jeunes filles en fleur. theater notes.

K. invited me to her daughter's class production of High School Musical last night. Her daughter goes to a private school in my neighborhood, and this was the 7th and 8th grade stage production. Everyone takes part, regardless of talent or experience. I go because this is how the next generation of people who love theater, onstage or in the audience, this is how it begins. I sit with my friend's younger daughter, who's seen the musical twice already. It's a nice theater, with fixed stadium seating and a thrust stage with a simple but professional-looking set. We are reminded to turn off our cell phones - the frequency might interfere with the performer's wireless microphones. What? Wireless mikes? We definitely didn't have those when we were in middle school. How times have changed.

Things I forgot about middle school: in 7th and 8th grade, the boys still look like little boys, some short, some tall. One boy has a Bieber haircut and is so baby-faced as to make the real (and already near-fetal) Justin Bieber look like an octogenarian. The girls are almost young women. They are long-limbed and not quite graceful, but they are definitely jeunes filles en fleurs, young girls in flower. They are all beautiful. Were we all that beautiful, when we were young? Another four years and they will be even more beautiful, like the girls in a high school production of Noises Off we saw a few months back, who ran effortlessly up and down stairs clad in skimpy slips and dangerously high heels.

The singing is not all in tune. Sometimes the mikes fade in and out. But there is energy, poise, love, the kind that might mature into passion. They have pride. They've worked hard for this. They are having fun. And so are we.

love letter.

(to theater).

There was young laughter in the audience at The K of D last Sunday. I'm more aware of it now, seeing young faces in the audience at intermission and hearing their voices as I leave the theater. Often they are students clearly there for a class, maybe for an extra credit paper. But it makes me glad to see them fall in love with the theater as I did, twenty years ago. You can see it in their faces, the excitement, the thrill of it all. It means that a new generation will carry on, will make art, will support art. There is hope, now. A few summers back I sat in half-empty theaters and worried about the future. That's not to say the tide has completely turned; it's still hard for theaters to make money, to keep actors and directors employed, to keep producing works both old and new.

The first play I remember is a production of James and the Giant Peach (based on the novel by Roald Dahl) at Seattle Children's Theatre. Back then it was at the Woodland Park Zoo, the old Poncho Theatre tucked away in a park. We screamed when the giant peach came rolling down and cheered when the ghastly aunts get squashed flat. That was my first memory of the theater. The second came three years later at ACT, with Shadowlands, followed immediately by The Revengers' Comedies. The love and admiration I felt for the actors in these plays has continued unabated for nearly twenty years now, for Michael Winters and Laurence Ballard and R. Hamilton Wright and Suzanne Bouchard. The list is longer now, the list of actors whose names attached to a production guarantees that I will want to see it.

I felt, that recent Sunday afternoon at the Seattle Rep, there will be another generation enthralled by the joy of live theater. That they will remember Renata Friedman's electric performance the same way I recall Suzanne Bouchard's as Karen Knightly 19 years ago. That it will keep them coming back the same way I keep coming back, again and again.

theatre notes. K of D.

I'd noticed Renata Friedman in The Female of the Species at ACT last year, when she played a overwrought student who takes an iconic feminist writer hostage in her English country home. Her gangly energy (one review compared her to Olive Oyl) fueled the physical comedy around the verbal quips that ricocheted back and forth across the stage. It left me looking forward to more. When I saw that Friedman was the sole star of Seattle Repertory Theatre's production of The K of D: An Urban Legend, I knew I had to see it.

The K of D is about the mysterious events that take place in a small town over the course of a summer. A single performer inhabits over a dozen different characters, the various townspeople whose whispers build up a legend around a single, lonely girl, Charlotte McGraw, who stopped speaking the day her twin brother was hit by a car and killed. Even taller and wirier than I remembered, Friedman continuously transformed herself from one character to the next, with nothing but voice, inflection, posture, movement to mark the changes. It was staggering. Those endless arms and legs flung themselves across the stage with an electric, kinetic force, twining themselves around lampposts, gesturing with a sudden, surprising tenderness.

There was something about the play that reminded me of To Kill a Mockingbird or other stories about how children - though in this case, they are teenagers - can band together with nothing much to hold them besides, perhaps, propinquity. Or a secret. Or a mystery. And how whispers can grow from a story that passes for truth, and from there, expands into a legend. The things that are clear are how the loss of your twin, your other half, can leave such an aching void in your heart that the silence can wrap itself around you, and that this silence has a kind of unshakable power.

This is the second play I've seen at Seattle Rep this season (the first was Three Tall Women) and both times I've been completely blown away. Everything was perfect - the music, the set, the actors, that intimate connection between the stage and the audience. Extraordinary things are being done here.

on language. (English).

My English and American literature lecturer when I was a freshman in college was an enormously tall British graduate student with an absolutely impenetrable Midlands accent. He once recommended The Buddha of Suburbia as an interesting read, only it sounded more like "Teh Booba ef Suboobeyah." Took me ages to figure it out. Class was always an adventure in twisting my brain around his words, searching for familiar words spoken in his unfamiliar accent.

Language is tricky. The lines between dialect and accent are blurred, as we learn as children when reading The Secret Garden (Martha and Dickon's unfamiliar Yorkshire vocabulary) or Strawberry Girl (the hardscrabble south of Florida with its flat vowels and hard words). My ear can separate the Irish from the Scottish and the English from the Australian, but not pinpoint the region or city. Within what we think of as a generic "accent" there exists another range of variations.

I thought of Mary Lennox and her confusion at the Yorkshire words she didn't know as I was reading Richard Milward's Apples. Set in his native Middlesbrough, it uses language in a way I've never seen. I thought again of Daniel Bye's blog post in The Guardian and how thrilling it was for him to hear his native Tesside accent in the stage adaptation of Apples (and in the novel as well). For me, someone who speaks English as a second language and without any discernible (American) accent, this idea of feeling a connection to the place where you grew up through language is utterly fascinating.

state of the arts. (thoughts on theater).

I found the playwright Oliver Emanuel (@foolisholly) on Twitter via the wonderful actor Samuel West (@exitthelemming), and through Oliver I found Daniel Bye (@danielbye), also a playwright/theatre director. I'm not familiar with Daniel's theatre work, although he is certainly brilliant and hilarious in his tweets and blog posts, but Oliver does a fair amount of radio work, which is occasionally available through BBC radio online. This is a new facet of globalization, one where I can talk to writers in England (sorry, and Scotland; Emanuel is based in Glasgow, I think) in the middle of the night in Seattle (morning there) or vice versa, where I can listen to a radio play that might otherwise go unheard as I live halfway around the world.

I grew up in Seattle amidst what I thought was an intense and intimate theater scene in terms of a passionately connected community of actors and local playwrights. The big names - Pinter, Stoppard, McDonagh, et al., trickled out from London via New York; if it was a hit there it might eventually make it out here. (I leave out the classics - Shakespeare, Shaw, Ibsen, and so forth - the same rules don't apply). You might see someone local working on a project in readings and workshops, but you wouldn't see the powerhouse playwrights except for at the height of their careers, their greatest hits. It wasn't until Frank Corrado's Pinter Fortnightly series of readings that I understood the great beauty of being able to experience the complete arc of an artist's body of work.

What we have here in Seattle is a network of small theatre companies and programs like ACT Theatre's Central Heating Lab, which acts as a sort of incubator for new work. They operate on a shoestring and a prayer and they create art, the next generation of artists. It is a homegrown process. What we don't have is a way to see other young playwrights across the globe, how they are working, how they are coming into their own, creating their own language, creating their own New Wave. When I think about British theatre my frame of reference is off by a generation or four; I came of age reading Stoppard and Pinter and John Osborne. I need to see what's happening right now, to bring my sense of awareness up to date.

What I get to do now, thanks to the Internet, is watch (or rather, listen to) these young playwrights - ferociously intelligent and funny, of my own generation - create a body of work that, years from now, can be looked upon as something extraordinary. Already I have heard four different radio plays by Oliver Emanuel, already I have seen how a distinct voice can develop and evolve from work to work. It is a beautiful thing.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

'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.'

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.

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."

Blood & guts. McDonagh.

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

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

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

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

Reading. Glück.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Louise Glück, October. Averno. 2006.

Reading: Pinter/Fraser.

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

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

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

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

Weekend thoughts.

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

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

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

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

I'll make the time.

Reading. Mary Oliver.

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

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

In Blackwater Woods

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

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

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

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

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

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

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

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

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

- Mary Oliver, American Primitive.

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

School lunch.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pinter Fortnightly. Madagascar (JT Rogers).

And now for something different.

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

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

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

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

Pinter Fortnightly. The Hothouse.

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

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

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

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

www.acttheatre.org
www.pinterfortnightly.com