XX X Triple X New Year Resolutions

January 1 XX X

As you can see that I have decided that this will be the triple X year. In Roman numerals one X is ten, thus two are twenty, a space and another X is ten again. Making it the year  XX X or 20 10.

Oh my dyslexic self loves the look of this; without the space it is another perfect palindrome year like 2002. This stuff makes my heart soar and my differently wired brain hum with a combination of calm and clarity.

Ok So the first day and I have named the year, taken down the Christmas tree, swept up, mended shirts, and obsessively organized all my passwords and codes into an alphabetic wonderland. My husband Zach and I attended two open house parties where we found old friends, a nemesis or two and wonderful food and conversation. For New Year’s Eve, we danced at home to James Brown and watched, he for the first time, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and we quaffed champagne and nursed caviar.

All in all, it was a good first day filled with work, thought, love, goodies and possibility. I can’t ever ask for more. Let’s hope I won’t.

Here is the encapsulation of my new year’s resolutions.

Less Waste

Less Waist

Less Waste: Use what you have well; stop thinking you need new whatever. I like my 1968 Raleigh and although it poses some challenges so does my 1950 corpus. I’d like a new refrigerator, but this one keeps things cold, and that’s its purpose right?  The list can go on. Less waste means using up the food bought during a shop, no tossing because it’s about to spoil and it isn’t convenient to cook tonight. Less Waste means mending shirts, coat linings, and sweaters.

The biggest place of WASTE for me, is time. To that end my daughter bought me a half hour, sand clock, similar to the one the wicked witch tortures Dorothy with, cackling that her time is running out. So the timer gets me started on writng. Turn it and write for a half hour, what do I lose. Or it limits the time I can fall into a sinkhole of social networks and (sometimes) useless information.

Less Waist is deciding that a little less of me and my expanding waistline could be a god thing. Nice to have a husband who adores me at size 12 or 16 but my knees would like a return to less. I read that every pound off the body is 4 pounds off the knees.  I ‘d like to keep riding my old bike and walking up stairs and running after toddlers with abandon and I need knees for that.

So that’s day one.

Happy Triple X   or   XX X  or   20 10

Winter Solstice 2009

Today is the shortest day with the longest night and we had a blast of sunshine during the peak hours and I ventured forth. I did nothing of consequence, I went to the bank and the super market and I ran into my Italian teacher from ages ago and actually turned my bike around after hearing his voice. It was clearly him, even though I hadn’t heard those dulcet tones in years. OK I had a crush on him but still. Cool to see him and his girl friend.

Then I was weigh laid by the Internet, (a new year, new decade resolution: half hour maximum in the vortex of electronic procrastination), so then I checked out a new site, mentioned in the Times magazine this week and on Wordnik.com I found this info. In 1932 Wilfred J. Funk, whose father launched the Funk and Wagnall dictionary, posited a list of the ten most beautiful words in the English language. Melody, murmuring, hush, lush, chimes, golden, lullaby, mist, luminous tranquil dawn.

My take: I was murmuring a lush melody, a lullaby, as I pondered the luminous, golden dawn breaking through the mist this tranquil morn; silent save for distant chimes.

My former consulting job, just ended mid December, wanted me to finish a report, which I offered to write two weeks ago, but they said they didn’t need me to do it. But today they need it done, NOW but I do not have the information to do it ASAP.  Oh well it will have to wait until after the holiday. Is that a surprise??

This interaction made me depressed, uneasy, disquiet. WHY I hate to do something half-assed and my reaction is akin to an anxiety attack. So since I could not achieve the report I mended all the items on my fix it list, I did wash, I cleaned out the refrigerator, wrapped gifts, even the big ones which I thought could be given in card board boxes, and I am raring to go to the Winter Solstice yoga class. The last thing is a lie, but I thought by saying it I might make it so. In deep winter when it gets dark early,  all I want to do is hunker and cuddle and read or watch a movie or maybe roll over. But there is going to be cello and good cheer so I will push out of my cave and do sun salutations hoping, as my ancient ancestors believed, that might bring the sun back. And you know what tomorrow the day will be a tad longer, and who knows it might be all because we saluted the sun in her shortest appearance of the year.

After the Yoga class.

It’s true all is new intentions and an upward facing spirit from all the downward facing dogs.  I dragged my 25-year-old daughter, as she has tugged me along on other nights when I was less inclined. And after the amazing class, we both agree that a session where mind, body and spirit unite is all wonder. And that is was taught in an unflinchingly beautiful, candle lit, loft downtown, where Indian samosas, sparkling cider and wine were served to celebrate the Solstice was the best thing we could have done. We parted ways after class, she off to a party and me slipping and sliding home to my own candles, cats and a dinner to cook.

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

Time To Write . . finally, maybe

Oct 15, 2009

 

As I left my loft downtown, bouncing my bike down from the loading dock and donning my slicker, while coughing heartily into my hand, I encountered my neighbor.

Wow even in the rain, this cold, the bike . .  . really ?

 

 Oh well if you give your self a day off, or an excuse you are done for. . .

NO EXCUSES

With that I pedaled off coughing and wheeling into the pelting downpour. I was wearing no hat and had grabbed only thin sweat pants to wear. I was on my way 3 miles north to a Pilates class, having forsaken my warm home and the promise I’d made to write something today that didn’t involve work. Meaning neither a journalistic piece on quilts nor a grant to support housing for homeless women. All important, but  diversions from my creative writing.

 

As I peddled off I was rattling around in my head, Never give yourself an excuse or an easy way out. You have to brave the rain, cold to stay strong. Go on out into the rain on your bike. I seemed truly crazy. And has I felt my fever heat and cool me simultaneously and my cough kept me hacking I had a simple epiphany as I crossed Canal Street. I am nearly sixty years old, when can I give myself a day off ? Or when can I take a respite just because I feel like it. WHEN?

 

And just like that I circled back and rode home. I turned my metal mule around and bumped back up the slippery loading dock and came home into the warmth. Ate a crisp apple and read.

 

Rather than feeling defeated I felt as if I  made a grown up decision. Pilates is wonderful but this cold and sore throat will not get better by beating myself up. I have a few hours without meetings and I am a writer who says she never has time to write.

 

Please do not think this is what I am passing off as my writng time, no this is the prelude, the foreplay to re- announce my intention to myself. As Lizzie Simon said in her wonderful  SHEWRITES.COM webinar yesterday, “Practice being a writer by writing every day for 30 minutes. Be in the void” Hell I spend a half hour wondering if the cats are actually smiling at me. Another thirty minutes pondering banana bread or a trash toss; so I think can invest that time in me and my desire to amass words into a form that might become a book.

 

I also went to a poetry reading this week given in a local gallery by the seductive and talented Max Blagg who said, “ I write1000 words every day, not all good words, not all keepable words, but words to get the juices flowing and refer back to perhaps when the real writng starts. Like keeping the machine in order.” His words and rhythm are magical and if they come from a rigor of daily writing then maybe I can join in.

 

At any rate I am home having turned back from rain and cold and wheezing and embracing, for a little while, the warmth of my home and the comfort of words.

Let Me Down Easy Anna Deavere Smith

Let Me Down Easy  Written and performed by Anna Deavere Smith

Anna Deavere Smith is a genius, and she even has a MacArthur fellowship to prove it. Anyone who is lucky enough to take a seat in the Second Stage Theater on West 43^rd Street and be regaled by the 20 real life characters created by Smith in For Let Me Down Easy will burst out acclaiming her bravura intensity for all to hear.

Anna, as her characters refer to her, pioneered a form of theater at the confluence of journalism, caricature and mimicry, all tied together with a shining bow of theatrical excellence. Anna takes her time to create her work and will not be rushed. For Let Me Down Easy she spent years interviewing celebrities, folks, clergy, doctors and hospital administrators across the county in order to find a synthesis that hits pitch perfect.

Health care in America at this crucial moment is on all of our minds: how to get it, how to pay for it and how to feel safe. Anna began work on Let Me Down Easy with a commission from the Yale School of Medicine. Her findings were then wrapped into an early version of the play and shown at New Haven’s acclaimed Long Warf Theater, and then debuted this fall on Broadway. This is not the usual route to creating theatre, but then Deavere Smith has never done anything other than work off the grid and make her audience rethink whatever subject she is tackling.

She is a consummate journalist whose ear is pitch perfect when both questioning and listening to answers. She begins by taping everything and then she returns to the tapes, edits them and becomes the person whom she interviews. Do not skim over this, she is an alchemist and she becomes for our delight and education a Buddhist monk, a boxer, her aging aunt, Joel Siegel, Eve Ensler, former governor Ann Richards, a patient at Yale New Haven hospital and Lance Armstrong among others.

 

Each character contributes a salient piece on the debate about ageing, becoming ill, dying or attempting to be well and achieve in a society which often seems to not value those who are not perfect: women who are not svelte, the wounded, the poor, the uninsured, the uneducated. Anna gives them all an eloquent voice. She equally allows the celebrities and higher ups in the pantheon of medicine to wax poetic about how they view this confused landscape of medical care and the shifting sands of health.

As the characters emerge Anna is served props or costume pieces by an unidentified hand maiden and by the end of the nearly two hour piece the wonderful set, flaked by mirrors, is littered with the detritus of the twenty characters we have seen metamorphosis before our eyes. Boxing gloves, wine, eyeglasses, a hospital gown, and various suit jackets, all remain to remind us that every character, every story builds on the one before it in this play, as in our lives.

This kind of thought, effort and execution is rare and is the result of long hard work. Anna Deavere Smith has a glorious team surrounding her in the director Leonard Foglia, set designer Riccardo Hernandez, lighting designers Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer, costumer Ann Hould-Ward and the movement and dialect coaches, dramaturge and various assistants; they all must be noted because Anna obviously knows that all the characters she brings so vibrantly to us are the work of a kind of distillation whereby gallons of liquid are distilled to produced drops of elixir. Do not hesitate to run and drink from the magic Anna Deavere Smith has created.

Thru November 8

ONLINE at www.LetMeDownEasy.com

CALL (212) 246-4422


VISIT THE BOX OFFICE at 305 West 43 Street