Flying

I fly a lot in my dreams. When I was younger, I'd fly really high--too high--and get scared that I couldn't get back to earth. It's ironic for a person with a mild fear of heights (me) to fly so much. Lately, the flying has been especially delicious, more like swimming through air. I push off with my foot, going down a huge flight of stairs for example. I find it easy to float and move my body along on the air currents. I glide all the way to the bottom without touching the ground. It's a moment-by-moment sensation, of feeling the air currents beneath my feet, feeling that I can "swim" my way farther, no strain, no fear, no struggle for control.

I dreamed like that the other night, Friday night, or more accurately Saturday morning, then went to synagogue for my friend Amy Bat-Zipporah's adult Bat Mitzvah. She was brilliant and beautiful and eloquent, and afterwards there was a huge spread of food, and a little mid-Eastern combo. We danced and danced and danced and DANCED, whirling, spinning, holding onto each other, letting go. I dance a lot normally, with Wing It!, but this was even more intense, perhaps because of the three hours of chanting and praying which had preceeded it.

At one point I locked onto a rhythm with my partner in spinning--I think it was my friend Beth, it might have been Chinabear--and all of a sudden I was flying again, just like in the dream! My feet were on earth, spinning me around, but I wasn't worrying about them--I was being spun, being lifted out of myself. Exquisite ecstasy I have only felt a few times, during sex, when the enrgy was extraordinary.

I danced until I was covered with sweat, heaving and panting. I danced with Susan Felix, who is the arts ambassador of Berkeley, and who used to dance with Anna Halpern. She must be around sixty and she outlasted everyone else on the floor.

Two days later, my calves are still sore. I have to go to Interplayce to lead the women's group before Wing It! rehearsal.

Elizabeth came to synagogue with me Saturday, which felt so precious and important to me. She had to leave the party before the dancing got really wild, in order to edit three minutes of videotaped exploration of my poem Mediating a Discussion of the Words Gay and Retarded in the Fourth Grade, as part of a grant application to the Zellerbach Foundation for our show.

I tried to get some writing done this weekend, but couldn't do much. A theatre director friend in Seattle responded to the first draft of the new play ("Garlic: A Metaphor" but she says she likes the original title "That Greeny Flower" better. What do you think?)

She likes the second act, but thought I should cut the first. It's good to get a response, even if I think some of the material in the first act might be necessary. Now I have to print the play out in its entirety and figure out how to do that, and if and how the story should go on...

It was my father's birthday yesterday. At 72, he is having the time of his life, kids, grandchildren, still writing, still giving workshops all over the world, going to bridge tournaments, traveling with my stepmother to Europe...I know very few people who have managed to get through ife mostly loving their work and being happier at 70 than they were at 35. He's one of them.