Ouf! I just got back from taking my Little Sister to see Disturbia, which is a surprisingly well-written, well-acted horror film that scared the living pants off of me. I NEVER go see these kinds of scary movies, but she really wanted to and it had been weeks since we had a date, so I acquiesced. (The really scary part: $19.00 for a movie, $8.00 for a nitrate-laden hot dog and medum Sprite that was mostly ice, $2.00 for some lame candy called Sour Babies.) But she loved it and that's all that counts. It was a great time.

Last Wednesday I sat in on a rehearsal of Oasis, a short play I wrote back in November at the playwriting boot camp that I took through Playwright's Horizons. Oasis is a strange psycho-mytho-poetic-political one-act thing that I basically wrote in four days under intense pressure. Therefore it squeezed up a lot of my more troubling psychic material from the bottom of the the toothpaste tube. The director--Stuart Bousel, the founder of No Nude Men Theatre Company--is brilliant, the cast is great, rehearsal was rich, stimulating, deep.

I just googled Stuart and pulled up his resume and despite being 20 years younger than me, he's directed, acted in and written dozens and dozens of plays. So I'm in the weird/wonderful position of learning from my youngers, which is a good thing. He loaned me a play by John Guare called Four Baboons Adoring the Sun, which employs some of the same allegorical structures I do (although much more skillfully, and over a longer stretch of material.)

It feeds me intellectually and spiritually to sit in circles where people feel the same urgency about myth and character and depth psychology and metaphor as I do. Plus, it's just fun. One of the actors looks like a young Meg Ryan. The young man who plays Harold was great--soft and then fierce, sarcastic and reckless and heartbroken. I feel good about the production but uncomfortable at the thought of taking my dad and sister--and possibly step-sister--to see it. It's dispatches from the underbelly, unmediated by my usual defenses.

This is a good time for me, this season, but a stressful one. Saying Kaddish With My Sister gets a workshop production by Jewish Ensemble Theatre on April 30 and May 1--I fly into Detroit April 29 and the head of JET "thinks" someone can "probaqbly" meet my plane. I'd prefer a confident, "Yes, so and so will be there, meet her by the baggage claim," but I haven't got that yet--consequently last night I had a nightmare about being stranded in Copenhagen without luggage or a passport or even a credit card.

Then May 4, 5, and May 11, and 12 both Oasis and See How We Almost Fly go up. Oasis is at the Exit Theatre on Ellis St. in San Franscisco, and See How We Almost Fly will be at St. Gregory of Nyssa's Church on Deharo St. in San Francisco (www.mendana.org) Both shows start at 8:00.

The relationship with C, who is amazingly patient and supportive in the midst of the madness is good, G is still my dear friend and all I have to do really is make the crucial phone calls, write comments on 120 student poems a week, critique fifty pages of my advisees MFA thesis, drink a lot of water and try to maintain health and sanity through all of it.

I just keep feeling like I'm falling down and disorganized in key areas of my life--like I never get birthday presents to my family sent out on time, and I missed a rehearsal of See How We Almost Fly today because I was taking a nap, and my room is still littered with unpaid bills and miscellaneous mysterious paperwork. But last night I went out to a faux lesbian bar with one of my housemates (a real lesbian,) and drank wine and talked about poetry, and now C is coming over, so I better try and straighten the room into something approximating the cave of a normal person.