Kathy's Blog

To the Class of 2011

2011-06-18T12:55:00.001-07:00

My son graduated from the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts yesterday. LACHSA is filled with talented, dedicated artists, and my son, as a member of the theatre department, has spent four years with his classmates. We have hosted innumerable film shoots in our back yard, shuttled to and from rehearsals, given standing ovations at many shows, and have watched this group of kids blossom into talented, eager, hungry young artists waiting to take the world of stage and screen by the tail.

From the ceremony at Disney Hall, to our lavishly indulgent dinner at the Pacific Dining Car, to the blow out after party at our house (that ended 16 hours later)... it was a magnificent, celebratory day.

Graduations evoke tears in the same that weddings do. They are ceremonies laced with hope and optimism and possibility. They are the culmination of one long and hard won journey, and signify the embarkation on a new and frightfully unknown voyage. The tears are ones of joy and relief and fear and poignancy. The graduates stand at a perfect balancing point moment between youth and adulthood, aching to fly with new wings, while loving the good friends and the shared memories of their fellow fledglings in the nest.

My husband Roger, his first wife (whom we all adore), the boys and I had made reservations at the Pacific Dining Car. And we were delighted when we found that our son's best friend, with whom he is rooming at college in Boston next year, was also having his celebration there, with his mom and a friend of hers. We changed to a table of eight, ordered some drinks, and settled in to what became one of the most undeniably great dinners of our lives.

The food was perfection, the conversation went to deep and satisfying places. The hierarchy between generations was flattened, and we were all honest, funny, happy, and truly ourselves. We were people who loved each other deeply, whether we had just met or had a lifetime together, and we were collectively dedicated to honoring the two graduates' accomplishments and to wishing them well on their new adventures going forward.

This was my toast to them:

This is about causes and conditions. There are an infinite number of things that have brought each of us here tonight, and without those things this moment could not have happened.

About five years ago, a girl we knew was unable to go to LACHSA. She had been accepted into the theatre arts department, was a shining star in her family and school, and she -- like our graduates -- had a sparkling future spread out before her like a feast. But she died after closing night of the 8th grade school musical. And the hearts of our town, and her classmates, and certainly her family, were broken in a way that will never fully be healed.

She was 14. And she never made it to high school. My son and I mourned her loss and the loss of her potential and the loss of her light. And through that mourning, my son came to understand something about himself, and we learned about this high school called LACHSA, and he realized that maybe it was his job to take up the torch that had been left untended when Marieke died, and he applied to the school, and he was accepted, and in this way he learned his life's passions.

The first week at LACHSA he met his best friend. They have been inseparable ever since. They have grown together, gotten in trouble together, shared their four years together, and now they are continuing to college together.

Roger's son went to LACHSA and was three years ahead of my son. When Roger and I started dating, one of the things that we found most indicative of how we may be "meant to be" was this fact that we have three sons, three years apart, all three want to be actors, and all three went (or are going) to LACHSA.

So there's a girl whose brief brilliant life lights a fire in the heart of a younger classmate. He takes up the torch and attends the school of her dreams. He meets another young man. His mother marries the father of another classmate. His brother entered the school last year. We all sit together at a feasting table, and we toast the infinity of the future, and the complex lace of the past. We toast Marieke and all she has meant to all of us.

Causes and conditions.

We are all connected. The life of one person changed all of our lives forever. One person performs a great scene, or writes a great paragraph, or sings a perfect high C ... and destinies are changed in a breath. Our art keeps us sane, gives us meaning, weaves a web of grace around our lives of hard work and emotional turmoil. One person has a spark, and it becomes someone else's flame, and that flame becomes a candle, and the candle becomes a torch. And we hand this life force from one to another, and thus keep our souls, and our humanity, and our passions fueled.

To the class of 2011... I wish you infinite blessings. I want to dip you all in a bath of inoculation from pain and hard knocks, but know that it is exactly those things that will continue to burnish and shape you. We, the older generation, cannot protect you... but we can love you, and encourage you, and share with you the stories we have learned.

Enjoy your summer. Enjoy your future. And keep your spark alive. There is no limit to the number of lives you touch.

And the flowers bloomed like madness

2011-03-26T12:58:00.000-07:00

It was the anger. The anger and the wit. The anger, the wit, and the intelligence. Mixed with a crazy rock 'n' roll bass line and the passionate drive of the brilliantly deranged.

Aqualung. The album was my bible in my last days of high school. I played it in my eight-track in my Chevy Impala Super Sport and then later in my dorm rooms and in my single apartments. I sang and cried and lived by the riffs, the achingly perfect breaks, the volume, the words.

It got me through my bitter divorce with organized religion. It saw me through emotional upheaval and uncertainty of a nature I couldn't begin to articulate. It accompanied me off my high school campus to smoke cigarettes and hang with the smart angry political crowd. It went with me to college, took road trips with me, sang me to sleep. It fed me words. And it spoke for me when I had none left.

Jethro Tull is doing a 40 year revival tour of Aqualung. We just booked tickets to fly to Phoenix to see a show, as the show in L.A. directly conflicts with a fundraiser I'm doing with Opera A La Carte. (Rock 'n' roll lives forever, but Gilbert & Sullivan takes some work to preserve.) We are cutting out of work early, flying in for the show, staying overnight and then sliding back into town just in time to set up lights and run a production. Then the next weekend my son graduates high school. And two days later Roger has surgery. And the beat goes on, on either side of this moment we have decided to carve out for ourselves.

So this is our present to us. I could not be happier if I had a boat load of Prozac. Or any drug, licit or otherwise. We cleaned the house this morning, with the system cranked up listening to the old fabulous tracks. We are nearly forty years past high school. We are bogged down with Schedule Cs and HELOCs and FAFSAs and work commitments and career choices. We are in our mid-fifties, and are actively managing the deaths of our parents, the flight of our children. The words inside my head intone "if not now, when?" with insistent monotony, louder every day, while the heaviness in my heart grows. The answer, at this point, for many things, could actually be "never." We're at that point.

When I first lived and breathed by the Aqualung code, I had other passions consuming my heart and head. Freedom was something to be fought for, clawed for, won at any cost. The imperative was to get out, to become myself, to be born. It was as painful as any labor, leaving me coughed up on the beaches of young adulthood, panting and disoriented for years. I thought I'd seen it all. And yet I never would have guessed that the fire was a finite resource. That in the face of all the keeping on, we could someday lose the juice.

So grabbing at this opportunity is more than just spending our grown-up paychecks on a high school remix. It's a defiance against the mandates of prioritization. It's a wrestling against the density of our schedules. And it's an up yours to the perplexing way the checkbook ledgers diminish even as we work harder and harder.

It feels good. It feels good to reconnect with that anger and drive. We should all periodically give the finger to this middle aged shit. It's really such a very inadequate way to reward ourselves for making it thus far.

Crank something up today. Crank up the music that got you through. Spend a few minutes remembering who you were and what credos you lived by and what dreams kept you sustained. And maybe... maybe... just do one of those dreams. Strum a few chords. Book a couple of tickets. Write a blog. Do it. In honor of your own bad self who suffered so much that you could live. In gratitude for all you've been through to get to this point, today, in your long strange trip.

May you be defiant.
May you be triumphant.
And may the flowers bloom like madness in the spring.

Howl

2011-02-08T13:54:00.000-08:00

Saw the movie "Howl" (2010, directed by Rob Epstein) last night and was taken by a single fact of Allen Ginsberg's life. For awhile he was working in San Francisco in an office job, in advertising, making some good money. He said he enjoyed the fact that he could do it, but wasn't really enjoying it intrinsically at all.

He started seeing a shrink who kept asking him, "What do you want to do? What would make you happy?"

And Allen Ginsberg say, pretty honestly, that all he really wanted to do was write, get stoned, fuck his lover, and contemplate art all day.

The shrink said, well, go ahead and to that.

And Ginsberg said, I can't do that. I'll get old, and gray, and I'll have pee stains on my underwear, and I'll live in this horrible apartment, and I'll be alone.

The doctor said, no, actually I don't think that will happen. You're a charming fellow. You'll do better than that.

So Ginsberg did it. He dropped out, got stoned, fucked his lover, contemplated art, and wrote Howl.

Think about it.

A Christmas Tree Memory

2010-12-24T18:10:00.000-08:00

We have Truman Capote's Christmas tree in our living room.

It is about two feet high and covered with ornaments that were last placed on it by his own hands, sometime before his death in 1984. How it came to us is a long story, but we did not steal the tree, nor did we just find it laying around in some Sotheby's auction catalog and decide we just couldn't live without it. It was given to us.

It's been sitting on top of our china cabinet for about a week, and it has suffused the house with a subtle, charming, mystery. It feels like it's trying to tell us something, impart some meaning... but what that quite is is difficult to tease out. We know very little about Truman's private life and we don't know anything about who gave him the ornaments (some of them inscribed with first names and years) or why they were chosen. We don't know what rooms this tree has graced, what people have looked upon it, or how many Christmases in how many cities it has seen.

It's Truman's tree. A great writer. A cultural icon. A man we never knew. And for some reason, his tree is in our room.

It seems, oddly, a fitting ending to a most remarkable year. This year saw huge shifts of power in my life. Three major areas of my life changed radically, and painfully, with more stress than I've experienced since the mid-70's when I first was on my own. For most of the year the stresses compounded upon themselves, never having the grace to come at me in single waves. I was nearly always battling on two or more fronts, in addition to trying to maintain my normal roles of wife, mother, and faithful corporate employee.

The areas of these three power shifts were, oddly enough, all family related. The balance of power tipped between me and a father figure, between me and my mother, and between me and my ex-husband, which resulted in a balance of power tipping between my children and their father. There were seismic shifts all across the board, above and below, plots and twists of Shakespearean scope and Greek archetype playing out, betrayals and failings and heroism and defeat.

The difference of where I was at the beginning of this year as opposed to where I am at the end, is vast. I am now a trusted financial adviser for my opera company. I am now a trusted financial adviser for my mother. I have just barely survived a huge legal battle that has resulted in a long-overdue formalization of roles and responsibilities between my ex-husband, myself, and our children. Apparently it was my year to finally have my voice heard. To engage in adult undertakings. To get beaten up like an official contender.

And yet despite all this, most of the time it felt like the worst year ever. It has taken a huge toll on me physically. I've never felt so old or run down, and it felt for awhile like I was getting sick just about every other day. But when I look at it in kind of global terms... looking at what the state was at the beginning of the year versus now... I see that the daily stresses were really representing bigger shifts afoot. They were symptoms of larger adjustments that probably also had something to do with my getting married last year, and (going further back) nearly dying a year and a half before that. Like concentric circles rippling outward. I thought I had gotten plenty grown up a long time ago. But apparently there are always more hills to climb, more growth to be pushed through.

Truman's tree is a fitting grace note to all this upheaval. There are so many unknowns contained within these little green branches that it seems to exist simply to add mystery and grace. It coming into our lives has reminded us that serendipity still exists. That surprise is still not only possible, but inevitable. Things can change in a heartbeat and you can go from the plodding footsteps of despair to angel wings with a knock on the door.

So that's what I'd like to share with you on this Christmas Eve. The battles you may be going through could possibly be part of something larger, something ultimately beneficial, some painful kind of growth that it is now your time to endure. But remember that surprise can come at any moment. And we never know what wonderment will come at us through the switchbacks of fate.

Aristotle, by Billy Collins

2010-12-08T18:04:00.000-08:00

This is the beginning.
Almost anything can happen.
This is where you find
the creation of light, a fish wriggling onto land,
the first word of Paradise Lost on an empty page.
Think of an egg, the letter A,
a woman ironing on a bare stage as the heavy curtain rises.
This is the very beginning.
The first-person narrator introduces himself,
tells us about his lineage.
The mezzo-soprano stands in the wings.
Here the climbers are studying a map
or pulling on their long woolen socks.
This is early on, years before the Ark, dawn.
The profile of an animal is being smeared
on the wall of a cave,
and you have not yet learned to crawl.
This is the opening, the gambit,
a pawn moving forward an inch.
This is your first night with her, your first night without her.
This is the first part
where the wheels begin to turn,
where the elevator begins its ascent,
before the doors lurch apart.

This is the middle.
Things have had time to get complicated,
messy, really. Nothing is simple anymore.
Cities have sprouted up along the rivers
teeming with people at cross-purposes –
a million schemes, a million wild looks.
Disappointment unsolders his knapsack
here and pitches his ragged tent.
This is the sticky part where the plot congeals,
where the action suddenly reverses
or swerves off in an outrageous direction.
Here the narrator devotes a long paragraph
to why Miriam does not want Edward's child.
Someone hides a letter under a pillow.
Here the aria rises to a pitch,
a song of betrayal, salted with revenge.
And the climbing party is stuck on a ledge
halfway up the mountain.
This is the bridge, the painful modulation.
This is the thick of things.
So much is crowded into the middle –
the guitars of Spain, piles of ripe avocados,
Russian uniforms, noisy parties,
lakeside kisses, arguments heard through a wall
too much to name, too much to think about.

And this is the end,
the car running out of road,
the river losing its name in an ocean,
the long nose of the photographed horse
touching the white electronic line.
This is the colophon, the last elephant in the parade,
the empty wheelchair, and pigeons floating down in the evening.
Here the stage is littered with bodies,
the narrator leads the characters to their cells,
and the climbers are in their graves.
It is me hitting the period
and you closing the book.
It is Sylvia Plath in the kitchen
and St. Clement with an anchor around his neck.
This is the final bit
thinning away to nothing.
This is the end, according to Aristotle,
what we have all been waiting for,
what everything comes down to,
the destination we cannot help imagining,
a streak of light in the sky,
a hat on a peg, and outside the cabin, falling leaves.

From Sophocles

2010-12-03T20:01:00.000-08:00

"Philoctetes":

Heroes. Victims.
Gods and human beings.
All throwing shapes,
Every one of them
Convinced he's in the right;
All of them glad to repeat themselves
And their every last mistake
No matter what.

Ruby Slippers

2010-12-01T04:59:00.001-08:00

And then, there's this.

Two nights in a row. Unable to sleep more than about three hours. I drift off gratefully, sweetly. The blackness of sleep is thick upon me. And then... something happens. The dog, usually. Or something. I wake up, holding onto my dreams, as if they are breadcrumbs leading me back to that promised land. I let the dog out. I let him back in. And then I crawl back into bed.

My mind starts to click off, my body starts to relax. And then...

The stories start. The stories of my life. The schedules and lists, the teeming people, each with their own voice, clamoring for center stage. Snippets of my past, my present, my imagined future drift in and out, a montage of characters and interactions. The consummate rewriter, I work with each little scenario, compulsively. I move someone over to this side of the stage, I change motivations. I see how it plays out this way, then that. Over and over. Until the setting changes and a new scenario begins.

And as I was doing this for the past three hours, for the second night in a row, a few new thoughts started peering out from the wings. Thoughts about actual stories, things I could write. Instead of going down corridors and losing myself in alleyways of the past and present, I found myself transported, briefly, to fictional paths, with new faces and voices and scenes.

I remembered the truth that I came up with a few years ago in the hospital. That there are three main things in life; the three elements that absolutely matter the most. And they have a hierarchy: the body is the most important as, without it, there's not much to work with any more; our friends and family and connections who give us the most amount of happiness and joy, keep us grounded, save us in time of need; and finally, there's art. The consuming and production of it. The art, whether music or theatre or dance or words or crafting cabinetry or painting walls, the art is the thing that ties it all together. The art is the component of meaning. The art transports.

And suddenly I realized, again, that even though life seems very bleak in the dark hours when the veil is thin, the magic of that third element is always with us. Always with me. I can always summon the gods of art and beseech them to bestow their magic once again. The gods are always present and will always serve when called.

The gods, the muses, the art... it's like Dorothy's ruby slippers. Something I forget I have at my command. Something I use functionally, unthinkingly, forgetting its underlying power. And every once in awhile, in a small moment of grace, I remember that there's something else available to me in this world of lists and turmoil and responsibilities. There are those magic slippers. There is the ability to turn to that part of me that creates and say "There's no place like home, there's no place like home."

Feelin' Groovy

2010-11-30T09:00:00.000-08:00

Everyone's heard this a hundred times before. Maybe a billion. But: When your body feels better, you feel better.

Duh.

But, golly gee. It's really true.

During one horrible night over the weekend, when I tried to go to sleep without my Nyquil-induced coma, I woke up at about 3:40 and just could not go back to sleep. I mulled over everything there was to mull about: my symptoms so numerous I couldn't distinguish my sore throat from my headache from my fever from my cough; my mother's age and increasingly proportionate sweetness and dementia; my own age and the fact of all our mortality; the things I wish I'd done; the things I'll probably never do... you name it, I mulled it over.

At 4:30 I took two melatonin, downed some cough syrup, and settled back into bed confident that I would be soon sliding off into dream land.

At 5:00 I was still staring at the clock, going back over all the things I'd lost, all the people who hated me for not calling them enough, the things in the garage that needed sorting out, my god! the storage unit, I'd never get that dealt with and I'd be spending money every month, for ever... like throwing it away.. flushing it down the john, and why? because I was a loser and could never just get down and do anything and I'd better get used to it because I was now never going to have my mobility back again so the storage unit would stay unsorted... you get my drift.

At 5:30 I began marveling that I could actually take one Melatonin tablet, at 35,000 feet, with -65 degree Fahrenheit air surrounding the little metal container I was bobbling around in, completely at the mercy of some unknown entity in the cockpit, who probably wasn't even trying to fly the plane but who was him/herself completely at the mercy of some piece of software some bozo developer put together somewhere to fly planes over long distances at very high altitudes with like some funky old QA process and no functional specs and a list of Known Limitations a mile long, with no place to rest my neck, and annoying people yapping behind me, and children crying and stupid images burning through my eyelids from the video in the back of the seat in front of me (the little plane crawling with excruciating slowness across the map of the US, ticking of the miles in 12 foot increments, the miles decrementing with agonizing slowness, the smattering of little hamlets of farmhouse lights clumped in the dark far far below us, their inhabitants slumbering in their warm feather beds after an honest day's work and maybe a half hour or so watching Sarah Palin's Alaska before slipping off into dreamland, then staring back at the little plane on the monitor....oh look... we've got a ground speed of 555 miles and we've traveled exactly 10 miles), and how, freezing and neck spasming and annoyed and somewhat molecularly freaked out -- I could fall asleep within about 20 minutes.

But that night, with two tablets, and a very comfortable bed, and a sweet husband by my side and a goofball dog sleeping quietly on the floor, and a good day of watching Swamp Loggers under our belts, and all well and right and good with the world: nope. Could not sleep.

At 6:00 am I thought, my GOD it's going to be the night that I woke up at 3:40 and never went back to sleep.

And then, I must've, because the next time I looked it was all of 6:30. Thus even ruining my story (and martyrdom.)

And while I was ruminating about every single last part of me and my life that had gone off track, and wondering how in the world I would ever get any part of it back in shape again... that my days of exercising were certainly over, and my days of actually feeling happy were obviously gone, and that any wonder or joy or sense of mastery I ever had over anything was now going to progressively erode away until I would be laying in bed someday, at 87 (my mother's age) and I'd still feel like me but I would be old. Old old old. And my body wouldn't work and my brain would be bleak and, basically, I'd feel like I was feeling at right that moment... only I'd feel that way all the time.

And, well, you know, that certainly cheered me up.

So I made a little deal with myself. Very slowly, maybe, possibly... I could try to get back on track. And I wouldn't try to do it all at once because that would absolutely be impossible. But maybe there was one, or maybe two things I could do, for a week, to kind of try to sneak up on health, both mental and spiritual and physical. I wouldn't just jump into it, and further dislocate every bone in my body. But I'd stealthily, and carefully, and quietly... just try two things.

I would sit in meditation for five minutes a day.

And I would drink more water.

That's it. I couldn't solve anything more. In a place where there was no foothold to start from, the first goal was to get a foothold. And meditation has always worked for me (which is good as I, you know, married the meditation teacher). And water... hey. Always a good start.

So I've been doing it. Two days. And the sitting is like an oasis to my frenzied mind. It just feels good to stop. And I know this, and I've done this. But, gosh, it really works. And it felt like a balm to my sore and wounded brain.

And water. Water: good.

And then today I went and bought about $100 worth of high end supplements from Whole Foods. Including a sleep-inducing something that promises something called "relaxation" (whatever that is). And a supplement that addresses stress and immunity. Hmmm... ya think? So, yeah, that went into the basket. And some teas with pretty pictures and nice marketing writing on the box that make you feel better just reading them. Or at least you have the potential for feeling better.

And ... I'm feeling better. Like, actually really better. Roger of course feels like crap because the angel of death is now in his body... so maybe I'm just joyful I've been liberated... but... it's true. Body feels good; you feel good.

Photos from the 90's

2010-11-29T21:30:00.000-08:00

I attempted to do something yesterday, which was kind of remarkable in itself. But what I chose to do troubled my sleep and got into my sub-conscious in a way that I wasn't expecting.

I have boxes and boxes of photos. And I'm trying to, very gradually, get them in some kind of order. I manage to spend about 20 minutes on the project once every three months (which puts me at an estimated completion time of about 2060), but I figured a rainy afternoon in which I'm too sick to do anything else would be a good time to hack away at it.

I picked a box with pictures from the '90s. And over the next couple of hours I saw a long, bittersweet slide show of the first six years or so of my kids' lives, highlighted by many birthday parties, vacations, visits to grandparents, school events. I saw the first months of baby pictures for Spencer evolve into his first birthday party, held proudly by his godfather. I saw him blowing out his second set of birthday candles out at Travel Town, surrounded by an assortment of people I can barely remember. At two, he was not yet in school so I hadn't formed the close network of friends that I have now, so the people at that birthday party were all friends from our former lives... from Gavin's school days mainly.

Then Taylor was born, and I have a series of him and Spencer and Gavin in the hospital room, Spencer grinning proudly like he'd created his brother all by himself. I have a couple of sequences of them at four years old (Spencer) and about one (Taylor). And then a few later at about five and two. But it's obvious that life got pretty busy in those years and the only time the camera came out was for special occasions.

I found some pictures of a camping trip I took Spencer on, up to Northern California up by Tahoe. It was a reunion of some of my friends from college, all of whom (including myself) turning 40 that year. We felt so old. And we all had our four-year-olds with us. Most of my friends and I tracked exactly when we had kids, whether it was a hormonal alarm clock going of or just plain understanding that we'd never be more ready than we were right then. Since none of us were ready, we all collectively held our noses and took the plunge at the same time.

So the pictures from that series show Spencer's first touching of snow, and a piggy back ride on the shoulders of an old friend from college. There was a romance between Spencer and that friend's daughter, a romance that time and space conspired to thwart. But it was a poignant moment when they all came back down last summer for the wedding and the teenagers from that camping trip got to reconnect.

There are many pictures of the kids and I visiting with my mom, and many pictures of the kids with friends. Lots of birthdays, trips to Disneyland, trips with friends up to the long-lost, much lamented Mira Mar in Santa Barbara. Trips to the snow up in Angeles Crest to sled and build fluffy little snow people.

And there is even a set of pictures of me doing something without the kids -- a trip I took with my mom to New York in 1998. We both acknowledge that was the pinnacle of our relationship and our pictures reveal our mutual exuberance, our sense of adventure and extravagance.

Something happened to me on that trip. It was at a performance of The Lion King, which I cried all the way through. I remember being pierced with the understanding at that moment that my life needed to have more of a sense of joy in it. That I had lost, somewhere, the wonder, the buoyancy, the excitement.

All the pictures show happy joyful kids. And adults. But there are shadows in the pictures that of course I did not see at the time. Occasions that seem so happy in the picture, I remember being extraordinarily stressful behind the scenes. And looking at these pictures with my older, more informed eyes, I notice a few things. First of all, I'm always juggling. I'm juggling the kids, or have a wary eye cast over on something that needs my attention.

My (now ex) husband rarely appears in these pictures, and not because he was snapping the shutter. He just wasn't there. Except for some early birthday pictures, the only time he appears is when we're in certain groupings, with certain people, and I now see those images with a different understanding altogether.

And of course, I know that the closer we come to 1998, the closer we are moving towards changing these kids' lives indelibly. I look back at my old house and the pictures taken there and remember thinking that would be forever. I remember thinking that my partnership with my husband was solid and strong and that we'd be making our decisions together all the way through college and beyond.

But now, of course, I know that the course shifted. The paths diverged. And at the end of that box of pictures, I found a set of shots showing the duplex I moved into at the very end of 1998. A sweet little two story duplex. The pictures are from when I'd just moved in. My mom is there helping me furnish it; I'd left all unduplicated furnishings behind, so as to impact Gavin as little as possible. I had my brand new rug from Ikea on the living room floor (the same rug that Roger also bought, when he also separated from his wife, on the exact day I moved from Gavin's house). I do not yet have my bookcases. But the outline of the new life was there. A new life. A new, and much needed, beginning.

The kids are beaming in my arms, and there's an unmistakable lightness to all of us. I have a picture of me goofing around with Taylor (the only one of the whole box of hundreds of pictures where I'm seen being goofy and fooling around). And even though you'd think that these pictures would be laced with pain and stress and fatigue, the complete opposite is true: there is a light, there is a joy, there is the buoyancy that I'd missed for oh so long.

Chronic

2010-11-28T10:30:00.000-08:00

Now we're both sick. Roger's feeling all funky and I'm still blech on my concoction of decongestants, expectorants, suppressants and anything else I can find that sounds like it will boost my weary immune system. However, we have a fridge full of Thanksgiving leftovers, we've cleared our schedule of social and work engagements, and they say it's going to rain later. So, all in all, not a bad way to spend a vacation weekend.

Oh. Warning: Since I've sort of committed myself to writing a blog every day, you can now delete this along with every other "today I filed my nails" blog that takes the minutiae of daily life and blows it into headline-worthy 72 point type. Just in case you're wondering what I'm going to make of all this sickness and lethargy, I'll tell you right now -- there's nothing going on and it's highly doubtful I'll find anything meaningful to say by the end of it. I'm just going to spew out dumb stuff and then go take a nap. So... if you want to keep reading, be my guest, just don't expect much.

So, this morning I did nothing basically but loll around with Roger watching infomercials about folk singers and channel surfing to find the best reality shows. We spent a good 15 minutes watching "Deadly Women" featuring atrocious dramatizations of crimes involving women murderers, then about 20 minutes watching with dropped jaws a show about pet hoarding, featuring a woman with 300 cats. Unfortunately, we could not find anything on about swamp logging, which is my current favorite. And we couldn't get a channel that had a show on about moving big things with great difficulty (in this case, the Golden Gate Bridge). That bummed me out.

On the other hand, we did watch a great documentary ("Helvetica") which really kind of made our heads spin (more) with all the nuances a typeface brings to the table. So that was great.

And I finished a terrific book (Chronic City). I'm now an official fan of Jonathan Lethem, a fellow Bennington-ite who did what it takes to become a staggeringly good writer and make us all proud. I'd kind of love to write a paper about this book. It is weird and complex and it has layers and it got under my skin. I couldn't put it down for the last half, and the last few pages I doled out to myself because I didn't want to lose the weird, fantastic, very disturbing world he created.

But end it did, I now I'm back to searching in vain for Swamp Loggers.

Anyone have a good suggestion for a book that will both entertain and sustain itself artistically at the same time?

Viral Meditation

2010-11-27T12:00:00.000-08:00

This is being written in a drug-induced haze. Not anything super fun. Just loads of over the counter stuff. "Tussin" (I love the generic names), Nyquil, Cold Away (chinese herbs which usually work great), acetaminophen, and albuterol (which imparts a nice speedy edge to the soporific effects of the other stuff). I'm also taking copious amounts of Vitamin D, and a whole variety of other Chinese herbs.

I'm so locked down in the miseries of my body that I can hardly think.

But, in some ways, that's not altogether a bad thing. I breathe from my mouth, I cough from my chest, my eyes water constantly. I am consistently and acutely aware of every present moment.

This is what meditation is all about, I think in my haze. Present moment sensory awareness. I'm unable to construct a single delusional thought, so much so that I'm actually quite... well, calm. I wouldn't say happy. But stressing about the past and future is basically impossible when the present is so downright uncomfortable. I gaze out into the world through my red and scratchy eyes and think, OK. Whatever. It's neither good nor bad. It just is. And then I just concentrate on my breathing again.

It's meditation. Forced on my by the viruses that must've found me somewhere at 38,000 feet or in some train in Boston or NYC. The bug has gotten inside of me and forced me to stop, or tried very hard at least. So, OK. I'm stopping. Or trying very hard. And in the meanwhile I'll focus on my rattling breath. And contemplate my present moment through my senses. And enjoy the freedom from any deep or worrisome thoughts.

Whatever works. Frankly, I'd rather be in some excruciatingly expensive zendo being fed high end gourmet food and doing yoga all day, but... well... just imagining that is more difficult than it's worth. I'll take a sip of water. Feel it go down my scratchy throat. And then I'll see if I can breathe some more.

Radical Parenting #2

2010-11-26T09:00:00.000-08:00

Here's another radical idea. I'm convinced that this one notion is the single most insidious cause of bad parenting and fractured relationships between parents and children.

Ready?

Your children are not you.

You can play Mr. Potato Head games all day long and figure out if they have his ears and her irritability, or whether that funny wheezing laugh came form old Aunt Martha, and all that is really fun and all, but it actually doesn't address the fundamental fact that these children of ours are separate people.

The new word here is "separate." First, children are people. And secondly, they are separate.

Separate.

People.

This is not mitosis. Your little amoeba self does not suddenly and spontaneously split off into another little amoeba and then there are two of you. Your children may have aspects that remind you of you and other aspects that remind you of their other parent. But they are not you and you are not them.

Their choice in plaids does not reflect your style acumen. Their F in geometry was not done solely to remind you of your own humiliations in Middle School. If they like friends that you wouldn't choose... guess what? It's not up to you. They are not your friends, and it's not your choice. Sorry. But they are separate people.

You cannot project your needs, wants, fears, aspirations, dreams, desires, phobias, neuroses, joys, challenges, and successes onto these people. They are not your projection screens. If you hate the water, it's not your place to keep them from sailing. You can teach them to swim -- that's permissible. But you can't keep them from sailing because you don't like the water.

Their opinions about you don't matter either. They don't get to project their shit onto you any more than you get to project your shit onto them. Seriously. If they think you're a big bad meanie, OK then. They can do that. It doesn't mean it's so. And if they love you to pieces it doesn't mean you're perfect either. Everyone gets to still take responsibility for their own being and doing. They do. You do. Separate people.

I saw two examples of this recently, both during our recent slogs through highly traveled airport terminals.

In the first terminal, Spencer was accosted by a woman traveling with three young kids. She had all the stuff. The big puffy airline travel seat, the big fat assed stroller with bags and attachments sprouting out all over the place, the kids with their backpacks and the pouch on her front for the littlest marsupial. She was, maybe, in her late 30's/early 40's and she was traveling with three kids. Three kids AND about $3500 worth of additional equipment.

She enlisted Spencer into helping her. She asked him to take her picture. She asked him to take one of the big airline seats up through the aisle of the plane to get her situated. (Not like he didn't have his own backpack, duffle bag, and my own overflow stuff to deal with.) All this was fine, except for one thing she told him that stuck in my craw. "Hey," she said to him. "You know, not many people could do what I'm doing here."

And, I'm like... what? You mean, this is all about you? The whole point of this whole parade is so you can show the world that you can do it? I mean, it's not the most egregious comment in the world. There are certainly far worse things that she could've said or done that would've bugged me a whole lot more. But... there was ego involved. She was engaged in taking care of her kids and it wasn't about, you know, simply taking care of her kids. It was all about her.

And then there was this kid on the way back. Little girl, maybe two years old. First time I saw her I was immediately taken by her unique fashion sense. She had on a bright green and gray striped jumpsuit and bright red galoshes, that had fake shoestrings printed on them. She was standing in the middle of the aisle stating something factual to her mom who was about twelve feet away. She looked sure of herself, sure of her world, and easy in her place within it.

I watched them in the terminal and they ended up sitting in front of us. The kid occasionally got cranky, and cried a couple of times. She was a very little kid, after all. But what got to me what the way her mother handled her. She talked to her, throughout, like a very caring person would talk to someone she really liked and respected. She was not condescending, she did not lay down the law, she did not threaten or cajole or plead or punish.

When the little girl cried on the plane her mom said, "Wait, stop. I need to understand what you need." And immediately the kid stopped. The mom said "point to what you want, OK?" And the kid did something and then it was all OK again. At the end of the flight I heard the little girl ask her mom if it "was all better." And her mom said "yes, this flight was much better. Thank you." They'd had the conversation, they course corrected and -- what struck me as so neat -- the kid had incorporated into herself the desire to be better. It wasn't because of fear, or desire for a new treat, or because she had been punished into submission. They'd had the conversation, and she wanted to know if the new plan had gone well.

Neat. I would love to know what happens to that child as she grows up. I know both she and her mom felt very lucky to be paired with each other. And I felt lucky to be able to watch them for awhile.

Separate people.

Virtual Centerpiece

2010-11-25T11:29:00.000-08:00

I used to have a tradition of asking everyone who came to Thanksgiving dinner to bring a talisman to put in the center of the table, a representation of something that they were thankful for in their lives. I know that one of my first offerings was a little figurine of a sleeping baby (because it was my first Thanksgiving after Spencer was born -- or maybe my second! -- and I was deeply grateful for all the intermittent moments that he actually slept).

As we await guests and prepare food, I'm going to start off a list of things that I am thankful for on this day, and then I'm going to ask my guests to come in here at their leisure and add to the list.

So here goes:

On this day when we give thanks, I am grateful for...

My incredible family
Roger, who is so committed to taking care of me, and us, that it takes my breath away
Spencer and Taylor, the most amazing people I've ever had the pleasure to know
My beloved extended family - Xia, Zach, Mel, Pythia, David -- who have brought food, helped out, and made this day so warm and cozy
Everyone who did everything while I sat here blowing my nose
All of our incredible friends, north and south, east and west (and even right at home)
My mom's improving health
My banana slug sweatshirt
Robitussin DM
Nyquil
Tylenol
Soft soft Kleenex (TM)
Our collective sense of humor

From Roger:
Grocery shopping for my family and friends, filling my cart, greeting other shoppers (especially the "amateurs" who only come out on holidays), and feeling bountiful.
Kathy for her ability to keep me calm.
Zach, who constantly amazes me.
Xia, for being in our lives.
Tay and Spence, for coming into my life.
That we have friends and family to spend the day with in good health.
My wonderful work and careers.

From Spencer:
My friends
my fantastically dis-functional school
my trailer, and treehouse!
My various bits of technology that make my life so much simpler.
And of course my wonderful mother who made this blog and myself,
oh yeah, thanks dad for your spermacle contribution.
And of course Taylor, my super awesome brotha/broski/brohan/brocundo/brodozer

From Sam the Golden Doodle:
My food.
Going on walks.
Playing with other animals (species not important).

From Taylor:
I'm a man of simplicity so I shall say that I am thankful for everything that has made me smile, and not some awkward sarcastic smile.

From Kathy again...

A great meal, a lovely afternoon with family. Very thankful for the fabulous food, the cleaned-up kitchen and, now, an opportunity to just... stop. Very very thankful for that, too.

Family

2010-11-24T12:00:00.000-08:00

Ah yes. The holidays are upon us.

Thanksgiving is one of my favorites. I do love the colors and lights of Christmas, but Thanksgiving is great because it involves food and people and gratitude.

For the first 17 years of the kids' lives, we spent Thanksgiving in some configuration with their dad. For easily ten years after the divorce, we'd manage to find a place in our hearts and homes to get together to share the meal, sometimes with other people, sometimes with some part of our family, sometimes just the four of us. When my ex-husband got together with his current wife, we all had Thanksgiving together, and when I got together with Roger he blended seamlessly in, adding his son and ex-wife to the mix. It was cozy and lovely.

Last year, we didn't do that. I'm not sure what happened last year. The kids were with Roger and me and we had a lovely extended family day, with Roger's son, his ex-wife, her good friends, and a couple of other friends who chose to share the day with us. We ate and drank and Roger played Alice's Restaurant on the guitar (under duress) and it was lovely.

This year, it looks like we'll do much of the same thing. It will be great, but... it's just not the same without the rest of the family. My ex-husband and his wife have cut themselves out of this tradition, for some reason. And, as weird as it may sound, I really kind of miss them.

Family is a funny thing. Family is composed of people whom you really love, and who really annoy you, and whom you would probably never choose to be with if you really had a choice. But family is special. And it's weird when it spins off into other configurations that consciously and adamantly separate out certain factions.

Anyway. We'll have family, in whatever configuration. And we'll be thankful for the things we do have.

Radical Parenting #1 (continued)

2010-11-23T09:00:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I put forth this crazy idea that children are people. And of course I'm being sarcastic because it seems, well, pretty obvious. But as much of a no-brainer as this notion seem, I actually think I'm going to get some pushback.

Here's what I imagine the thought bubbles look like:

Whaaa? What are you saying here, Kathy? If kids are people and they come out kind of mostly pre-formed, what about discipline, what about teaching them about the Things that Matter, what about being a guiding light and a parental influence? If you just let them, you know, be -- what happens to all your control?

Ahhhhhhhhh. Do NOT let me forget to talk about control, because I think all this is all about control. But I'll get to that later.

Here's what I'm saying and not saying: I'm not saying you just let them run wild, like little free naked hippie flower children babies. I'm not saying you don't teach them and guide them and, yes, even make sure they know when they've crossed the very fundamental rules of decency, honesty, fairness and respect. Of course we have a duty to raise children who tell the truth, who use their wise mind whenever possible, and who are emotionally healthy and whole. I'm not in any way saying we don't have a place in their emotional and behavioral upbringing.

What I am saying is that children are people. And as people, we should approach them like we would any other person. Or -- here's a very radical idea -- as we would wish to be approached ourselves.

When you meet a new person, you leave room for all sorts of possibilities, rather than going in with preset notions of how the whole agenda is going to go for the entire span of your relationship. So why can't we do that with our kids?

Here's another thought bubble I feel popping up out there. Oh, Kathy, you're just a softy. We are NOT friends with our kids. We are their parents and if we call ourselves their friends we're somehow going to let them down and we're somehow going to lose all possibility of control over their lives. (There's that control thing again.)

Well. Yes and no. I'm not saying we're their friends like their peers are their friends. We're not their peers and it's not our job or within the realm of possibility to have that type of relationship with them. On the other hand, we're not their owners, either. We're not. If we put ourselves into the position of being their owners we open ourselves up to a whole lot of confused and conflicting and, in my opinion, ultimately impossible positions.

Ownership gets back to control. I own my car therefore I can determine when to change its tires (or not.) I can determine when to gas it up and whether to run it into the ground and how often it should be washed. And in exchange for all this caretaking I expect a certain level of service from this car. I expect it to go forward when I press the accelerator, and I expect it to stop when I push the brake.

Seriously. Don't you see a whole lot of people approaching their kids this way? "Because I said so." "Because I said NO." "Because I'm the mom."

Again, I'm not promoting anarchy. It's more of an approach. Do YOU like it when your boss says the equivalent of "Because it's your job" or "Because otherwise you can't pay for your groceries?" Nope. No one likes to be handled that way. People want to be treated as... here we go again... human beings. And since children are ... RIGHT!... human beings, maybe it's better to treat them the same way as we'd like to be treated.

We are neither friends nor owners of these people. I would suggest we're something that's not either of these things. I would suggest that we're guardians, in the sense that we need to protect their physical and emotional well being. And we're guides, in the sense that we have important information that we have gleaned from years of our own life experience, and we are in a unique position to share that wisdom with these people in hopes that they can learn whatever lessons can be learned from it.

When we decide to have kids, we decide to have new people in our lives. They can be people who are very similar to us in nature and attitude; or they can be extraordinarily different. I propose that we treat them, at whatever age, as fully fledged, fully viable, people. People with their own rights, their own responsibilities, and their own hearts and minds. I propose that we do not presume that we know everything about them, just because we share some of their DNA. I propose that we let them just be. Like we'd let our friends to be, if we cared about them. Or like we'd like to be treated ourselves.

But this leads to Kathy's Second Radical Belief: Children are not us. Which I will discuss soon.

Radical Parenting #1

2010-11-22T09:00:00.000-08:00

Let's talk about parenting.

I have some pretty radical ideas about parenting, although it hadn't been brought to my attention until recently. Much to my surprise, I'm really pushing some pretty major traditional parenting envelopes in my various philosophies about children.

As I promised, however, I'm going to break out and actually put words to some of my more incendiary notions. So grab your Dr. Spock, put the toddler into a time out, and be prepared to hear the first of Kathy's whacked out assertions about these people we call our kids.

Kathy's First Radical Belief about Children: Children are people.

They actually are. They come out of the chute with their own brains. They have their own bodies. They have their own personalities. They like the things they like. And they dislike the things they dislike.

The moment my second son was born I realized instinctively what scientists have been arguing about for ages. In the battle between nature and nurture, nature wins. My second son, at the ripe old age of zero, was simply, and obviously, and immediately, a very different entity than my first son.

They are both their own people, and they started out with much of their personality already intact. They were knowable from day one. Which means to me that it is not entirely incumbent upon us parents to form these little blobs of clay into fully formed human beings. To that I say a big WHEW, and apologize to all the therapists out there who make their living blaming everything on the parents.

Now, that's not to say that we, as parents, can't fuck our kids up. We certainly can. Kathy's theory of radical parenting includes an idea that, while most of our kids' personalities are almost entirely nature-created, how our kids interact with themselves and the outside world are very much informed by what we model to them as parents.

Let me explore this a bit.

From us our child learns how to feel about him or herself. From us our child learns how to be with other people. We model relationships for him, and we show him how much he is valued. From us, his parents and caregivers, he learns how much to trust his own instincts, how much to count on the reliability of his feelings. He learns whether he's worthy or not. And he learns how to conduct his social relationships.

Our children, I believe, learn this by modeling, rather than by our talking at them. I think they watch us conduct our marriages, take care of ourselves, interact with others, and then they use that as a blueprint for how to interact in the same way. (Or not. Negative modeling is oftentimes far more of a powerful imprint than positive modeling.)

All the other stuff in a child -- their tendency to eat things that start with the letter P, their aversion to clothing that contain any colorful pigment, their learning preferences -- all that, I believe, is mainly nature-based. Anything that has to do with how they literally perceive the world through their senses is nature.

There are also peer influences, but I think you get my point. Children are people much like -- I know, this is where it gets a bit out there -- we are. Just as we are a combination of hard-wired preferences and tendencies, so are they. They come out like that, just like we did.

You'd be surprised at how rarely this concept actually looks like it's being acted upon.

Many parents, it seems to me, spend all their energy trying to mold these people into little dolls that behave and think like they think they should. They battle and fight and impose limits and force activities on them and fight with them and ridicule them and tsk tsk tsk that they are such a disappointment when they don't turn out exactly as the parents' current blueprint dictates.

Here's Kathy's Radical New Idea: we can just respect and accept the fact that these children are people in their own right, and we can get to know them. We can enjoy the fact that we have been graced with these very amazing creatures in our lives and we can treat them like the people they are, rather than the clones we may want them to be.

This gets into some other crazy ideas I have, so I'm going to stop here and let you think about this for awhile.

Respect and accept. They are people too.

On the Train

2010-11-21T11:57:00.000-08:00

Traveling north on the Acela Express with Spencer after a glorious 20 hours or so in New York City. The fall colors sprinkle through the trees in the towns we are traveling through, interspersed with little marinas, junkyards, the backs of warehouses, and the rest of the back yards of this heavily traveled east coast corridor.

I love it out here. The sky is a soft and gentle blue, the hint of the cold to come making itself known in a preliminary way. Before it gets warmer, it will get much colder. Before the trees turn green again, they will become thin stark sticks of gray. Random leaves whip by the train windows, hinting at the snow flurries to come. Inward looking anticipation in the air. The world is gathering its belongings to itself in preparation for the cold.

After Spencer's audition for Emerson was scheduled, I realized that we would have some time afterwards between the end of our duties in Boston and tonight's flight back to LA. I figured that relaxing was for old ladies and wussies and that we could maximize those precious thirty hours or so by taking the train down to NY. Thanks to the miracle of Hilton Honors (TM) points, and my exceptional travel management, we stayed at the Waldorf Astoria, garnered a wide variety of freebies while there, shut the downstairs lobby bar down at 1:35, and had a wonderful old time, all for free.

Glorious.

But as great as all that sounds (and it was great, truly), the pixie dust really came in the middle of our stay. Thanks to Roger, who knew the show, our friend Jill had snatched up some great TKTS tix to "A Life in the Theatre," a David Mamet play that was at once delightful, loads of fun, and more haunting as the immediate memories recede. As Roger said, it's a piece that works on many levels. It absolutely entertains (which is my first prerequisite), but at the same time it raises a lot of thoughts. Relationship of actor to audience, the nature of performance, the act of the creative process ... to what extent is an actor giving, and to what extent does he suck the experience dry in an ultimate act of ego gratification. Good shit.

Of course, in order to do all this with only two actors, you need some pretty top notch talent. And talent there was. The production starred Patrick Stewart and T.R. Knight (O'Malley from Grey's Anatomy). Jill had procured some terrific tickets, about seven rows from the stage, so we were able to experience the energy and expertise at close range. Excellent acting, terrific technical mastery... thoroughly enjoyable.

But that STILL wasn't the best (although it was getting pretty close). After the show, and after Spencer was the first one up for the standing ovation (and everyone else followed), Sir Patrick and TR stopped the applause and said that there was going to be a fundraising collection after the show to help with HIV/AIDS patients. And, as a special incentive, the first ten people to donate $250 would get to come up on stage and have their picture taken with Patrick Stewart.

THIS is where the pixie dust came in. Luckily, Jill is a total geek and has the same sense of misguided (or possibly well-guided) values as I do. We glanced at each other, agreed almost immediately to split it on credit cards and bolted down to the very close stage left door. Yessir. We were second in line and proceeded to happily dig out our cards to swipe.

How cool was that?? Here we were backstage on a broadway stage, in a setting that is my equivalent of a church altar to a priest. And sure enough, about three minutes later we were all shaking hands with Patrick Stewart and thanking him profusely for an amazing performance. He was gracious, warm, and the consummate professional. Spencer whipped out his iPhone and we took the photo above, giggling like little geeky groupies and having our hearts just beating in our chests with glee.

We were fairly quickly ushered on but the really lovely moment happened next. The next couple did not have a phone with a decent camera, so Spencer popped up and offered to take it with his phone and then email it to the guy. Suddenly there's my son, in this bizarre and wonderfully weird situation, hanging out with the stage hands and Patrick Stewart, saving the day. That is when the pixie dust rained down. The moment of connection and synchronicity and culmination. After auditioning for Emerson in the morning, seeing a beautifully first class production about life, literally, in the theatre, and then ending up backstage... there was my son, integrating all of it with grace and good humor.

And the reason this all is so meaningful for us right now, is that it was all so needed, and gratefully received, for both of us. We are both in the thick of way too many conflicting pulls on time and heart these days. We are stressed, overburdened, beleaguered. And before it gets better, it will probably get worse. The winter we are going through as a family will not be over soon.

Pixie dust comes when it will. Unexpected, unbidden, and like a shower of grace from the gods.

In the Lobby

2010-11-20T09:00:00.000-08:00

Fall in Boston. The trees in the Boston Common are losing their color in great glorious swatches. Most of them are shimmering gold and dropping their leaves like early snow. Some are flaming out, like wild crazy 80's rock stars, completely drenched in vivid hot pinks and reds.

You don't need acid in the northeast when the trees are doing it for you.

I'm here with my oldest son, visiting colleges and prepping him for an audition to his first choice school. I am his willing accomplice as we roam the streets, dropping in at Dunkin' Donuts for sugar and caffeine reinforcements and navigating the T -- me going old school with a tear out map from the hotel tourist brochures, and him on his iPhone.

He usually wins in the navigation department, a fact that fills me with equal parts pride and chagrin. Up until I married Roger (whom I am VERY proud to say is as good with directions as I am) I was always the navigator in the family, the intrepid traveler, the one holding the map. There's always one person who has that designation in a traveling group: the guy who holds the map. And it's always been me, and now Roger or me.

But now I have this son. This... kid. Who figures out the logistics of traveling as fast as I do. Sometimes faster. He's taller than me, he holds the door open for other people, he knows the niceties of moving through the world. He hands spare change to the shivering guys standing outside the McDonald's. He handles himself so well I find myself increasingly relying on him.

It's the passing of the baton. I feel it in a dozen ways. My body is sore from the red-eye, so I let him to take both bags. I tell him to go figure out how to get from point A to point B, and I find myself not double-checking his route. I trust him.

I easily envision us in twenty or thirty years. Roger and I will officially be doddering, slow, frail. We will probably both be deferring to all three of our sons as the guys with the map. And I have to swallow the shudder of mortality that runs down my back and soothe it with immense rushes of pride. I see it daily these days: I have raised a son who can survive out in the wilds of a new city. Who can navigate a map. Who has street smarts and who is compassionate to strangers.

My worry about my son as he juggles school and applications and film shoots and theatre productions takes up a lot of my time these days. We are both under immense amounts of emotional stress and I watch us both for signs of failure, of falling apart, of letting the myriad plates come spinning off and crashing into the walls. But when I'm out here in the world with him, I get to see him as I hope he will be next year as he's off, somewhere, going to college. I get to see him exercising a reasonable amount of judgment, of being aware of his world. I feel reassured.

Like the trees, the time comes when we get to burst with color for a short short while. Then the leaves start to blow off in beautiful gusts, leaving the limbs bare for the winter.

Voice

2010-11-19T05:14:00.001-08:00

In September of 2008 I was given some information.

This information was, as they say, game changing. It made me understand that much of what I understood about my life was wrong. It made me understand that the world was not as I'd perceived it. It shocked me into realizing exactly how idealistic I am, how all too ready I am to believe that other people go through life with the same values that I have. It made me realize that certain events, certain actions, have ripple effects that catastrophically compound rather than diminish in intensity.

This was damning information. Damning to people I know and still love. It nuked friendships. It decimated trusts. It took out my world with a surgical precision.

And it was information that can go no further, because it would do the same to other people I love. People who do not deserve to know this information any more than I did.

Which meant, as I worked through this information over many many painful months, that along with everything else, I realized that -- for once -- I could not write about something very important and personal to me and share it publicly.

I could not write about it. Which has meant that, for the past two years, I have not been able to write.

It's been like a big intestinal blockage. The thing that most needed to be expressed, could not come out. I could no longer write the words that needed so badly to be written. I could no longer write the words that could possibly alchemize the poison of the situation into something useful, something funny, something benign.

I could no longer write.

What happens when a writer cannot write the story she has to write? What happens when that inner, urgent, passionate imperative to make sense out of chaos ... cannot be given articulation? Sure, it's painful to the writer. But, as I've asked myself over and over for all this time, in the bigger picture, who cares? Does it matter?

Of course it matters to me, the writer. I mean, intestinal blockages matter -- a LOT -- to the person who is blocked. But, seriously... and I'm sorry for going to this metaphor but it really actually kind of works... it's just not that interesting a subject to anyone else. Whether I write something or not, in the cosmic sense, is inconsequential.

I've recently learned that another blog that I created in partnership with someone else was taken down without my permission. Oddly enough, the same person who gave me the information that turned my world upside down is the same person who erased my words from the world without my consent.

I have a lot to say. And whether there's anyone out there listening is really not the point. The point is that my voice was stilled, and now I'm no longer willing to be quiet. I can protect the people I need to protect and still wake up with a roar. I can figure out how to break the silence without breaking hearts.

The size of the audience is not the point.

The point is voice.

The point is whether a voice, anyone's voice, has a right to be heard.

So, after thinking about it for a good long while, I realize that I have only three words to say:

Fuck that, people.

It's over.

Whether anyone likes it or not, I do get to have a voice. And it does get to be heard. And you can read it or not. I don't care. The point is that no one gets to erase my words. And no one gets to hide if I decide that I have information that also needs to get out. No one gets to password protect the truth, my friends.

So, starting today: more blogs. I have a fuckload of things to say.

And it's about time I start saying them.

Cynthia

2010-03-24T20:04:00.000-07:00

Cynthia died yesterday.

My beloved friend, inspirational colleague, seeker of truths. Hungry, rockin' out, haunted, laughing, brilliant... absolutely brilliant Cynthia.

Cynthia who always hung up the phone laughing. Usually at the absurdity of it all. Usually seeing the acute futility and absolute humor permeating any and every situation.

Cynthia whose liver was compromised during a random walk through Oakland one night a couple of decades ago, walking with her 20-something friends, deciding to get a tattoo at a non-descript parlor. A rose on her wrist to match her favorite top. Yeah, there was something funny about the guy at the front desk. A yellow pallor to his face. But they were young, and who would think. Who would think... who would think...

Cynthia who went through hell on earth the past two years, battling insurance companies and waiting on transplant lists and moving in and out of hospitals several times a month. Losing her apartment to bills that were unable to be paid due to the stalls and snags of the bureaucracy.

Cynthia, whose friends rallied around her spiritually and physically, surrounding her with love and the highest intentionality, willing her back from the brink over and over and over.

Cynthia, who finally got her much needed and much overdue liver transplant... but whose body was, at that point, so compromised, so wracked, so tired, that it didn't ever quite take. Whose body gave up: exactly one day after the health care system that put her through this horrific journey, was finally... finally overhauled.

Cynthia, whose voice we will never hear again.

She has already taught me lessons.

Like, to never postpone doing the right thing. Sometime last week I awoke in the middle of the night, unable to go back to sleep, riddled with anxiety about my cherished and beleaguered opera company. And while I lay there, I suddenly decided to pay her a visit. So I knocked on her spiritual door and said hey. The veil is thin. Why shouldn't we commingle our souls for awhile, take a break from it all, go for a fly-by to the beach, or the mountains, or wherever we want to go. And while we walk together, let's have a long conversation. Let's talk of movies and music, literature and love, sassiness and sex. Let's hang out, you and I... I said to her. It's been way too long.

So we did. And it was lovely. And when I heard last week that her devoted friends up north were collecting and taping voices to surround her with, I thought, gee, I should tell her about this vision I had about us. It would be cool, and she'd hear my voice, and maybe I'd play "Get the Party Started" by Pink because she always loved that song, and it'd be cool. And the technology was available to do it easily. And... I put it off. I was traveling... I was busy... I'd do it from Seattle, I told myself. I'd do it when my work was done. And I never did. And now I know: you never put off doing the right thing. Because you don't always have that time. You really don't.

And she taught me, again, how precious are our physical beings. As valiant and stubborn and brave and feisty and willing as Cynthia was, the body could not withstand the assault. So today I started exercising again. And drinking water. And taking better care, remembering that no one is immortal. No body lasts forever. And the sadness we leave in our wake is deep and vast and lingering.

Cynthia was my guardian angel for my book. She worked with me on all parts of it, the structure, the title, the deep underpinnings, the marketing, the vision. She made it sing, made it coalesce, made it sparkle. It was a project that we both loved, and she shepherded it into the world with as much care as if it had been her own.

And on the day we launched the project, in a little room off from the stage where I was to give my first reading, she gave me a refrigerator magnet that completely embodies who she was... who she is... and who she always will be for me:

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the sky...

-Jack Kerouac

I'd say rest in peace, my dear dear friend, but I don't mean that. I want you to fly, to sing, to rock the world as you make your transition. I want you to get that party started, once and for all. I want lots of postcards on your way out. And I want you to burst into the heavens like fireworks and sparklers, roman candles and the 1812 Overture. I want you to explode with joy at the release from your tired body, dance on your grave, laugh at the absurdity of it all. Hang up the call laughing, beloved fabulous friend. We will meet up again next time the veil is thin.

Friday

2009-10-30T18:01:00.000-07:00

Roger has just started a new blog, and I'm here at work while he finishes up his first post.

Have just a few minutes, but wanted to just mention that very special feeling that Friday evening still seems to have. For those of us with nine-to-fives, work is done for the week, the weekend looms ahead...if not glittering with possibilities, at least as long in its potential span as it will ever get.

I always used to say that my favorite part of the week was that elevator ride down to the parking lot on Friday nights. Even though I'm old, and even though that feeling of endless summer is but a sad and aching distant memory, there's still a whiff of it in the air on these Friday evenings after work. Even if there's nothing planned. Even if there's nothing but a bunch of housework in store for me. Even if it's just another coupla days off... still, it's something. It's something.

Anyway. To all the rest of you working stiffs stuck with a 40 hour work week, enjoy. This is the place where it's good to be us, and not so good to be a free lancer, or a student, or someone who has to live by their wits, which translates to working around the clock in high anxiety 24/7. Nope, this is the point, the one point, where we can say OK, it's done for this week. And walk away.

Have a good weekend. And enjoy Roger's new blog.

Sullivan's Farm

2009-08-15T01:11:00.000-07:00

True, it was Gilbert and Sullivan rather than Jimi and Janis. And, true, we only had 5000 as opposed to 500,000. But we had emergency vehicles. And we were a gathering. And you could feel the energy.

I was trying to picture what 470,000 looked like. It would be slightly less than 100 times more than the audience we had at the Redlands Bowl tonight. 100 times bigger than this WPA-era amphitheater and all its surrounding grassy hillsides was holding. That's... big. But it was also sort of kind of conceivable as well.

I watched and ran the show from the lighting and sound area in the midst of the audience. Doubt there were many geriatrics moving up the aisles on their walkers at Woodstock, but there were plenty of kids at the Bowl tonight... conked out on their parent's chests, or against each other like floppy, deeply peaceful bookends.

Some time during Act II we saw a pair of red flashing lights coming slowly up the side street. I realized that a gathering even 1% as large as Woodstock was still big enough to host its own medical emergencies, create its own microcosm of community.

So I got a little thrill. When I mentioned that we were a little Woodstock over the headsets (not really hoping anyone would actually get it, but just saying it out loud because I was so tickled with the notion), one of the crew members (all of whom were born after our current set was built) (no lie) asked if I had been there. I snorted in huge derision and mock affrontery. Hellooo. I was, like, TWELVE at the time. What did they take me for, anyway?

And then I realized... wow. I really am kind of old. Most of my commentary this show has started with comments like "you know, I was there when they built the 210 freeway." "You know, I've been with this company from before they had computerized lighting boards." "You know, when I started Word Processing we used 7 inch floppies. Nope, not 5 1/4. Nope, not 3 1/2. Nope you wouldn't have seen these computers in your parent's living room when you were a toddler because this was before there were even PCs!"

That's been how it's been the past few days. Then there's this Woodstock moment with the flashing lights. And I saw that I had been graced with a little tiny postcard from the universe. See, it said on the back in a messy scrawl. Here you go. It's the best we could do on short notice, but here's a little message -- the balmy summer night, the crowd of humanity sharing the same music and food and weather -- the moments of hope are not yet over. For you, or for the world. There will be other grace notes of intersection, both big and small, when people come together and have an experience laced together by community and music. It happens far more frequently than you'd imagine, and it's magic when it does.

So take heart, fair days will shine... take heart, we are still stardust and we are still golden. We are closer these days than we have been for awhile, but we are still very far away from that idyllic garden we all were so eager to find. We'll get ourselves back to it someday. And in the meantime we'll find ourselves a song and a celebration and set our souls free free free.

Cheating

2009-07-30T07:54:00.000-07:00

Let's talk about cheating. The weakness of telling lies because telling the truth is too difficult. The trail of destruction the cheater's actions leave behind, and how it poisons all primary, secondary and tertiary relationships for years to come.

I'm not going to sugarcoat it. The more I know about cheating, the more disgusting a crime I believe it to be. I once theorized that sleeping with other people could be acceptable in an open, authentic relationship. But I don't think anymore that people can actually be open and honest enough to make that possible. And doing it in a covert way is one of the most emotionally destructive activities we can do to ourselves and the other people in our lives.

In the early days after my divorce, I had two affairs with married men. I am not proud of this and I grow increasingly ashamed of my actions as time goes by. I did not know their wives, and I rationalized my actions by telling myself that their marital problems had nothing to do with me.

Bullshit. I was wholeheartedly and enthusiastically helping the husband be less of a person, avoid his responsibilities, and develop his ability to be deceptive and sneaky -- all in the name of someday being together ourselves. What was I thinking? I was helping someone become someone I would despise. I was honing his skills of deception and reinforcing his ability to compartmentalize and rationalize. And somehow I kept losing sight of the fact that if we were ever to get fully together he'd now be fully capable of using those skills on me.

I have also been cheated on. Profoundly and profusely. I have discovered more than one boyfriend either in the act or after the fact. I have been lied to by jedi masters of deception. I won't go into it here because it does get to be a litany of the same kinds of words: betrayal, rage, despair at ever finding a safe haven of trust and kindness.

So I know how it feels, both ways. It is an ugly, gutless, selfish act. Take the easy way out and damn the consequences to the hearts closest to you.

That's the emotional side of cheating.

But yesterday I came across an article in last year's Psychology Today (Love's Plan B, August 2008) that has me thinking about other aspects as well, in this case the psychological side of cheating. The article talks about "Plan B" relationships -- relationships, or even fantasies of relationships -- that we carry around with us in case our primary relationship fails. Here's how the article describes "love insurance":

Although we may love our exclusive partner, we can still think about other romantic possibilities -- people we keep in a mental box that might as well be labeled "Open in case of current relationship's demise." No matter how content we are, we still seek a sense of security by creating a web of potential future romantic alliances. That's why people are hardly shocked to hear that a sizable percentage of men trawling online dating sites are married.

The theory is that we all have to keep gauging our viability in the marketplace in case the current relationship fails. And one of our security blankets of love is keeping a little something on the side, just in case. This little something something is more than just a casual fling or flirtation, but at the same time it's less than the primary relationship. It is nothing more, or less, than a backup plan.

This sheds some new light on the concept of cheating. Maybe we keep those options open because of some ancient genetic imperative to make sure that we, as women have a mate to take care of the offspring if our main squeeze gets in trouble with a boa constrictor. We all know about the "need to seed" that we attribute to men, but it probably works on the emotional level as well. It's like having a backup pint of Ben and Jerry's just in case you need some comfort food asap.

Which makes it sound pretty rational. But there is a catch: once you get labeled as a No. 2, you are rarely going to ever make it up the ladder to the No. 1 spot. Backup plans stay backup plans, even if the primary relationship goes sour.

Whether you're a man or a woman, the problem with being a backup is that once your inamorata labels you second tier, your chances of becoming the primary love interest diminish. Labels, once created, tend to stick. Plus, once you accept the role of runner-up, you risk seeing yourself as a perennial backup in many walks of life. You can find someone for whom you are Plan A -- but not if you're inertly functioning as someone else's Plan B.

Which brings us back to the fundamental assertion: it's just wrong. It's wrong morally, it's wrong socially, it's wrong emotionally, and it's also wrong psychologically. It's wrong in the same way that suicide is wrong, or anything else that negates our higher sense of self and dignity. It decimates the self worth of every one involved. It churns up innocent people in the wake of its selfishness... and usually those people are our children.

It's disrespectful - both to your No. 1 partner and to your No. 2. It's wrong when you're the cheater, and it's wrong when you're the one on the side, and it's especially wrong when you are both.

The Plan B relationship is not a relationship. It's a strategy. At best it's a safety net that no one actually ever wants or plans to use. It almost never turns into a Plan A and when it does, it's fraught with memories of the deception that brought it into the world.

I used to think that a lying, covert, secret love was all I deserved. That is simply incorrect, for all of us. Somehow we need to realize that doing things fully, in their right time, without deceiving other people in the process... is worth the fear, is worth the wait, and is worth the value of our sweet little souls.

It is terrifying to be someone's Plan A. It is vulnerable and precarious to put all your eggs in one basket. As someone newly married, I feel these things acutely. Roger and I have both been involved in situations with Plan B people (and, actually, Plan C and maybe Plan D people), and we both knew, even at the time, what shabby facades those structures were. How much less than authentic. How hard it is to be fully present, and how -- in the final analysis -- it's the only way to be.

We are tender little seedlings, precious beings trying to hold ourselves together in the midst of a turbulent planet. We have better things to do than to be each other's Plan B's. We have a higher purpose than to degrade ourselves in the name of some pale variation of love.

The Dharma of Travel

2009-07-27T08:16:00.000-07:00

As we settle in to being back in "real" life, I'm noticing something kind of sad and possibly important. Time goes by in a blur when one is doing the habitual thing. Days blend into each other. It's like frames of film going by without stopping for a 24th of a second for the eye to register. Life becomes a kind of swooshy blur, rather than a narrative to become engrossed in.

When we were traveling I kept a journal and was amazed at how long ago yesterday felt. There was so much packed in to each moment that the days felt long and rich and chock full of goodness. My days now are also good, but I've noticed they don't have that clear definition, that sense of constant wonder, the feeling that this is my LIFE and I'm really LIVING it to the fullest.

I think that one of the reasons for that difference is that we notice so much more when we're in a foreign country. Every sense is on full power, listening intently to the announcements on the Metro, feeling the change in humidity in the evening air, tasting the nuances of difference between a Parisian croissant and one from the local Winchell's. For two weeks I was inhabiting my body fully (and not altogether blissfully, due to the accumulation of wedding fatigue, jet lag, and the lugging of luggage). I was tuned in to every sense, in rapid succession, at every moment -- like five radios playing all at once. Not much opportunity to get cerebral and start worrying about what a loser I am for letting my yoga practice lapse. No time for maudlin grousing. There was too much of the world, inner and outer, to experience.

And by the time we were ready to pack up and come home, I was ready to stop all that wonderment for awhile. Living that fully attenuated to your senses and the world around is kind of overwhelming. There was a part of me that wanted to just stop and go back to a life where I wasn't constantly marveling at the way the street signs were constructed, the differences in journalistic style, the configuration of the toilet. Travel opens up all the sensory floodgates and everything comes washing in.

It struck me, of course, how travel is the ultimate meditation. In meditation we strive to train our minds to stay in the present moment by finding a sensory object to focus upon. In vipassana meditation, that object is usually the breath. It is always with us (hopefully) and always gives us a touchstone to anchor ourselves with. We pay attention to the breath and then notice our our minds always want to veer away into ruminations about the past, or anxieties about the future, causing us stress and fatigue and that sense of numbness that comes when life is passing you by without seeing each individual frame.

The trick to recovering that sense of wonder is not to travel more (don't ever tell anyone I said that) -- but to learn how to incorporate that noticing more into our daily lives. As Sherlock Holmes says, I am training myself to notice what I see. Travel gives us the opportunity to notice the entire world constantly. Instead of the film frames going by at 24 per second, travel bombards us with 1000 images per second. It's incredible, and mind blowing, and cannot be sustained. After changing countries several times, I started noticing how different the third day felt from the first. Our tendency is to make things normal. Even in a foreign country, after a few days the mind becomes acclimated and able to file experiences away in safe little files. We can't live with that kind of density of experience.

On the other hand, we can't live -- truly live -- without it. Maybe not at 1000 frames per second, but the sweet spot is somewhere between that and a deadened blur. We need to train our mind to notice what we see. Take in the small pleasures of little everyday things. Not letting habits become lost in the gray fuzz of the habitual. Not letting days go by in a daze.

There's a lovely graceful place to be, when we live in our "regular" world. It's a place where we are not deadened or numb, but are comfortable and attuned. Where we stop, frequently, and pay attention, on purpose, to our lives. Eating a bowl of cornflakes out of a new tangerine-colored bowl with a summer peach on top, is not that different from marveling at a French billboard. The joy is in the noticing and the appreciating, not in the content itself. The noticing slows life down so we can live it as it's happening.

Arriving where we started

2009-07-19T22:54:00.000-07:00

So we're home. Have been home for a week and, to all outward appearances, we have resumed life where we left off.

Our dreams are littered with scraps of Europe: a fruit market on the corner of Rue St. Honore, the cold lofty beauty of the Rose Window of Chartres, the discordant haunt of a bagpipe melody in Scotland. Roger says that something about Paris has infected him. He cannot get it out of his mind.

When we first got to Paris, Roger asked why we were doing this, why do we care about Paris. (I forgave him for this and we are, in case you are wondering, still married.) It had been a long ride in from the airport, past graffiti and trash and through a massive urban traffic jam that seemed, for all the world, like a plain old garden variety gridlock that we could get here in LA. The taxi driver was archly condescending, the streets narrow, and the sirens incessant. So Roger made a good point: Why? Why Paris? What's the fuss about?

Today, after he awakened and said that he was again dreaming of the city, I asked him if he's figured it out yet. And he said that, simply put, Paris embodies everything there is to know and love about life. The streets, the air, the architecture, all contain such a passion for living, such a consummate gusto for the art of the palate, the symphonies of space, the music of the streets, the rhythms of love and life force and passion... it's all just there. Fully and unapologetically.

It's like a rare rich wine, greater than the sum of its parts. It's a city that is hectic and moving; the locals walk along the sidewalks with tightness around their eyes and a clip to their step. Sirens blare and the pulsations reach deep into hidden alleyways, sheltered passages, narrow jazz clubs, secret doors. It's built in upon itself for many centuries, so much so that the mysteries have mysteries, each city block could seemingly yield its secrets begrudgingly for dozens of years and still have plenty to hide.

So we've touched these places, walked through Scottish graveyards, sung in pubs, strolled long paths by ancient streams. Two weeks is obviously not enough to do anything but sample a quick hint of foreign flavors, and then return to the known and comfortable... but it was enough to change us. We're back, but there's a difference.

Every day I am grateful that summer waited for us to get back. I am reveling in the heat, that searing anvil of sharp bright warmth that Pasadena does so well. I drive by the low slung ranch houses and remember how it felt to go inside them when I was young and visiting my better-off friends. Walking through the dark, oak-shaded yards and entering these air conditioned homes was a reprieve, and I felt like I'd entered a world of quiet muted efficiency, a life of grace where the temperature was modulated and the harsh sounds of the outside world were muffled and remote.

We'd drink Nestea instant iced tea in the spacious living rooms and play card games while we holed up from the weight and press of the air outside. Going out again, the air would feel encompassing and bold against our chilled skin. That was the feeling of being a teenager in the summers of love, with the Vietnam war accompanying our Swanson TV dinners, and KRLA and KHJ tuned on our handheld transistor radios, playing Light My Fire and Up, Up and Away.

I feel summer these days when I drop the kids off at camp, a ritual that I've been doing for more years than I can count. But right now, after returning from other places, I start feeling a whiff of euphoria just smelling the sunscreen on the tanned bodies, listening to the happy din of kids playing on the grass, knowing that there are silly songs to be sung and lanyards to be woven. It hits me in the solar plexus in a way that it's never done before.

I love summer down here. I love the feeling of salt water and sun and long daylight hours and the taste of a Dodger dog washed down by a cold cold beer. I love the soaring ecstasy of a good wave caught with a boogie board. I love the feeling afterward of having a body in tune with the powerful rhythms of the sea.

I know this place where I live. I've spent many summers here, but despite how many summers I have enjoyed, it is still all happening for the first time. Somehow, I've been graced with even more of that understanding than ever.

We've just undergone a series of life-changing rituals: a marriage, a reunion of family and friends, seeing people who represent every part of our lives for as long as we can remember, and a honeymoon. We've been on a hero's journey, one with obstacles and quests and treasures to recover. We have discovered that we have the tools to survive, both emotionally and in the world. It's not the world that's changed, it's us. And with that change we have come back, with newly-refined senses, to see our lives with brand new eyes, and inhabit the world with a fresh awareness.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

T.S. Eliot