a poem for a Saturday.

I found a scrap of paper as I was cleaning up my room last night, floating to the surface of the tide of flotsam and jetsam that fills that bedroom. It must have been tucked into a letter from my friend Ana, written when we were young. "A Wednesday Poem," it says. A handwritten note on the back suggests that we have 'Wednesday poems' every week, but somehow I think this tradition never took hold. It seemed serendipitously appropriate to find this at the end of a week of grieving for a friend, who died Monday afternoon. The letter I had been writing the Sunday before is in my bag, unfinished. I wrote another letter to her daughter, instead, late Monday night, still reeling from the news.

Day brings what it is going to be. Trees -
wherever they are - begin to stand.
I have a crossing to do today
onward through this shadowy land.

How still the earth stayed that night at first
when you didn't breath. I couldn't believe
how carefully moonlight came. It was
like the time by my mother's grave.

Today I am going on. In former times
when you were back there, then
I tried to hold the moon and sun.
Now when they ask me who you were -

I remember, but remember my promise
And I say, "No one."

Letting You Go.
(William Stafford).

My friend loved poetry; when her children were young she put poems in their lunchboxes every day in April, which is National Poetry Month. In return, they started a blog of poems for her at the beginning of this month, the three now grown children choosing a different poem each day. She died before April came to an end. This friend loved many poets, but her favorite poem was another one by William Stafford, posted here.

in memory of Kim Ricketts.

This afternoon I got the email that I have been dreading for weeks. The wonderful Kim Ricketts had passed away after a long illness. She had been in and out of the hospital all winter, the hospital which I can see from my windows. The hospital which is within a stone's throw of the bar where she went into labor with her oldest child, nearly 27 years ago. The news of her passing hit the internet with a speed most often reserved for famous celebrities, like Elizabeth Taylor, and the outpouring of grief on Twitter and Facebook for Kim and her family was like a tidal wave. I expect it will continue over the next days and weeks.

Most of us in Seattle who love food and books have been touched in some way by Kim and the events she put together. I attended one of the dinners she had at Lark (for David Tanis and his book A Platter of Figs and Other Recipes) two and a half years ago, and while I didn't meet her that night - I was too shy to introduce myself in those days - it was one of a series of moments that changed everything. Her motto - and her company's - was "connecting people, stories, & ideas." She loved books more than anyone. She loved her three children - and they her - with a pride and a wild strength that was like a hurricane, and my heart is aching for them and her husband and the rest of her family.

I told Kim, all the time, in my letters to her, that I was so grateful to have met her, and that she was so loved by all of us. Nothing was left unspoken. It is a rare and precious thing, to understand what someone means to you, and to be able to tell them this. I was lucky to have this chance. We all were.

"Only connect."
(E. M. Forster).

theatre notes. O Lovely Glowworm.

(in memory of Mark Chamberlin).

I had planned to see New Century Theatre Company's production of O Lovely Glowworm even before the untimely death of Mark Chamberlin a month ago. He had been very much involved with the company from the beginning, and was already in rehearsals as the Goat when he died. In the wake of his passing, another founding member of the company, Michael Patten, stepped in, and this tightly knit small cast pulled together a beautiful production dedicated to Mark's memory. Throughout the tender "scenes of beauty" that make up the play there seemed to be an undercurrent of grief and loss for a fallen comrade, or perhaps I was imagining it. Perhaps I was imagining that shattering poignancy to every word. Perhaps it was all really there.

O Lovely Glowworm is a shape-shifting creature, a tangle of fables that leap from one to another. At first I can't tell where the separate stories are headed, until the second act when they begin to collide and then intersect. The thread that ties everything together is very simple: our never-ending human need for love, desire, faith, that is almost an ache. This thread is pulled and twisted by the Goat, who looks on with longing at the human comedies and dramas that swirl around him like the eddies and whirlpools that guard Philomel, the mermaid who lives in the lake. I am confused and enchanted at the end, and I want to see it all over again.

The New Century Theatre Company feels like an actor's theatre company, more born out of a collective passion of a group of performers than a single director's vision. In my program is a list of people who have donated to the company over the last year; I recognize many of them as actors whom I've seen on Seattle stages over the past twenty years. Sitting behind me in the audience is Anne Allgood, who I remember from Tom Stoppard's Rock 'n' Roll and one of the Pinter Fortnightly readings last year. (I introduce myself at intermission, telling her I recognized her laugh; I'm learning not to be shy). Nearly all the actors onstage are familiar to me, and I remember all over again why I've come: theatre is about passion and faith, and it gives me something to believe in. It is an enduring kind of love.

It would not be fair to Michael Patten and his wonderful performance to try and imagine Mark Chamberlin as the Goat. But his presence seemed to be there, still. The part that moved me most to tears was when the Taxidermist (Patten, in one of his shape-shifting roles) prepares the goat (a stuffed dummy, really), talking to him all the while. "You are loved," he says, gently. For a moment I am not entirely sure if he is only speaking to the goat.

O Lovely Glowworm, presented by the New Century Theatre Company, performs at the Erickson Theatre Off Broadway until May 14. http://newcenturytheatrecompany.org/

more theatre notes.

I heard the other day that Intiman Theatre was closing for the rest of the 2011 season, only just begun. I must say that I have not supported them lately, but the sadness I feel is still very real. Many of my dearest theater memories stem from their magnificent productions - Betrayal, Ghosts, The Importance of Being Earnest, (all when I was in my teens), and more recently, To Kill a Mockingbird, Heartbreak House, Crime and Punishment, and A Thousand Clowns. Lately my attention has been more preoccupied with other theaters, with ACT downtown and Strawberry Theatre Workshop in my own neighborhood, and the Taproot up in Greenwood, which has a tender intimacy that reminds me of the old ACT Theatre on Queen Anne. There is the New Century Theatre Company which I discovered last year with the incredible On the Nature of Dust, and the Pinter Fortnightly readings run by Frank Corrado, and my time and money are taken up with other things. But these are all only excuses.

I feel guilty. For not having contributed. For not subscribing to another season. For not taking the time and making the effort to ensure that our city did not lose any of our incredible wealth of theater. I take heart in remembering that ACT went through its own turbulent times, perhaps ten years ago. They had moved from a tiny space a block or two from Seattle Center (which houses both Intiman and Seattle Rep) over to a giant building downtown, which contained three separate stages on different levels. There were a few rough seasons, which I don't quite remember because I was off to college at the time, but I remember wondering if they would survive. And they did. The Taproot was rebuilt after being devastated by a fire about a year and a half ago. I hope that Intiman's new director will find her own ground, coming back to us even stronger, and better than before. There will always be room for all these theaters in Seattle.

Art is a necessary privilege. We need art the way we need air or water, unconsciously. If it is taken away then our souls will die the way our bodies will die without air or water. But at the same time it is a privilege, too, one that can be taken away if there are no resources to sustain it. I hope Intiman will be able to regroup in the coming year, and find a way to move forward.

Re-reading. Pinter/Fraser.

To console myself for not being able to get a seat for tomorrow night's Pinter Fortnightly, I'm returning to Antonia Fraser's Must You Go?, that beautifully tender gathering of memories of her life with Harold Pinter. I read it in one fast gulp last fall, staying up late into the night. It opens with the two meeting for the first time, after a 1975 production of The Birthday Party. "Wonderful play, marvellous acting, now I'm off," she says. "Must you go?" he asks. She stays, and eventually they leave the party, with Pinter giving her a ride home. I offered him coffee. I actually gave him champagne. He stayed until six o'clock in the morning with extraordinary recklessness, but of course the real recklessness was mine.

Pinter knew all about recklessness, of course. Think of the lovers in Betrayal, their tangled stories unraveling until we can see that first knot from which these twisted threads emerged, that first tryst in a bedroom in the midst of a party. Earlier (that is, earlier in the play but later in the story), there are those letters Jerry sends to Emma when she is off in Venice with her husband. (I'm going by a memory, now fifteen years old, of how it all unfolds). What we don't see, of course, is what happened before that - what unspoken messages, accidental touches, speaking glances across a room - that led to the point where the play ends. Someone has to make that first leap into the "must you go?" moment that leads to all the other moments.

They were Bohemians, Fraser writes, shedding the class divisions inflicted upon them by the press - she from the titled upper classes, never mind that her father became an earl late in life, he from the working classes - to meet in this kingdom of Bohemia. They were like the Schlegels in E. M. Forster's Howards End, who were the answer to his question, "who will inherit England?" some sixty years before. Aside from being a great love story, theirs was a kinship of two writers, though not collaborative like the Didion-Dunne marriage, writing in separate studies in their combined household, working on plays and screenplays (him) and researching historical biographies (her) wherever they could, in London or in Scotland or in New York. They had three decades of happiness, not without cost, but real happiness, even if it is seen through the rose-colored flushes of early passion and late widowhood.

The more I read of him, the more Pinter I see performed, the larger and more intricate grows the puzzle that is his vast body of work. I feel as if I have only just begun.

Fraser, Antonia. Must You Go?: My Life With Harold Pinter. Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2010. p 5.

farewell. (coda).

(in memory of Mark Chamberlin: 1955-2011)

The first Pinter Fortnightly reading of this year (now we are in the third year of this wonderful series) was scheduled to take place tonight. It was canceled in honor of Mark Chamberlin, who passed away quite suddenly last week. He was to have taken part in tonight's performance, but his memorial service was this afternoon, instead. I wrote of my sadness at his death earlier, and of the sense of loss that surely must be felt by the Seattle theater community, to say nothing of his family and friends.

The theaters of Seattle, large and small, make up an intimately connected constellation that spreads across the city. They form a tight network of actors, directors, and writers who make their home in this city and whose work I have been privileged to experience for the past twenty years. People come in from the outside, of course, visiting directors from New York or the occasional movie actor from Los Angeles. But the heart of the community is people like Mark Chamberlin, who settled here as a young man and continued to grow and develop over the years as an actor, constantly evolving, constantly challenging himself.

I remember the first Pinter Fortnightly reading I attended, nearly two years ago. I remember my heart leaping at the sight of Suzanne Bouchard, Michael Winters, and Frank Corrado. I remember recognizing Marianne Owen in the audience. The gods of my youth were real now, and even better than they had been when I was young. The more Pinter readings I attended, the better I understood Pinter, of course, but most of all, the more I could see the extraordinary level of trust and collaboration between the actors. It gave a soft tenderness and depth to Pinter's often brutally sharp words, but maybe that was what Pinter intended.

This sense of trust and connection happens best when you have a distinct community of people who have known each other and worked together often, sometimes for decades. This is what Mark Chamberlin was very much a part of, and I will always remember the last role I saw him in, as Gibbs in The Hothouse. He was suave and menacing and hilarious by turns, and later made a wry reference to "the Scottish play" during the post-play discussion, which made everyone laugh. I looked forward to seeing more of him, and now that will never happen.

movie notes. Jane Eyre

A few weeks ago, I went to see the newest film version of Jane Eyre with a fellow literature-geek friend. Both of us had read the novel as young girls (mine was a hardcover classic edition, one of a set that included Wuthering Heights, Frankenstein, and Walden. The last one doesn't quite go with the others). It surprised me how deeply the dialogue has sunk into my consciousness, how much I remembered of it. This is what happens with books that you have read many times, that you've loved for most of your life. The most memorable scenes remain the same from movie to movie, bringing them alive as they have been in your imagination for twenty years.

L. has seen every film version of Jane Eyre there is; I've seen most of them. There are a lot. The New York Times recently had an article explaining this: as costume dramas go, this one is relatively easy (that is, inexpensive) to produce. There aren't that many characters or houses to costume, unlike, say, Pride and Prejudice. It's a more sympathetic story than Wuthering Heights (everyone in that one is selfish, weak, batshit insane, or some combination of the three), and in this version, much funnier than I remember it being. L. and I giggled a lot, much more than we should have, I suspect.

If you think about it, Jane Eyre is the precursor to the modern romantic comedy: our hero and heroine have their "meet cute" when the latter startles the former clean off his horse. There is some bantering dialogue, the thrilling incident of his bed catching fire and her tossing a jug of water at him, their gradual falling in love, and the inevitable separation and ultimate reconciliation. There's a crazy ex (for him) and the seemingly perfect match who nevertheless isn't quite her soulmate (for her). There is tragedy and heartbreak - as Brenda Blethyn says on the commentary for Saving Grace, you've got to have drama to give the comedy its emotional weight - and, of course, a happy ending.

My favorite thing about this version of Jane Eyre is the luminous strength of Mia Wasikowska. She is not shy. She will not waver, will not break, will not give in, the most indomitable of Janes. She is not beautiful, only heartbreakingly young. Watching her impossibly slender figure walking away from Rochester and all he can offer calls to mind that line from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn: "...they were made of thin invisible steel." I have never liked Jane Eyre so much before.

farewell.

I was deeply saddened last night to read that the local stage actor Mark Chamberlin had died after a bicycle accident over the weekend. I saw him last year, in ACT Theatre's production of The Female of the Species, and also at various Pinter Fortnightly events. He sat near me in the audience one night and while I didn't have the chance to meet him, he was warm and funny and charming and quite disarmingly handsome. His passing has rent a hole in the tightly knit fabric of the Seattle theater community, and I am reminded again of the fragility of human life, and also that when you have the chance to thank someone for what their art has meant to you, you have to grasp it with both hands or else be left with an everlasting sense of regret.

For twenty years, Mr. Chamberlin was one of many actors whom I loved and admired in our local theaters, and I am sorrier than I can say that his great light has been lost to us. My heart goes out to his family, his friends, and his colleagues.

l'heure d'été. (movie notes).

*contains plot spoilers.*

I watched l'heure d'été (Summer Hours, directed by Olivier Assayas, 2008) some weeks ago, and it left me with a kind of lingering wistfulness. I think it's one of those films which will stay with me for a long time, from the opening sequence to the last moments. In between it is a meditation on the nature of art, of death, of family, of memory. Of childhood and growing old, opening on a pack of children running through the gardens of a family summer home, following a treasure map up and down trees and along steep winding paths. The house's chatelaine is turning 75. She is determined to see that her late uncle's legacy of art passes on after her death. She takes her unwilling oldest son through her things, the Majorelle desk and cabinet, the Redon panel that is quietly mouldering on the studio wall, the shards of a Degas plaster cast that her sons broke when they were boys. Everything has a memory for her, and she is the last one left.

If it were an American film, this elderly lady would die dramatically clutching her chest as a glass of water spills to the floor and shatters, as shocked family and devoted housekeeper looked on, but thankfully it is a French film, and her death happens offscreen. We move slowly through the seasons, as the three grieving grown-up children sift through the estate and come to terms with what it really means to preserve a legacy. The art goes to the Musée d'Orsay; the house is sold. Two of the grown children live abroad, and to them the house is just a house. "Our children won't care," one of the sons says. They won't remember the stories that come with every piece; for them the Uncle Paul who collected it all is just another ancestor who died before they were born.

Near the end of the movie, Frédéric and his wife walk through the Musée d'Orsay to see his family's collection displayed in the gallery of decorative arts. There is a piercing sense of nostalgia, seeing these antique pieces, the Majorelle desk cleared of papers and the vases arranged on glass shelves under spotlights, instead of on the mantelpiece or filled with summer flowers. The Redon panels have been cleaned and restored; behind the scenes an expert is piecing together the shattered Degas into a dancing girl. But there is also a sense of loss; that human touch of everyday life and its accompanying clutter has been swept away in the climate-controlled rooms of a museum. The line between art and object has blurred; that inlaid mahogany desk was built to be used, to be cherished, in a home. The painting was meant to be hung in defiance of rot. A vase is meant to be filled with flowers, no?

At the end, a teenage girl holds her boyfriend's hand as they walk across the countryside where she and her cousins played at the beginning of the film. She tells him, her grandmother used to bring her here, used to tell her that she in turn would bring her own children here. "Now the house belongs to someone else." But she'll remember it, always. Do you have a place like that in your heart? I do.

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.