The Chinese mother.
The other night a friend posted this article from the Wall Street Journal, provocatively titled "Why Chinese Mothers are Superior," an excerpt from the upcoming book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. (It is important to note that the title of the article was most likely chosen by the WSJ to be as provocative as possible). The response amongst my American-raised Chinese friends was immediate: some things rang true, but ultimately none of us can remember being called "garbage" by our parents.
There are a lot of things our childhoods had in common, my other Chinese-American friends and I. We spoke Chinese at home. We had a hot-water dispenser with pink or purple flowers on it. We none of us wear shoes indoors. We don't hug each other. All of us washed vegetables and learned to make dumplings at an early age. The fact is, all these little things become insignificant compared to a greater fact: I had an amazing childhood. That my parents' love for me and mine for them is unspoken does not diminish it in any way. At all.
Talking about parenting is tricky. It creates yet another way for people to judge each other, to measure themselves against someone else's standards. In many ways, my parents weren't like other parents I knew, like their friends. It would take too long to explain all of the freedoms I had, all the experiences that make up my childhood. I remember now, why I played piano, why I practiced every day for an hour. I hated practicing. I would prop a book or a magazine against the music and play while reading. But I hated the idea of giving it up even more. It wasn't a chore, a burden, but a privilege, I was told. If I didn't want this privilege it would be taken away.
I cannot look back and say I regret anything about the way I was raised. Praise was rare, and all the more valuable when it was received. Criticism was freely given, and either stung me into apathy or improvement. My father can given a lecture on disappointment that seems to last for days, and my mother has a temper that could frighten Cerberus. There are things I am confident about - making ice cream, photography, finding obscure things on the Internet - and things that I am not - baking with egg whites, my looks, my writing. But I am grateful for all of it, because they are all part of the entirety of my life.
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Monday, January 03, 2011
the long goodbye.
A friend was diagnosed with cancer this past fall. I remember getting the email while at another friend's house on Halloween night. We had just eaten a magnificent supper of cornbread and beef stew and caramel-frosted prune cake. We were laughing at Eddie Izzard when I checked my phone and read the news. It is typical of this friend that her main concern was for her three children, all younger than I, the youngest still in college. She wanted to make sure they had a support system. I got into my car to drive home and I cried.
She is a firecracker, this friend of mine, the kind of woman who seems to be moving even when standing still. Like a hummingbird, or that Boccioni sculpture, you know the one I mean. I have seen her talk herself hoarse and keep going in a whisper. I know from experience her hugs are tight and warm, and time slows down when her arms are wrapped around you. I know she loves books more than almost anyone else I know, more than me, even. I know she loves her children with a fierceness that is like a wild thing, and the weight in my heart I feel must be magnified a hundred thousand times for them. Or more. This kind of sadness is incalculable.
Then, suddenly, more sadness was around us. Two friends of friends - people I'd met, but didn't know well - lost their fathers in different traffic accidents, just days after Christmas. I thought of my father's brother, who died of a heart attack when he was barely fifty and my cousin was away at college. There were no good-byes, no warnings. No time. I thought of an interview by Justine Picardie with the luminous English actress Natascha McElhone, whose husband had died unexpectedly while she was pregnant with their third child and working halfway across the world. "I told him I loved him every day, all the time," she said. "Nothing was left unsaid." How many of us are that lucky?
As an only child I don't know what my greatest fear is, coping with aging parents on my own, or losing them, as I know I someday will. I remember sitting in the waiting room of the Delhi airport, reading Julia Reed's beautiful The House on First Street: My New Orleans Story. I wept when I came across this passage: I realized that my biggest fear was of an inevitability far greater than any hurricane: the fact that they too would be gone. I hug my parents a little tighter when I say goodbye to them at the airport now.
How do you say goodbye when you know you have a year to do it?
A friend was diagnosed with cancer this past fall. I remember getting the email while at another friend's house on Halloween night. We had just eaten a magnificent supper of cornbread and beef stew and caramel-frosted prune cake. We were laughing at Eddie Izzard when I checked my phone and read the news. It is typical of this friend that her main concern was for her three children, all younger than I, the youngest still in college. She wanted to make sure they had a support system. I got into my car to drive home and I cried.
She is a firecracker, this friend of mine, the kind of woman who seems to be moving even when standing still. Like a hummingbird, or that Boccioni sculpture, you know the one I mean. I have seen her talk herself hoarse and keep going in a whisper. I know from experience her hugs are tight and warm, and time slows down when her arms are wrapped around you. I know she loves books more than almost anyone else I know, more than me, even. I know she loves her children with a fierceness that is like a wild thing, and the weight in my heart I feel must be magnified a hundred thousand times for them. Or more. This kind of sadness is incalculable.
Then, suddenly, more sadness was around us. Two friends of friends - people I'd met, but didn't know well - lost their fathers in different traffic accidents, just days after Christmas. I thought of my father's brother, who died of a heart attack when he was barely fifty and my cousin was away at college. There were no good-byes, no warnings. No time. I thought of an interview by Justine Picardie with the luminous English actress Natascha McElhone, whose husband had died unexpectedly while she was pregnant with their third child and working halfway across the world. "I told him I loved him every day, all the time," she said. "Nothing was left unsaid." How many of us are that lucky?
As an only child I don't know what my greatest fear is, coping with aging parents on my own, or losing them, as I know I someday will. I remember sitting in the waiting room of the Delhi airport, reading Julia Reed's beautiful The House on First Street: My New Orleans Story. I wept when I came across this passage: I realized that my biggest fear was of an inevitability far greater than any hurricane: the fact that they too would be gone. I hug my parents a little tighter when I say goodbye to them at the airport now.
How do you say goodbye when you know you have a year to do it?
Saturday, January 01, 2011
farewell to the old year, bring in the new.
i made no resolutions last year
or if i did i don't remember them
but i remember all the things i did
people i hugged tight
children who told me stories
and who held my hand at the fair
meals with friends
during which i laughed until i could barely eat
and travels with my family
that led to dusty hills as old as time
under a burning sun
the fragrance of jasmine in the air.
i baked cookies and cakes
planted paperwhite bulbs
that sprang up in the warmth of the dining room
and burst into bloom.
and i took picture after picture
of dogs
and children
and flowers
sunsets and sunrises
the camera and my eye merging into one.
it was a good year.
i made no resolutions last year
or if i did i don't remember them
but i remember all the things i did
people i hugged tight
children who told me stories
and who held my hand at the fair
meals with friends
during which i laughed until i could barely eat
and travels with my family
that led to dusty hills as old as time
under a burning sun
the fragrance of jasmine in the air.
i baked cookies and cakes
planted paperwhite bulbs
that sprang up in the warmth of the dining room
and burst into bloom.
and i took picture after picture
of dogs
and children
and flowers
sunsets and sunrises
the camera and my eye merging into one.
it was a good year.
Thursday, December 30, 2010
this is just to say. (with apologies to William Carlos Williams).
(second draft).
(the first draft is here)
this is just to say
i have eaten all the pickles
that you gave me
which filled a tall mason jar
which i had thought to save
for picnics with friends
at the beach
or on the living-room floor
sliced into an egg salad
or guarding a cheese plate
but instead i ate every last one
straight from the jar
they were so cold and crisp
and briny
and delicious.
(second draft).
(the first draft is here)
this is just to say
i have eaten all the pickles
that you gave me
which filled a tall mason jar
which i had thought to save
for picnics with friends
at the beach
or on the living-room floor
sliced into an egg salad
or guarding a cheese plate
but instead i ate every last one
straight from the jar
they were so cold and crisp
and briny
and delicious.
Wednesday, December 01, 2010
state of the arts.
I remember listening to the radio, or perhaps watching public television, when I was little. At the end of the program - which one, I can't quite remember - a voice would say something like "This program, and so much more, is funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts." It sounded important. Later I understood that this meant it was funded by government money, and that sometimes the government preferred to spend its money on other things besides art, like war.
I grew up with art. We went to museums and plays and dance performances and the symphony. I took ballet and made crooked clay pots and watercolor paintings in art class. This grew into an interest in photography, encouraged by my parents, which continues to this day. Quite recently I came across a poem by the artist Tim Etchells (the entire poem is here) in answer to the question "What can art do?" His response has been echoing in my mind again and again for days now.
I remember listening to the radio, or perhaps watching public television, when I was little. At the end of the program - which one, I can't quite remember - a voice would say something like "This program, and so much more, is funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts." It sounded important. Later I understood that this meant it was funded by government money, and that sometimes the government preferred to spend its money on other things besides art, like war.
I grew up with art. We went to museums and plays and dance performances and the symphony. I took ballet and made crooked clay pots and watercolor paintings in art class. This grew into an interest in photography, encouraged by my parents, which continues to this day. Quite recently I came across a poem by the artist Tim Etchells (the entire poem is here) in answer to the question "What can art do?" His response has been echoing in my mind again and again for days now.
'You asked what art can do
I wanted to write you that it
can make a spark flames
and a puddle ocean
a river tears
a room a world
a cry song
....
I meant to write you that art
can close a wound
and open a legal case
that it can stare further than a telescope
go faster than Internet and
beat like a loved one's heart
....
I wanted to tell you that art is loved as a hammer
because of how well it breaks lies and speaks truths
knocks down obstacles
...
And in case anyone is wondering, art is not a servant of any government
nor of any policy, nor of touristicism
nor a servant of money
nor an icing on a cake
...
That's what art can do.
And people should be careful with it.
Otherwise they may wake up one day and have to live alone
With no hammer of change, no truth, no laughs,
No bringing together or wondering apart
With no reflections, no possibility to reflect
Just living alone with only their ghosts and their ideologies muttering at them.'
Saturday, November 27, 2010
Theater notes. Albee.
I'd seen Three Tall Women before, at Intiman, fifteen years ago. The same year as Pinter's Betrayal, in fact. I was fifteen. What did I know about being 26, or 52, or 91? Of falling in love, being married, coping with an unfaithful husband and a son I couldn't understand? Of growing old and dying? Nothing. And now I'm 30 years old, past 26, only a little closer to all of these things. I heard Seattle Repertory Theatre was performing Three Tall Women. I saw the women would be played by Megan Cole, Suzanne Bouchard, and Alexandra Tavares, all of whom I am familiar with, especially Suzanne Bouchard, whom I have loved for nearly twenty years. I had to be there.
It is everything I remember - much of the dialogue has stayed with me for fifteen years, which is a testament to Albee's brilliant writing - and yet more. More gentleness, more anger, more humor. This theatre is smaller, more intimate; sitting in the fourth row I can see the actors' faces clearly. I know them so well, Megan Cole after her recent part in one of the Pinter Fortnightly readings, Madagascar. Suzanne Bouchard, from dozens of performances in the 18 years I have been experiencing theater in Seattle, Alexandra Tavares from several plays over the past four years. I know their voices, the way they hold their heads up high, the way they move across a stage. This is what keeps me coming back, again and again, beyond the playwrights and their works. The actors are a part of what I love most about theater, the familiar faces shifting and changing from character to character.
In one of the first plays I remember seeing at ACT in 1992, Suzanne Bouchard exploded onstage in The Revenger's Comedies, as the unstable, seductive Karen Knightly. She continued to slink through a variety of femme fatale roles (often leaving a befuddled and slightly terrified R. Hamilton Wright in her wake), but now, more than ever, she is at the top of her game. There is tenderness, and a quietly intense fury, seen in the Pinter readings and performances last year and earlier this year, and as 'B' in Three Tall Women. The mark of a great artist is when they never stop evolving, never stop surprising you. We have a lot of these artists here in Seattle. We are lucky to have them.
I'd seen Three Tall Women before, at Intiman, fifteen years ago. The same year as Pinter's Betrayal, in fact. I was fifteen. What did I know about being 26, or 52, or 91? Of falling in love, being married, coping with an unfaithful husband and a son I couldn't understand? Of growing old and dying? Nothing. And now I'm 30 years old, past 26, only a little closer to all of these things. I heard Seattle Repertory Theatre was performing Three Tall Women. I saw the women would be played by Megan Cole, Suzanne Bouchard, and Alexandra Tavares, all of whom I am familiar with, especially Suzanne Bouchard, whom I have loved for nearly twenty years. I had to be there.
It is everything I remember - much of the dialogue has stayed with me for fifteen years, which is a testament to Albee's brilliant writing - and yet more. More gentleness, more anger, more humor. This theatre is smaller, more intimate; sitting in the fourth row I can see the actors' faces clearly. I know them so well, Megan Cole after her recent part in one of the Pinter Fortnightly readings, Madagascar. Suzanne Bouchard, from dozens of performances in the 18 years I have been experiencing theater in Seattle, Alexandra Tavares from several plays over the past four years. I know their voices, the way they hold their heads up high, the way they move across a stage. This is what keeps me coming back, again and again, beyond the playwrights and their works. The actors are a part of what I love most about theater, the familiar faces shifting and changing from character to character.
In one of the first plays I remember seeing at ACT in 1992, Suzanne Bouchard exploded onstage in The Revenger's Comedies, as the unstable, seductive Karen Knightly. She continued to slink through a variety of femme fatale roles (often leaving a befuddled and slightly terrified R. Hamilton Wright in her wake), but now, more than ever, she is at the top of her game. There is tenderness, and a quietly intense fury, seen in the Pinter readings and performances last year and earlier this year, and as 'B' in Three Tall Women. The mark of a great artist is when they never stop evolving, never stop surprising you. We have a lot of these artists here in Seattle. We are lucky to have them.
Sunday, November 21, 2010
The radio play. Emanuel.
I heard The Vanishing, a radio play by Oliver Emanuel, on BBC Radio 4 a few weeks ago, and found it hauntingly beautiful and absolutely terrifying. A man, (played by the velvet-voiced Samuel West), searches frantically to find out what happened to his former girlfriend, who disappeared from a petrol station while they were on holiday, eight years before. Now I finally understand: what makes the radio play so much more suspenseful than any other medium is that it takes place entirely inside your head. On stage, on film, or on television, you depend on visual cues, facial expressions, occurrences happening stage left or in the background; they tell you more than what even the characters might know. The radio play is different: you only know what you are told, and you can't see what is coming. A bit like reading a novel, where you can only see the page you are on.
The Vanishing is adapted from a Dutch novel published in 1984 (there have been two films, one a disastrous American movie with a trumped-up happy ending). This version doesn't end happily. The next morning I woke up in the dark (the main character gets buried alive) and freaked out until I realized I was still wearing my sleep mask. But it left me eager to hear more from this young playwright, and a few more weeks went by before another radio play came along on Radio 4's Afternoon Play program.
Everything is still available for listening, at least for another two days. Commissioned by the BBC / Children In Need, the play comes from the time Emanuel spent as a writer-in-residence at Running: Other Choices (ROC), which provides a refuge and other support services to children under 16, in Glasgow. As a desperately wanted only child I have felt loved by my parents my entire life. Even in the darkest of times - and we have all have those moments of doubt and despair - I have always known this. It made it especially heart-wrenching to listen to this story of a girl who has run away from home, away from a stepmother who didn't want her and a father who didn't give a damn, and no one else to turn to. Sam, the counselor at the youth refuge, struggles with maintaining a connection with this girl, who at first responds only with growls and silence.
With every progress made, the fragile peace is quickly shattered, over the course of seven days, the maximum amount of time a child can seek refuge at the center. The girl is too wary, too hurt, too certain that any trust she places will be broken. She is not wanted, anywhere. "What will happen to your child if you die?" she asks Sam's wife, who is pregnant with their first child. Beth has no answer, only a kind of faith in the unknown and the hope that the unthinkable will never happen. "What do I have to live for," the girl later asks Sam. "Why shouldn't I kill myself?" Questions no 14-year-old should ever ask. "What do you want, then?" he asks her in return. "Everything."
I heard The Vanishing, a radio play by Oliver Emanuel, on BBC Radio 4 a few weeks ago, and found it hauntingly beautiful and absolutely terrifying. A man, (played by the velvet-voiced Samuel West), searches frantically to find out what happened to his former girlfriend, who disappeared from a petrol station while they were on holiday, eight years before. Now I finally understand: what makes the radio play so much more suspenseful than any other medium is that it takes place entirely inside your head. On stage, on film, or on television, you depend on visual cues, facial expressions, occurrences happening stage left or in the background; they tell you more than what even the characters might know. The radio play is different: you only know what you are told, and you can't see what is coming. A bit like reading a novel, where you can only see the page you are on.
The Vanishing is adapted from a Dutch novel published in 1984 (there have been two films, one a disastrous American movie with a trumped-up happy ending). This version doesn't end happily. The next morning I woke up in the dark (the main character gets buried alive) and freaked out until I realized I was still wearing my sleep mask. But it left me eager to hear more from this young playwright, and a few more weeks went by before another radio play came along on Radio 4's Afternoon Play program.
Everything is still available for listening, at least for another two days. Commissioned by the BBC / Children In Need, the play comes from the time Emanuel spent as a writer-in-residence at Running: Other Choices (ROC), which provides a refuge and other support services to children under 16, in Glasgow. As a desperately wanted only child I have felt loved by my parents my entire life. Even in the darkest of times - and we have all have those moments of doubt and despair - I have always known this. It made it especially heart-wrenching to listen to this story of a girl who has run away from home, away from a stepmother who didn't want her and a father who didn't give a damn, and no one else to turn to. Sam, the counselor at the youth refuge, struggles with maintaining a connection with this girl, who at first responds only with growls and silence.
With every progress made, the fragile peace is quickly shattered, over the course of seven days, the maximum amount of time a child can seek refuge at the center. The girl is too wary, too hurt, too certain that any trust she places will be broken. She is not wanted, anywhere. "What will happen to your child if you die?" she asks Sam's wife, who is pregnant with their first child. Beth has no answer, only a kind of faith in the unknown and the hope that the unthinkable will never happen. "What do I have to live for," the girl later asks Sam. "Why shouldn't I kill myself?" Questions no 14-year-old should ever ask. "What do you want, then?" he asks her in return. "Everything."
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
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.
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.
Monday, November 15, 2010
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.
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.
Thursday, November 11, 2010
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.
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.
Saturday, November 06, 2010
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.
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.
Monday, October 25, 2010
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.
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.
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
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.
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.
Monday, October 11, 2010
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.
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.
Tuesday, October 05, 2010
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
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
Monday, September 20, 2010
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.
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.
Saturday, September 18, 2010
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.
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.
Monday, September 06, 2010
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.
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.
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
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/
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/
Friday, July 23, 2010
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.
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.
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