Blood & guts. McDonagh.

Saturday afternoon I headed down to ACT Theatre to catch one of the last showings of Martin McDonagh's The Lieutenant of Inishmore. I'd been putting it off, unnerved by the violence. The words "black comedy" have always made me a little nervous. There's nothing funny about blood. Or is there? At what point does violence become comedy? When does Macbeth become Fargo? I thought about Kurosawa's Yojimbo, where a swashbuckling Toshiro Mifune makes treachery and torture somehow entertaining.

The play is straightforward, one single act - a murdered cat - setting off a chain of events that leaves blood splashed all over from one end of the set to the other. Just as you think it is ending, the story takes another, even more violent turn, bodies piling up onstage. The actors take their bows at the end, sweating and grimy and mostly crimson. I close my eyes and wince with each pop of the gun. There are a lot. I also closed my eyes during the scene where the psychotic Padraig is torturing a hapless drug-dealer hanging from the ceiling, having already sliced off a couple of toenails and threatening to take off a nipple while he's at it.

In Inishmore, the violence is played for laughs, each gunshot a wink at the audience. The dripping, spurting blood is almost like something out of a Coen Brothers film, or even Monty Python. The brutality is exaggerated. And the comedy masks a deeper truth - it is a commentary on how people will fight for causes that they don't even begin to understand, and how violence spirals very quickly out of control, begetting more violence, death upon death, until almost no one is left standing.

What anchors the story is the deep attachment that Padraig has for his cat, Wee Thomas, the only friend he has in the world. The only thing that means anything to him, more than torturing drug dealers, more than blowing up chip shops. Even the most murderous of men, with no humanity or sympathy for any other person in the world, not even their own father, can love their cat.

Reading. Glück.

You will not be spared, nor will what you love be spared.

A friend posted a fragment of this poem by Louise Glück last week. I keep coming back to it again and again. It has been a sad autumn. A family friend died after an eighteen-month struggle with cancer. Another has relapsed after being treated last year for lung cancer. One friend has just been diagnosed with a rare and severe blood disorder; her youngest child has been living with leukemia since last winter. Another friend emailed to say that her father's lymphoma has returned. I came of age with AIDS awareness, in the 1990's, but cancer is the dark shadow that has touched everyone I know. No one I love has been spared.

A wind has come and gone, taking apart the mind;
it has left in its wake a strange lucidity.

You would think that cancer would have been conquered by the beginning of this century, the way tuberculosis had been the century before, as Susan Sontag wrote in Illness as Metaphor. Not so. AIDS came closer to a cure, or rather a kind of temporary sanctuary, with expensive drugs that delayed disease progression and managed symptoms. Which for now is as good as it gets. That is not enough for us, for those friends and family who are now only memories I hold close to me. Their shades walk through my dreams and disappear when I wake.

How privileged you are, to be passionately
clinging to what you love;
the forfeit of hope has not destroyed you.

Cancer entered my life for the first time with the death of my grandmother in the late 80's. I did not know her well. Family stories tell me that she was not easy to know, but I regret that I do not remember her. Then, when I was in high school, my father returned from a meeting in Washington, D.C., having gone to the hospital with pains and discovered, via x-rays, that there was a mass in his chest. Further tests revealed a tumor, so rare that one of the pathologists who diagnosed him still remembers the case, fourteen years later. He had lost one brother to a heart attack and was watching the other fight the liver cancer which would kill him seven or eight years later. Lately I have been returning in my mind to that year. Last Friday was the fourteenth anniversary of my father's surgery.

This is the light of autumn; it has turned on us.
Surely it is a privilege to approach the end
still believing in something.

I came to poetry late. I was 25. I have told this story too many times; surely I do not need to say again that I was going blindly into the dark and Bukowski pulled me back from it the way a fireman pulls a child from a burning building. Now I understand what poetry is for, to find in someone else's words a kind of map of my own innermost emotions, dark fears and sweet elations, to lay them bare before my eyes. Now I see in Glück's words that weight of despair, and yet the will to keep going, as I have seen in those who clawed their way back towards another Spring against the bleakest of odds.

you are not alone,
the poem said,
in the dark tunnel.

Louise Glück, October. Averno. 2006.

Reading: Pinter/Fraser.

I remember seeing Betrayal at Intiman Theatre when I was fifteen. Fifteen is young, young enough to think that love and sex is for young people. Young enough to not want to examine the lives of middle-aged people falling in love, or in lust, despite husbands and wives and children. They were parents, and parents didn't have s-e-x or go away for holidays in Venice. Still, it was painfully funny and sharply written, an intricate puzzle about three friends and their shared histories and betrayals, unwinding backwards in time. It has stayed with me for all the years since.

Much later, I learned more about Harold Pinter, that he was married to the writer/historian Lady Antonia Fraser, that their relationship had begun while each was married to someone else. They made headlines in the gossip papers, despite being middle-aged writers rather than hot young actors or pop stars (although Antonia was and is gorgeously, glamorously blonde). Time softens harsh facts, as tabloid news becomes a part of history. Respectability grows over scandal like ivy creeping across the rawness of newly laid brick. Meanwhile, the Pinter Fortnightly readings at ACT Theatre opened the vast expanse of Harold Pinter's oeuvre before me, and even now I am impatient for more.

A memoir of their life together was recently published by Lady Antonia Fraser. The title, Must You Go?, refers to a question asked by Harold Pinter the first night they were introduced at a party; she was leaving, and he didn't want her to go. That is the beginning of their story, the beginning of a relationship which ended their respective marriages and ultimately lasted for more than three decades, until Pinter died in 2008, on Christmas Eve. She weaves together journal entries and memories and poems written by Pinter, tracing their lives together from that first "must you go?" to his last breaths.

Through it all - between the agonized wondering about whether they were ever really going to be together - are bits and pieces referencing the plays Pinter wrote as the years went by, with insights that throw into sharp relief his political beliefs that drove much of his work throughout the 1980's and 1990's. Fraser's journals and comments illuminate some of the plays I've seen in the past year - Ashes to Ashes, A Kind of Alaska, The Hothouse, fleshing out a background that was merely glimpsed before. It shifts my understanding of Pinter ever-so-slightly to a firmer ground, and at the same time it confirms what I've felt all along - his words are really all you need to know him.

Weekend thoughts.

I went down to Marigold & Mint this morning to buy vegetables. I was early and the woman who works there was still setting up for the day, so I prowled around, looking at the spools of pretty ribbons and letterpress cards and sweet-smelling soaps. There were vintage gardening books and handmade ceramics and old glass bottles, and I thought again of the lovely writer Elspeth Thompson, who I wrote about last spring, just after her death. I had discovered her after she left a comment on Justine Picardie's blog. Drawn to Elspeth's warmth, I loved her writing, her photographs of the home she was restoring and of that glorious Sussex coast just beyond her garden. She had an insouciant, elegant beauty that recalled the slender grace of her beloved lurcher dogs. And then she was gone.

Bits and pieces of the story trickled along in the following months. The sadness now is understanding that someone so stunningly gifted lived in pain, with demons no one else could see. At least no one who knew her only through her words and photographs, what she showed to the rest of the world. Her husband, months later, spoke of a crushing insecurity beneath the soft polish. However beautiful and talented Elspeth was, she didn't see it. A black depression descended, one that antidepressants ultimately worsened, leaving her sleepless and raw. Then, one day, she slipped heavy stones into her pockets and walked into the lake near her home. The cold waters closed over her head, the way night throws a black curtain across the last glow of sunset. I wonder if she thought of Virginia Woolf, who did the same thing 69 years before, almost to the day. Elspeth left behind letters for her family and friends, her husband, her young daughter. She left behind questions that will forever remain unanswered. Why. How could anyone have stopped her, lifted that weight of despair, quieted her fears.

I bought two roses this morning, one pink, one red. In Russian class we were taught that flowers in even numbers are for the dead, and odd numbers for the living, and since I am not dead yet I put one in the living room and one on the table next to my bed. I thought of the flowers that Elspeth scattered around her home, how she loved white flowers, how I'll plant paperwhite bulbs this winter, the way she did. I thought of this little poem, by Georgia O'Keefe, which she posted on her blog:

"Still, in a way
nobody sees a flower
it is so small
and to see takes time
like to have a friend
takes time."

I'll make the time.

Reading. Mary Oliver.

The other day, a friend wrote about the mother of her son's classmate, who was scheduled for some upcoming surgery. It brought to mind her own two battles with cancer, now in remission. She'd written of her experiences before, the first when she was 28, the second several years later, when her sons were 3 and 1. I had read her blog before we even met, and I was a little in awe of her. It was clear that L. is the kind of woman who makes everything around her beautiful, who seems to take pause and drink in all the moments that we should all stop and treasure. It felt like those months of illness and recovery, especially when her children were so small, were what made L. so determined to live with such awareness.

The anger and fear that she wrote about, of her own mortality and the body and life that would never be the same, of missing precious months of her sons' toddlerhoods, reminded me of the journalist Ruth Picardie. She died of breast cancer at the age of 33, leaving behind a husband and twin babies. For them her absence was not merely for the months of treatment, pain and anguish and hope, but for the rest of their lives. I knew of Ruth from her sister, the writer Justine Picardie, and from the late Elspeth Thompson, who gave us this poem. This was read at Ruth's memorial service:

In Blackwater Woods

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

- Mary Oliver, American Primitive.

I've always loved Mary Oliver for her clear way of writing about love and loss, of the fleeting moments of sadness interleaved with splashes of happiness that make up life. This poem is pinned to the wall above my desk at work, along with several others. It never fails to break my heart and then put it back together.

School lunch.

This is re-posted from my other blog because I think each one reaches a different audience. Perhaps I'm wrong about that, but never mind. This is about food. Later I will write about art; the two are connected.

I have been reading and re-reading this post in reference to the current battle over school budget cuts in Great Britain and alternately weeping from rage and heartbreak.

I grew up in the south end of Seattle. We lived on a nice street, the highest in the neighborhood, with sweeping views of Lake Washington and the mountains beyond. But the local elementary school and high school were down in the valley below, in one of the city's poorer neighborhoods. I had tested into what was then called the Horizon program, which meant that our math and writing skills were one grade ahead of the average. Four grades - 1st through 4th - shared a vast space which contained three open classrooms, one central common area, and a small lab; we were in a newer wing of the building, separated from the rest of the school. Our paths rarely crossed those of other students, save for one day when an older boy tried to beat me up on my way home from school. I escaped with a scraped knee, and was never allowed to walk home alone again.

It was an interesting time, the mid-to-late-80's. M. told me the other night that she had been bussed into our school district because of the Horizon program but also because of "forced integration." That I don't remember. What I remember is that we spoke in hushed tones on the playground about the supposed drug house down the street and joked that classmates who wore red were "Bloods" and those who wore blue were "Crips" (rival gangs). I don't know if there were any actual gang wars going on but I remember used needles and condoms ("Eeeewwww!!" we said) on the playground and a drive-by shooting late one summer, before school started. Then I left for the manicured grounds of the city's most expensive private school, in fifth grade, and never looked back.

But this is all irrelevant, or perhaps it isn't. We were talking about school lunch. Our elementary school served breakfast and lunch, every day. I usually ate breakfast at home - whole wheat toast, English muffins, oatmeal, cold cereal, congee, or fruit and yogurt - but I also dimly remember school cafeteria pancakes, or perhaps it was French toast, with sausage, maybe some fruit, maybe orange juice in a plastic foil-sealed cup, like the ones they give you on airplanes. It was cheap, like the lunches, which I also occasionally ate (flabby pizzas, corn dogs, Salisbury steak), washed down with plain or chocolate milk (a rare treat). I think it cost a dollar. And for many kids, it was free or otherwise discounted. I wasn't really conscious of it at the time; I led a happy, sheltered, middle-class life that I later came to understand was incredibly privileged. I remember being shocked that some kids ate their lunches as if it were the best thing they'd ever tasted. I think about it now, and it breaks my heart.

People - like Jamie Oliver, and others who, like this friend, are following his example - who are trying to change the way children eat are doing an amazing, incredible thing. In one sense, the system (as it stood 20 years ago) was doing one good thing: it made sure that children got fed, twice a day. In another sense, it wasn't: the food was crap, except for those for whom it was the best thing they had. It is part of a larger problem - where does the responsibility lie? On the school system which can't afford it, or on the parents who can't afford it? The more I think about it - and I say this as someone who is single and childless and doesn't see that changing anytime soon - the more it makes my heart ache. I don't have any understanding of what it must be like to have to send my child to school hungry. I hope I never do.

Twenty years have passed since I last ate in that elementary school cafeteria. I still remember the flimsy partitioned foil trays and the plastic sporks, the crates of half-pint milk cartons. We have to do better.

Pinter Fortnightly. Madagascar (JT Rogers).

And now for something different.

To shake things up a little bit after a dozen or so readings of Harold Pinter's expansive body of work, tonight's reading is of a work by a different playwright, JT Rogers. To keep things connected, Madagascar won the 2005 Pinter Prize for Drama, but I will leave aside any comparisons to Pinter. It isn't fair to Rogers, or his play, or my understanding of it, to hold up this single work against the vast landscape that makes up my experiences with Harold Pinter. There isn't a history, a memory; I walk in the door with no expectations, except from the actors, who are, as always, perfect.

Madagascar is about secrets and mysteries. It is about memory, and how memories and family histories are made. It plays with time, as three people at three different points of time unravel their interconnecting stories. A character's place in time shifts their memory of what happened in the past. A mother and daughter, Lilian and June, are locked in an emotional triangle with their son and twin brother (respectively), who is not a part of the play and yet is spoken of so vividly it seems that he appears before you, along with their also unseen husband and father. The third character onstage, the mother's lover, adds his own dimension to these unseen characters.

At the heart of the story is the son's disappearance. The mother's story takes place in that moment before he was supposed to arrive; his sister's retraces the five years after that. His twin spends two or three years searching the world for him, before finally accepting that he is gone forever. But is he? In her last days, a mysterious postcard arrives, with the words "I'm still here." But we never know what it means. There are too many questions unanswered. Lilian slips away and drowns in a lake; June takes the perfect combination of pills in that same Roman hotel room where they stayed in her childhood. There is a kind of terrible symmetry to their deaths: the mother, when she feels that her son is gone forever, and the daughter, when her brother comes back from the dead. (Or does he?).

In the end, it is the lover, Nathan, who is left behind in that Roman hotel room in the present day. June has died, as has her mother, years before. Like the rest of us in the audience, he is full of unanswered questions. Such is life, without clear-cut answers.

Pinter Fortnightly. The Hothouse.

By now the memories of all the Pinter readings and performances I've seen are piled high in a corner of my mind, tangled together like fallen leaves. Two full plays - Betrayal (at Intiman in 1995) and last night's The Hothouse - countless one-acts, a handful of revue sketches, all have gradually coalesced together into a single body of work. At first sight, The Hothouse seems apart from the others, a broadly-drawn comedy which reminds me of Simon Callow's comment that "being British is inherently funny." But the physical, almost slapstick humor evolves, slowly, and darker elements creep in, as with Pinter's early works, such as The Room and The Dumb-waiter. There are explosions of temper and electric shock experiments and drinks thrown in faces and a sudden, violent end (which, of course, occurs off-stage).

The Hothouse comes from that earlier time, the late 1950's, the era of Pinter's "comedies of menace." I believe it was left unfinished and shelved, although one scene where a hapless institution employee undergoes testing by two other employees appeared as a revue sketch around the same time. This brief sketch was performed at an earlier Pinter Fortnightly reading, and the familiar words made me give a little jump of recognition in my seat. The Hothouse in its earlier incarnation then disappeared for twenty years, before it was resurrected and expanded, picking up undercurrents of political commentary along the way. (By now Pinter had passed through his period of "memory" plays - Betrayal, A Kind of Alaska - and had moved onto more overtly political plays).

What becomes clear across these different thematic eras is that a visible thread holds together this body of work: a fiercely beautiful mastery of language, a sharp intelligence, a black sense of humor. It creates a sense of cohesion between these fortnightly readings, helped in (a very great) part by a somewhat rotating repertory of actors who come together on their days off, who do these (free) readings out of love. It couldn't be done without a group of people who have chops, and boy do they ever have chops. The kind of skill and experience that allows this ever-changing crew to pull together a smoothly polished reading from a single afternoon of rehearsal. There is a sort of perfect alchemy between the staggeringly precise language of Pinter and the tremendous emotional and intellectual chemistry of the actors. Comedy is timing. Drama is trust. Here we have both, apparent with every word, every moment and movement, every look.

ACT Theatre (which hosts these Pinter Fortnightly readings) and I, we go way back. 1992. I was still in sixth grade when the season began. (I was not allowed to see the first play of the season, Steven Dietz's Trust, because of "mature thematic elements"). I remember the old theater near Seattle Center, in lower Queen Anne. There would be a crush of people at the snack bar during intermission and leaving at the end of the evening felt like being a salmon swimming upstream. I remember the parking lot where subscribers got to fit their cars into some kind of Tetris-like puzzle. I remember the first play I saw there, Shadowlands. The new theater downtown felt like another world. It still does, a little, even though it is now second nature to park my car at the Convention Center and make my way down the escalators. But the familiar faces remind me, again and again, that this will always be the theater I remember.

www.acttheatre.org
www.pinterfortnightly.com

Pinter Fortnightly.

In an interview from 1964*, Louis Malle spoke about being a part of the French New Wave, saying that "The good fortune that the directors of the new wave had is this: they made their first films the way others write their first novels, injecting into it the sincerity and emotional power of youth...the problem is to create the second or third films, and then a body of work." Malle himself did create a beautiful body of work, shifting and evolving from film to film, some of the later ones building on an idea first touched on in an earlier work.

The idea of developing a body of work after an explosive starting point of the first work has stayed with me since I first watched this interview, and echoes in my mind with each Harold Pinter reading I attend. This is what I am most grateful to Frank Corrado and the Central Heating Lab at ACT Theatre for providing: the opportunity to see a body of work unfold before me, making connections in my mind even as I enjoy them as individual plays.

First we see John Aylward and R. Hamilton Wright in The Dumbwaiter, which is alternately hilarious and menacing as two assassins await their assignment in a basement room. It owes much to Waiting for Godot, and Laurel and Hardy, the comedic pull between two men, and in this case the chemistry between Aylward and Wright, conveyed by a mere sideways glance or fierce glare. Unlike the Pinter plays that twist and invert our sense of time, it moves in a logical progression: prologue, dialogue, anticipation, suspense, climax, ending. Wright loses his shit, as he always does (I can't put it any other way, and nobody does it better). It is a little like The Room, Pinter's first play, with the same shifting sense of laughter and fear.

The second play is actually a radio play from the early 1980's, Family Voices, and while equally hilarious, it is actually more emotionally devastating, when you consider that it was written at the end of a personally turbulent time in Pinter's life; he had divorced his first wife, who was falling apart (not long afterward, she died of alcoholism), and married his second wife. In the process he became estranged from his only child, a son, which was echoed in Moonlight, a decade later. A mother, a father, and a son read their letters to each other aloud. But are the letters real or imaginary? It is funny, as only Pinter can be funny, but beneath the humor is a bleak expanse of emptiness, of distance, the kind of distance that you only see between a parent and child, and it is heartbreaking.

I thought again, looking at the faces of these actors I have loved and admired for nearly twenty years, R. Hamilton Wright and John Aylward and Clayton Corzatte and, of course, Frank Corrado, how lucky Seattle is to have this kind of theater community. How lucky I was to grow up with it. How glad I am that it is still going. A new generation of actors is continuously emerging, but the previous one more than matches them, their polished experience standing ground against this new wave. This year I chose to support two theaters: ACT, with a monthly membership that allows me to watch pretty much everything, and Strawberry Workshop, whose next works I look forward to even before the lights fall at the end of the play. I hope to do more, in the future.

*This interview with Louis Malle is included on the Criterion Collection edition of Les Amants.

Strawberry Workshop. Breaking the Code.

I always walk into the Strawberry Workshop theater knowing that my heart is about to be broken. The plays I have seen so far are full of unbearable things, either brutal acts we humans inflict on each other, or choices we have to make. (The exception is Gutenberg! The Musical during which I laughed so hard tears poured down my face and snot ran from my nose as though from a faucet). I look at my program, recognize the actors, feel a thrill at the thought of seeing them again. When the stage lights illuminate their faces I see the ghosts of previous characters, for a moment, and then the present story takes over and the memories fade away.

Breaking the Code is about the mathematician Alan Turing, whose efforts in code-breaking during World War II helped defend Great Britain from the German forces. He was rewarded with an OBE for his wartime work. Then he was charged with homosexuality, illegal at the time, in the early 1950's, and treated with female hormones to reduce his sex drive as part of his parole. A few years later, he committed suicide. That someone could be treated as a criminal for his sexuality only sixty years ago is mind-boggling. Heart-breaking. That many preferred to live a lie is equally so. And sixty years on, the world is only a little better. Matthew Shepard died twelve years ago next month. He would have been 34 years old this December.

The play shifts back and forth in time, between schoolboy days and wartime interludes and the events leading up to and after his arrest for "gross indecency." I still don't understand how something you do in the privacy of your own home, not even out on the front lawn in view of the neighbors, can be considered "gross indecency." I probably never will. The law itself is grossly indecent, because it presumes that a higher authority - the law - can pass judgment on the most intimate of acts that should remain unwitnessed by others. If Turing had remained silent, if he had not called the police about an unimportant burglary that took place because his lover had told an untrustworthy acquaintance his address, then perhaps his life would have continued on with his research, with his computers, with his mathematical theorems.

But he didn't keep silent, any more than he could marry a woman and pretend not to be a homosexual. He makes the ultimately devastating choice to not ignore the petty thefts of a few pairs of shoes and trousers. It would be tantamount to paying blackmail, he tells the inspector, who is forced to turn him in. Why can't you just let it go, he cries. The inspector gives him a long look, which I can see clearly from the second row. There is something like pity in that look. The inspector cannot turn away, and let him go, any more than Turing could remain silent, and live a lie.

The set is a spare black space, with a carpet incised with a diagram of the Golden Mean, motherboards dangling from the ceiling, a nod to the early computers that Turing developed. Between scenes the actors carried furniture in and out to delineate different times and places. You are so close you can see the actors' faces clearly, watch the play of emotions across their faces. Inspiration. Love. Guilt. Heartbreak. Anger. Shame. It is not an ensemble piece, for the whole of the story rests on Alan Turing (and the actor who plays him, Bradford Farwell), but the emotional weight of the story comes from his interactions with the people in his life - his boyhood love, his mother, his superior at Bletchley Park, a co-worker who loved him and whom he might have married, his lovers, the inspector who eventually arrests him.

The heartbreak comes from watching the intellectual brilliance of a man become eclipsed by his inability to control his emotions. Inability is the wrong word. It is more like a defiance, arrogance. His world is centered around himself, his work, his desires. He cannot be bothered to lie to save anyone's feelings, nor, in the end, to save himself.

Let me tell you a story about love. a wedding.

B. and A. got married on Vashon Island last weekend. When I say "got married" I mean they stood up in front of a crowd of family and friends and spoke vows that were written from the heart and exchanged rings that had been tied around the necks of their two dogs. B. fed A. a piece of chocolate on a wooden spoon, and A. poured B. a sip of her favorite wine, traditions whose origins I forget. In the fine Jewish fashion, they threw a glass on the ground and stomped it to smithereens. That their marriage is not recognized by the state of Washington or indeed forty-four other states in the United States of America is deeply and profoundly unfair. What difference does it make if it is two women or two men instead of a man and a woman, promising each other their enduring love?

I have been to many weddings in my life, especially in recent years as friends and colleagues and the children of my parents' friends are getting married, in waves, it seems. They are always fun. You get dressed up, and there is cake. There are speeches, some awkward, some funny. Often there is dancing. Sometimes there is more tequila than you have drunk in your entire life up to that point (or so it seems), but that is another story. This was something special. Everyone who was there - most of the guests in 1920's garb, the theme of the wedding, and lots of women, including the brides, were in beaded flapper dresses - was there out of love. Not out of obligation. Only love. Only because they wanted to be there, to see two beautiful, loving women pledge to a life together.

It was a beautiful day, a beautiful wedding, perhaps the most beautiful one I've ever attended. There were wildflowers in vintage tins and a vast buffet of potluck offerings. The glamorous guests floated around a meadow fringed with blackberry brambles and Madrona trees, like glittering butterflies. There were women dressed as flappers and women dressed as men and men dressed as gangsters, and Amelia Earhart. I felt lucky to be a part of it, lucky to be with my friends, lucky that they have come into my life and become a part of it, over the past year. What a thrilling, wonderful year it's been.

The Laramie Project. Strawberry Theatre Workshop.

I was a freshman in college in the fall of 1998. I had the hand-me-down Mac laptop that had gotten me through high school and a narrow single room in a suite of five girls (there should have been six of us, but one never arrived). I wore my hair in a long braid down my back. I had spent the summer studying Italian, and had now moved on to Russian. I was 18 years old and 3,000 miles from home. I cried when I said goodbye to my father in Seattle and again when my mother left me in Rochester, New York with a brand-new down comforter that still covers my bed, twelve years later. These are the things I remember.

Sitting in the audience at the Strawberry Workshop's production of The Laramie Project I remembered other things, too, things I didn't remember I had known at the time. The description of the wounds on Matthew Shepard's body. The statement his father gave at the trial of one of the two young men who beat his first-born son to a bloody mess and left him tied to a fence to die. I had remembered the part about the beating and the tying to a fence but I had forgotten, or thought I had forgotten, the fractured skull, the lacerations around his head. And I wept.

The Laramie Project is an ensemble piece in the truest sense of the word, and it was seamlessly performed by the eight actors on stage, shifting between interviewers and interviewees, between past and present, memory and truth. It is the fourth production I have had the privilege to experience here at the Erickson Theatre off Broadway, the present home of Strawberry Theatre Workshop. Some of these actors I know from previous plays at other theaters, which is what I love most about Seattle and its closely-knit theater scene. Again and again I am reminded about how lucky I am to live here, to witness the closeness and creativity that we have here.

On the back of the program is this note: "How many times have you been encouraged to buy locally grown food whenever possible? By doing so you'll be helping preserve the environment, and you'll be strengthening your community by investing your food dollar close to home. The same thing is true for the arts."

I'll be coming back.

http://www.strawshop.org/

the lost art of writing letters.

I don't write very much, anymore. My life has been swallowed up by Facebook, by Twitter, by photography. By weekly breakfasts with friends and impromptu dinners with these same friends, meals where I can barely eat for laughing. There are bookclubs and plays and field trips to strawberry fields. My circle of friends has grown, split into different groups that nonetheless bump against each other and intersect, the way they do in a small town dressed as a big city, which is what Seattle is. Last year M. found me on Twitter, after 20 years apart. We had not seen each other since fourth grade. Then I found A. again, who I have not seen since we were 11 or 12 and I was visiting her grandparents one summer, in Massachusetts.

A. and I used to be pen pals. Her grandmother was a dear friend of my mother, and as I had no grandmother of my own I felt lucky to have her in my life. We wrote letters back and forth, me on a succession of girly stationery (I recall one was pale blue paper printed with a teddy bear with a heart and flowers) in my childish scrawl, and Gigi in her impeccable handwriting on cream paper. I still have some of her letters. I still remember her address. She died early last year, and I miss her, even though we did not communicate in recent years. Now I see A. often. We are grown-ups in the city of my childhood. We are friends by choice now, because we love so many of the same things and not because her grandmother is a friend of my mother.

Lately I have been writing letters to friends again, inspired in part by The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society, which is a lovely epistolary novel that I read about a year and a half ago. A. and I had not met up yet, we had only been exchanging emails. M. had not yet found me on Twitter. My world was about to change, was already changing, and I didn't even know it. How lucky I feel to know these people, who I talk to every day, on Twitter, on Facebook, on the phone, at the farmer's markets, at parties and dinners and breakfasts. How lucky I feel to find a perfect card in my enormous stash of stationery, and curl up on my bed with a book for a writing desk and a pen in hand, to tell them, I love you for being here.

The Passion of Frank Corrado.

I am a few minutes early for this week's Pinter Fortnightly reading; the room is still half-empty. There seem to be more chairs, this time. The stage runs parallel to one long side of the room instead of sitting squarely at the end. There are more props; chairs and round café tables with bottles of wine and mineral water. The actors are milling about, disappearing and reappearing behind a partition at the end of the room, and I wonder (not for the first time) just what exactly is back there and how many people could possibly fit in what cannot be a very large space. I chat with an elderly lady who agrees with me: we are lucky to have a theater community as rich and intimate as this one. I tell her I grew up in this town, with these actors. The room fills with more theater-lovers, and we begin.

At the heart of it all is Frank Corrado (who reads the stage directions in a voice that can only be described as "mellifluous"), whose passion for Harold Pinter is what brought us all here tonight, has been bringing us all together over a series of readings that began last summer, and, I hope, will continue. Bit by bit, with each play, the separate pieces of Pinter's ouevre have been assembling themselves in my mind into one cohesive body of work, anchored by the now fifteen-year-old memory of Betrayal, which I saw at Intiman in 1995. Pinter's last play, The Celebration, is entirely different, and yet not. It is pure comedy, but with that occasional sharp jab that Pinter does so well, those verbal spears that people stick in all those places they know will hurt you the most.

In The Celebration (which Pinter wrote after a disastrous restaurant dinner), two tables of diners are having dinner in a posh London restaurant. Their raucous conversation grows progressively rowdier as the evening goes on, interrupted intermittently by a historically (and hysterically) name-dropping waiter, an imperturbable maître 'd, and an emotionally oversharing maîtresse 'd. As an audience, we grow progressively rowdier to match the verbal antics onstage, whooping and laughing along. The energy in the room is something else. We are a community of theater lovers, of Pinter-lovers. The actors are enjoying themselves as much as we are, and I am wiping away tears (of laughter).

A series of three short sketches follows, each funnier than the next, each depending on that complex mastery of inflection, expression, and timing that breathes life into comedy. We roar with laughter at the innuendo of Trouble in the Works, howl at the painful job interview in Applicant, and explode when Frank Corrado and Kurt Beattie end things with the hysterical Victoria Station. Again and again I am blown away by the chemistry between the actors, their ability to hit upon that comedic alchemy that is all the more extraordinary given that they are reading from a script, having had almost no time at all to rehearse.

The pure, electric excitement of being in the theater is like nothing else.

There is one more reading scheduled for the Pinter Fortnightly series. I won't be here, unfortunately, but I know it will be as wonderful as all the others have been.

Last week the gardener/writer Elspeth Thompson died, at the too-young age of 48. She was a wonderful writer, with a gift for seeing beauty and possibility in everything. Everything she touched was transformed into something extraordinary. Her blog chronicled her rehabilitation of two dilapidated Victorian railway carriages on the coast of Sussex into a cozy, charming home nestled into a Paradise-like garden. Elspeth's latest project was about "gardening against the odds," creating glorious Edens in the most unlikely of places, in tiny London balconies or in the barren soil of her own seaside garden.

Elspeth often wrote about fragrant white flowers; in the wintertime she had vessels of narcissus bulbs everywhere, and one of the photographs from her last post showed pots of blooming hyacinths, one of my favorite flowers. Earlier today I walked to Marigold & Mint, a new flower shop several blocks away, and returned with my arms full of sweet-scented hyacinths and heirloom daffodils, as well as a stalk of flowering rhubarb and a bundle of pink jasmine. At least I think it’s pink jasmine. These flowers are for Elspeth.

I don’t know the whole story - most likely I never will - but her obituary tells of a dark depression that descended in recent weeks, and in the end, she took her own life. My heart breaks for her young daughter, and her husband. That someone who looked and sounded so happy, who saw the beautiful in the ordinary, who could conjure up small patches of Paradise in the bleakest of surroundings, could be overcome by such despair that nothing could bring her back from the brink is beyond comprehension. The sadness I feel must be magnified a hundred thousand times for her family.

What I understand now is that the people who rage and storm and speak of their grief, who stand on cliffs and howl at the wind, who write about the black despair that leaves them shaking, unable to get out of bed, these are the people who give you the chance to talk them back into the world of the living. These are the people who are asking for help. Not the ones who slip away silently and leave you with a million questions left unanswered.

Pinter Fortnightly. The Room and The Collection.

I remember clearly, as I've said before, seeing a performance of Harold Pinter's Betrayal at Intiman Theatre in 1995. That was fifteen years ago. That was all the experience I had with Pinter until last summer, when the actor Frank Corrado channeled a life-long passion for Pinter into a series of fortnightly readings at A Contemporary Theater. I caught the last one, Moonlight, and it left me eager for more. My eagerness was rewarded by a new company, Shadow and Light Theatre (founded by the aforementioned Frank Corrado and the sublime Suzanne Bouchard), and a production of two one-act plays, Ashes to Ashes and A Kind of Alaska a few months ago. Then the Pinter Fortnightly series started up again, and although I missed the first one, I made it to the second.

This time around I recognize some of the players: Anne Allgood, from Rock 'n' Roll last fall, and Elise Hunt, from last summer's Moonlight. There are six actors, besides Frank Corrado (who presents the plays and gives the stage directions), some of whom are in current productions and are here on their night off. We start off with The Room, Pinter's first play, and suddenly I realize that now I have seen more Pinter than I have any other playwright, save for Shakespeare. (Though Shaw, Stoppard, Chekhov, Ackbourn, and Steven Dietz are close behind). The Room is, like his other works, by turns sharp, funny, somewhat unnerving and suspenseful, rising unexpectedly in a shattering crescendo that causes me to jump about a foot in the air at its climax. (In this last part it is unlike the other plays I have seen).

The Collection is different. It is more like a Noel-Coward-like drawing-room farce, entertaining, but still with something unsettling about it, the way Pinter is always unsettling. The more details you know, the more truths you hear, the less you understand. As it draws to a close I finally realize that I can imagine all the plays I've seen so far as one cohesive body of work, that Pinter, as a playwright, hit the ground running with The Room and just kept going, creating a language, a sense of atmosphere that remains entirely his own. I can hardly wait for more.

Pinter, again. (more thoughts).

It struck me early on in Ashes to Ashes that one thing Pinter understands more than anyone is how people know each other so well, as siblings (in Moonlight and, in a way, in A Kind of Alaska) or friends, lovers and spouses (Betrayal and Ashes to Ashes, and Moonlight as well). You know the other person's weak points, what gets under their skin, how to hit them where it will hurt most. That is the uncomfortable part of watching his plays, catching people when their defenses are down, when their innermost feelings and thoughts are dragged out, laid bare. There's something real happening on stage, something you see in yourself or in others, things you have done to people you love or that they have done to you. That kind of savage honesty became clear to me with the first time I saw Pinter onstage, in a 1995 production of Betrayal, and has stayed with me ever since.

After yesterday's performance of A Kind of Alaska and Ashes to Ashes the director, Victor Pappas, made a comment about the evolution of regional theater, beginning as a repertory of actors and growing into something quite different. After 18 years of theater-going in Seattle I've come to think of the local theater scene as almost a repertory of local actors, some of whom have been fighting the good fight in the name of art for more than twenty or thirty years. What then develops between these wonderful actors is an intimacy, a rapport, an emotional chemistry that communicates itself in a level of trust onstage that could never happen in three weeks of rehearsals between perfect strangers. The kind of brutally emotional honesty that Pinter demands needs that kind of trust, that tenderness which keeps his lacerating truths from becoming unbearable. This is what I love most about Pinter, that clarity, that sharpness, just softened by a touch, a wry twist of the mouth that is almost a smile.

Pinter x 2.

I had been eagerly awaiting Shadow and Light Theatre's production of two one-act plays by Harold Pinter since I first heard about them a few months ago. Last summer there had been a series of readings of Pinter one-acts, and I was lucky to catch the last one, Moonlight. It brought together some of my favorite actors from the 18 years I have spent in Seattle theaters, and reminded me all over again of the starkly, emotionally devastating beauty of Pinter. It was the first time I had seen Pinter performed since Betrayal, at Intiman Theatre in 1995, which remains one of my most enduring theatrical experiences.

A Kind of Alaska and Ashes to Ashes brought together the director (Victor Pappas) and one of the actors (Frank Corrado) from that 1995 production of Betrayal, and added one of my most favorite actresses since the very first play I ever saw at ACT (Suzanne Bouchard), as well as Kimberly King, who played the title role in the play which was solely responsible for bringing me back to ACT after nearly a decade's absence (Becky's New Car, by Steven Dietz, 2008). Corrado, Pappas, and Bouchard are the three founders of Shadow and Light Theatre, a new company devoted to the works of Harold Pinter. The energy and passion of Mr. Corrado (the Pinter Fortnightly series was his creation) and Ms. Bouchard that was so apparent in the Moonlight reading last summer crystallized into two polished gems of plays, in the intimacy of ACT's smallest theater, the 92-seat Bullitt Cabaret.

Pinter is about memory; it is the common thread that twists through the four works I have seen so far. In Betrayal, it is about a friendship, a marriage, and an affair, unraveling backwards in time. Moonlight is about grief, jumping back and forth from past to present as its characters deal with a past loss and an impending one, the death of a daughter (past) and father/husband (future). In A Kind of Alaska, a woman awakes after 29 years asleep, and she, her sister, and her doctor each struggle with all they have lost with those years. And Ashes to Ashes turns a husband's questions about a wife's former lover into a game where the landscape of memory remains murky and shadowed, shifting like mountains of sand that give you no solid footing.

The thing about Pinter is that the beauty of the language is balanced by the brutality of the emotions they convey, that the sharpness of every word that the characters throw at each other, like knives, is leavened by an unexpected tenderness, that the bleakness that wraps around the stage like a dark cloud is lifted by jolts of black humor. I walk away feeling drained and confused and yet thrilled by what I have seen. I look forward to more with the greediness of a small child who tastes something wonderful for the very first time.

Theater. Seattle Repertory Theater.

The other day J. mentioned an interesting play was finishing up its run at the Seattle Rep. I hadn't been there in years, and even during the time we held season tickets at Intiman or ACT we had rarely set foot in the Rep, mere yards away from Intiman on the northern edge of Seattle Center. I looked it up, and then noticed that it was a production that had originated at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, down in Ashland, Oregon, and that its star was Anthony Heald, whom I remembered from my first trip to the Shakespeare festival my sophomore year of high school.

The festival is like nothing I've ever seen, a tight company of actors who return - or base themselves in Ashland - year after year, playing multiple roles in multiple plays in one of three theaters. One theater is a minimalist black box - this is how I remember Anthony Heald, playing a mysterious, brutish man in an adaptation of Henry James' The Turn of the Screw, a classic theater with a proscenium stage, and an open theater modeled, of course, on Shakespeare's Globe. The plays I saw at in Ashland are among some of the best I have ever seen in my life, and when I saw that Equivocation had first been produced there I knew I had to go.

The theater was nearly full, on the last night. There was a certain energy; people were eager to laugh, quickly and loudly, so much so that I even missed a few lines here and there. The production was slick. Costumes, sets (however minimal), lighting, everything was dead-on. Everything was tight, in a way only a production rehearsed and performed over and over again, with the resources of community that the Oregon Shakespeare Festival has, can produce. The actors became so completely woven together that it came together into one single, seamless performance.

It is an angry play, written out of anger after the playwright watched the World Trade Center towers collapse eight years ago. It is an imaginary story of what happens when Shakespeare tries to write a play about the Gunpowder Plot, and becomes mired in a murky tangle of truth, lies, and conspiracy theories. There is his sorrow and grief over the death of his son, his alienation with his daughter, his despair at trying to write a play that will not get him hanged. Sir Robert Cecil, the power behind the throne, attempts to split apart their theater company with his secret machinations, but he cannot. The community of a theater is too strong. When the actors tell Cecil that he cannot break them, they are not just talking about the characters; they mean what they say: they are a company in life as on stage.

I leave with my mind on fire, every nerve in my brain electrified.

Pinter Fortnightly.

Some weeks ago I became aware that ACT hosted a twice-monthly reading of Harold Pinter plays. It seemed interesting, but I never actually made it downtown until the very last reading. Two of my most favorite actors - Michael Winters and Suzanne Bouchard - would be participating, and several others I was familiar with. And, it was the last one. I had to go. I ran into the theater, and guided by someone in the lobby headed towards the Buster's Special Events Room, a long, airy space with gilded chandeliers and rows of chairs. About thirty or forty people were there, students and theater-lovers and a few familiar faces that turned out to be other actors I have seen onstage here and there, during the sixteen-odd years I have been experiencing theater in Seattle.

Frank Corrado - who I am also long familiar with - takes the stage, and it immediately becomes clear that these Pinter readings are his passion, that it is his energy and drive that brings these fortnightly occasions together. Such is the community of actors in Seattle that he has pulled other longtime friends and colleagues in on their night off - Matthew Boston has two more nights of A Thousand Clowns to go - to join in. Can you imagine loving your work, your art, so much that you want to do it on your day off? The actors take their seats, all familiar faces to me, even if I can't quite place two of them, and the play begins. Tonight's work is Moonlight, one of Pinter's last plays, about a dying man, his wife, and his estranged sons, haunted by the memory of a long-dead daughter. Without staging and props I must confess I get confused at times, and have trouble following along.

But it is a fascinating play, biting and sarcastic, unexpectedly gentle, using commonplace cliché to mask deeper emotions. It is funny and sharp, exactly what I expect from Pinter, and heartbreaking, too, even if you didn't know that Pinter was estranged from his own son. And seeing the actors I have loved since childhood up close and in person is so exciting I bounce a little in my seat, find myself sitting up a little taller. What makes it all so exciting is the energy between the actors and the audience, many of whom seem to be old friends. As long as there are people like this, actors with enough passion and love for their work, and theater-goers who appreciate it, then the theater will survive. It will grow. It must.

Theater night. Intiman.

Still high off the hilarity of Below the Belt the night before, I head down to Intiman for A Thousand Clowns. The usher warns me that the play is almost three hours long, but then the lights go down and the laughs begin, and the time slips by. The center of the play is Murray Burns, a grumpy, curmudgeonly iconoclast who quit his job working for a children's television show and yells at his neighbors and plans trips to the Statue of Liberty. That he hates the world is obvious; equally obvious is his love for his nephew, Nick, who lives with him in a one-room apartment but spends the night with a neighbor whenever Murray has to "work." Your "work" left behind her gloves, points out Nick in the morning.

Reality crashes in when two social workers come to inspect their living situation and decide whether Murray is an acceptable guardian for his nephew. Murray confounds their every question, their every examination into his and Nick's life, until the investigation ends somewhat explosively, with the male half of the couple leaving, the female half staying...ending in one of the most hilarious mornings-after I have ever seen (with a rendition of "Yes Sir, That's My Baby" involving both uncle and nephew on ukeleles somewhere in between).

Beneath the humor there is still a burning anger that causes Murray to rage against everything, everyone, makes him yell at his neighbors from the open window. He can't make allowances, he can't make the changes that will help him keep Nick from being taken away. He can't force himself to accept a job, any job, especially not his old job writing jokes for a desperately unfunny man who has a children's show in which he performs while costumed as a giant squirrel dressed as a clown. (It is terrifying). He can't accept Sandra, the social worker, as a steady presence in his life, while she redecorates his one-room apartment with flowers and cushions and purple curtains. He can't be what Nick needs him to be, because that means that he would have to change, to grow up, to compromise. He can't. Or can he? Can any of us?

Theater Night. ACT.

From my seat all I could see was the back of R. Hamilton Wright, and I recognized him immediately - the shape of his head, the tilt of his shoulders. He is older, now, of course, but then so am I. The Revenger's Comedies was back in 1992, the very first play I ever saw at ACT, as a sixth-grader. Now it is 2009 and I am at the theater on my own, glad that I made the choice to go for season tickets, glad that I have a reason to head out one Tuesday night a month and go to the theater. I make my way through the parking garage and down the silent escalators of the Convention Center to the passageway that leads to one of my favorite theaters. ACT stands for A Contemporary Theater, and most of its works are modern plays, or modern interpretations of classic plays, such as a Tennessee Williams reworking of Chekov, or a twenty-first-century adaptation of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, last month's play.

Below the Belt is about three men marooned in the company compound of an unnamed corporation who produces parts for something - we aren't told what - in some far-off corner of the world, which is unidentified. Certainly it is some part of the world which requires Americans to live and work in a walled "compound" patrolled by armed guards to protect them from whatever is beyond those walls. Two of the men - R. Hamilton Wright and Judd Hirsch - are inspectors, and a third man, John Procaccino, who is their boss. It is brutally funny - for all that we say that women are cruel to each other, men are no different, only they do it differently - and nobody loses his shit onstage better than R. Hamilton Wright. I hurt from laughing. The theater is full, and we all hurt from laughing.

Readings. Mary Oliver.

The crowd at Benaroya Hall is not the usual symphony crowd. Here is a sea of silver-haired women, natural fibers, neutral colors, ethnic shawls and scarves and jewelry, very little makeup. Not sleek and black and gleaming gold, glittering diamonds. They are clutching volumes of poetry, hoping for an autograph at the end of an evening of poetry. The hall is nearly full, 2,500 Mary Oliver fans. E. is here, with her friends, and it was she who introduced me to the poetry of Mary Oliver a year or two ago, as she introduced me to Donald Hall more recently, just this year. I can see her, a few rows behind and to the left, a halo of curly grey-blonde hair. I wave, but she does not see me, on the far right of the auditorium.

Mary Oliver is a small woman, or appears to be, behind the podium. She introduces her sign-language translator, a handsome man wearing all black. She is sharp and funny - unbelievably funny - and every word seemed to captivate the entire audience. We were spellbound, laughing and sighing in turn, like one giant, single organism of 2,500 souls. When she announced that she would read, by request, the poem Wild Geese, a collective murmur swept over the crowd like a wave. There were twenty-five poems in all, several of them brief haikus written while a broken arm made typing difficult, one long poem that was a single, fractured sentence lengthened by pauses and dashes. But this is the poem that everyone knows.

Wild Geese.

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

I first encountered this poem in A Book of Luminous Things, a poetry anthology collected by Czeslaw Milosz, and it never fails to capture my attention.

SAVE THEATER.

Last night I went to ACT to see Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. On a Tuesday night, the theater was about two-thirds full, much as it was at Intiman a few weeks ago, at Crime and Punishment. I get the sense that the theater scene in Seattle is dying, and it breaks my heart. I grew up in Seattle, going to the theater every month during the season, which runs from late Spring to Fall, interspersed with the symphony and modern dance performances by visiting artists. Art is about passion, and you walk away touched by someone else's emotions, hurled across the stage, sending itself in waves through the audience.

This is the first year that I have committed myself to season tickets for two theaters, even if it means I have to go alone. Now when I sit in the darkened theater watching four Mr. Hydes converge on a stricken Dr. Jekyll and feel a trickle of anticipation run up my spine, or when I watch the hapless Raskolnikov hurl himself across the stage, I know I have made the right choice. When I watch actors I have seen onstage since I was in middle school, I feel something electric in my brain, in my heart. I grew up with these faces, these voices; I want this sense of continuation to go on, I want my children (not that I have any children, or even a prospective father for them) to have this same experience. I want theater to live.

You have to have a passion for what you do, my father tells me. It is enough to be able to experience other people's, if only for a few hours, two nights a month.

Round and round we go.

I haven't posted here in a while. Not because I haven't been reading; quite the opposite, I have been reading so much it has been difficult to focus on one thing long enough to write about it. Several months ago I discovered a nearby thrift store and began coming home every week with my arms full of 50¢ books. Another neighborhood bookstore has a 25¢ bin (and a dollar pile) that has yielded all sorts of interesting things (Shirley Jackson's Life Among the Savages being the latest acquisition). I took an alternate route home one day and stepped into another used bookstore, a subterranean cave lined with shelves that went up practically to the ceiling, presided over by two grizzled old men and their dogs, Xena and Jellicoe. (I came away from that one with an 1896 edition of Sir Walter Scott's Marmion). The new shelves in my bedroom and the old bookcases in the other bedroom are quickly filling up; soon my apartment may disappear altogether beneath the endless rows of books.

There's a Bukowski poem that is going round and round in my head these days. It's called mind and heart, the last poem in one of his posthumous volumes.

unaccountably we are alone
forever alone
and it was meant to be
that way,
it was never meant to be any other way -
and when the death struggle
begins
the last thing I wish to see
is
a ring of human faces
hovering over me -
better just my old friends,
the walls of myself,
let only them be there

I have been alone but seldom
lonely.
I have satisfied my thirst
at the well
of my self
and that wine was good,
the best I ever had,
and tonight
sitting
staring into the dark
I now finally understand
the dark and the
light and everything
in between.

peace of mind and heart
arrives
when we accept what
is:
having been
born into this
strange life
we must accept
the wasted gamble of our
days
and take some satisfaction in
the pleasure of
leaving it all
behind.

cry not for me.

grieve not for me.

read
what I've written
then
forget it
all.

drink from the well
of your self
and begin
again.

Bukowski, Charles. Come on In!: New Poems. Ecco, 2006. pp 278-279.

It's time for a change.

I've been thinking of dividing the food writing and the literature writing into two different blogs for a while now. It just seems better to separate the two things that have been the most important parts of my life. Now the food writing will be here. I hope it will allow me to be more focused, more coherent in my thoughts and my writing. I don't know whether the old posts here will move to the new place; I haven't figured out how to do that without losing the comments which have meant so much to me over the past few years. (For someone of my generation I am ridiculously computer-illiterate).

I'm behind, as usual. Life has been hectic in so many ways. At present approximately two-thirds of my entire library is stacked in piles on my bedroom floor and along the windowsill. New shelves are going up soon; I will probably spend the next week arranging all my books in ways that may or may not make sense. The stack of Things To Read grows higher and more unwieldy each day. But I'll be back soon.

Breakfast. bacon.

I woke up, reluctantly, but with one thought firmly in my mind: crepes. Ham and cheese, to be precise. And a mocha. (An indulgence saved for the occasional Sunday). I bundle into my most pajama-like clothes (fleece hoody and sweats, all black, so I look like an untidy sort of ninja) and out the door, down the hill to the Essential Bakery. There are plenty of open parking spaces; the bakery is nearly empty. Only a few other tables are occupied, and there is no line. Everyone has left town for the holiday weekend, and I am too early for the brunch crowd.

I had been hoping for a ham-and-Gruyére crêpe, but time has passed and the seasons have changed; now they have a bacon-and Swiss crêpe instead. I order my crêpe and a mocha and buy a loaf of bread, stumbling over the pronunciation of pugliese. (Later I will slice some for lunch, to eat with a smoked-salmon spread; it has a crisp, chewy crust and a soft interior that has a faintly sour tang to it). The guy at the counter tells me that he hears all sorts of variations on the word; he goes with an approximation of the Italian pronunciation.

My mocha comes in a big cup, the white foam swirled with a coffee-colored leaf. I drink these rarely, a treat saved for Sundays I have to work. They have the best espresso here, and my mocha has the dark intensity of espresso (but never bitter) smoothed out by chocolate. It wakes me up. I sit back and sip my coffee and wait for my breakfast and read about Bill Bryson's adventures traveling alone around Britain.

The crepe arrives, folded in quarters, sprinkled with chives, and scattered with cracked black pepper. I like eating things wrapped in other things; it is like opening a present to discover something wonderful inside. The crepe is soft and eggy and just crisped around the edges, almost sweet against the mild cheese, the savory bacon, all of it gently spiced by the black pepper. A man walks in, exclaims, It smells fantastic out there! Bacon, comes the reply from behind the counter.

Work is waiting for me; I have to leave. But it is enough that I have this moment to myself before moving on.

Eating out. Lark.

It's not dinner at Lark without each server stopping at my table at least once. J. is the one who greets me, tells me the specials of the day, takes my order and checks on me as I eat my dinner. But various others swoop down to fill my glass, take away empty plates, take my order for the quince tarte tatin, bring me a spoon and fork with which to eat it, and at last, the dessert itself. (Which is presently taken away and replaced by the check). There are five servers at Lark, and they have all come by my table tonight. Plus K., one of the owners, who presides over the room and stops to greet everyone. (Most of the diners tonight seem to be old friends). I tell J. that I saw her at the market a few weekends ago; she tells me that she sometimes works at Matt's in the Market during lunch (during the week, alas, so I won't see her there).

When I arrive, the restaurant is completely empty, except for the staff folding napkins and chatting behind the bar. It is a strange sensation to sit alone at one side of the room and look around at the neatly laid tables, stemware and flatware gleaming in the candlelight. The menu has some subtle changes, some old stand-bys (stand-bys is the wrong word, but you know what I mean). Today the farro is made with black trumpet mushrooms; I've had it with morels or chanterelles. Like everything else on the menu, it changes with the season. But when I eat here alone, I only order from the day's specials. Osso buco.

I order my osso buco and braised carrots and sit back. Diners begin to trickle in, sitting down at the booths across the room or at the tables that run down the middle of the dining area. There is bread, one studded with walnuts, the other plain, with a soft, airy, yet elastic crumb and a perfectly chewy-crisp crust, and sweet butter. (I prefer the one with walnuts). My osso buco arrives, with a tiny knife and fork to assist in liberating the marrow from the bone. The braised veal is tender and richly flavored in its dark sauce, over slender twists of fresh pasta and roasted vegetables (which I can't identify). On another plate I have sweet carrots, all kinds, fat little round ones (roughly the size and shape of a large marble) and elongated pointy ones like baby fingers. Some are soft in their honeyed glaze; others are just on the tender side of crisp, all under a gentle sprinkling of herbs.

The tables are all full by the time I have dessert, a tarte tatin made with quince. It is as good as always, melting fruit over the crunch of a puff-pastry crust, under caramel sauce and ice cream. So far I have tried it with apples, peaches, pears, and pineapple. The pineapple is my favorite, but they are all wonderful. The diners to my left, who have only just ordered and are sipping wine, look on with envy. I almost offer the woman next to me a taste (she is tall and glamorous and model-gorgeous), but decide against it. Their turn will come.

The day after Christmas.

I have the day off. I could go grocery shopping (the contents of my fridge: half - or rather more than half - a roast chicken, one onion, and some leftover Brussels sprouts sautéed with hedgehog mushrooms), or I could go watch National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets. I choose grocery shopping. (The movie can wait until another day). Whole Foods is quiet for once, even in the late morning. After the holiday rush they are out of mushrooms, the white buttons, the brown creminis, the big portabellos. Never mind. I buy potatoes, onions, celery, a few carrots. In my mind I have already moved past last night's Christmas dinner, now only a memory.

As usual, I had gone to D.'s house. Like Thanksgiving, it was a small(er) gathering, fourteen people, all of us in the kitchen together. The usual suspects, minus a few. I arrived bearing my cake, a pint of cream (minus the four and a half tablespoons I needed for icing the cake), and two shallow containers of Red Rooster. (D. had made the Red Rooster a few days before and left it in the freezer), and the way she makes it, it turns out to be vodka flavoured with a little orange and cranberry juice). The smell of roast prime rib and caramelized onions filled the air. (When the roast came out of the oven and was placed on the table, I started eating the onions straight from the pan, hot and sweet and spicy with black pepper).

The menu was simple - the prime rib, perfectly rare, a green salad, mashed potatoes, a fruit salad (involving fruit salad, hard-boiled eggs, and Miracle whip - I am not sure of the origins of this dish, but it is strangely addictive), hot rolls (crescents from those cardboard tubes that pop open with a bang), and king crab legs - and there was tons of everything. We ate and ate and ate and then took a break for a movie before returning for dessert. My cake was fragrant with bourbon and rich with figs and nutty and spicy and if it was slightly on the dry side, a dollop of whipped cream (whipped with my new cordless stick blender) was all I needed to make it perfect. I staggered home, stuffed full and laden with presents and collapsed on the sofa.

But that was yesterday. Today I have groceries to buy, a whole week of dinners to plan. I'll mash some potatoes to eat with the leftover roast chicken tonight; I'll make soup with the carcass and the vegetables later on in the week. Another night I'll make fried rice, or mini-cheeseburgers, and with the last of the cheese I can make macaroni and cheese. They are out of bacon (unthinkable!) so I buy a thick slice of ham to chop up for the fried rice and perhaps the macaroni and cheese as well. I buy bread and smoked salmon spread and pâté for lunch; milk and juice and fruit and yogurt. Three bags of groceries later, I am on my way home. Ready for the week ahead.

Baking. cake.

It started with D, when she suggested I bring dessert to dinner on Christmas day. I couldn't make bread pudding - I always make bread pudding, and if no one else is sick of it, I certainly am. I couldn't make brownies - they aren't really dessert, and nor are cookies. Tíramisu seemed wrong. I spent days dithering, until a piece of luck came in the form of the most recent issue of Gourmet magazine. Flipping through the pages yielded a recipe for a fig-pecan-bourbon cake; it looked complicated and time-consuming, but not too much so. I would need dried figs and pecans and bourbon and cake flour, and, of course, a Bundt pan. Most of what I needed I bought at the market, except for cake flour, which I couldn't find anywhere. The perils of eating organic. A note posted in the bulk foods section of my local co-op suggested 3/4 cup pastry flour - which I had bought by mistake - to 2 tablespoons of cornstarch. Some quick math brought that to three cups of flour to half a cup of cornstarch, more than enough for my cake. (I think).

I can't remember who taught me to read the recipe through and gather my ingredients together before I begin, or to estimate how long things would take. Usually it takes longer than I expect. What I like about Gourmet is that it tells you "active time" and "start-to-finish time." Certainly it takes me longer to simmer the dried figs until they soften and absorb most of the liquid. (The recipe calls for water, but I use bourbon and water). I am annoyed at the recipe, which merely says "until most of the liquid is absorbed," which is not precise enough for something like a cake, which needs precision. (I am someone who weighs my ingredients if possible, even when making macaroni and cheese).

My eggs are coming to room temperature; the butter is softening in its dish. I have to remind myself to do these things at the start of cooking, instead of in a hurried rush near the end. The flour is sifted into a large bowl, and then measured; I put all my dry ingredients together and the wet ones in another bowl. The figs are not ready, so there is time even for a quick dinner, which I eat standing up, hovering over the stove. The standing mixer is on one counter; the food processor takes up precious space at the other, but I need them both. It is fun to puree the warm figs with bourbon (I taste some - it's good); my food processor is shiny and new and with a few pulses the figs have become a smooth puree. The eggs are beaten with brown sugar and oil until pale and creamy before I add the figs, and then the flour mixture, fragrant with cinnamon and nutmeg. As usual, I get flour everywhere.

But there is no time to dwell on the far-reaching mess I have made, because the pecans are just on the verge of burning and I rescue them just in the nick of time. A few more pulses with the food processor and the nuts are ready to be folded into the cake batter; the pan is already buttered and floured (a few bare spots linger, so I pray for the best) and waiting to be filled. And then it all goes into the oven, and I breathe a sigh of relief. It's out of my hands now. The scent of figs and bourbon and toasted pecans fills my kitchen, my apartment. An hour later I take the cake out - it is slightly burnt around the edges, but never mind, I can slice the dark bits off - and let it cool before turning it out on a rack. It is beautiful, dark and rich and fragrant, and I can't wait to taste it.

Two more days to go.

Market day.

I went down to the Pike Place Market this morning. It was raining and there were errands to run, so I took the car. I went shopping first, because it was too early for lunch, wandering through the stalls, buying dried figs and ground cinnamon and nuts. The lady at the spice market laughs at me for writing my grocery list on my forearm. I stopped at our favorite produce stall for hedgehog mushrooms (EVEN BETTER THAN CHANTERELLES! exclaims the sign) and "little green balls of death" (Brussels sprouts) and beautiful deep purple eggplants, tiny ones a little larger than a jumbo egg. I hear two of the people who work there discussing the sweetness of the Satsuma oranges and grab several, all loose skin and glossy dark leaves. The produce joins the other things in my bag and I head to Sur La Table. I need a Bundt pan. (Like the pecans and figs and ground cinnamon, it is for a new recipe I want to try).

Sur La Table is packed with people and kitchen gadgets. I trip over strollers and push past other shoppers to stare, stupefied, at the bewildering array of cake pans, which come in every imaginable shape and size. They are expensive. I give up, as Matt's in the Market opens soon, and head back out into the rain. Ducking into the old market building, I notice the creamery - good, I can get the eggs and heavy cream I will need for my cake here - and spy another kitchen store. I don't know how I've never seen this place in the twenty years I have been coming to this market, but better late than never, I suppose. I find a Bundt pan for much cheaper than those at Sur La Table (although they have the fancy ones, too) and run out the door, arriving at Matt's just as they open.

Again, I am seated at the bar. (This time I don't get carded). I order the seafood chowder and the 'mac and cheez,' and settle back to watch the bartender make Bloody Marys for the lunch crowd. This is the kind of place where the staff gets together before opening and has a drink as they talk about how the day is going to go, and by the time I leave he's made about twenty Bloody Marys. Plus a Virgin one, at which point I ask him, where 's the fun in that? I am drinking orange juice, so I am in no position to criticize. The chowder arrives to distract me from the notion that brunch was invented so people could drink in the morning without being labeled as alcoholics. Th soup is light and creamy without being too rich, filled with chunks of fish and shellfish and altogether extremely good. But I regret it when my macaroni (actually, they are cavatappi, twisty hollow corkscrews of pasta) and cheese arrives, lush and creamy, with a hint of goat - or perhaps sheep, I've never been any good at identifying cheeses - and fine shreds of prosciutto, with the satisfying crunch of breadcrumbs scattered across the top.

I wish I could eat more, but I am full and there is more shopping to be done. I buy cream and eggs and decide against steak for dinner or fish for the night after. (I think I will roast a chicken instead). I still have to go to the bank and the post office and I need a bottle of bourbon and oh dear where did I put the parking garage ticket? But in all it was a successful morning, and I am warm and well fed and I have most of the things I need for my cake. I can hardly wait to get home and unpack my bulging grocery bags.

Eating out. Nishino.

It's wet and cold and rainy out, and I'm hungry, and we can't decide where to go for dinner. In the mad dash to the car (again, it's raining) I drop my box of chocolate on the wet pavement and bags of chocolate-covered cherries go everywhere. (In the darkness I almost don't notice my black book - full of notes and phone numbers, but not *those* kind of phone numbers - on the ground and snatch it up just in time). It does not bode well for the evening ahead. But we don't feel like cheeseburgers at Quinn's or pizza at Via Tribunali or pasta at La Spiga or twee little bites at Licorous (and I know better than to suggest Café Presse) and at first we head to downtown and Thai food, which has its own problems, what with the traffic and parking lots that say SORRY, LOT FULL and the multitudes of last-minute shoppers (and I am smug because all my presents are bought if not wrapped) and finally C. says, let's go somewhere that has parking.

Names scroll by in my head as I think of a place to go, like the tumblers in a combination lock as your fingers turn the knob past one number to the next. Anything at University Village will have the same parking problem as downtown, or, god forbid, Bellevue. Nishino, perhaps, in Madison Park. We drive up back the hill as I toss other names in the air - Dinette, but C. doesn't like things on toast; Coastal Kitchen, but it's hard to find parking - but ultimately, I've already made up my mind. Nishino has its own parking lot. And I want Japanese food, even if I don't know it yet. It feels strange to be here without my parents - the still-charming owners don't recognize me alone - but I have eaten there so many times it is still like returning to something familiar.

I order the unagi and the toro and a few different kinds of rolls; I ask for tempura and broiled hamachi collars and miso soup. Hot tea and miso soup warm us, and I am caught off-guard by the soup, which has a deeper, more complex flavor than the kind of miso soup you get in other restaurants or from instant packets bought at the supermarket. The sushi rolls - spicy tuna and house special - are good enough but not particularly interesting; the unagi is spectacular, as usual. They broil the eel just before making the sushi, so it comes to the table still warm and crisp around the edges. As always, the toro is better than anywhere else, like the unagi. One piece per person is just enough, one taste of that wondrously fatty tuna belly to excite the tastebuds, fill the senses.

The tempura is fine, but the grilled hamachi collars are even better, the meat rich and fatty and falling away from the elongated plates of bone with gleaming stretches of skin hiding pockets of unctuous flesh. I wish I could eat more, but I am full. I tell C. that the restaurant is the quietest I've ever seen it, with a handful of tables still open. We turn down dessert, and head out the door. Instead of turning left to the twisting lakeside road that lead to the old house where I grew up, we go straight, straight down Madison. I have been eating at Nishino for a long time, I tell C., since it was an Italian restaurant called Trattoria Carmine. It has been Nishino for twelve years now, and it is always busy.

Cooking. beef Stroganoff.

Impatience is one of my greater faults. This is apparent as much in the kitchen as it is anywhere else. Another one, as my mother tells me, is my lack of consistency, which is why I am not a chef, because as a chef you have to get it right, perfectly, each time. The combination of impatience and inconsistency has probably lead to the majority of my kitchen disasters (aside from the one involving flaming whiskey). Any cookbook will tell you that cooking requires patience - when you are searing meat, for example, and try to move a steak or a piece of fish too soon, the flesh will tear - and most recipes are tested again and again so that when you try them they will work. The danger, for me, is when I step outside of the recipe and start improvising. Which is, of course, just asking for trouble. It can turn out splendidly, or it can be disastrous, and, because it was an improvisation, it can never be replicated.

I can't remember the first time I had beef Stroganoff, but I remember ordering it at a restaurant high in the Swiss Alps when I was in my early teens. (I don't remember whether it was good or not). Later I would order it at the Kaleenka, a Russian restaurant near the market; it came with a choice of fried potatoes (which is the classic presentation), rice pilaf, or kasha (which I preferred). I have always loved beef Stroganoff, with its rich slices of beef, tender mushrooms, tangy, creamy sauce, and something like noodles or rice to sop up all that lovely sauce. Then the Kaleenka became a French café (bar le jour, café la nuit, Le Pichet calls itself), and I had nowhere to go for beef Stroganoff. The only solution, of course, was to make it myself.

I have never followed a recipe for beef Stroganoff because I only make it for myself, and it is hard to adapt a recipe for four or six for one person. It has never turned out the same way twice, and it is not always successful. Sometimes the beef is too tough or the sauce is too soupy. Sometimes my timing is off and the noodles are soggy by the time everything else is ready. Last night's Stroganoff was a combination of all of the above: tough beef, soupy sauce, slightly underdone onions, and soggy noodles; edible but not far from disaster. Having sliced up enough steak, mushrooms, and onions for two meals, I had a second chance to try again. (Because beef Stroganoff does not reheat well, I divide all the ingredients into two equal, single-serving portions, cooking one and reserving the other, uncooked, in the refrigerator).

This time, I would start making the sauce before dropping the noodles into the boiling water. The beef was briefly browned and seasoned, then placed aside. The thinly sliced onions were sautéed until golden, and then the mushrooms were added. When they started to brown around the edges, I added red wine and let everything simmer until the wine had reduced considerably before returning the beef to the pan. The wine had become a syrupy glaze. A few spoonfuls of sour cream were stirred in, until they melted into the wine and became amalgamated into a creamy, thick sauce. I drained the noodles and tossed them with the sauce-slicked contents of the pan, which always tastes better than just pouring the sauce on top of the noodles. Perfect? Not quite - I could have reduced the sauce even more - but there will be other chances. At least nothing caught on fire.

Eating out. Matt's in the Market.

I first heard about Matt's in the Market from my uncle, several years ago. He would tell me about a tiny little restaurant above the Pike Place Market that had a few stools along a bar and no proper kitchen. The chef cooked up his soups and sandwiches on two camp stoves or something like that, and people lined up for ages.Everything came from the market downstairs, fresh produce and meats and seafoods and breads. Later A. would tell me that it was the best place to eat in the market, and I would nod my head and mentally file the idea away. Then the chef/owner expanded his tiny hole-in-the-wall into a light-filled space with about fifteen tables, a counter that overlooked an actual kitchen, and a bar with seven or eight stools. It was time to head out there and try it.

I'm early, having underestimated my own ground speed. The hostess directs me towards the bar, and I scramble up onto one of those bar stools, only to be immediately carded by the bartender. Apparently I look younger than I am. Maybe when I've eaten here a few times I won't need to rummage around in the depths of my bag for ID as soon as I sit down. The two other guys at the bar - one of whom looks barely old enough to drink - seem like regulars, or at least well-known to the bartender, who offers them Bloody Marys. They come "with a snit," a small glass of beer served on the side. I am not sure of the origin of this custom, but it seems to be a Midwestern one. They sit and drink their Bloody Marys and chat with the bartender, who is veering towards middle-age, barrel-chested and bespectacled (in owlish dark rims). I order the sautéed prawns and settle in with my book.

Diners begin to trickle in, and the tables around me fill up. My lunch arrives, three huge shrimp nestled on a bed of vegetables. There are fingerling potatoes and Brussels sprouts and some kind of squash that has caramelized to a crisp sweetness around the edges. Against the warm sweetness of the vegetables comes the cool sharpness of capers mixed with finely diced roasted red peppers. There is bread on the side, with a small dish of olive oil. Conversations flow around me and I listen in as I eat my meal. This is what I like about eating alone; I can concentrate on my own food, I can engage with other people, I can people-watch, I can stay in my own world or emerge out into the present.

Was it half as good as it looked? asks the bartender as he clears my now-empty plate. Better! I tell him. He hands me the dessert menu. I think of the long walk down to the market (just over a mile) and the even longer walk back (because it will be uphill the entire way) and order the bread pudding, heady with whiskey (or perhaps it is bourbon, I can't remember) and thick with golden raisins. It is a long wait for the bread pudding, for which the bartender apologizes, but it gives me time to eavesdrop some more, to sit and look at all the bottles of scotch and whiskey and bourbon and various liqueurs behind the bar, to look at the rain-streaked windows and down at the market below. I have never seen the market from this height, from the third floor in this building that holds layers of histories in all its shops and cafés and stalls; I can see the sign next to the neon Public Market sign that somehow I've never seen before.

The bread pudding is warm and crunchy around the edges and soft in the middle, with a scoop of ice cream melting on the side. To my right I can see the gleaming new tower that houses the remodeled and expanded Seattle Art Museum, a few blocks away. I'll go there another day. Right now I have my dessert to finish, which seems to take only a moment. I pay my bill and slip out the door, down the stairs and through the market. I see A., who cooked dinner for J.'s surprise birthday party last week, at the seafood stall where he works; I run into the woman who was my server at Lark the last time I ate dinner there, walking swiftly in the other direction. Another day at the market.