyfriend helped carry buckets of ice and water. I asked them when they were going to get married. Hattie dragged me away saying I had too much champagne. It was one glass.

Liz Papas, mom to little star Madison, bought the champagne and told me she got it donated, it was lovely but not as stunning as she was in a wrap dress.

Souhad and Paul were there, she so beautiful and not aware that she is. Soheyla and Pico, Mitchell and Whitney, Lori and Laurie, and on and on and on.

We were clapped for and toasted and I thought, oh let’s limp home after watching, barely helping Hattie’s mom and dad, Margaret and Rod, load up all the left veers into their car. Oh, let me go home and sleep, but neighbors Liz and Michael Pierce had other plans. So I was a good sport and we ate late at the local pub, Walkers right across from the fire station, the one that loaned us the fire coat that the cast believes is magical.

The entire night was magical.
I am so full of appreciation to all the components of my life.

BUT I still am only fantasizing about sleep.

Gathering Storm

I am awake and neither in a meeting nor rehearsal. I am up, well-coffeed and processing the dream I had last night about seeing a performance of Calling, our little opera at the grand, Paris opera house. I have seen work there, and it was that very place, with the fru-fru like a wedding cake interior, and a full orchestra and stage filled with our casts’ wonderful faces and, of course, more and more.

They were whirling and doing the mechanized dances that Edisa has cooked up, born from the images, photographic images, of workers fleeing the Towers on September 11, 2001. But now there was a chorus of heartfelt, office workers and construction workers all moving to composer Doug’s amazing music. And I don’t know if they do this at the Paris opera, but dreams can merge and purge and thus my words were running across the top of a lush red velvet curtain and they were in French. Although I speak French sometimes in dreams, I rarely read French and here were words so clear and fast zooming across my mind.

I suppose the dream was predicated on the great success of last night. Not only was the reading and performance, our little Page-to-Stage concoction at the TriBeCa Barnes & Noblem, a success, but the fact that we, our tiny company, pulled off a performance and rehearsal in dual locations was incredible and showed our nimble abilities to the best.

There we were, Carl conducting Maja on violin, and replacement crazy talented, Rob Walker on clarinet, subbing for Jay Hassler who was playing for Paul Newman (can you make this stuff up?). Nicole and Madison both really exemplified mother and child, full of emotion and voice. Hattie marshalling the forces of booksellers and press wishing she had a staff of 20. While Hiroya took the other musicians through their paces with Edisa blocking scenes where mom and child were extraneous. We were a producing family; all going about our tasks, staying on point and moving this baby closer to the real thing, an opera.

I have a need to insert an aside here, and although this is ALL ABOUT ME. (Hey, I wrote this thing right, so here it is.) I was touched beyond belief by the folks who showed up at Barnes & Noble and they all seemed to be truly moved by the reading and the operatic segment that followed. But here is the kicker, as I was shuffling paper getting ready to go on, I hear a voice from my very far past hollering my name. It was my favorite high school teacher, and just typing that I begin to well up. And all of this crying is happening as Tropical Storm Hanna gathers outside my window turning a blue sky to gray and threatening a big cry from the sky. Not only was sociology teacher Vic Leviatin there, but so too his wife Roz, who I had not seen in 40 years. I used to babysit for them.

“Oh, you are a regular old person.” She blurts. “I mean, you are a grown-up”.

Okay, Roz was the very first blunt person, blunt woman I had ever encountered. Roz was honest to a fault, and very political. This long time married duo, sported OBAMA buttons, hers a “WOMEN FOR OBAMA" button and, other than my husband, they were the only ones wearing political buttons at this event. I was so happy to see them; of course they bought books for their two little boys, now 44 and 48. I am still reeling from the kindness they showed and the happiness it gave me, especially now with both my parents gone, those in loco parentis mean so much.

I do miss my parents and with my kids away and sometimes unavailable, I miss that love the perfect squish of a hug that says, “You mean everything to me.” Luckily I have the kittens and a sweet, affectionate husband to fill in my family circle.

We have a super-long slog today, and every time I write September 6 and do the math, meaning it is four days until we offer our open dress rehearsal to folks downtown who helped us, my skin starts to leap off the back of my neck and arms. My job is to remain calm and hold the reins of this run-away pony. Composer Doug did give me some good feedback today, although I may be evincing this calm, he says I am jumping to conclusions too fast and I often jump to a negative conclusion so I need to slow my roll a little.

Okay, Doug, here I am, breathing and going to get a little lunch with my man with whom I feel I haven’t eaten in ages. Pizza or late night cereal does not count. I am excited to sit in the café next door and watch the storm arrive as I contemplate a salad and the metaphoric storms on the horizon lurking in wait for our little opera. I am confident that although we will get wet, we will flourish.

Home-free-all

Yesterday... what a strange combination of emotions.

WOW -- the New York Times saying actual nice things about bone-head me. And me taking my still silent, grumpy son back to college -- or at least I drove to the country house. (And yes, John McCain, I know how many houses I have, and, yes I know I am a very lucky person.) My husband, Zac, drove the rest of the way from the Hudson Valley to Skidmore College. Henry is still holding a grudge, and the ride north from the city -- where I was bursting with excitement and happiness that we had a real honest to goodness NY Times article that might put butts in seats and make people notice this little opera after months of working for free -- and well, the silence was chilling. I talked the entire time in my head, but it was sad.

After they drove off, I took back the little farmhouse from the renter ladies, making the nest my own again. Changing beds, doing more washing, tossing out weird renter food that is perfectly fine, but not mine. I then went out to touch plants, pull weeds, crush beetles and remember what wet earth feels like after a month of dark rehearsal spaces and late night bike rides home. I also fielded tears and confusion about rehearsal times; I dealt with egos on whose name appears where, and if middle names are used or why is former musician listed but not. . .

All told, it lets me know, again, that we are all fragile and all looking to be recognized for the little and large things we do.

After a romp through the woods with the cats, I collapsed into the hammock and fell asleep to find my husband standing over me, having waited, he said, for me to wake up so we could go get ice cream. OH, twist my arm. So we were off to Holy Cow. Can you make that up? We ate drippy sundaes in the shortening light and I tried to forget that in nine days, the show would go up, with lights and dance and music and all the cast members who have never even yet been to a single rehearsal... and I tried to stay calm and see it all working. All safe, all fine, all singing and then the audience applauding.

And in my head I will yell out "HOME-FREE-ALL!" Just like I did when I was ten and ran to hug the tree in dusky games of hide and seek.

When I went out to cut brambles and prune roses this morning, I let the big Maine Coon cat, Auggie, named for last month, lead me where he wanted to go. He wanted to walk in what our Scottish friends call the Dingly Dell. This is a path cut between blackberry brambles and a bogey hollow west of the house. It took me two years to cut this path through brambles and woods that resemble nothing short of Sleeping Beauty's prison in the fairy tale. But I hacked with clippers and machete and now there is a path where mossy tufts and lazy tress leave a clearing for deer, intrepid humans and fearless cats to tread.

This morning, there were clear paths marked by the pointy hooves of deer and Auggie and I picked our way along. I wondered what the deer think when they smell us and I imagined this conversation between the doe and her spotted twin fawns I spy regularly making crepuscular leaps.

“Oh look, kids, that is the foot print of the human woman who made this path. You know the thing about humans, and the reason they are so dangerous, is that they have forgotten how to use their intuition. They know things, but will never use what they feel until they can connect it to something they have learned in books, or school.”

“What does that mean?" the smarter, small female fawn will say.

“It means they can’t tell if things are dangerous, or fun or wrong unless they learn them, not feel them.“

“That must be a hard way to live.”

I think they are right. And I am going to attempt to feel my way though this last bit of time until we open. Now it is 8 days until our invited dress rehearsal on September 10. I will have to keep feeling the gratitude, luck and hope that I see evinced all around me and keep pushing myself to imagine the woodsy calm and the joy that comes form feeling the tree and yelling, “HOME-FREE-ALL!”

The Flood

Last night I came home after a long slog in rehearsal. Some folks were missing and still we attempted to be very good sports; all to extraordinary results. A storm was brewing in the City stirred up by hurricane Faye, and the humidity hung like bags of wet wool. I was grumpy. I called my husband on my bike ride home, who informed me he had ordered Chinese as a treat for he and our son.

I was excited, “Hey what did you get me? I’m starving.” My loving husband, the man I adore, began to list the items he ordered. It was clear he and Henry had ordered and he was marketing the leftovers to me. I stopped him, “ So you didn’t actually get anything for me right? OK I’m on my way ” Click.

Oh I heard my voice, a horrible harridan knife-like sound. I hated the sharp, cranky bitch that shared my spirit. And she tends to rear her head more in tired, hungry situations; and this was one.

By the time I made it home and into the breezier loft, I was calm. I kissed my man, fixed a plate of Chinese and prepared to watch the US Open with my tennis-crazed husband, who had Tivoed all of it. I ate my chicken and broccoli and an egg roll. I sat back on the coach and swiftly began to doze; it was 11 p.m.

I transferred to the bedroom with tennis still pinging back and forth in my ears and the next thing in knew I heard rushing in and out of the bathroom. What was my son up to at 4 am.? On his second trip in I asked, “Everything OK? “

“No, water is pouring into my bedroom.”

I walked into his room, and there was a waterfall. We short-term problem solved with buckets and towels, called the upstairs neighbor, and I beat on the door of the family living on the top floor where the wife is 9 plus months pregnant and they have two others under the age of two; only the husband woke up in all the hub-bub.

Henry and neighbor Charlie, wrapped in his wife’s robe, ran up to the roof and Charlie pried the door open with a knife. A torrent of water poured onto us. We slammed the door and waded through knee-high water to find the drain. Once located Charlie fished around and lifted off a rag that had capped the drain; and the water loudly sucked down the pipe clearing the roof in moments.

We went back downstairs with Henry content that he had saved the day. He had once upon a time, declared his life’s ambition to be a rescue dog, and tonight he had a go at it.

The loft was chaos, water still pouring, towels everywhere, buckets full, and books thrown out of harms way, filled the living room. Well at least the Times’ photographer came today to take shots; it would have been a disaster now. Not yet 5 am. And I threw a load of sodden towels into the laundry and thought to fire up the pot roast I promised for a real Saturday supper.

In my extra time awake I returned to the job of being a mother and wife, jobs I fear I have abandoned for the last few weeks all eclipsed by the work of directing, producing and attempting to make an opera. Funny how in times of crisis, big or little, what I turn to is the old fashioned tasks that women have embraced or been assigned for eons. I cook and clean.

Laundry washing and pot roast bubbling I retired to google, and email and phone donors and invitees, compile the days lists and ride out on my bike to secure my list of props: 3 push brooms, 3 sky blue yoga mats and reams of white paper. I ride back and forth on the bike gathering, redistributing post cards as I check on the locations to see the stashes are still high. Then I head off to the rehearsal loft to be astounded.

The chorus in nearly complete, there is finally some percussion in the little orchestra though strangely the clarinet and cello are missing, but thus is the style of rehearsal we have to put up with as we are paying so very little that it requires participants to take on other jobs to pay rent. We understand, but I can’t wait until we hear and see everyone and everything playing, singing moving across the stage together. Still the choral sounds, shored up with piano, violin and percussion are thrilling.

I no longer think I was insane to attempt to do this, but I have to hold back my enthusiasm at wanting it to be ready and focus on the tasks at hand. We have such a long way to go before our invited dress rehearsal on September 10, our Gratitude Performance. More to come on that, but for now enough to say, that we are moving forward. For today I am heartened by arriving home to excited men waiting on mashed potatoes, salad and pot roast, I hear them smack and moan loving the dinner and I think, “They are easy right?” Some times even disasters just require towels, buckets and pot roast and the rest takes care of itself.

The Birthday Boy

Birthdays are sometimes harder, maybe deeper for the mom than the kid. Or am I imagining this in a hyper-exhausted, need emotional support kind of a bog and fog way?

My youngest kid is 20 today, and we haven’t been having an easy time. So does that make me feel older, less competent? Yes, it does. And I am steeped, working on a piece that takes place in my family's life nearly 7 years ago, right before September 11 happened, makes me reflect back on when and how it got so hard between me and my son.

I know that moms and boys need to have a real separation. I know that, but it is tough when I see it as a strident separation. I love this kid and feel as if time is passing so so fast. And yet I bet he thinks that time is slogging and he wants his real life to jump-start and begin, but instead it is another birthday during the dog days of August, when few friends are around. It is another end of summer waiting for school to start, or dreading its start. He is back to college on Monday and it feels very weird to me this time because we haven’t found our way back to each other.

Everyone fights, but this feels different, and so today when I saw the homeless woman on the corner, I saw me. When I saw the couple fighting in the super market, I saw me. I viewed myself in every negative, sad or difficult image of women that I passed as the day unfolded.

We went to dinner, my son and husband and I, our daughter is still in France. It was quiet. The men seem fine not really discussing the elephant in the room, meaning talking about sports, and repo guys, or heat, or the menu. And all the time I am screaming in my head, why is this so difficult, why isn’t it loving and kind. And my husband tells me it will change and he will come around, if I keep believing.

And so I do. I bring cupcakes, which melted into a box puddle and I had to steel myself to not cry at the table, as I felt they were the metaphor for my relationship with my Henry. Melting and not what it should be. Sweet but needing time to maybe pull together in the refrigerator. Is that what time does to relationships, a kind of re-forming.

I had to head to rehearsal and Henry was walking the same way. I started to walk with him, but he made it clear he was going onto the phone. I piled onto my bike and cried all the way to the rehearsal loft. I miss him.

Maybe it won’t always be this way, but for now it is and he heads off to college to be more of a man very soon. The music really transported me tonight, and every time the mother in the opera sings, “I’m worried about Henry, about the kids in school,” I think, yes I am still, still worried and still love him so much.

Being Perfect

In the midst of all this opera hubbub (what else can I call it) I stumbled into an email conversation with a young downtown mother, who is also a big time Conde Naste editor. She and I are connected through other friends and my daughter, who baby-sits for her. It began as an email in passing, HEY WHAT ABOUT NURSERY SCHOOL? And it segued into being a discussion about the desire of mothers, especially the over-educated, over-wrought, over-worked mothers’ desire to be perfect.

Perfect does not exist, unless it is in the Japanese notion of Wabi Sabi: beautiful ugly. Unless it is in the perfect notion of nature, where things have a moment of pitch perfection and then the leaves fall off, the peach over-ripens and we move to the next season. When did we begin to believe that mothering could be an undertaking where perfection, a no-faults expectation, could be expected or even sought?

My new email friend’s son is just a year old and already she feels she is not enough for him. My son turns 20 next week and he often tells me in vibrant, blue tones how I have failed. I have a litany in my head that ranges from when I zipped his neck in the snowsuit, to making him attend a reading seminar on his birthday before he began High School. I forced him to go to a free summer school program for under reading kids that extended into Saturdays during the fall and spring of second and third grades.

I have embarrassed him endlessly by introducing girls, by asking him to accompany me to theater events. I took him to the Broadway Show The Puppetry of the Penis when he was 13; he tells me he still has nightmares. I have yelled in public, I yell at home. I didn’t push him to be adventuresome in eating, I cooked special meals for everyone because I felt so bad that I had to leave his father and put him and his sister through all that. So I didn’t push enough. Even though we paid for him to live in Los Angles for his junior year of high school, found a tennis coach, a thing he said he wanted, he still feels as if we didn’t visit him enough. Now please remember that this is a very hard working family comprised of two freelancers, with little back-up. We struggle, but have fun doing it. So the fact that his stepdad and sister and I made visits out there, some of us more than once, seems huge to me. But in the end I do very little right.


It is not perfection and it is never enough. This summer he yelled at me, by email, saying I never gave him good advice. This was as he endured two weeks in the South of France. I KID YOU NOT. I have gotten him tutors, helped get him jobs, edited papers, found him a semester abroad in Scotland working at a castle, I have taken him to his driving test again and again and paid for classes. I paid for music lessons and fancy sneakers and I sit up with him on occasion eating Cheetoes after a night of beer drinking. After the LA year, he wanted to drive across country so I contrived to get a story so that the expenses would be off set, and we did drive across country and had a blast. At least I thought we did.

We do enjoy each other from time to time, but underlying it all is the raving notion that I am not perfect, I am so far from perfect and I see it in him. He is gruff and has not learned the dual art of apology and appreciation. I suppose, like my friend with her toddler son, I expect perfection from myself. And when I see my failure at that goal evaporate I am stung and stunned. In fact it happens every time.

I know I am occasionally judgmental and short tempered, but I have tried with all my gumption and power to love this kid, to shower affection on him and to see who he really is and love that, not who I want him to be. BUT . . . he comes home today and I know I will see again my terrible imperfection reflected in his eyes and words. Running away tonight to rehearsal will almost be a respite, a cowardly retreat I know.

Spinning Wheel

It is nearly suppertime and I have passed most of the day sitting behind a wheel. No not driving, but spinning clay into bowls. For five hours I took slabs of clay, between two and four pounds and I spun them into bowls. Fat, flat, lifted feet, stuck to the ground... each unique, and I was in heaven.

In my head, there was no missing voice coach, no lack of funds, the clay slabs all got along. I didn’t think I should have nicer here, or more stringent there, I sat and I mesmerized myself. Each bowl for a different person. Do you, gentle readers, recall my insanity at deciding that I “needed” to make all the opening night gifts. Well I now have enough and there are even some extras thrown that may go to my son Henry’s campus apartment, if he stops mouthing off.

I worked on Calling this morning, I gathered, listed, and talked at length with composer Doug about schedules and how to copy music and distribute it, and when to meet to begin writing the next round of grant applications that are due the first of September. It still seems a little like fantasy baseball or knitting for a yet born baby. I know how these things happen, I have seen plays and dance and music evolve from idea to magic under the lights of a flickering stage. But I have never been the one who had the hair-brained idea and then rallied the troops. It feels so different.

At any moment I expect these troops of amazing artists and designers to turn on me, as if we were on a bad hike and rebel.
“We are not taking another step!” they will holler.
I will shrink back and cower, “Why, why?”
“Well, because you do not know what you are doing!”

Shall I say, “What’s your point?”
Or something a tad more philosophical, “Do any of us really know where we are going or what we are doing?”

That might throw them off the scent of fear for a day or two, but I know it will reappear.

All of this life thing for me, making pottery, being a mother, cooking, writing, producing, directing; I am aware there are books and methods that could. . .
NO can teach you how to do it, but then there are people like me who have to feel things or they can’t achieve it. At any rate today I made seven bowls and a big mug complete with handle for Henry, the converted Scottish tea drinker.
So that’s a good enough amount to make me feel productive.

Tomorrow is root canal, getting checks cut, that’s a kind of root canal too I guess.
And Rehearsal, writing grants and whatever else the gods of theater find amusing to toss our way.

Beyond The Brain We Know

It is Saturday, which means little when one is immersed close to drowning, in a project of passion. The work piles up and it has to be done. Calls must be made, parties planned, singers scheduled, invites printed, calls made to recalcitrant wine donors and tricky plans made to hang lights, and make dances in a theater space often unavailable for rehearsal at the same time as actors. It is a logistical nightmare, even with all the artistic stuff removed. Making an opera full of sound and fury and tiny set and major light and dance and props and found costumes. And I know you all get it.

But add to this my most insane decision to make all the opening night gifts from clay. This means going into the pottery studio on Chambers Street to throw on the wheel the bowls or cups, or pitchers or planters. Then these have to be trimmed, then fired once, then glazed and fired again. At any point, just like theater they can fall apart. Quit on you like a cast member or you budget. Explode in the fiery kiln or have the glaze run and stick and look more like an elementary school gift that only a mother can love.

So this morning I was going into the studio early. After all the phone calls to new singers, scheduling confabs and dropping off postcards at local markets and restaurants. I was going to sit at the wheel and spin and ruminate. Of course I had a list of all the other things I had to do, and silly as it may seems, calling my kids in France was on the list. I hadn’t wanted to hover so I haven’t called in a few days. I have my special super cheap, bought in a bodega, cardboard calling cards that require dialing many numbers, a skill I am particularly poor at, because my extreme dyslexia often messes me up mid-dial and have to start over. So I was waiting until later.

But I kept getting jangled in my head by my daughter. I do think of her often, but there is a certain buzz that is a real call. So I braved the multiple digits, had to redo twice since the first cards were used up. Tossed them and began again. I got her on the fifth ring and she was laughing. “Hey, it’s your mama.” She is still laughing, so I ask, “What’s up?”

“Well, I was thinking of you so so much and I thought I have to stop thinking about her because I can’t talk right now and I was trying to cancel the thoughts, like hanging up mid-dial, but I guess it didn’t work.”

This is no longer amazing is us. Perhaps others think it is bunkum, a lie, a good yarn to evince closeness, but it is a scientific as any other unproven fact. The earth still revolved around the sun even when folks said it didn’t. And many scientists have been exploring all the portions of our brain we don’t ever use and it just sits there waiting to be discovered and believed in. This is one of those parts. A way to communicate beyond words, and cheap paper phone cards and emails, and text messages and Hallmark cards. It is such a deep, and vibrant communication that even a quick touch where we laugh at being babe to make each other call is wonderful.

I know my son Henry has the ability to some extent, but he is happier believing that the earth is the center of the universe and doesn’t want to believe in magic, or communication beyond the phone or email. Sometimes he enjoys its wacky nature but mostly he wants, “Nothing but the facts, Mom.” I bet in his lifetime there will be scientific data to shore up why Willi and I can call across time lines and phone lines and reach other more clearly than if there was an email saying “Please call me.” That I can ignore, but the buzzing, unanswered shout-out from the south of France while climbing the steps of a cathedral is something I can’t and will never ignore.

Unlucky 13

Usually I love the 13th of the month. In my mother’s family lots of kids were born on the 13th. I even opted to take my brokerage exam on Friday, January 13 when so few others wanted to, thus the date was available. I passed.

But today I seem to be falling prey to a concatenation of unlucky happenings. It was not enough that yesterday we had to whittle the set back to bare bones and I was heartened when the creative folks all pitched in to change and react with love and aplomb. That was tough.

This morning began with an email, from my soon to be 20 year-old son who is visiting his sister in the south of France. I had to talk him into it, forget why, but my heart jumped when I saw his name in the email box. Then I opened it. Let me leave out the swearing. But it said in short “You have never had a good idea and this was among the worst on your long bad list.”

Then I attempted to restart the day with a positive attitude by corralling the schedules, and meeting with the costume gal who is my new favorite neighbor, Liz Dougherty. I can see her loft from mine. I love to talk with her and she seems to really understand me and that buoys me up. So I waited for her to call. But in the meantime I receive an email from Composer Doug, with whom I had spent a great long time last night, matching words and music. FUCK it says in the subject matter. I open this one right away.

It turns out, the family whose 3 kids, count them, three kids out of a total of Four kids, in the opera, THREE KIDS are being pulled from the project; less than a month from opening. I call the mother who says, the kids need to practice choir at school. I say I can call the school and ask if perhaps opera practice with us can count. She says NO ONE CAN EVER CALL THE SCHOOL. Then she says the kids need weekends in the country. I say I am Gob-Smacked and perhaps they could have thought of this before coming to the first rehearsal, signing a letter of agreement and taking checks, albeit, tiny checks.

There is no resolve with her. She wishes me well, which in these kinds of situations really seems quite false. Good wishes I don’t need. I need a little boy and other kids who can sing. So I call the trusty Director of the Church Street School of Music and Art and nearly weep. Lisa Eklund-Flores and I have wept many times: over grants and life over music and talented kids, over September 11 and over cleaning and making parties. We have both run non-profits and know the joy and terror of that endeavor. Lisa was undaunted and began to list kids, what their skill set is and how to get them. I began to believe again and this may sound like Polly- Anna, but hell she lives inside me too; I thought, I’d much rather have downtown kids, and children associated with this school I so adore. So come on universe dish it out.
There are still 10 hours to go before the 13th is over.

Let’s see... we need to redo the schedule, and get champagne and goodies for the opening. We need costumes, we need to get the book reprinted and I need to get out in this summer air, which is a miracle.

And my kid, my son, the one who gave me guff and whose doppelganger in the show quit; ALL ON THE SAME DAY; well my son Henry can just venture forth and visit the beaches of the South of France and hate me when he gets home. The one who was about to play him can toddle off with his brothers into the sunset.

By this point in the day, I wish them all well.

And I may break my 30-day moratorium on alcohol. This day can count as thirty. And believe me I haven’t even gone into the 12 other crazy things unfolding.

I will hold off on all of that until after the drink, and the sunshine.

Til Tomorrow.