Mercury is retrograde and that means reminders of the past crop up everywhere. I went out with C Saturday night to hear Paul Drescher's new opera The Tyrant, (interesting, but static--just one man singing the whole time. I thought it would be better to bring in other voices.) At the theatre we bumped into one of his old girlfriends, and then afterward, when we stopped at Le Bateau Ivre for a glass of wine, another of his old lovers.

I teased him about it, but it doesn't feel bad, it feels right and rich and strange--we are both entering something so familiar and still new, that state of in-loveness when you tell your story to the other person, the layers and layers of story, the old lovers who hurt you, the ones whom you hurt, the mistakes you made, the things forgiven and not forgiven.

Afterwards we went to the Rose Garden, climbing down in the dark past frangrant rustlings, to the center of it, and tilted our heads back and looked at the stars. The Big Dipper is still the Big Dipper, and will be after both of us are gone, which is a great comfort.

Love in mid-life is more passionate than I ever would have guessed, but also tinged with melancholy. Just now, after a date with my little sister, stringing word-beads on a necklace and then seeing Spiderman 3--a terrible movie, but James Franco was great, and the allegory of the Sandman was kind of cool if overwrought--I took a wrong turn off the freeway bringing her home. I ended up getting off at the same exit--16th Ave.--where I used to get off to go home to Alan in our first apartment in Oakland, the first year we lived here when I was so lost and he was so sick.

Just that old obscure dark exit brought back so many feelings to me, like a physical rush of melancholy, and I remembered with painful clarity just how desperate I was, how grinding reality was, how hopeless, how it seemed I would never be happy, had never been happy, could never be happy.

This after a lesbian Jewish-Native American wedding today where everyone told me how well I look, and it's because I'm happy, happy, happy, and I'm reminded what a miracle that is when I get off the freeway at 16th Ave and am immediately transported back in time to 1990. Alan and I lived in a cold blue apartment in a Victorian, above a photography shop and across the street from some other industrial building that wafted dangerous chemicals. He was sick a great deal of the time, and when he was awake he was working. I was so unhappy I could barely breathe and our aprtment was cold and bare, all gleaming wood, no rugs, no carpets or natural warmth, no plants.

I didn't know how to make the place pretty, and I didn't know how to heal myself or Alan and I didn't know anyone except co-counselors whom I couldn't socialize with, and Alan's family. I was desperately unhappy and ashamed of myself for not being able to make a better adjustment. Every time I got in the car I got lost, and the neighborhood was grim--prostitutes worked the strip on International Blvd, around the corner from our apartment, and I'd find syringes and condoms in our parking lot.

There was no green around us and I didn't know how to get to the green places. I didn't know how to get to anything. Every time I got behond the wheel I got lost and kept ending up at the Coast Guard Station in Alameda. That winter of '90-'91 was so cold and we had no heat; we closed off the kitchen and sat in front of the open oven door like Russian peasants.

There was a claw-footed tub but no shower so I took baths. One of my few pleasures was going to the Farmer's Market--I went religiously, every Tuesday afternoon and Friday morning--and I got to know some of the farmers. One of them told me how to make zucchini--saute a garlic clove in olive oil, add the zucchini, add some red wine and cover. It turned out so well, and I liked the garlic so much that I sauteed cloves and cloves of it. I ate sauteed garlic until I threw up; the whole bathroom stank of it, and Alan could barely get near me, I was excreting garlic through my pores.

Persimmons were a revelation to me--I had never tasted them before. Jicama was new. Poemgranates I had seen and tasted before, but never in such abundance. Our relationship to food was fierce and unbounded; our relationship to each other full of silences, secrets, things we couldn't say.

C and I have been saying even the things we are afraid might freak the other person out; so far nothing has. Intimacy. I felt so far away from even the possibility of having this a few months ago and I am so in the soup now. Everything changed so quickly. Is changing, and ever-changing, and I am just open-mouthed in gratitude. And all the while the awareness of death dogs our footsteps--C is much more firm and persistent about facing it than I am; he is getting his affairs in order--I am sill in some kind of adolescent denial, acting as if I will live forever.

I want to live out this love. I pray for time in which to really know what it feels like to circle the seasons in love, to keep growing this intimacy, to watch his dreams evolve and fruit, to watch my own dreams flower and change. There was so much I didn't know the first time around--I had no clue, really. And the membrane is that thin between knowing and not knowing, between darkness and light, between joy and despair. I am on this side of that thin line now; I was on the other side of it before. I was on the other side of it for many years, God help me, and I see other people on the other side of it and I want to reach across and pull them over but I can't.

As I drove past the dark and gritty exit where I used to live I felt so sorry for that young woman, 31 years old, completely isolated, thousands of miles away from friends or family, with no clue how to be intimate with her husband, and no life of her own established. It has taken seventeen years to grow from there to here.

I finished, I finished, I finished! Sweet God in Heaven, I finished.

And it's good--I have the sense that this is a good play. It's lively--it moves. The dialogue is natural. The plot has forward drive. There's even suspense.

For the last eight days my butt has been glued to the seat of my chair. I don't know what kept me here. Stubbornness? Compulsion? These voices coming through.

I finished at 7:45 p.m. Flew out the door and was in Redwood Park by 8, hiking. I felt feral, like I could eat the bark off the trees. Finished my hike in near darkness at nine, the whole city glimmering below me.

I feel wild. Feel like I could live in the woods, feel fierce and shaggy and unwashed and untamed.

Tomorrow I'll do a load of laundry and get my hair trimmed and make an appointment to do my taxes and rejoin the human race. But right now I haven't really landed yet, I'm suspended somewhere between imagination and reality, still talking to myself, still hearing these characters in that ghostly hot tub.

I wrote myself into a raw, vulnerable, chaotic, dark and jumbled state yesterday. Bottom-feeding in the soup of the psyche. Bumped into Masankho on my hurried way out the door, hair sticking out (mine, not his,) keys in hand, all askew. He was beaming beatifically, with a little paper lunch bag in his hand.

"Working?" he asked genially.

"I'm swimming in the cesspool of my consciousness," I blurted out.

He laughed. "Surely, it's not just a cesspool."

No. But there's plenty of cess in there--not just mine, either. Cultural cess, which is the whole point of taking the dip.

C confessed that he also disliked my character Jack--wanted to kill him in fact--and I myself had been contemplating various ways of doing him in. Except that I don't want this play to be like The Beauty Queen of Lenane which played at the Rep a few years ago and was an international sensation and was/is a well-constructed, but so goddamn depressing that at the end of it I felt the need to go jump off the Golden Gate Bridge--or take some Prozac. It was just so godawful grim. And violent. The only solution to the characters' dilemma was violence.

There's enough grim violent unrelievedly bleak theatre out there, I don't need to add to it. I have a redemptive image for this play--I know what it has to be--I just have to write my way towards it. And it feels like crawling through the jungle with a 350 pound man on my back.

I figured out a fix to the problem of Jack's unlikeableness--not a fix, but a complication, a needed and necessary correlative to all his bullshit. Put it in this morning. I now have 34 pages--nowhere near a finished full-length play. But this, here, is good, I think. Feels good, feels right, feels like I'm finally getting to the pay dirt.

And there's a matinee of Death of a Salesman this afternoon by A Traveling Jewish Theatre at Julia Morgan on College Ave. Only 15 dollars for Kehillah members, of which I am one. I want to go. but I haven't finished Eli The Super-Hero yet, my nephew's seventh birthday present. Or made the doctor's appointments I promised C I would make. Or cleaned up the mess in the back yard which is a fire hazard. Or figured out my return flight from Malawi and booked it, or gotten my shots. And I haven't worked out yet and I'm fat, fat, fat. Up fifteen pounds from my slender and buff era, only a year ago. I miss that feeling. Somehow, although I'm swimming and walking and everything else, the pounds won't come off.

God, I'm in the thick of it. I'm in the soup. Twenty-five pages into a new/old play that I'm trying to bang out quickly (ha!) and my characters are really getting to me. Especially the guy. He's me, under the skin, his terrible fear that he can't love, his narcissism just covering up all this crap. And deep down the seed the spark of life.

Not having to deserve love. That's what I think I'm writing about. i didn't know that when I started. I emailed the first 10 pages to my friend Ruth and she wrote back that she liked them--they were funny--but she didn't like either character very much, as a person.

But that's just it. Not having to be "good" to be loved. The nut of it.

Meanwhile, C and I had a beautiful weekend. Saw the new comedy Knocked Up (okay, but not as good as the 40 year-old Virgin.) Went out to brunch with friends of his and then to my friend Lauren Ari's Open Studio and saw all her amazing artwork. (Check her out at www.laurenari.com). I told her about Saying Kaddish getting produced in Detroit and her face transformed--there is no other way to say it--just glowed with pride and joy and kvelling, then broke open and burst into tears.

"I'm so happy for you!" she kept crying. "Oh my God, you've been at it so long, I'm so happy for you."

I was awed, stunned, humbled by her tears. This capacity to feel so much, for another person's good fortune. Her open-heartedness.

Evelyn Orbach, of the Jewish Ensemble Theatre in Bloomfield, Michigan, just called, and said they want to do Saying Kaddish--a real production!!! Costumes, sets, a real theatre and most importantly Equity actors!!! Seven years, innumerable revisions (and more to come, I'm sure,) several staged readings, it is finally happening!! Seven years!!!

It will be in Michigan on January 26, 2008. I will pack up my long underwear, unearth the eighteen year old snow boots I brought from Massachusetts and go. A real production. Just like that.

Baby steps into more committment with C...first plane ride together, back East, in July, for my stepmother's ordination as a Buddhist...whatever-she's-going-to-be (priestess? rabbi?) I reserved the tickets on-line. And the rental car. Observed my heart pounding a little. It's not like I haven't done it a hundred times before. Typed in my credit card to Jetblue.com or Orbitz, chosen a flight, booked it, hit Purchase. But this was the first time doing it with someone, with a partner, in...years. A dozen years. Gulp.

From Massachusetts, we'll go to New York, and then I'll join other Interplayers on a plane for Malawi (double gulp!) and C will fly home to California.

Meanwhile, Berda Lee sent me the link for the MP3 file of our interview..which I cannot open. But perhaps someone out there in cyberland can. It is http://www.sendspace.com/file/7cxuw1

Work on the musical continues. And another essay, which I submitted to More Magazine in an attempt to earn More Money.

And then, spur of the moment, ten pages of the hot tub play in a mad attempt to beat a June 8 deadline for a plays-in-progress contest.

I sat in Borders today and read Julia Cameron's latest book, Finding Water. It's basically a rehash of The Artist's Way, with the message that it takes persistance to stay the course. I already knew that! The one new factoid I brought away from the book is that it takes an average of seven years to get a musical produced. (Cameron has written several musicals, a movie, a couple of plays, and was once married to Martin Scorcese.)

Seven years! At that rate, C and I will see our as-yet-unnamed musical go up in...2014???

But I know there's truth to what she writes because I started work on Saying Kaddish in Fall 2001 and if Jewish Ensemble Theatre takes it--big if--it will see the light of day in a full production (and I may finally see some money for it) in 2009 or so.

Hence the mad scramble to get the hot tub play out by next week--(Just do it! Don't be too precious about it, don't overthink all the little twists and turns, just spill. Suzan-Lori Parks wrote Topdog/Underdog in three days. And I read somewhere that Tony Kushner wrote Hydrotaphia on an airplane trip (but then, he's Tony Kushner. There's a reason they call those MacArthur things Genius awards.)

It--the hot tub play--is turning out kind of nasty, sexual and angry and even gross--but that could be good. I honestly don't know. I'm writing fast, under pressure, (albeit self-imposed,) so the censorship switch is off. Gnarly stuff about male-female relationships, marriage, betrayal, anger, power, and sex is coming out, and I'm letting it.

Right now, I feel like the six-burner stove that C covets, with all my gas jets blazing, and full, almost-boiling-over pots on each one. Had to take myself for a long hard walk in the woods this evening and breathe--breathe!--and pray.

Dear sweet God, God of the cool evening fog and the twig-strewn woods, and the little orange wildflowers whose names I don't know, and happy dogs, and chewed pinecones, and green piles of horseshit, help me do a good job with all of this. Help me be a better Big Sister. Remind me that the source of my good is not any individual man or woman, but this spirit of life and truth and divine intelligence that is flowing through me and through all living things. Amen.

It's almost scary how well things are going. Did I say baby steps soward committment with C? Actually, it's more ike giant strides. Like my life is changing--has changed--overnight, the way it does, the way it did when Alan and I got together. Only this time around everything else is fuller too, work, friends, the house. This time around I am a grown-up in the world.

(After I get this hot tub play out, I'll turn my attention to writing another essay--this one about improvisation. I'm hoping to get regular work as a personal essayist for these high-paying glossy mags.)

And also incubating ideas for the third book of poems.

One would expect--one would hope--that with the accumulation of a track record, it would get easier to get books published and plays produced. That somewhere, over the rainbow, there's a promised land where one just has to do the writing and the rest of it--audience, production opportunities, and money--follow smoothly.

I'm beginning to suspect there is no over the rainbow, there is just the next project, and then the one after that. The reward for the work is just to keep doing the work. That and love, and serious play and connection with other beings, the freshness of the Redwood trees, and this incredible aliveness I feel as the moon rises and pink lights of the city turn on below the ridge. And that is more than enough.

On the pretext of helping both G and C with their seasonal allergies, I bought a big jar of "Hood Honey" at the Farmer's Market last Saturday. Honey harvested from urban bees, tough survivor bees who have been cruising the streets on their motorcycles looking for action. It might be working, C had a bit and didn't have any trouble with allergies when we were in Guerneville. Of course I am eating it myself; smeared on bread, dipped into tea.

I didn't note in my blog last night that the only word I definitively picked up from the street fight below my window last night was "nigger," possibly my least favorite word in the English language. Or, that the people shouting this word at each other were African American.

Or, that in the grocery store, sweaty and frizzy and done in after my ball game with G I was approached by a very drunk black man, slurring his words and staring at my bird's nest of hair.

"'Zat natural?" he asked me. "Why don't you put some straightener on that? You got a black daddy? Black mama? You a little bit Black?" He checked out my butt. "You got a little African womanhood going on back there. Most white womens be flat as pancakes. You got a little black booty. Don't you lose that now. You do your lunges, you do your squats. You don't want to lose your booty, cause that's all you got."

"Leave me alone," I said.

"See, that's how black women talk. You got two dollars?"

I told G about it afterwards. He laughed.

Masankho's aunt Emily is visiting the States from Malawi. She will be our host when we go there in August. She runs several children's services, and will help me find placement in an orphanage. When I met her, I said, "My sister's name is Emily."

With quintessential African warmth and hospitality she said, "Then I will be your sister too."

I feel like I live surrounded by Africa, that Africa is part of the air and language and culture here in Oakland. Drumbeats from open windows and car stereos. The flea market at Ashby BART--pure Africa. Yet how strange that C and I drove a few hours out of the Bay Area and hardly saw any black people.

My best friend is a black man who shoots baskets and plays tennis with me, teaches me about jazz, debates politics and popular culture with me and knows my family. We watch movies and eat popcorn and drink wine together. Yet when we walk down the street sometimes he has encounters with other black men where a subtle code is exchanged, a word, a look, occasionally a handshake, that doesn't exactly exclude me, but comes from a place that I don't know.

I measure how it feels different to walk into a restaurant with C, who is white, than it does with G. I have never noticed any racist attitudes on the part of servers or cops or passers by when G and I are out together. The Bay Area is a pretty mellow place and I see tons of interracial couples of every description when I am just walking around here; gay couples, Latino and Asian mixed couples, black and Asian, and every possible combination under the sun.

The difference is that when I am with C. I am not at all on my guard waiting or watching for any possibly racist behavior. That little defensive filter just disappears from my mind when I am out with a white man. We become anonymous, "normal." We blend in. We could be anywhere.

Beautiful Memorial Day weekend--C and I went up to Guerneville, a pretty tourist town about two and a half hours North of the Bay Area. There's a community radio station up there, "low power and high spirits." I swear every man, woman and child in Guerneville has their own hour when they can play music, read stories or do whatever they want. Hooray for community radio!

An elf named Berda Lee has a program called "She Said" featuring women writers, and she invited me to be on it. I read some poems old and new and my essay Purple Nails and we chatted. I think it's all listenable at www.kggvfm.org --it was the May 27 nightcast of She Said--I hope it can be gotten via mp3, but Berda was a little vague on the technical details, so I'm not sure. I hope the techno-savants who read this blog will try it and report back.

Anyway, C and I enjoyed our mini-vacation. Berda has a sweet house full of magical tchotchkes and paintings, goddess flags and crystals. It overlooks the glorious basin of the Russian River. We slept amazingly well on a tiny bed under a hand-sewn quilt. The absence of gunshots, sirens, cars with jacked-up stereos broadcasting street-shaking bass lines and other normal ambient sounds of the Oakland hood was refreshing. (As I type this, there's a big, noisy altercation going on outside my window in the street below; some men and women screaming at each other. I wonder if I should call the cops but I don't hear the sound of anyone getting hit, and then it falls suddenly quiet.)

The car ride back was an opportunity to talk deeply. It's all still so new. Without either of us pushing or pulling, this little canoe of our relationship seems to be moving very fast--gliding--down a swiftly flowing river. It feels good. Thrilling, actually; forward mementum, change, after years of poking around in the shallows.

Twenty-two years ago, on Memorial Day 1985, I called Alan's mother in Berkeley (I was living in Cambridge,)and he was there--I wasn't prepared for that--and she handed him the phone. As soon as I heard his voice, I knew, we both knew. I didn't think I would ever know that again. I feel full and young and hopeful and serious and happy.

Played basketball this afternoon with G and did okay--actually scored some good baskets. We played for an hour or so until he twisted his ankle and we had to stop. Then we watched two episodes of The Sopranos; in one of them a major character got whacked and then dismembered in a bathtub. I'm not sure why I like this show so much--oh yeah, the dialogue. The acting. The dialogue and the acting were great. The bathtub dismemberment scene not so much.

I've just printed out everying my advisee emailed me and it comes to about sixty pages. Oy. I have to read and comment on all this for our meeting tomorrow and prepare and teach a class for Writing Salon tomorrow night. All my brain wants to do is be on vacation and digest the huge new turns my life is taking...but it's probably good to have to focus on work.

Free at last, free at last...no disrespect to the late, great Dr. Martin Luther King, but thank GOD almighty, I'm free at last!!!

Last day at the high school today--filled out my time sheets, dropped off seven classes worth of student poems with comments like "Nice work!" and "Maybe you could find a simile here?" in the appropriate teacher's boxes. A feeling of shame for being so burned out, but then again, it's been a very full year and we're barely five months in.

The air is almost unbearably sweet tonight, the heavy bunches of jasmine hang over my fence and release their perfume. It's cool and fragrant, so lovely it makes me shiver. I carried a mountain of paperwork up to my bed, got a couple of trash bags and began methodically going through it--oh, look, my car registration, oh look, the gas bill, oh look...all the stuff I just couldn't deal with for the past few months. It's not so bad. I need to go through my old lesson plans as well, edit, throw out the old, in with the new, reorganize, reshuffle...hey, doesn't Mercury go retrograde in a few days?

I'm getting a head start on the trend.

the feeling of lightness and freedom is exquisite. I sent SHWAF to one more poetry book contest--that makes six, that makes $150.00 in entry fees for that little exercise alone, enough already, who do I have to fuck to get a second book published, but I've done all I can, now give it a rest, turn my attention to the other five projects bubbling away...

The Sun came with my poem Liar in it, which I wrote three years ago. I am so far away from the feelings in it now, it's strange to see it, like an old photograph of myself in a really bad haircut. Thank God I'm not in that emotional place anymore.

Tuesday I took myself to see a matinee of After the Wedding and cried a river over the father-daughter, husband-wife, old-lovers scenes--they were so raw and well-done. Powerful acting, beautiful, intimate camera angles, slow-cooking family story, suffused with pain and love...

Yesterday the Internet went out again and I listened as Masankho patiently went through the whole rigamarole with tech support for the umpteenth time without any sign of impatience in his voice or manner towards the employee on the other end of the line. I was impressed. He gives trainings in non-violence--a sexy topic, when you're talking about international relations, Israelis and Palestinians et al.

But someone who can stay non-violent and gentle in bad traffic or when their Internet connection goes out for the sixteenth time in a week has my undying respect.

More and more scenes, songs, scraps of dialogue for the musical keep coming through me, at odd hours; I write them down and email C, Elizabeth, Theron, and my family. Over the weekend, C was asking questions about the ending of the play. I don't know because I haven't written my way there yet. Some balance has to be struck, some bargain made, some cosmic see-saw swung. That's all I know so far.

A few more specific details begin to emerge in the writing: one of the boys' mothers is a nurse and an activist. She also has a prior relationship with the Devil. The other boys' mother is a bit shadowy still. The young men themselves are only sketches as of yet. And the father was in the military himself, only during peacetime, like G...

While I work on these pieces, I try not to think too much about revising the play I wrote last year, or about the personal essays waiting their turn, or the next poetry manuscript to be compiled. Creativity is a fire. I keep shovelling on wood until it's time to stick my head under the shower, wet hair and glue down frizz with gel, throw on a bra and a short-sleeved shirt that will cover my armpits, and show up at school and teach. Only two more days of poetry at the high school! Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah! I can smell freedom. It smells like cinnamon.

Another golden morning. Hot coffee. The kitchen clean. I woke at 5 a.m., listened to birds, fell back to sleep. A long weekend, spent mostly with C, in his loft, a beautiful hike in Tilden, where we saw vultures, and a BART trip to SF to see a play. Deepening intimacy. The old stories of our lives, the gifts we've carried with us all this ime, longing to give them to someone, but transformed. Beginning to transform them. Hoping to.

His senile, demented cat, who yowls at night, whom I am going to make into a pair of fur earmuffs. My roommates, my family, my thousand projects, my messes and failures and triumphs. His dreams deferred and pursued, the boy he was, serious, artistic, sensitive, creative. His thousand projects, his power tools and musical instruments. Our middle-aged bodies, strong and crumbling. Piles of books next to the wide bed. A skylight.

A show at the ODC based on Henry V--an anti-war dance and text show that was moving and clear with minimal props and gorgeous dancers. Good chewy bread and butter, salad, rich Greek yogurt with green apples and salted nuts in it, dark chocolate truffles (alright, one), champagne (one glass), strong coffee, music, music, music.

Full.

And that meant I didn't go to synagogue to see Vicki and Jaynie and Beth and Dixie and Chaya and Shulamit and Debbie. I did hang out with G Sunday afternoon--we went to Ocean Beach where the freezing wind roared in our ears and he got some good photos of crazy windsurgers and para-sailors. The surf was so strong, the green glittering water so cold and rough I admire anyone with the guts or foolishness to even get near it, let alone in it. This one guy who was wind-surfing close to shore had a board that flipped around so he zigzagged at an incredible speed back and forth with the wind, looking like an insect clinging to his big plastic wing.

Wing: wind.

At the faculty meeting for New College Friday I read the student evaluations for my memoir class. Some of them loved me, loved the class. Others were critical; it wasn't well enough organized, the reader was a mess (true, I didn't know how to get it copied right, I'll do that differently next time.) I didn't talk enough about craft issues, the student presentations were like book reports. Ouch. There was truth in the critiques.

I am off-the-charts intuitive, and everything I know about writing I've learned through reading voraciously and absorbing other writers' styles through my pores. Some of what they do has stuck to me, mixed in with my own unique digestive juices, my sweat, my karma, and come out as my style, whatever that is. I don't think about style when I write. I aim for transparency, to be a clear window, through which the world can be seen. But of course, there is style, there is structure, and they can be taught. And people who are paying university tuition expect to be taught them, taught in a certain way.

Next semester, I think I really should sit in on some of my colleague's classes, in order to learn what they are doing and how they do it. I thought that this last semester, but I didn't have time. I probably won't feel I have any more time next semester, but it's a question of priorities--if I want to be a better teacher, if I want to stretch and enlarge the place of my tent as the Arabs say, I'll do it.

And synagogue, and lovemaking, and my little sister, and friendships, and my own creative work?

I'll have to find or make time for all of it. When I wrote The Largest Possible Life, I should have added a subtitle; "and the time-management skills for all of it."

New moon, time to plant seeds, intentions. See How We Almost Fly, the poetry manuscript is chugging out of my printer as I type this. I'm also copying over the song lyrics I scribbled in my notebook last night while I was teaching a Writing Salon Creative Writing class for the musical, to send to C.

Masankho's wireless internet service went out yesterday and the modem is in my room, so he came up here and tried to get it going again and in the process killed my internet service. We spend an hour and a half on the phone this morning with a very patient tech support woman named April who walked me and then him through a bewisldering and frustrating series of steps which culminated in me getting my email again.

But he came up to my room fifteen minutes later complaining his service was off again. Then he left for an interview. So I'm madly trying to type up and email the first scene of the musical (which I also wrote last night) to C before Masankho comes back and potentially disrupts my service again. I love him but I want to scream, This is my only day off! I need to get everything out now!! But of course that's not true. Next week I'll have Friday as well as Wednesday and the week after that the high school will be finished and I'll be an almost free woman.

Meanwhile, scenes for the musical are bubbling to the surface of my mind.

It helps that I had this idea before, did a little work on it and then put it away. In the time since, it's simmered away quietly in my subconscious.

Monday night I went to see The Lives of Others with G because Dad loved it so much he called and urged me to see it. It was powerful, especially the actor who played the Stasi agent, his big hungry eyes that seemed to swallow up his face. He looked almost like a bug--I don't mean that in a bad way (what other way is there in which to mean it?)--but like one of those cartoon bugs that are all expressive eyes and no body. The scene where he had sex with the fat middle-aged prostitute and begged her to stay for an extra minute of warmth was heartbreaking.

I love European films because the actors look like real people--the prostitute was dumpy and tired-looking with sagging breasts. If it were an American movie she'd be played by Julia Roberts and they would end up getting married or something.

Okay, I have to get back to planting seeds now.

Sunday morning we were awakened by my 8-year-old nephew chirping "Happy Mother's Day!" and trying out his new jokes for the talent show. Sample (he made this one up himself): "How did the gum cross the road?" "It was stuck to the chicken's foot."
What can I say, he's a genius.

It was 7:30 a.m.

"He is a genius, but maybe you could give him a tutorial about the time difference," C said with a pillow over his head.

This morning, the cat walked across my esophagus at 4:00 in the morning, which is cats' favorite times to do things like that. For punishment I banished him from the bedroom where he whined and cried outside my door.

I'm pretty much over the cat thing.

The show finished Saturday night to another very good house, although I was sad that a few of my good friends had health crises at the last moment which kept them away. Maybe we can resurrect it in some form or other at another venue. So much work went into the show, and it was so well-done, it seems a shame to retire it after only four performances.

We're looking into other spaces and if anyone reading this blog knows of a good venue with theatre in the round potential, please let me know.

Saturday night I also read a bit from my memoir piece Drama Queen at the New College faculty reading, right before See How We Almost Fly. It went well. My department chair loaned me his reading glasses and afterwards hugged me and whispered that a close relative of his had MS.

I am not technically the strongest writer on the block, but it seems as if I have some intuitive place that connects with other people's experiences.

C's response to See How We Almost Fly was "I want to collaborate with you." We started talking about writing a musical together--I'd do the book and lyrics and he'd write the music.

"What are your favorite musicals?" he asked.

"Caroline, or Change," by Tony Kushner (actually, more of an opera.)
"Hair"--I used to come home every day from seventh grade, where I was dying of depression and social awkwardness, and push aside the furniture in the living room and dance to the Hair record, flinging my head and neck around like a writhing serpent. I also loved "Jesus Christ, Superstar," and "Godspell," and "Tommy," (again, some of these quaify more as rock operas.) I love "Rent."

I asked C the same question and he mentioned "Cabaret," "West Side Story," and "Threepenny Opera."

Yesterday, C skipped his jazz piano class and I skipped a music-jam barbecue and we just lounged around. Went out for a 10,000 calorie brunch at Lois the Pie Queen, then to Amoeba Records where we bought soundtracks for Hair and Rent and Caroline, or Change, then back to his place for a listening orgy. He had set several poems to musical arrangements as an undergrad and we heard those compositions which had the flavor of art songs. I could see this working!

A couple of years ago I really wanted to write a musical and had borrowed a bunch of videos from my musical theatre loving friends. I watched Into the Woods by Sondheim and didn't like it too much. Of course a musical is even harder to get produced than a regular play. I got involved with other writing projects and put the idea on the back burner.

For the past two years I've been quietly incubating the desire to write a play about military recruitment. I suggested that as a topic to C for our musical. Of course this will bring a whole new level of challenge into the relationship: collaboration, compromise, negotiating differing ideas and aesthetic visions.

Meanwhile, to do:

Find keys (clean room)
comments on two more classes worth of student poems
another free-lance article for More (make money)
send out poetry manuscript for See How We Almost Fly to at least 10 contests, publishers, etc.
liposuction on the second act of Saying Kaddish asap before Jewish Ensemble Theatre submits it to the Ann Arbor play festival
revise the play I wrote last summer, That Greeny Flower
write and illustrate a little storybook for another nephews' seventh birthday
shots for Africa
taxes
mammogram
eye exam and new contact lenses
get back to my fighting weight and full strength, work up to swimming a mile at a time and quit sugar again

Went to See How We Almost Fly again last night and there were eighty people there! Eighty!! They had to bring in extra chairs! It was fantastic!! A little dance-poetry performance never gets that kind of turn-out--often a small, start-up dance company is lucky if the audience outnumbers the performers! A lot of old friends came, and even my aunt Varya, who lives in Berkeley, and they all loved it. I got to chat with Elizabeth's mom afterwards and kvell with her about how talented and brilliant her daughter is. It must be an amazing feeling to see your child create such beauty in the world.

I spent last Wednesday reconfiguring the poetry manuscript for See How We Almost Fly for the fifty bazillionth time, pulling out older, weaker (I think) poems and replacing them with newer, stronger (hopefully) poems, re-ordering the work, and just generally trying to get it right.

I'll send it out next week to all the contests with deadlines in May, cross my fingers, hope for the best. I am definitely ready to have a second book out by now--have been ready for five years, not that I'm counting, but these things have their own timelines. It's looking like Saying Kaddish With My Sister may finally see a full producion in '09 or '10--only eight years after I wrote it. Overnight success!

I'm not so angsted out by the whole process as I used to be though, because I have figured out the solution, which is to have a lot of projects going at once, large and small, independent and mainstream. That way, something is always coming to fruition, even while other things are taking years to manifest.

That and finally having a fulfilling personal life, which was long-overdue and definitely takes the edge off my driven desperation to achieve. I'm a late bloomer, that's for sure. First book in my early forties, true love in my late forties, first full-length play production at 50, if I'm lucky. I guess all this means I need to take my vitamins and drive carefully, since I'll be wanting a few decades in which to enjoy and savor the fruits of the harvest.

My dad called this morning and we talked what a great visit he and my sister had here. It really was perfect--and packed. Can't believe it was only a week ago. The weeks are so full, and I feel like I'm barely keeping up, juggling full plates and dropping half the food on the floor.

Dad had the opportunity to have dinner with my two brothers the other night, just the men--and says what a lucky man he is, to have had me and Emily last week and the boys this week. He talked about how hard my brothers both work--corporate jobs, both of them, good money but no time for themselves or any hobbies or creative pursuits. It's all work and family, work and family. I know this is the "normal" American lifestyle and both my bros are good fathers, good workers, good men. I just wish we lived in a culture that valued community and participation in the arts as much as it does quarterly reports and stock options.

The cool dim early mornings are so delicious now I find myself getting up at 6:30 a.m. to have some time before the heat and glare of the day. It's been so hot I sleep with just a sheet, and the windows open. Sometime around four a.m. a cool thick breeze rolls in, letting me snuggle under blankets for an hour. By eight in the morning the sun is blazing and the butter is melting in its dish. The cat goes looking for someplace shadowy to hide. I pour my second cup of coffee.

For the past two days, every moment that I'm not swimming or meeting with students or writing comments on student work I've spent promoting See How We Almost Fly and Oasis. I made at least 20 or 30 individual phone calls to friends and theatre colleagues (which entailed having some great conversations.) Wrote a bunch of emails, some individual, many mass ones, to all the people and groups I know.

I'm not usually such a good PR person for my own work, but this feels bigger than me. The two young directors, Stuart Bousel and Elizabeth Mendena are so talented, and have done such an amazing job putting these shows together. The actors and dancers are beautiful and fearless and completely committed. Not one weak link. It feels like a group act of love. I would be calling my friends and urging them to see the shows even if I hadn't written them. They are worthy of being seen.

Today: three poetry classes at the high school, then a two and a half hour poetry intro class at Writing Salon in SF. The only thing that will save my bacon is if I get in a good swim. Even though I'm swimming more, my weight won't budge--ten ounds up from last year when I was so buff. C doesn't mind, and no one else seems to notice, but I like the skinny feeling when my clothes are loose around my waist. Also, the coffee seems to be making me more tired rather than giving me energy. Hmmm...

My God, my God. I need to fall on my knees in gratitude. I need to pray. I need to be grateful for the rest of my life for this past week, and the love and beauty that accompanied me on every step of it, from last Sunday when C drove me to the airport and I met Evelyn and Masankho came to see Saying Kaddish, to this morning, when I drove my sister Emily and my father to the airport after an incredible evening last night at See How We Almost Fly.

I don't know how to even begin to say it. I don't know how I am even walking around upright--(although I barely am--I spent most of today in bed.) I got back from Detroit Wednesday night. Rolled out of bed Thursday a.m. and taught four classes at the high school. Made an ineffectual stab at cleaning the house on Thursday night because my family was coming but I was just too tired and jet-lagged to do it.

Taught again Friday morning--four classes of first graders, then drove directly to the Marriott and picked up Dad and Em and brought them back to my house. Which was dazzlingly clean and beautiful. My roommate Julie, to whom I had spoken three sentences at 7:30 in the morning to the effect of "Oh well, I wanted to clean for them but I just didn't have the energy, guess we'll all have to grin and bear it," had whipped through the house like a tornado. The bathroom sparkled. The kitchen gleamed. There were cut roses from the garden in glass water jars on every surface. She had even gone into my room and remade the bed and turned over the sheets and arranged the pillows so that it looked like a bed in a hotel. All that was missing was the mint on the pillow.

That evening C came over with gifts of books for Em and Dad (his idea.) We went out to the Tenderloin to see my one-act play Oasis at the Exit Theatre.

For years my sister lived in a village of 700 people. Last year she moved to a town of 2,000. We probably passed that many people on the way to the theatre, and half of them were homeless. Things are tough in the Tenderloin. It was kind of Night of the Living Dead, with claw-handed beggars and emaciated crack addicts and bundles of rags sleeping in doorways. We ate at Original Joe's an Italian place that my father found reassuring because he peeked in the window and saw a maitre d' in a tuxedo. Good solid food.

My Dad and Emily and C found their rhythm together. All three of them love books and music and have quiet, almost sly senses of humor. Dad reminisced about some of the more painful experiences he's had in forty years of attending my performances. In particular, he remembered an unfortunate woman who was perhaps off her meds who used to read her voluminous and incomprehensible poetry at a little hole-in-the-wall gallery called Stone Soup, where started my poetry-reading career at age eighteen. Here we were, thirty years later, stepping over bodies to get to the Exit Theatre on Taylor to see my weird little allegory Oasis performed.

I was amazed at what the director, Stuart Bousel, and the actors had done in only a few short weeks of rehearsal. It was fantastic! They were fantastic!! They brought out layers and nuances in the words that I hadn't even been conscious of. A few deft touches, a jar of olives, inspired costumes, sensitive interpretations and staging--I was impressed and grateful that my work had fallen into such capable hands.

My play was followed by a shorter one about Robin Hood and a mouse which gave my Dad fodder for teasing me for the next thirty years. Both he and Em were beyond exhausted, but they were troupers and held up well, yawning and blinking. I had been afraid that some of the content of Oasis would trigger them, but it didn't--either that, or they were too tired to notice.

Yesterday I took them to the Farmer's Market, where we ate Brazilian cheese bread made with yucca flour, which they loved, and then Emily and I went down to the Cinco de Mayo celebration at the foot of my street. Her eyes got huge when she saw
all the Mexican people thronging the streets, pushing strollers, enjoying barbecue and music and corn on a stick slathered with hot sauce and pina colada popsicles. She is good friends and a support to a Mexican family in her area, but she says they are isolated in a place where hardly anyone speaks their language. Here, Spanish was the lingua franca, and everywhere there were Mexican flags waving and arches made of red green and white balloons and red green and white ribbons in the little girls' hair, braided elaborately like Frida Kahlo, like little Aztec princesses.

We got back to the house hot and sweaty--I had just time for a shower before G picked us up and drove us into SF to St. Gregory's for See How We Almost Fly. Dinner with my stepmother's spiritual mentor and her husband and we met up with my stepsister and a friend. And then the show.

I almost lost it. In a church with a vaulted cathedral ceiling hung with strings of brightly colored peace cranes, with an eclectic pantheon of saints painted dancing in a circle all around the high walls--Malcolm X holding hands with Queen Elizabeth, Lady Godiva sashaying next to some gay Roman centurians, and on and on, in a divine cosmic conga line.

This is the part where words fail me. Because what Elizabeth and the other dancers have done with my words, my poems is so glorious, and moving, such a total sacrifice in the sense of the word "make sacred," such a gift, to me and to the world, that I can't think of anything worthy enough to say about it. Except that from the first note of music coming from Sekh Ma-at's throat I was blown away. Blown. Away. And it did not let up.

Power. Grace. Generosity. Passion. Love. The dancers kept giving and giving, everything they had, their bodies, their breath, their souls, and I saw my poems come alive in a series of scenes, songs, arias until I almost couldn't take it all in it was so rich.

I stole occasional glances at my Dad and Emily. No yawning, no blinking. They were rapt.

I thought my heart would burst. Elizabeth pulled me onstage for the final bow and I had to restrain myself from prostrating on the floor and kissing the dancers' feet--their precious, hardworking feet which they had selflessly worked to the muscle and tendon and bone in the service of beauty.

After that a blur of people hugging and talking and wanting to introduce everyone to my family and at the same time not wanting to overwhelm them because they were still jet-lagged. Thank God G was there to drive us all home afterwards because there is no way I could have managed it. I am still not sure how I managed to get my folks to the airport early this morning, and I got lost on the freeway coming back--a short two-exit sprint I have travelled dozens of times.

Home, Julie and I talked a kvelled a bit, then I tried to nap. It was hard to shift down, to let go, to realize that I could let go--and that I'd better if I wanted to have energy to teach again this next week. Finally I talked with C, and was able to catch up some with his life, which grounded me, and then I slid under the waters of sleep.

At the Chinese restaurant right before the show I had gotten a fortune cookie which read, "You will soon gain something you have always wanted," and I thought What? What have I wanted that I don't have now? I have my family's respect as well as their love--I always had their love, but I don't think I always had their respect. Now I do. Is that it?

I have a sweet lover in my life, a man who can cry and laugh and show emotion, a man who can feel and love and play and listen and talk. He shows up. After all the excitement and shlepping of the last week it was perfect to just make some dinner and eat on the porch with the slight breeze carressing our bare legs, the scent of jasmine and the fig tree bursting its bounds, and the noise of motorcycles and car stereos roaring up the street. The gorgeous silver earrings he gave me swing from my ears like precious talismans.

I got to put beauty out into the world, helped by people whose gifts and talents humble me.

And friends. And love. And music. And my Dad and my sister healthy and vital enough to come and share it with me.

Years ago, in Boston, in my early twenties, I saw a show that Elizabeth Swados had put together, of poems set as little theatre pieces. I still remember Sylvia Plath's The Applicant done as a waltz, and Delmore Schwartz' In Dreams Begin Responsibilities. So many years ago. In that moment, I yearned woith all my heart to do work like that, but I did not see how it could ever be possible. I didn't know how a life that included such work could be possible. And now it's here, and I am, and we are.

It stopped raining in time for the play reading, and we had about two dozen people there. Average age: seventy. That was okay, though; they were passionately engaged with the issues--a little too passionate about the issues, one man really didn't get that it was the character's viewpoint, and not my own thaqt I was expressing. Q & A afterwards with me.

I had started the day with another luxurious swim--had a lane all to myself for over half a mile--and ended it stretched out on Evelyn's sofa, drinking wine and eating very good chocolate (I know, I know,) and talking about Life until the wee hours of the morning. Bottom line: Evelyn Orbach really likes the play, and God willing and the creeks don't rise, I think that means JET will do it as a production either in 2009 or 2010. (Geez, do those dates even exist? They do, and they'll be here before we know it.)

Meanwhile, JET will send my play to an Ann Arbor festival of new plays in June--again, another reading--and I'd like to edit the fat off of it before then. Flesh out the father's character a bit, and trim down some of the more didactic parts of the Passover scene and the courtship scene and maybe the taxi scene.

I flew home, quiet and relaxed in the clouds above the country. Oakland! As soon as the plane got close to home I felt my heart leap up. Detroit was much more civilized than I thought it would be--before I left C and David and I were sitting around the kitchen table drinking coffee and joking about how people wash their laundry by beating it on the rocks in Michigan and how I'd probably be swept off my feet by a knuckle-dragging snowmobiling football-watching yahoo with a deer strapped across the hood of his jeep, but I met no such animal.

Instead, the actors were professional (much better than the ones who did my show in NY last year) the people responsive, cultured and intelligent (granted, I was meeting with mostly Jews and artists. But still. My East and West Coast snobbery stands abashed.) And yet there's no place like home.

C met me at the gate and we had a romantic reunion which included a nap and dinner at the little Vietnamese place right up the street from my house. And then work today, four classes at the high school, which went well despite my jet lag. Now I've got to clean my room and the car before Emily and Dad get here tomorrow. At least make a stab at appearing organized.

Shit! It's raining! Pouring, actually, a drenching, midwestern rain. I hope it won't keep people from the show tonight. I hope Michigan theatregoers are a hardy and dedicated lot, even for a staged reading. I hope it lets up before this evening...

Miraculously, we did find each other. She's tiny--about four feet ten--a strikingly beautiful seventy-year-old with enough energy and drive to launch an independent theatre company when everyone said she couldn't, raise four children, act, direct, produce, and keep going long past midnight. As my friend Bob used to say about this type of petite woman, "a pocket rocket."

So as of tonight I've been here 24 hours and I got to sleep in all morning, and then spent the day hanging out in the well-appointed gym of the Jewish Community Center where the Jewish Ensemble Theatre (JET) is housed. Evelyn Orbach wrangled an executive pass for me, in her pocket rocket way, which meant access to the posh dressing room, with the sauna, schvitz, and what the Russian attendant called the "veelple" (whirlpool).

"Vould you like to use de veelple?"

Yes, I would. I would like to do forty lazy lengths of the Olympic sized pool, which is heated to a perfect temperature, and where I have a lane all to myself, and then enjoy the veelple afterwards, and then slather my body with free moisturizing lotion and spend the rest of the afternoon drinking coffee and reading a year-old "O" Magazine about loving your body as is (where I learn that carrying a little excess weight might actually delay menopause, so maybe I shouldn't be in too big a rush to re-lose these extra ten pounds.)

I change into my good jeans, and the nice black shirt with the fancy embroidery I bought at the Community Thrift Store in San Francisco for nine dollars and low heels and even a little make-up. And then Masankho shows up, looking exhausted but smiling broadly, and we are in West Bloomfield, Michigan, where the economy is seriously depressed because of the death thrashings of the American auto industry, and Saying Kaddish has its first of two staged readings and it goes great! The audience laughs and sighs and makes all those satisfying audience noises in the right places. The cast is very good. The actress playing Oprah looks like a bigger Anna Deavere Smith--same heart-shaped face and intelligent radiant presence.

It's interesting to hear the dialogue spit out passionately with an overlay of mid-Western accent. Somehow, it works very well, grounds the family in the heartland. This Lydia is a red-haired spitfire, very funny, strong presence. I love her. Rahel has a soulful quality, especially in the scene where she fights with God, and pitch-perfect Hebrew.

The scene where the mother and father kiss for the first time as teenagers is especially tender. I don't remember that kiss being so powerful in any of the other readings. Later, the actor who plays the father, tells me he re-lived his first kiss in that scene, a kiss that happened more than fifty years ago when he was a teenage waitor summering in the Catskills.

The second act drags a bit. I can hear places that need editing, and some awkward transitions. The ending is poignant and brings tears to my eyes.

Afterwards, Masankho, Evelyn, and I sit around her kitchen table and drink tea and talk. There's footage on TV about the freeway collapse in Oakland. It looks bad--twisted smoking metal and construction worker guys with masks over their grim faces. I'm afraid of how this may mess up Bay Area commuting, which is already a major hassle, and even hurt the economy back home. It makes me aware of how fragile everything is, our circumstances, luck and smoke.

We sit around Evelyn's kitchen table, in the house with Chagall paintings on the walls, talking about theatre, about writing, diversity, drumming, improvisation, friendship, persistance, and plane schedules. Evelyn has told me about a Federation of Jewish theatres which I should join. I will. My play belongs in that world, with the other verbose, melancholy, questioning, arguing Jewish writers and actors and directors, the overly-intense, overly-sensitive, funny-sad theatre folk. I don't mind the prospect of more editing, another rewrite. I want this play to work as well as it can.

Oh my God, I am tired. Oh good Christ, I am tired.

I was so happy yesterday to be over being sick that I overdid it. Took my computer to the fix-it shop. Went shopping. Walked all around the lake with G. in the beautiful balmy late dusk talking about Condoleeza Rice being indicted and who the hell the Democrats are going to run in 08. Watched another episode of the Sopranos with him while eating popcorn.

Slept with C, blood-red towels on the bed, two bodies falling into each other more deeply. Deeply and softly, soft landings, sleep and dream.

Morning coffee and eggs and then BART into the city. The long necessary rigmarole of graduation, the students' tearful speeches and shining readings, the awkward standing around with paper plates of Brie and crackers afterwards.

It was hot.

I gave Storm the introduction he deserved,he's been a teacher to me as well as a student, my first advisee, it was from him that I learned how to be an advisor.

I shouldn't have had the champagne.

Now it's the night before Detroit and my nose is running again and I am so tired I want to cry. C is coming over for dinner and I have to let him see me like this. I have to let him see me when I'm feeling like I'm in seventh grade again, dorky and uncool, with all the wrong clothes and no one to sit with at lunch.

I want New College to hire me back again and again, and I know that they like me, and that some of the students really like me, but I also know that my syllabi are kind of informal and raggedy, and I only have one book and no Master's Degree. And I barely know what post-Modernism is, although I probably shouldn't admit that in a public blog like this, but I am too tired to care.

Tim said when I got the New College job I should just go around saying deconstructing hetero-normativity whenever I felt insecure about my lack of hip credentials. There is something about academia and how sincere and over-articulated and eager and hyper-sensitive it all is, and how sincere and insecure and eager and needy and bright and beautiful all the students and all the faculty and everyone is that can press all my seventh grade buttons.

I think that's it. I think that's why I feel like crying now.

No wonder I successfully resisted it for twenty years.

I treasure the electricity, and in truth I somewhat envy the students for getting to crawl back inside an intellectual uterus in which to grow new work. I know the courage and tenderness word-shaping requires--(and now I think perhaps I wasn't always the tenderest of critics with student work, expecially because abstraction frustrates me--)

One of my advisees from the first year was there, looking fabulous, and her book--which was her thesis--just got accepted at a small press! I was so happy and excited for her! (Her work was abstract, but I loved it--it was about the Jewish concept of God as an abstraction, the refusal of form--I understood that, and when she left the program last year she wrote a note thanking me.)

(And I remember when I first met her, how freaked she was and so was I, both finding our way around the program and we talked about swimming in our advising sessions, about how important it was to find a regular place to swim.)

This morning I showed C some of the photos from my life--Haiti, working with Haitians, and the time I hitchhiked across country with Maxim. He said I was brave, but I'm not, it's just that the wrong things have always scared me. Outhouses in third world countries and possibly contaminated drinking water and propeller jet prop planes and men carrying guns don't freak me out but school makes me feel like I'm twelve all over again, twelve and gangly and awkward and don't know how to dance and I look stupid holding a cigarette while everyone else smokes (while one of the other adjunct teachers lit up a cigarette and asked me my other paying gigs, and I see while she is way more hip than I am (and taller!) and has a class that is popular with the students with a truly impressive syllabus and has more books published, she is just as lost and terrified and insecure as me. Adjunct faculty do not get health insurance. Adjunct faculty live by their wits.)

Right this moment I am a very tired and emotional twelve year old who has had too much richness to process in this past week and who needs to cook and pack and eat and sleep and maybe weep a little before catching an airplane tomorrow to a strange city where I have never been before to meet a strange woman at the airport, Evelyn from Jewish Ensemble Theatre.

"What do you look like?" she asked.

"I'm tall and I have curly hair and I look like the poster child of an Ashkenazi Jewish woman. What do you look like?"

"I'm short and I look like the poster child for an Ashkenazi Jewish woman. I drive a dark green car but at 10:30 at night you won't be able to see the color. I'll pick you up outside of baggage claim. I'm sure we'll recognize each other."

I am learning a little bit about grace through this whole experience of having the flu and having a week packed with engagements. First, grace starts out in gracelessness and whining. On the phone to Marci: "I'm s-i-i-i-c-c-k-k-!" Hack, hack, cough, cough. To my Dad. To C. To my housemates. Pity me, pity me, I feel like crap. My head hurts, my body hurts, I'm burning up. Hack hack hack, spew spew, sweat, sweat. Sleep.

Then: get up. A half an hour before the assigned time. Wash up. Take some daytime formula Wal-Phed. C comes over, looking concerned. Put on a nice shirt. A little lip gloss. Go to his house, eat dinner, lie down until the last minute. Walk into Black Oak and see the people and the flu is gone. So happy to see everyone, when they ask "How are you?" I don't say "Sick," but answer truthfully, "Great!"

I don't even cough through the whole reading, which is delivered in a voice half an octave deeper than usual. I can feel myself sweating profusely up there--fever or hot flash--I don't know and it doesn't really matter. I just focus on the goodness of the people who showed up, this reading series that Joyce Jenkins and Richard Seilberg worked so valiantly to put together, my gratitude at being able to share the crop of new poems--and the poems themselves, that want to live in the world.

Later, lots of hugs. I don't hold back. I'm not coughing or sneezing, I don't feel contagious. My co-reader, Robin Becker, feels instantly familiar, like an old friend. Short, pugnacious, Jewish, butch: I recognize her. I like her poems.

C is there for me the whole time and drives me home afterwards: Driving Miss Ali, I joke, but I feel funny taking so much from him because he works full time at a demanding job and he gets tired himself. But it's so good to have his hand in mine throughout this week. "I feel fine," I say. "It might hit you later," he says. I lie down in bed and the hacking starts again. Get up, slug some Ny-Quil, pass out.

The next day I try to go to work. Four classes at the high school. Midway through the first one I realize I'm not going to make it. I have very little voice. I feel like I'm going to pass out. I tell the teacher and she begs me to stay through the second class--I'm supposed to be covering all four of her classes that day--so that she can figure out something to do for the last two. I barely make it through the second class--coughing, hacking and sitting down to keep from falling over. The car drives itself back to my house. I fall into a sweaty coma on the bed.

Wake up hours later. C had bought tickets to see Marion McPartland ages ago, had planned this special double date with two of his best friends. I get up, take a shower, put on a nice shirt and make-up. I loook good. Meet him and his friends in Jack London Square, go to dinner. His friends are great. We talk about food, houses, kids, education, music, and theatre. Not about being sick. I feel slightly outside of my own body, but I keep squeezing C's hand and he keeps me anchored.

Marion McP is a revelation. Eighty-nine years old, stooped and artritic in one leg, ("Don't look," she says,) her voice is ageless, dry, elegant, cool, just like on the radio. She has such an easy, laid-back personality, no fuss, just adjusts the mic a little on top of the piano and starts playing. Her music is young, fresh, unforced. Nothing about her is forced. That is the essence of grace. Not to force the work, just to do it. Not to "try" to do it, twisting and teeth-clenching, but just to do it.

I drove myself home and fell into bed. This morning I almost thought I could go to work and teach first graders. I wanted to. Calling in sick means I have to pay for it down the line. But I realize the only way I can get through this flu thing is to just pick one thing I'm going to do each day and do it. Today it's taking the computer in to get fixed and going to the bank and this blog. (Okay, I know, that's three things. I can count.) Enough.

It took me all morning to get out of the house, one step at a time, pausing to pull some dandelions that had grown to be as tall as I am (I don't think they are officially called "dandelions" anymore at that height.) And--I realize this is indelicate to mention in a public blog, but since it's mostly close friends and family who read this I'll say my period started in the middle of the McPartland concert. So here's the glamorous life of the playwright; flu-ridden, bleeding, getting on a plane to Detroit (after tomorrow's MFA graduation at New College which I wouldn't miss, I am so excited for my advisee Storm!)

I have death flu and my computer blew up. Those are the two things of note after I just posted on my blog that I'd like to turn inward. God decided to give me a little down time. The only problem is, I can't take it now!! I have to read my poetry tonight at Black Oak!! Then teach!! And teacg some more!!! Then get on a plane to Detroit.

Sorry, says God. You've been running sround like an idiot for the last three months. Lie down. So I lay down.

I've been flat on my back for the better part of two days, reading March by Geraldine Brooks, a fantastic book, about Bronson Alcott and the Civil War, one of the best things I've read, and dozing off and SWEATING. I awoke in the middle of the night last night soaked in sweat, worse than that Bikram yoga class. Sore throat, aches, pains, scratchy voice, waves of fever...nice...

It might not be helping to be reading about the unbelievable sufferings of the Civil War just now. The hero, the father in Little Women, gets very sick and almost dies, although in conditions considerably less cushy than my own, and without C coming over with packs of kleenex and chicken soup and The National Enquirer.

Meanwhile Jasch sent a big box og awesome organic food--thank you!! and a DVD for this Big Mind process he's excited about and which I will watch as soon as I can wrench my consciousness away from escaping slaves and stops along the Undergroud Railroad and dinner with the Thoreaus and the Ralph Waldo Emersons.

My friend Carla has offered to be my workaholic coach this week and just remind me to surrender--I surrender, I surrender--I was already trying to cut back...but I feel just about as bad walking around as I do lying around, Camille-like on the couch, with my arm over my forehead, sweating out this fever, so in some ways I think I might as well walk around...

Okay, enough emailing at the local Laurel Cafe. Back to bed for another nap/sweat before the reading tonight--hope you can come!!!

Woke up this morning from a dream where my friend the poet Ruth Schwartz, told me the title for my next book would be "Beware the Inner World." Because I place absolute faith in dream messages, I scrawled it immediately in my notebook which I sleep with, went to the bathroom, and did three morning pages of a rough poem on that topic. I didn't feel like it got deep enough, but it's a start.

This weekend I was mostly tired, with a sweet little burst of energy after breakfast yesterday, when I played basketball with G. (I still sucked, but the good news is I sucked less, that is, I actually got some baskets in.) And sweated a bunch, which must be good.

I know that the dream was telling me, in a teasing way, that I need to turn my attention inward, into the inner world, even with so much happening on the outer plane. (I just don't feel like doing sitting still meditation these days, although my friend Jasch is excited about a new technique called Big Mind, which I'd like to investigate.) My dead mother was in the dream too; I was angry at her because she hadn't read my book, and because in a dispute between Allen Ginsberg and some other people (authorities?) she sided against Ginsberg.

Things are sweet on the home front, C and I simple and gentle with each other. Breakfast in bed, toast, omelets, hot coffee. My Dad is ecstatic because the Red Sox beat the Yankees. I have to read fifty pages of student work by two this afternoon, so I'd better get going on it.

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.

It's a gorgeous day outside, windy, wild, sunny. The irises are up. Jasmine is blooming. Figs getting fat and sweet on my tree.

Thirty-three students and teachers were gunned down at Virginiaq Tech yesterday (and where did that kid get his gun? Where did he get his fucking gun???) and I'm inside at my desk slogging through the poetry manuscript of See How We Almost Fly, re-copying individual poems by hand into the files of my still-new-to-me computer, finding the slack spots that can be trimmed, the words that are off-key, revising and reviewing and reworking.

This kid, the gunman, was apparantly an English major, who wrote rambling, disturbing plays. Oh, God. When someone does something crazy in the world these days, first thing I hope is that they are not Jewish, then I hope they're not Black, then that they're not Arab (I know, it's sick, but there you have it.) I never think about them being an English major! I think of his professors, who are probably tearing their hair out now. No one can predict which student is just writing weird stuff and which student is going to explode. The only thing we can do is get rid of the guns, get rid of the guns, get rid of the guns, godamnit.

Here in my house, this place of rumpled bed sheets and grapefruit in a bowl and sweet reminders of love's presence, I have a stack of poems and other writing to attend to. I was seriously disappointed when CSU Press rejected the manuscript for See How We Almost Fly for the umpteenth time and I am working to find the silver lining. I'd put heart and soul and more hours than I can count into these poems for seven years now. I feel like Jacob at the fucking well, laboring to win Rachel--was it Rachel he wanted? Or Leah? Anyway, I feel like that poor dupe, laboring away and then being told, "Sorry, you have to go back for more."

But the thing is, here's the lining: the poems are getting stronger. And stronger. And since I'm signed up for a lifetime of this writing business, it doesn't really matter when any particular book comes out (although it sure would be nice to have another one...right around NOW.) The poems need work, so I'll work them. As Lucille Clifton says, "because I am adam and his mother and these failures are my job."

It's a gorgeous day outside and I'm in here slogging through the poetry manuscript of See How We Almost Fly, re-copying individual poems by hand into the files of my still-new-to-me computer. Yes, I know, I could take the whole thing down to Kinko's and get it put on disk and then insert it. But here's the thing: the manual re-copying makes me pause and edit, pause and edit, and surprise! I find clumsy lines, places where the poems go off-key, fat to be trimmed, etc. So it becomes, not just an exercise in retrieval, but renewal.

I was seriously disappointed when CSU Press rejected the manuscript for See How We Almost Fly for the umpteenth time. I've put heart and soul and more hours than I can count into these poems for seven years now. I feel like Jacob at the fucking well, laboring to win Rachel--was it Rachel he wanted? or Leah? Anyway, I feel like that poor dupe, laboring away and then being told, "Sorry, you have to go back for more."

But the thing is, the poems are getting stronger. And stronger. And since I'm signed up for a lifetime of this, it doesn't really matter when any particular book comes out (although it sure would be nice to have another one...right around NOW.) The poems need work, so I'll work them. As Lucille Clifton says, "Because I am Adam and his mother and these failures are my job."

More about sacrifice: my friend Coke interviewed me for an art project in September. I talked about sacrifice and said that I hadn't made many. I was thinking of Muriel Rukeyser's quote about being an artist where she said that it is all a matter of choice. Don't second guess your choices and don't talk about sacrifices. Just make them and go on. (I'm paraphrasing badly here.)

Did I sacrifice having a family for the freedom to live and write the way that I do? Or would I have been badly cut out for domestic life anyway, and instinctively avoided it?

I don't know. The honest answer is, I don't know.

I guess the more important questions are: Is it too late to choose again? Do I try to get a second chance/second act, make enormous changes at the last minute, as Grace Paley wrote so presciently, or do I stick with what I have now, a full artist's life, bursting at the seams already?

Sacrifice means "to make sacred"--to give something, not just to give it up for the sake of being a martyr, but to give it to life. When dancers dance, they make a living sacrifice of their bodies, their energy. They spend themselves in the dance, holding nothing back. There must be a difference between sacrifice and self-denial, although the two often get blurred...

I had delicious times this weekend with C, lots of holding, laughing, teasing, eating, an epically sweaty Bikram yoga class, great reading ("Perfection" an amazing story by Mark Helprin from his collection The Pacific--read it!!!) and a mediocre movie ("Freedomland" with Samuel Jackson and Julianna Moore.)

And then C went off on his own musical adventures, and I went to the MOMA to see a photography exhibit with G. The featured photographer, whose name I can't remember, liked to photograph ordinary things, as G does--city buildings, bridges, lampposts.

For the past year, G has been making his own wonderful cityscapes of architectural details and then when I praise them, he typically responds, "Yeah, but is anyone going to want to look at a photo of a corner of a building?" So it was wonderful to be with him in an exhibit full of corners of buildings, parking lots, phone booths, telephone wires strung out on empty highways. Emptiness was a big part of this artist's theme--the emptiness of America, the vast spaces in the middle of the country, sagebrush and clipped anonymous lawns in front of shabby tract houses.

I could see the lightbulb go on in G's head; he got it--what he does is art, it counts, and here were people paying good money to stand and gaze at photos that were not unlike his own (and I know I'm biased, but the best of his work is as good as anything I saw in the museum.) It was like that great moment when students read W.C. Williams and understand that they can make poems out of paper bags and plums, and they don't have to speak in an elevated faux-Wordsworth or Shakespeare voice to make good art.

We also looked in at the Picasso exhibit that's up now, which wasn't as satisfying, partly because there were a million people wandering around with ipods stuck in their ears, diligently learning about Picasso from the audio tour, partly because there weren't that many actual Picassos, more artists whom he had influenced, and the ones there were seemed to be culled from his ugly period.

I know this will make me sound like a total yahoo and I don't even care, but I couldn't help comparing him with the Impressionists whom I liked so much better. When E and I went to see the Monets at the Palace of the Legion of Honor, we were both transfixed. We could have stayed there all day, eyeball to eyeball with the luscious glowing canvasses. And when I saw the Van Goghs at the Met last year I wanted to put my nose into the paintings and just inhale them. But these particular Picassos--jumbled abstracts in repellent colors--left me cold.

"Call me old-fashioned, "I whispered to G, "but I like beauty."

I don't know what elevated the photos of cityscapes and empty freeways into beauty for me, or why the paintings in mustardy yellows and snot-greens refused to rise, but there you have it. The mystery of art.

After G left to have dinner with his ex-wife, I stayed in the museum bookstore and picked up a small book of selected erotic paintings and drawings by Picasso. Here were the pictures I wanted to see--warm, alive, kicking. Given the weekend's activities I could relate to them strongly--feel the weight of the women's thighs, the feeling of the bodies rolling against each other. There was one which depicted a man going down on a woman that gave me shudders of pleasure.

Then I went on to New College, did some last final edits on a student paper, then met Olga for flamenco. We shared a glass of red wine and a great appreciation for one of the dancers whom she dubbed "snake woman," for her writhing upper body. The dance is imperious, even a little bit SM or dominatrix-like. Proud, fierce, angry. Olga said it has gypsy origins and recounted how she was almost stolen by gypsies when she was a child in her grandmother's village in Russia. No joke.

Now to work on entries for the Nimrod prize...

First graders: twinkling stars with missing teeth, Hallowe'en grins. "I like your pink shirt." "Why do you wear glasses?" I want to take them all home with me. The hard part is squatting beside their little desks and then standing up again; several times a morning it sends me into head rushes so severe I have to hold onto the walls to keep steady. It's like doing squat thrusts all morning. And then the junk food in the teacher's room...

Last night G and I went out to dinner in the course of which we talked about Don Imus. G maintains that while Imus' comments were stupid and racist, they are no worse than what hip hoppers say about women every day, and that that kind of internalized racism and misogyny hurts the black community even more because it comes from within.

Fired up from the experience of reading Lisa Jones' memoir about Native American concepts of sacrifice--contrasted with Native American life on the reservation, which is rife with alcoholism, violence, and degradation, I talked about sacrifice. It seems that in earlier generations, the concept of sacrificing one's individual pleasure for the greater good of the community was a cherished value (she said, digging into her chicken pesto risotto). Now, not so much.

We've all suffered from this cultural shift in values to me me me but perhaps communities of color, marginilized poorer communities have suffered most of all, because they most need each others' help in order to survive and thrive. Maybe rampant individualism works better for middle class and upper middle class people (except of course for the fact that it doesn't work, witness: epidemic levels of depression.)

This newfound sweetness and growing sense of trust with C have inspired a weird backlash in me; I should be glowing with gratitude and I am, but I'm also feeling pissed off at former lovers who just couldn't or wouldn't be faithful. "See, it's not so hard!" I want to shout at them. "You dig in, you go deep, you discover there's more depth and sweetness and richness here than you can explore in one lifetime--more pain, more beauty, more learning--and you stay with it. Is that so fucking impossible???"

I say this because I've watched myself taking quiet little potshots at polyamory in this blog--when in fact, several of my friends are in open relationships with great integrity. I know it is possible to practice ethical non-monogamy, I just so didn't want it, and for years of my dating life it felt like that was all that was on offer. Any man of interest that I met seemed to want only a non-monogamous connection, and many of my women friends (certainly not all,) were also willing to take on that challenge.

I felt lonely and frustrated and also doubted myself: if only I could get over my petty jealousies I too could be experiencing the bliss of limitless love and affection instead of sleeping alone night after night because of my ridiculous and selfish need for sexual exclusivity. (This was my trip, not that of my polyamorous friends who were sympathetic and understanding about my particular "kink" for monogamy.)

One intriguing question is why was the sex often better with the faithless men than with the faithful ones? (C being a notable and happy exception.) Was it because the non-monogamists were more "into" sex and had more practice? Because they were more alternative and thus more flexible in their sexuality? All I know is that I am so happy not to be having that conversation any more--you know, the one about how men's biological imperative compels them to want to spread their seed to as many different wombs as possible--it may be true, God knows if it is or not, but I'm so tired of hearing about it.

And the truth of my life is of course complex--in some ways I am having a love affair with all 25 members of Wing It--male and female, gay and straight. And my friendships with women, many of whom are lesbian, are sacred ground. And G and I have maintained our special connection through thick and thin, and I live with two men and two women housemates, sharing bathroom, refrigerator, and relaxing together in our pajamas making coffee on weekends, so I am certainly not half of a traditional nuclear-family couple in my daily life. I just want our intimate life to have a sacred energetic circle around it--and luckily for me, he wants the same thing.

I think the pain over infidelity goes back further than my current dating experiences, back to my childhood, the jealousy my mother and I felt about my father's affection, and the heartbreak of rough spots in my parents' marriage when fidelity was broken.

Now that I'm once again embarking on a serious relationship, all those issues are rising unbidden in my mind. I can go off on stories about this or that unfaithful lover--how he broke my heart, how callous, how cruel, how cowardly and immature, etc. But the real story is how enshrined this wound has become in my own heart, this worm-hole in the apple of my happiness, this poisoned tunnel of betrayal, this escape hatch, this reminder that nothing mortal can be perfect although we try.

Okay, I'm so tired my head is falling into my chest and I can barely see to type. C and I went up to Wilbur Hot Springs for a 24 hour getaway and cavorted in the smelly (think healing sulphur smell, a la Esalen) warm waters, relaxed and read on the comfy couches.

He played piano and sat in with some other wonderful musicians who were up there. We both sang. It was a beautiful time and we came back and I taught four classes today at the high school ("My brother, who is as gassy as Pluto,") and four more tomorrow in the first grade. In between more making and eating of big meals, and lots of strong coffee...

My body is crying out for a swim, but it may have to wait until next week when I get some time off because the high schoolers are having STAR testing, whatever that is.

I'm exhausted but content. Can't wait for real time, in which to clean my room, send poems and poetry mss. out, and work on some of the many fragments scribbled in my notebooks. There are the beginnings of a new play in there, more poems, ideas for new essays. (There's a tribe in the Amazon that have no words to describe abstract thoughts, no desires for more than they own, no Creation myth, no way to talk about the deep past or speculate about the future, (no apparant desire to do either, or the words would have been invented,) no numbers higher than three. I read about them in The New Yorker. A perfectly Zen culture.)

I got an idea the other night--in my Zen way-- that maybe I could raise money for Malawi by writing some erotica for Penthouse. Do they still pay for that? How much do they pay? Does it have to be real conventional boy-girl, rippling muscles and heaving bosoms and cocks going into all the expected openings, or have they gotten more interesting? I bet I could write something fun, 800 words, say, and sell it.

And I have to arrange with Masankho's friend to work in an orphanage in Malawi while I'm there. So much stuff...the important thing, though, is to be cradled and rock and swim and be held, to press all of my passionate energy up against another body and be fully wholly finally met, with no holding back. It's amazing to me that I don't have to diminish myself to be in this relationship--not my power, nor my real desire, which was to be in something sexually exclusive, primary, monogamous.

I get to be powerful and vulnerable and myself--amen! And Anna is doing better and spring is definitely here--the figs are purpling on my tree, and as soon as I learn how to squeeze an extra three hours into a day everything will be fine.

My little niece came through the operation with flying colors, and was sent home a day early because she was making such a good recovery. Thank you everyone who prayed for her, for her parents, for me, for all sick kids. I am so glad the operation is over, and from what my father says, she's doing well, although her parents could use a year in a resort to recover.

I've been reading a fantastic memoir by a woman named Lisa Jones about a Native American shaman who works with horses and people, helping beings find their center. It's quite remarkable and I should be done by tomorrow when I'll be able to post more.

Gray morning. Anna, my three-year-old niece, is in surgery right now. The surgeon is delicately untwisting and re-attaching her ureters. Her parents are pacing around the waiting room, exhausted. My brother probably is not saying much.

I couldn't say much last night. Went with some other Wing-ers to the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre in the city to see Michelle Jordan perform in Bricktop, a musical about a black woman, a contemporary and friend of Josephine Baker, who had a jazz club in Paris before the war. Michelle played Alberta Hunter. She was incredible. Her voice is so pure, so full, so exuberant, so holy, that it fills every sound molecule with God and leaves no room for anything else.

I am grateful to be on the planet with her, much less to share friendship and a stage with her in Wing It! But I was still irritable and preoccupied, brooding and tired. Too much sugar. Not enough exercise. Too many days between being held in love's arms. Too many hours sitting at my desk. Too much anxiety and holding other people's angst.

Ellen asked me, "Is there a way you can release other people's pain? Visualize it going back to the earth or give it to a tree or something?" That's a good idea. I wrote two good poems yesterday, but it's not the same thing as doing my inner work. I can't wait to get the phone call from my bro or my sister-in-law saying things went fine with the surgery.

I know Anna is in the hands of the angels right now. I know everything is fine.

Yesterday I went and colored my hair again, which depressed me. I have become one of those women who deny their age by coloring their hair. I don't deny my age exactly. I like my age. I'll be the first person to say that my forties--especially my late forties-- have been the best years of my life so far. I'm ten times more productive and skillful than I was when I was younger. I understand people and life so much more clearly. Situations that used to baffle me are now obvious. I move on from relationships that don't work more quickly; I waste less time (even though I still waste too much time.) I laugh more and cry less and work more efficiently and love with more tenderness and compassion.

In 2007 alone, I've written three or four essays, a bunch of poems, a children's play, a children's book, taught a bunch of classes, and been loving and non-violent and clearly communicated with G, with C, even with the man I dated for a few weeks around the New Year, as well as with family and friends. Experience rocks!

Why the hair thing then? C likes my gray. He maintains (stoutly) that gray hair is sexy. My hairdresser, Jamie, a woman my age, disagrees. "People say gray hair is sexy but they lie. Gray hair is ugly. You don't want to be gray."

By the time I finally made the appointment it had been four months since my last touch-up. I had three inches of gray in some places. She had to use twice the amount of solution she usually does. I sat there, draped in plastic, with the toxic burning smell of the chemicals making my eyes sting. After she rinsed me out, my hair looked too brown, too perfect. I know the color will settle in. I know a few gray hairs will reassert themselves within a week or two. I know at some point I'll just let it go--when I'm fifty, I've said. In a year and a half.

Why am I waiting that long? Is it really so important to me to be hit on by young men in supermarket parking lots? Do I need people to think I am in my thirties forever? What color is my hair naturally now, anyway? How much gray do I have? I don't even know.

I'm going to go clean my room as a form of prayer.

Full moon in Libra, and Passover Seder last night went beautifully, although in a moment of insanity I prepared enough food for thirty people, when it ended up being about twelve. Consequently, the fridge is stuffed with leftovers, but as my mother used to say, "That should be your worst problem."

There was a lovely feeling of community and sharing stories that happened, and enough Jews present who knew the rituals--always the nerve-wracking part for me, because I don't feel like I can carry a tune well enough to teach the songs and prayers to non-Jews with any accuracy. Plus, three Jews, five opinions about any given tune or interpretation, so that was good. The best, most magical part was the community that arises out of doing ritual together--everyone felt it, I think--a sense of connection, however ephemeral, in this confusing business of making human culture.

I was a bit frayed and sad before the meal began, more because my sugar relapse has gotten so severe it's seguing into binging than anything else. It's not my weight that makes me sad--I'm okay with being a bit rounder, I like my body with the extra curviness. But the old familiar feelings of being out of control, spaced out and exhausted by sugar use are creeping back in.

I know what I have to do--get really vigilant about keeping a food journal, make fresh vegetables a priority, carry healthy food with me at all times so that I never get caught hungry with poor choices, drink lots of water, and forgive myself the past months of lapsing. And exercise. As soon as I finish dealing with the dregs of the party downstairs I'll go to the gym and swim. This next month is going to be intense, with out-of-town travel and out of town guests and three of my plays getting productions plus two poetry readings plus New College graduation, plus more teaching. I want to be in shape so I can enjoy it.

I don't know what my stars are doing overhead, but it's crazy! The little play I wrote in November, called Oasis, has been accepted as part of a group of short plays that will get a small production in May--May 4,5,11, and 12, the same exact dates as See How We Almost Fly. And Saying Kaddish with My Sister will have had its workshop production in Michigan the weekend before. So I'll have three plays up and running in the same three weeks. This is awesome. The only thing missing from this scenario is money. I have to trust that that will follow--someday.

Meanwhile, I've tumbled into an unexpectedly close and romantic connection with C and have spent more time with him in the last three days than I've spent with a lover in years--long years. Amazingly we didn't get sick of each other, although cats on both sides got a little miffed at the intruder.

We saw The Namesake which is the best film I've seen in a long time--my vote for Oscar next year. Too bad it's coming out so early in the spring by the time the Academy Awards roll around everyone will have forgotten about it. Go see it. It's a genuinely loving film about life, relationships, and fate.

A couple of Writing Salon classes just ended, and yesterday I taught my last class of Memoir and Testimony at New College with a bit of a pang. I don't know when I'll be teaching there next. It was a great class. And I'm waiting to hear on several essays that are pout and about. This next week with more time I'll try to write the next essay in the line-up--and retrieve my poetry ms. again. For tonight it's a multi-cultural Seder for twenty people, and I haven't cleaned the house, copied the Haggadah or bought matzahs. Aaarrrgghhh!!