Change

The hard part about trying to change your life is what to do when it actually changes. I went trotting off to these auditions in NYC looking for a change. They were, quite frankly, depressing on so many levels, but they went well, and I got several offers. I've actually taken one of the offers, Memorial Day to Labor Day, 6 plays in 14 weeks. With any luck I can take my computer and give bulletins from afar.

Work is what I wanted. I got work. I get four months completely free of an office, working my butt off as an actor, which is EXACTLY what I wanted. So of course, now I am petrified. And I don't want to go.

Actually, that fear is a good sign. I always get it before good experiences. I dread them, I fight against the oncoming growth and excitement and long to burrow my head in the sand and do nothing. Then the thing I am dreading almost always turns out beautifully. But that doesn't stop me from dreading and fearing it, NO!

I remember the moment I realized I must secretly like change. I was waiting for a train, watching the pigeons flirt with the red and green ceiling, thinking about how much I hate change, when it dawned on me how much change I had forced myself into over the years. I had been bouncing from place to place, trying new lives on like sunglasses, always moving forward to find the next part of my life. Wow, I thought, if I really hated change, surely I would have just stayed in one of those places and tried to make a go of it.

In a way, I've done that in Chicago, with success, stayed put and tried to make things work. But now I'm restless, and rather than just suppress the restlessness, I'm going somewhere new to meet new people.

I know I'll learn, but, boy, I hope I have fun.

Cocktail Party

I got an invitation yesterday. A lovely watercolour of a white front door with red flowers blooming around it, overlaid with see-through paper printed in a refined font with lots of flourishes, invited me to a cocktail party in honour of my cousin and his fiance, who are getting married in June. The party is in South Carolina, in a little town called Trenton. Trenton is only about four streets wide by three streets long, and that's not an exaggeration. It's where my great grandmother held court until she was buried at the Ebeneezer Baptist Church. She likely had some reservations about being buried in the Baptist Cemetery, as she was a loyal Presbyterian, but according to my grandmother (her daughter), somehow all the cemeteries are Baptist.

I can't go to this cocktail party, but I wish that I could. A longing came to me like a flock of birds settling in a tree. There's something about that place that seems to own me. The streets are named for my ancestors, the town is full of my distant cousins, and even forgetting those connections, there's something necessary about celebrating a family event. I may exaggerate the historical significance of the place, since I didn't grow up there and have very few memories of that community, but the fact is that the nucleus of my mother's family is there, like the hub of a wheel.

My feeling of identification with the location is, I'll admit, Romanticizes. Another cousin was a teacher at the high school in this area for years - a school that until very recently, held separate proms for black and white students. I find that idea mind-boggling, but that's part of the reality of that community. The South is a complicated place, and I love its complexity, but I can't deny I am naive to much of its limitations.

So I have an acknowledged advantage when I think of home - I think of the fine and the beautiful things. I may be hundreds of miles away, I may live in a much more liberal place, but I appreciate a community that throws parties for its young brides and bridegrooms, and I appreciate that my family has been a part of that community for a very, very long time.

And while I may not agree with everyone's politics, I sure wish I could fly down and have a drink with those people.

Other worlds

So I'm broke. What else is new? What's new is that I shouldn't be broke. There are checks for work I did over three months ago that should be in my hot little hands. But they aren't. I can see the downside to non-equity acting. I am beginning to believe that no one ever gets paid in this business, that all agencies simply prey on your willingness to take crap because you "have to start somewhere" and if you finally make noise, they replace you with another eager young thing.

But I have to admit, the sums of money coming to me seemed massive at first, until I realized the very prosaic uses to which those sums must be put - debt, savings, health insurance. Depressing. I don't even have credit card debt, the way so many of my fellow 30-somethings do - I should by all rights be ROLLING in money! I live within my means! I give at least a paltry sum to charity!

The biggest problem with the three-four month wait for money you make on acting gigs is this: by the time the money comes through your door, you have spent it in imagination so many exotic and fabulous ways that having to put it in safe and reasonable places feels anticlimactic. You've had endless time to think about that money, to make plans for it, split it into happy sub-monies that will make so many accounts bigger. You've cut the pie over and over, trying to work out how to feed all the many, many guests.

Of course, some people have literally spent the money before it comes. I've only sort of done that. Heh.

Domesticity

Mardi Gras: so Hank made me gumbo and we played Scrabble last night. Frighteningly domestic - I might as well be sixty-five. I lost at Scrabble. I'm a better loser than most people - games are games, it takes special circumstances to make me feel bad about losing. I feel bad about failing in life, but not losing a game.

I can't help feeling a little guilty at how much fun something simple like our evening was: kick-ass, slow-cooked gumbo (chicken, sausage, AND shrimp), and a friendly round of word jamming. It is actually word jamming, since we play on a Travel Scrabble, which makes you snap the tiles into place so sudden movement won't jar them.

Part of the fun of the evening was allowing myself to eat. I am dieting - back on the wagon today - because I head off to NYC for some auditions in late March and want to look my best. I don't consider myself fat, not at all, but I'm trying to be as trim as is possible. It's a cattle call - I refuse to be dismissed for an extra five pounds. So the poundage is on its way off. I took a break in the diet for Mardi Gras, however. While I was at it, I made sure to eat pancakes yesterday, too. It was heaven. I've been making supremely healthy choices for about two weeks now, I can't tell you how gratifying it was to eat without compunction. Raaaahhhh.

So now I'm back to being good for the next three weeks. It's not torture, I don't starve myself. In fact, it's nice to put the brakes on for a change. Then, when the diet is lifted, food tastes so scrumptious, so decadent.

I'm looking forward to eating bacon again. Apologies to the Jews and Muslims, but bacon is delicious.

Time Flies When You're Being Evicted

Goodness. It's been two months since I spoke a word here at all. I have indeed been pushed out of two places to live in the meantime, so if anyone was wondering where I've been, I've been itinerant.

Today I'm sitting in a ghost world.

I work with a law firm - I fill in for secretaries when they aren't here, among other tasks. I dislike it, and I dislike the firm more and more as time passes. When first started here, I was full-time, and I worked for two lawyers, mainly, with some extra tasks thrown in by other people. One of them was the reason I was hired here. I temped for Ric for two days in December of 2001, and as I hadn't done much legal work, I kept my mouth shut and tried to follow his corrections. He was an graying, bespectacled man given to wearing bow ties and his fedora, and his bookcases were full of Best Short Story collections or philosophy books or new fiction like The Life of Pi. Not law books. I thought he was very business-like and serious but couldn't help making a sidelong comment about the case we were drafting documents for - two brothers in an all-out fight for control of the family company. Ric was at the marble counter by this desk, and he stopped for a second and looked at me, with an impish grin, and said, "Oh, yes, the furniture is FLYING."

And eventually, months later, he talked me into coming to work for him, which I never did like, not even a little. But he turned out to be a very interesting guy - well-read and interested in people, and taking all of life with that wry sense of humor that a man who wears bow-ties must have. I quit a years or so into it, but needed the money enough to keep working at the firm on a part-time, flexible basis.

I never missed his frantic pace or his incessant waste of paper or his occasional stress blowups, but I missed chatting with him day to day, and he always had a sly smile and a joke for me when we crossed paths in the office. He was one of the few lawyers who was truly good to his secretary on a daily basis, even if he rarely put much effort into secretaries day or Christmas. He spent time on pro bono cases, did favors for friends, threw a surprise birthday party for his wife, doted on his only son. He had a sense of humor, and a feeling that the world was much much bigger than his law office. He did not compromise who he was but he was willing to learn and grow and experience something new.

A year ago, he died of a heart attack, quite suddenly, while on vacation with his family. He was 57, I think. His son was 21. The partners of the firm called us into the conference room and told us what they knew, and a week later we all went to the visitation and funeral. He'd been cremated and his signet ring and glasses were on the table behind his wife. I told her I used to work for Ric and she immediately exclaimed, "Oh, you're the actress!" The idea that he'd gone home and told his wife about the secretary who was really an actress was touching.

I find it much harder to work here without him. But today, of all days, I'm back at my "old" desk, which is right outside his old office. His elegant, tasteful furniture is gone, and the room is piled with extra files and chairs and cabinets that the office doesn't have any other place for, but from here I can only see the edge of the door, like always. I want him to be in that office, and come out with yet another draft for me. No, I don't, not really. Because I don't like working here and if I were to wish him alive, I'd give him the option of retiring. But I do wish that he could be here on earth somewhere, so that when I spy a fedora or a bow tie, it might be him after all.

Strange to see your story end

I rode the el train last night from Harlem to the city sitting in the front seat looking through the window. It was beautiful - dark patches of unpopulated streets intermittently punctuated with sparkly Christmas frippery. I used to ride the front seat of the top layer of the London buses in the same way - walkman plugged in, unwinding a soundtrack of love and loss and all the while, riding the sound, riding the streets, I was high above it, myself and everyman. London is doing away with doubledecker buses, so I won't be able to do that again.

But last night I was blissfully alone. The Green Line out to the west is nearly a straight line, and using it to inch closer and closer to the city you can feel the activity of the Loop like a homing device, or a planet drawing you into its orbit.

I love that the tracks are elevated. It lends a superiority to mass transit, that as you wait, you stand above the milling, confused commuters in cars. It's far better than being plunged deep in the earth for having the temerity to use public transportation.

Now if it weren't so dishearteningly cold, it might have been a perfect evening.

Polygraph

I ran out of things to read on the train the other night, and the only thing I had instead was a journal. (Those of you who know it can insert the Oscar Wilde quote for themselves - it's Make Your Own Allusion Day here at t&t) I keep an exceedingly fitful journal, sometimes months or even years pass with nothing making it onto a page.

The bit I read the other night started in April of 2004, and so much has shifted since then. But here's the strange thing - it's like opening a series of Russian dolls, as I move farther along, I discover the things that I seek, and yet the real need is just beyond that discovery. Or maybe it's more like Super Mario Bros. - when you master a level, there's a new level just beyond that, with completely new quirks and secrets and skills to gain.

In keeping with the simile, I have jumped up to a new level, and there is hardly time to celebrate without realizing that this level has a brand new set of issues and goals. It's exciting, though, because in making discernible progress, I suddenly feel all goals are achievable with time.

What makes me Miss Pollyanna all of a sudden? In the midst of realizing I don't want an acting career at the expense of having a family I care about (and I use the definition of family loosely - pets, boyfriends, friends, stray relatives, etc.), I booked my first national voice over commercial and was asked to be in a show in the fall without an audition, strictly on the merit of my recent performance. I feel...and I hesitate to call it this, because pride goeth before a fall...I feel...successful. It's euphoric.

Success is in the eye of the beholder, and I have a lot farther to go, but this is still a big step forward for me. I'd love to make more of my money from commercial work. You have to start somewhere and I have finally started.

That's how I described it yesterday. I can start living the next part of my life, the part where I am doing more of what I want and less of what I don't want.

Acting is a strange business, and there is no job security, so I may book this and then go straight back to obscurity - that's possible. But I feel the power of what I can do, and I believe I have enough work ethic to get more work. I'm not sure I'll ever win a Tony but I hope to be a dependable actor, a journeyman.

So I read my journal from April 2004. A lot of the things I longed for then are now part of my life. Time to set up a whole new set of goals. And this time, I know achieving them is a matter of time, not talent.

Surge

I'm broke. My quasi-regular job has just assigned me the equivalent of those impossible tasks you read about in fairy tales - collect the feathers of a thousand birds, or find the one silver straw among millions of, well, straw-coloured ones. I need to make friends with mice, or rabbits, or some other helpful work source. Although with this task, I need mice and rabbits that READ.
I am tempted to up and quit today. I am suspicious that this task has been created to make me do that. But, see above, I'm broke. So, I must begin the task. Maybe after lunch.

I am less broke than this morning, however, in that I now have money to pay my rent and other bills that are coming due right now. This morning, I had $58. Total.

Part of the broke-ness is waiting for money that has not yet arrived. Part is a committment I made to put money in responsible places for a while (like, say, an IRA, or towards a debt I have).

I do feel fairly sunny and positive, however, and I think that's because being broke is not the drain being in debt is. Being broke is a bummer. It keeps you from doing things. You cook your own meals from things you have had frozen for months. But being in debt can make you lose sleep, or your hair (which, frankly, you can't afford, I've seen your pillow of a morning), or your ability to think about anything other than the debt.

So, I'm happily broke. It could be worse.

Ten Women. Two Days. Toffee.

I managed to have an adventure a few weeks ago. I did a two day industrial shoot for a product that shall remain nameless. The shoot was set up in a single family home - the family was away in Africa on vacation, we were told, and although they left behind the furniture and most of the furnishings, there was very little clutter, which made it seem like a model home and which led me to suspect some of their personal belongings had been moved off site while a film crew invaded their home. The shoot was set up like a gathering at someone's home, with a total of ten women involved.

Now, I could detail the shoot, and how much waiting around there was, and how the catered lunches were wonderful and how it was a really fun experience to be paid for being an actor, put up in a hotel room and given per diem and things like that. I could talk about that, but what was really fascinating was the people! However, I may have crippled my ability to do so, because the first day involved a massive, massive error on my part:

Ten women are wandering through the upstairs, lounging on the beds, examining the furniture, and generally making small talk to move the day along. (This could be the beginning of a fabulous murder mystery.) One of these women has her laptop out, which leads to a desultory discussion of blogs and websites (we range from "I update my blog everyday" to "I never could see the point of having an email address until very recently....computers are greek to me"), and I say, "I have a blog, but it's not a big deal. I think maybe three people read it."

"What's the address?" she asks, perky and interested.

And I told her. As well as a couple of other people who were in the room and who asked later.

Now, that's not a huge problem. But for the most part, I have been content with my small virtual space where I could say what I wanted and no one would be looking. I'm not so obnoxious as to imagine any of those women are checking this page regularly, but the very idea that they COULD, that they might stumble back upon it, leads me to an unhappy conclusion.

I can't write down exactly what I thought about it all. Because it's work, and I could run into these people again, and it's unwise to bite the hand that feeds. Not that I have much to say in the negative column, but I can't even make fun of them! It would be rude!

So I've been stymied as to how to talk about my adventure, because I have to come up with a edited way of approaching it.

I'm beginning to see why so many people turn to fiction.

Maybe it was good I wasn't there

My Love Biscuit was away for a wedding this past weekend, which time away I enjoyed, though I wish I could have been at this wedding, as it sounds amazing. (Crepe station at the reception, anyone?)

His friend who got married was the last of his high school friends to marry, and at they are all in their late 30's now, he got a lot of prodding about when HIS wedding would be. He's the only single one left, you see.

Now, to be fair, he is hepped up on the idea of marriage. I am the one standing in the way. My friend Michael suggested I have a t-shirt made that would say "I'm the Problem" to wear to events like this. True, true.

Anyway, I have been completely ruined by a photo taken of us at another wedding this summer. One look at the photo (above) and the whole group of his friends nodded their heads, as if one person, and said, oh, yeah, let us know when your wedding is.

Damn photo. If we didn't look so bleedin' happy....

Forward but not upward

I have a headache. Because I've been eating tons of chocolate. Otherwise...
Overall, I'm grumpy. I would like to be working as an actor, or if not, something to do with acting. I am still working, currently 4 days a week, in an office. I am working a lot in an attempt to hack away at a long outstanding debt and to throw money into an IRA, but there is nothing challenging to do here. Yet I can't leave, because who else would let me write my own schedule?

Part II: This week, being here pays off, because I booked my first ever industrial two day shoot and I was able to say, hey, I'm not coming in for 2 days next week. I won't make a ton of money, but it should be worth doing, and it will be a New Experience. I need one desperately.

I guess progress is being made, but it feels sooooo sloooooow. I don't need "drama" in the classic sense, but I do need challenge, and that has been in precious short supply. Watching "Joe versus the Volcano" the other night, I noticed that line about how most of the people in the world are asleep. I've been feeling like that. I mean, this has been my workplace for THREE YEARS. But again, it allows me the money and freedom to GO on auditions and yet still get paid. Right now I have the freedom to work 4 days a week because I have a show on Friday. It's incredibly flexible, and I won't get that anywhere else.

Except for the fact that I dislike it intensely, it's a great job.

Romantically, everything is healthy and happy and fine. My (what do I call him? Sweetheart? Love? Smootchie face?) paramour and I talk about getting married and I just don't know. He's super fun to date, he'd be a great person to go through life with, but I can't see into the future. How long will my life be like this? Will it change into something more artistic? We're both poor - how could we ever have children? Heck - we're both poor, how could we ever have INSURANCE?

The more I analyze the kinds of worries and problems I'm having (and it's me, so clearly I do this often), the more I notice a pattern - the "rest of life" looms, and I don't feel equipped to move into it. I haven't made money, I haven't established myself in my chosen profession, I haven't married into a place in life. How do I get older without achieving anything visible? Or rather, how can I be content to age without seeming to move forward?

Outside of it all

On the train, after a stressful situation was competently handled, I relax reading Simon Gray's The Smoking Diaries. It's lovely - irascible and unapologetic, Gray simply writes down whatever he needs to. He has turned 64 and seen his friend Ian Hamilton die. Within the first twenty pages, Gray has dinner with Harold Pinter and his wife Antonia (Fraser, the writer and biographer), and Pinter announces he has cancer.

I don't adore Gray's plays - I saw the critically trounced Cell Mates in London on its debut, Valentine's Day, 1995 (or 94?), and remember being seriously underwhelmed, even before the reviews did their dirty work. But this book, in which he putters along, speaking of his famous writer friends and looking kindly but honestly back at his youth and wishing he'd studied Anglo-Saxon more thoroughly so he'd know more about the origin of the word shiffen, this book soothes me. I think it eases some fret in me that he is an intellectual and feels no need to apologize for that. That he can argue about Auden not being a good poet without anyone taking him to task for his elitism. It is a world I miss, and yearn for, and, truth be told, am not really smart enough to belong in. I like Auden, and know barely any Latin, much less Anglo-Saxon.

The book eases my malaise so much that when a man sits next to me in the train, I have enough room in my brain to notice the wonderful smell of his coffee - clearly a flavoured roast, hazelnut, perhaps, or almond. He's studying a book about foundations, the page neatly blocked in diagrams.

The otherness of a life spent studying foundations further soothes me, like a french window into a new idea sliding open to allow a breeze.

I wish I could go to college again. Now I'm ravenous for knowledge, now I care less for the grades and more for the sheer knowing grace of grappling with the new idea. I'm still more at home arguing plays and poetry than philosophy, but I'm like to branch out into anthropology, biology again, maybe buckle down at a language. Who am I kidding? Languages are my stumbling block, and ever will be. C'est la vie. I'll bet - I'll hope I'm spelling that wrong and proving my point.

I love reading. I feel very sorry for people who don't or can't read, because I feel I have entry into whole worlds they deny themselves or are denied. I'm extroverted in company when the occasion allows, but some child in me longs always for a quiet space and a book to ride into the wind. When I read I become engrossed, so that conversation directed at me has to penetrate a thick haze ("I'm sorry, what?"), and any interruption aggravates, even sleep. Last night I made up my mind, after losing yet another whole night's sleep to a book, that if I ever have children, I will enforce lights out with an iron hand - all flashlights will be confiscated! As a child I found any loophole I could to keep reading whatever was at hand, thus beginning a habit that keeps me sleepy by day. Like all parents trying to root out the parts of themselves they dislike, my plan is doomed to failure, I should think.

In closing, I have the impulse to apologize for the last-post-but-one. I catalog the impulse, but I do not apologize. In the calm of another day, my rightness (or wrongness) is not as important as my shock that so few people even try to get things right - not intrinsically right, per se, but at least as right as they can. I deplore the thought that a person's objection to my personality could obscure the possibilities of my ideas (i.e., your smartness threatens me, therefore I will dismiss you as being too intellectual), but my own tantrum at not being respected reflects the same kind of thinking. I must decide I have something I want to say and say it, then whether or not people listen is external, and secondary.

And I still think I'm right

I'm frustrated. A friend of mine wrote a play, and I'm involved in a reading of about ten pages, and last night we had a rehearsal. I have very strong views about this play, though I have a sneaking feeling I have no objectivity left in this friendship, and thus my views are suspect.

I've read most of my friend's plays, and I think he's a good writer, but I've known him about five years now, and I have formed ideas about what he's trying to say, as many of his plays have similar themes and characters. (That's not a criticism - so does Chekhov, so does Tennessee Williams, so do many great writers.) I admit to feeling a little on the inside of his work, as if I know more about it than an outsider. This, I have realized, may or may not be true.

I went to the rehearsal with very clear comments and criticisms, and first, found there was no forum to air these, as my role had gone from "well-informed friend" to "reader of scene controlled by director", and second, found that the problems I had with the play were not universal, as several other actors disagreed with my views.

I'm shocked that not everyone shares my aesthetic for clarity. And I'm shocked that because I want clarity, there's an inference that I think I'm smarter than the rest of the group. This infuriates me, because I then waste time trying to play low status to make my point in a non-threatening manner, a ploy that probably doesn't work. I am thrown back to a college professor who graded a play journal of mine and wrote the comment: "It makes me sad to see someone so young have such strong opinions."

This comment and others like it have shut me up and haunted me for years. I have been told over and over again than no one wants to hear what I think, and certainly no one wants me to talk about myself. And I have accepted this as true, because it is. Even this blog is an effort, because I can't imagine what I might have to say that someone would find enlightening.

I am angry. Enough. When do I get the right to speak? When am I old enough to have opinions? Is there a day when I get to stop apologizing for having some thing to say and people will just listen to me say it?

Yes, maybe it's me. Maybe if I could train my ear not to be upset by this kind of comment, perhaps I would command the kind of respect I'm looking for. But the lesson has been hammered in for too long by too many to just shrug off.

The title of this post does not refer to the fact that I think my comments are unarguable, inherent. But if I say, this is unclear, I didn't know what this meant, don't fob me off with, well, people speak unclearly. Of course they do. But if you're trying to tell a story in a scant two hours, you need to chose every piece of information that goes into that story. If you PLAN to confuse, fine, that's a choice, but don't pretend your laziness makes you more authentic.

Someday, I will bear down on some script like an angel of the apocalypse and there will be no mercy. Of course, in a just world, that script would be mine, but as we've established, no one is interested in what I have to say.

An adventure

I'd like one, please. An adventure. 'Sfunny, I spend about eight hours every weekend playing out someone else's adventure, and yet I'm surprised as how much I want my own. I've always threaded the line between the responsible and the devil-may-care, but I've been trying to feed more money, time and energy into responsibility lately. I'm sure it's very grown up and forward thinking, but I'm feeling very trapped. Ugh. I feel an escape coming on.

To be fair, I don't want to escape acting. I like acting. I like the commercial auditions and gigs as much as the high-toned theatre acting. It is an adventure, and it changes all the time. It's just that currently, I spend a lot of time in the office to give me the opportunity to eat as well as audition. And I'd like to escape the office. It seems ironic that so many "creative" people have to pay for the chance to be creative with truly mind-numbing days. I suppose there's a nobility to earning your right to success, but I feel like I've been slogging away for four years - I'd like some success now, if you don't mind. Sadly, my life has never been run on my time line.

So in the meantime, I'm secretly planning an adventure. Hmmm.....it should involve derring-do and disguises. Also the judicious use of code words, and probably some interpretive dance. I'll report back with the mission is completed.

Insaniquarium

So I've been playing this game online called Insaniquarium, a complete waste of time when I should be putting mailings together to casting directors enjoining them to come see my show. Oh, the reviews, the ones I was worried about - the Tribune put it in the paper Monday, the Sun-Times on Tuesday, and the newest Time Out Chicago brought out an issue on Wednesday with a blurb. All were positive, all enjoyed the show, all feel the show is a massive fun romp with no substance. (Well, it is.) All three reviewers compare me to Emma Thompson.

This is flattering, certainly, if somewhat unnerving. Do these reviewers hang out in the reviewer bar afterwards? Do they phone each other before they publish? Did one of them watch the show while the other two slept, and so were forced to copy each other's notes?

The only problem with being compared to Emma Thompson is the shocking number of people who have no idea who she is. I'm sure that an overwhelming majority don't know who Edith Evans was, or Ralph Richardson or Gielgud, but Emma Thompson? I mean, even if you didn't see it, surely you'd be aware of Sense and Sensibility from 1997? Or have seen the Harry Potter movies, at least, that's just last year. It's not like she's an obscure British stage actress, like Victoria Hamilton or Joanna Riding (I can't stand the former, and adore the latter).

There is just one more problem. My character is described as insouciant, and I do know what it means, but apparently no one else does. So they all make little "insouciant" jokes throughout the day. YAAWWNNN.

So I should be putting mini press packets together and mailing them to Important People to tell them to come see the show. But instead I'm mildly obsessed with this odd game. You have to feed the fish regularly or they turn yellow, and eventually die. Sometimes the tank is teeming with fish, turning odd colours and requiring you feed them immediately.

Last night there was some bad news - a stroke in the family, not my family, but my sweetheart's. And I feel powerless, and guilty to be doing so well, and I have nothing to say but "I love you," over and over again, and that doesn't seem like enough right now. And I held this person and tried to sleep, and in the back of my head behind my closed eyes, animated fish swam. They rose in my dream state, turning green and yellow and orange again, shifting colours incessantly, wave upon wave of fish rolling around my mind.

I guess I'm lucky I haven't been playing Grand Theft Auto.

Pop Music

The air has that leaves-brittle-and-bright-as-confetti feel, and I want to go driving with pop music playing and the windows down. "I'm not strong, and you'll find out, how the girls love rock and roll..." I wanna warble. I want to be on the way to a high school football game, and be sitting on the winning side. I'd like to wear a scarf but no coat, and corduroy trousers. I'd probably look a little like a Sears ad.

What is it about pop music? Well-crafted pop music is like a tapeworm: it sneaks into your brain and devours you. You can't help being manipulated by it, and you like it, although you feel guilty. Once it takes over a moment, it's like a watermark, you can't hear the song without triggering the memory, and you never have the memory without thinking of the song.

Some pop songs end up being tenaciously enduring, but you can't predict that beforehand. Some are amazing songs but become dated, while others have some timeless groove, so the song sounds as if it were just released. Personally, I think one of the most perfect pop songs of all time is "You Can't Always Get What You Want." I think that's a hard song to hear without wanting to do a huge head-bopping dance that will encompass bystanders and perhaps even nearby dogs before you're done. It is hard to be completely unhappy after hearing that song.

Anyone else? Got a timeless wonder? Whotcha fancy?

Autumn

The weather is perfect. I love being able to put a jacket on, and extra covers on my bed. For some reason, autumn always seems so cozy. It would be nice to jettison my wretched day job and begin a round-the-world journey (funded, of course, by a grant that would allow me to live without worrying about money), but even without such a plan, autumn holds that kind of adventure and promise.

Who knows, maybe it will come to that. I'm opening a show on Friday, and for once, I'm actually in it enough that my performance will be reviewed with the show. There's no squeaking by without a mention now, no peripheral character. I'm glad, of course, but it's overwhelming. I'm not used to getting what I want. I love this play. I love being in it, I love the people, I enjoy spinning out the scenes and building up the story bit by bit. I adore getting a laugh, I do internal dances of joy when we get to the happy ending (complete with a big romantic kiss - yay!), I even relish the bits where I get beaten up. I also love fainting and being carried up the stairs. The show is a great big swashbuckling romp of a delight, and no matter what the reviews say, I will enjoy it.

But I feel exposed. As a perfectionist, I don't like criticism, as I will obsess and worry about all the things I got "wrong". The possibility exists that the reviewers might not enjoy it, and no matter how grown up and mature I am about that, I will be disappointed. I want to spend my life working as an actress - it's a nightmare to think reviewers will tell me I should scurry back to my day job.

Logically, the reviews won't matter. I love the show - I'll still love the show, no matter what gets said. And I doubt I can stop acting for long, no matter how discouraging a review may or may not be.

But isn't it about time I'm forced to accustom myself to getting what I want?

A True Story

My grandmother and I are negotiating the kitchen of her snug farmhouse in the middle of South Carolina peach farming country. She is nearly ninety, her white hair set off with a bright blue outfit, and she is very pleased with herself, because despite the fact that she recently had a hip replaced and should not be doing any more than absolutely necessary, despite the fact that I made it absolutely clear that I wanted to take her out to lunch, she has foiled this plan by having lunch already prepared. It's the South - you haven't visited unless you've been fed. In addition, she is meeting my boyfriend, and because we live in Chicago, she is determined to give him a "real taste of the South". Of course, he grew up for the most part in Pensacola, Florida, so he's tasted the South before. (When she discovers the Florida connection, she exclaims, with a big smile and note of relief, "Why, you're not a Yankee at all!!" Sigh.)

Grandma hobbles and I bustle. She has at least cheated the meal by buying most of it at a barbecue place, but she has made two gleaming, golden pecan pies with her own hands. We are in the midst of reheating barbecue and slicing tomatoes when there is a knock at the door.

"Good afternoon, ma'am. Maurice said I should come by about noon, twelve thirty for my gun." The older gentleman wears a hunting cap and a shirt with a nametag, "ROY". My uncle Maurice repairs and makes guns, and Roy has had some emergency work done on his gun so that he can go dove hunting this afternoon. The season starts today. I don't know what Roy does with his days, but his skin is reddish from being outside often. His deference to my grandmother seems genuine. Does it stem from shyness or respect? No matter which, it pleases her.

"He's not back yet, but he told me you'd be by, he should be here shortly. Roy, son, would you like a slice of pecan pie?"

"Oh, no, ma'am, I don't have no bottom teeth." He smiles just widely enough as if to be showing his gummy lack of tooth, but you can't see much. "I'll just go out and pick you folks some peaches."

In about fifteen minutes, he is back with two enormous shopping bags of peaches - the bags are full, and the peaches themselves are massive. By the time he returns, Maurice has brought Roy's gun home and everyone wanders off happy. My mother and I are sent home with one of the two bags of peaches to divide between us.

We haul softball-sized peaches on and off of planes and buses and finally into my apartment. All this hauling seems like trouble until the gluttony of peaches begins. Every time I eat one, I think of Roy, and how proud and ashamed and glad I am to be from the South.

And for the record, the pecan pie was amazing.

And I am

listening to Kanye West, and feeling hip and urban. (I am, actually, very hip, and urban.)

It leaves me fretful, though. I dislike such a liberal use of the n-word, but issues of race are touchy. I do (illogically) feel some burden of guilt for the evil of slavery, as a Southerner. If the inequality the system of slavery introduced into the New World had been eradicated, maybe I could separate myself entirely from what is in the past. It isn't.

And I find myself really intrigued by African-American culture, and yet I think to participate in the culture would make me the target for scorn, suspicion, and hosility. I don't think I'm allowed to have opinions about that culture. I grant you, my exposure is on the sidelines - I'm addicted to watching "Girlfriends", I'm listening to Kanye West, I think Taye Diggs is hot. (Well, he is.)

I guess really every individual is different, and the truth is I'd like to know a few who are very different from me. But human nature being what it is, befriending the different remains a threat for both sides.

Peace out, brutha.

City Girl

I went to get my hair cut yesterday for free at a shi-shi salon. Exposed brick, funky decor, and a gaggle of stylists wearing flip flops and sunglasses and anything that would generally make them look as if they had walked out of a fashion magazine. And of course, every one of them had feisty, layered, stylin' hair. The girl cutting my hair was a petite, dark-haired beauty sporting incredibly shiny lip gloss and slightly preoccupied by her upcoming move to Lincoln Park - she's moving in with a friend she grew up with in the suburbs.

I grant you, having your hair wet down and plastered to your head while someone cuts it is rarely a good look for anyone, but I started to feel a little insecure, surrounded by these uber fashionable girls wearing the latest tube tops and gossiping about movie stars and Eva Longoria. I hate wearing flip flops. I've got too much chest to keep a tube top in place. Lip gloss is wasted on me as it inevitably ends up all over everything but my lips (my hair, my fingernails, papers I handle...). I have, in barber's chairs, a large neck. It distracts me. Also, a wide face. Somehow, outside of the salon, things blend and never bother me, but when I'm having my hair cut I worry about my tremendously wide neck and face. Bye, bye, Hollywood, you wouldn't be able to use this sagging flesh. I have lines on my forehead nowadays, too, which I suppose is normal for someone who is 31, but those lines are still a shock, every time I see them.

The two stylists I can see very clearly in the mirror behind me (who have been gossiping about their drunken night on the town) have clearly come in early so that one can dye the other's hair. The application of the dye looks truly complicated, all these small sections wrapped intricately in tin foil, and then more dye applied to the straggling hair that escaped the sectioning. And wait - I suddenly notice that the woman whose hair is plastered against her head with dye looks dreadful - that indeed, she appears to have a very large neck.

It occurs to me that I am in Chicago. Probably most of these women are from the suburbs, and have moved into the city in a desperate attempt to wash that Middle America right out of their hair. I'm making a big generalization, but I'm guessing not all of them went to college, that they've never lived anywhere except Aurora before moving to Wrigleyville. They HAVE to dress like this, and have their hair cut wildly and use lots of styling products, they have to use glamour to remove themselves from the average, colourless existence they left behind.

I'm originally a small town girl myself, I admit it, but I've lived in a series of difference places of varying size, and Chicago isn't the largest. I am, at this point, a City Girl. No matter what I wear. Or how my hair is styled. I don't have to work at it.

Although, with a little product and a blow dryer, I have to tell you, it looks FABULOUS. I might start wearing eyeshadow. If the next issue of Cosmopolitan tells me it's still cool.