I am disappointed. It turns out I am only a mid-level nerd. Juniper, where’d you learn to be so nerdy?
]]>Someone please tell me to go to bed now
I made some cookies today
All the cocky young internet comics stormed my world again tonight
Like Pandora’s box, I gotta close this machine again
before hope slips out
]]>http://www.sgn.org/sgnnews36_20/page25.cfm
-A
]]>But for all you folks who commented after seeing the show that you missed Mok’s gleaming eyes and sparkly teeth, now’s your chance! Come see what this amazing man can do with just a few hours of last-minute rehearsal!
Oh, goodness, producing theatre is just moving from one emergency to the next, I begin to believe. What is that famous quote? Something about sliding into the grave sideways screaming “Whoo, what a ride!”
With adrenaline,
Alissa
Charles Mudede of The Stranger says: “The writers went wrong in the final act—it has the heaviness of revealing a final and amazing truth, but its truth is not heavy or staggering. We already know that life in the suburbs is empty and soulless. Even people living in the suburbs know that. Medea Knows Best should never have pushed beyond the lightness of its music and comedy.”
Joe Adcock of the P-I says: “As has been pointed out time and time again by sociologists and satirists, songwriters and dramatists, the American Dream can be a stifling nightmare.
Nebunele recycles this well-worn insight. At times the playwrights seem to be implying that peace is boring and war is stimulating — not a welcome view at a time when war is deadening and peace is hardly imaginable. ” (Though he does give props to some of the “sharply caricatured performances.”)
Most damning of all is Seattle Times’s Misha Berson, who says: “And what a pity the neighborhood Greek chorus of domestic goddesses, harmonizing on renditions of pop oldies (”Catch a Falling Star,” “Chapel of Love”), can’t save Medea from adultery and mayhem — nor rescue this production by Seattle’s Nebunele Theatre from tedium….this is awfully well-trodden ground on stage and screen. And doggedly plowing it again, without turning up much that’s new, makes for a long and not terribly illuminating show.”
The sad thing about all this is that we never meant to say that 50’s suburbia is deadening. That was not our point, although three out of four Seattle reviewers seem to think it was. In fact, we wanted to highlight the opposite: that there is something real happening there, and that to deride this world all the way is to overlook the things about these choices that are beautiful and powerful. We wanted to *start* from that cultural assumption that all of this is meaningless, and then argue for these choices, give them a little weight; we wanted to say that faith in a perfect structure isn’t necessarily such a deadly thing, and that we do it as a people for a reason, even if maybe we sometimes don’t get it right.
But enough people are coming away with the opposite understanding that it’s clear: either we did a bad job of communicating what we wanted, or we underestimated the power of our audiences’ expectations. I think these reviewers saw the setup and extrapolated where we were going from everything else that’s in the American canon on this topic, and didn’t wait to see that we were actually trying to push it in the other direction. We were so careful not to seem to promote the aspects of that culture that *are* deadly, though, that I think we didn’t argue hard enough or long enough for the beauty we wanted to support. I don’t think any of these reviewers considered the very end of the play…and, were we to rewrite again, I think that would be highly valuable information. Our audience expects a certain argument, and we have to work much harder to subvert it.
Here’s the parade of gloom:
Seattle Weekly blurb (Not really more than summary, though it does mention the giant TV’s awesomeness):
http://seattleweekly.com/listings/theaters/433419
The Stranger:
http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Event?event=561420
The PI:
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/theater/362766_theater13.html
The Seattle Times:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/thearts/2004416680_medea16.html
So far no word from Miryam Gordon of TheatreMania and Seattle Gay News. Perhaps she has decided to spare us.
Oh, critics! Oh, plays!
Hoping that some people still come see the show,
Alissa
It struck me driving over the bridge toward home—
the lights of the city! The dark water!
Oh, how the clouds reflected all the hazy light pollution,
made me feel small and adventurous
and alone, and like if I spoke
to the city itself, it might reply.
I turned to my new love in the passenger’s seat
and tried: “I just got this feeling of…
of yearning.”
“Of what?”
“Yearning. Like a…like a longing for something. For a life
I don’t have. Or something.” I felt foolish.
“I know a cure for that!” he proclaimed.
“But I don’t want to be cured. I like this, this
lonely melancholy. Do you see?”
He didn’t. I tried again.
“You know when you’re hiking somewhere beautiful, alone?
That pretty loneliness you get?”
“I think I know what you mean. Being alone in nature.”
“Yes, but it’s a feeling of being just outside of a magic life.”
He looked at me blankly.
“I guess I’m not explaining it very well. I was just wondering if you ever feel that way.”
“Maybe you should write a poem,” he said.
It’s like that time when you were nine and you spoke to trees, thinking they were wiser than you, and patient. It’s like the first understanding that your parents’ wooden chessboard, that inert object, is older than you. It’s like that time you cried outside at night and the wind answered, tickling the back of your neck and the new hairs prickling out of your armpits. It’s like the first boy/girl party in seventh grade that went late into the night, and the music was loud and some people were holding each other for the first time, and it was dark and you didn’t belong. It’s being very human which means wanting something so badly it feels good just to want it, that satisfying hole, that nerve-wracking hunger. I am, therefore I need. Something. It’s just like being alive. Like that time you were alive.
-Alissa
]]>So, a year ago, partially inspired by the Artist’s Way, I quit my lucrative day-job to run my theatre company and make some plays with uninterrupted focus. I decided to live on my savings account for as long as I could in order to complete the two-part project of Medea Knows Best, apply for our 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status (which we are shortly being awarded! Whee!) and start building the infrastructure for a company that more and more I am beginning to regard as my life’s work.
Did my mom freak out at my abandoning a stable income for an artistic dream that makes me approximately $0 annually, at 27 years old? No. She got excited for me, told all her friends how proud of me she was, donated money to Nebunele, and traveled to San Francisco with my dad (who helped build the set) to see the finished product.
This month, I decided to leave my cute little studio apartment on Capitol Hill to move into a beautiful big house, farther out of the city center, with partner-in-crime Claytie. We needed a third roommate to make the house affordable, and for a time were considering a good friend of ours who also happens to be an ex-boyfriend of mine. When I told my mom about that, she let me know that she thought it was a bad idea, as that would have the potential to create emotional storms that could wreck my relationship with him and make my living situation difficult. In the next breath in that conversation, though, she told me that if the landlord of the house was dubious about renting to me because I am currently unemployed, she would be happy to co-sign with me on the lease.
EVEN WHEN SHE DISAPPROVES, my mom supports my choices! She’s honest with me about how she disagrees, and then goes right on doing everything she can to help me out and make them happen. Such a generous, loving mom is straight out of a storybook, and in so many ways, I cannot even believe that I am so lucky.
I can talk to my mom about everything—my fears, my pride, my love life, my mistakes. I have been raised with an unshakeable faith in her love for me. My parents’ home is open to me any time—and not just to me, but to my friends, who tell me after they visit my parents that they feel they have been welcomed home. When I floated the idea of someday developing a show on their beautiful and secluded 5 acres in Trinidad, they didn’t even blink at the notion of hosting a bunch of actors and theatre technicians for months. My mom over the course of my life has helped me develop a strong sense of self; an independence that can only come from knowing that if I need it, I will always be taken care of; the belief that I am attractive and intelligent and capable of whatever I put my mind to. I could not be who I am today, doing the crazy things that I do, if it weren’t for the support, applause, love and validation that I have gotten all my life from my mother whenever I needed it, and often even when I didn’t.
Not only does she support me in a hundred thousand ways, she also happens to be intellectually brilliant, beautiful, an amazing musician, an admirably straightforward communicator, intuitive and compassionate, accepting, inquisitive, generous, and creative. I’ve spent much of my life looking up to her, learning from her, and emulating her. To be blessed with a truly admirable person as the woman who raised me feels like extra, like oh-my-gosh-what-wonderful-thing-did-I-do-in-a-past-life-to-deserve-this, like even more than I am entitled to as a human being growing up in this crazy world. If I stray into sappiness, forgive me. My mom deserves sappy. My mom rocks.
Thanks, Mom! I love you!
xoxo
Alissa
Anyway, no reviews are out yet, but we got a nice advance mention in today’s Seattle Times (Thanks, Sean, for spotting it!): http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/thearts/2004401326_dram09.html
More coming shortly!
xoxo
Alissa
http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheCoolAsHellTheatrePodcast
He was really cool to talk to, smart, interested in a good story, stoked about theatre. Does anyone in Seattle do something like this? If not, somebody should start!
We also did a quick radio spot on KGO’s Wednesday cafe segment. They introduced us as “the doo-wop group, Medea Knows Best” and mispronounced Yana’s last name (it’s KesALLa, dudes! :-p) but the anchors were super nice. Woo, crazy, radio!
http://www.kgoam810.com/sectional.asp?id=18170#
…and then a review from the Contra Costa times. This guy didn’t like us as nearly as much as the Chronicle did, but for completeness’ sake, and so that we can all mock him together later, here’s the link:
That’s all the journalists wrote for now! One SF weekend left, and then it’s back to the home turf…
xoxo
Alissa
It’s late, Claytie’s sleeping, I have the smell of my dance partners’ colognes on my borrowed shirt. Antoun’s living room looks out over the city and the bay, and distant traffic lights are blinking at me here on the couch. I managed to pick up a case of poison oak on my face thanks to a lovely walk in the hills in Berkeley (so glad we finally found that carousel, Kirby… :-p ) Trying desperately not to scratch.
We have one weekend of performances left here in SF and then we run home, load in, tech, and do it all over again in Seattle. I LOVE this cast; their energy and enthusiasm is matched only by the sheer force of their talent. Seattleites, if you ever miss a show of mine, it shouldn’t be this one.
Post-salsa endorphins are telling me not to worry about the fact that I really am going to have to find a job when I return. Aside from that, the world is in place. Hopefully soon I’ll have some new pictures to put up; I wrote half a poem while lounging at the marina today that someday will poke its nose into these pages; stay tuned! Alissa is slowly replugging in to wired life! Don’t lose patience, faithful readers!
And etc. and etc. and on and on. Tomorrow I will do some businessy things and then go hang out with these people to watch a rehearsal for Beowulf: A thousand years of baggage. I’m excited about that because Dave makes good music and BB&B seems to make crazy work (even though I’ve never seen! Tragedy!) and now I get to peek at a little bit of how they do it! Yay.
Ramble ramble. Are you reading this? I like you. Perhaps now I will dream of you as I fall in to bed…right…now.
]]>Love!
devilishly,
Alissa
Eep!
I’m feeling very disorganized. Ever since we hit crunch time a few weeks ago, I’ve let so much personal stuff slide—I have an unpaid parking ticket from weeks ago; I haven’t followed up on the fact that I never got confirmation for filing my taxes; I have checks to deposit in my bank account and emails to write and my laptop desktop is a scrambled mess, and my car tabs need to be renewed, and and and and…
And there’s Nebunele business that’s on hold at the moment too; if you’ve donated recently and you haven’t got your Little Crazies welcome email or your T-shirt etc., it’s because that’s on my important-but-not-urgent list, the one I keep telling myself I’ll get to after we open.
I need a couple hours just to sit down and sort myself out. I’m not sure I’ll get it until, oh, the 13th. But it’s all going to be fine. I’m pretty sure.
San Francisco is lovely, EXIT is treating us very well and it’s so good to hang out with these guys again, and despite my feeling of being slightly out of control I’m also full of excitement and anticipation. So, scrambling. So, living. All of it will go on.
Crazy week from me to you! Come see the show if you’re in SF!
xoxo
Alissa
Didn’t get around to posting this yesterday morning, and last night I was writing this sitting on Dave (my excellent host)’s bed while he studied up about trombones and I tried to unwind from a good but sort of bewildering rehearsal. I think I need a new paragraph to talk about it.
I have this thing, sometimes, where as an actor if I get lost in a scene, and it’s a bit overwhelming to know what to do, and maybe I’ve also been putting in long days for a while and feeling like I’m not doing everything perfectly, where I get frustrated and a little emotional. A sort of fear comes in—that I won’t get it, that I’ll be lost in these scenes forever, that they are impenetrable to me and always will be. So I got a little teary in rehearsal yesterday, to the mild consternation of my director. But something I’ve learned about myself is that when that happens, I can use my own slight panic to make a shift in the scene I’m doing. I think it was Judy Shahn, my voice teacher at UW, who first had me work through my frustration-tears, and something about crying makes some (not all) of the blocks sort of go away. So I cried a little bit, and then I made a little progress. Last night, though, I was just feeling raw. I lost my grip on the play a little, and though I found some new stuff, I haven’t really got a handhold on it as a whole again. I’m beginning to maybe acknowledge that my bizarrely frenetic happiness and excitement that’s been bubbling up inside for the last week or so has a flip side that has probably been equally present despite my denial of it. My weird calm was masking a storm I don’t want to admit to myself.
Or maybe I just got tired. What a day. I love this work; this work wears me out like a hooker’s butt wears out her jeweled thong; I don’t get this work at all; this work teaches me more about myself than Mr. Miagi taught Daniel-San.
Here’s what I saw on the T-shirts they’re selling at Guerilla Coffee: “It’s job of the artist to make the revolution irresistible.”
]]>If you have thirty seconds and a bit of compassion in your heart for a hometown girl who wants under the lights, take a moment, click this link, and vote for her! And, if you think of it tomorrow, vote again! You can vote once a day if you’re really excited for her. I am. She is…well, Jana is something else. I adore her and there’s no one quite like her and I want her to win. So.
http://parisbff.com/people/jsalamanca
Please vote.
Love!
Alissa
But there’s more kinds of fear than that. There’s the fear of failure. That one is bad. And then there’s this kind of wordless, nameless anxiety that doesn’t seem associated with anything…and that kind seems interesting.
I was feeling that one tonight as I walked here to the coffee shop. It’s dark out, and it was sunny today but it’s pretty cold tonight. Groups of people are walking about in little clumps between the restaurants and clubs and bars, as they always do in my neighborhood, and tonight when I looked at them they seemed so distant from me, like I was seeing them through a thick pane of glass, or something. I have a lot to do, but it isn’t unmanageable. But when I think about the show, there’s an inexplicable little clutch of panic in my tummy. And when I think about my life, how when I come back from San Francisco I really really have to figure out how to make money again and balance that with the full-time artist thing that I’m not willing to give up, I get another little throb of fear. But it isn’t coming from that, exactly, either. I’m not really afraid of anything specific, and if I think about any one thing that might be making me feel this way, it doesn’t seem fear-worthy at all.
As I walked to Online Coffee, I started to enjoy it a little bit. You know what this is? I decided. This is the letting go, over and over again, of needing to know what I am supposed to do next. This is the fear of jumping into the void, and chances are pretty good it ain’t going to kill me, but I don’t know that. This feeling reminds me of high school. So many things were scary then. But I never felt so alive as then, either.
I don’t want to give the impression that I’m a…a stress junkie, or something. But it feels really good, really satisfying, to turn around and hug this fear, let it engulf me without controlling me. I feel strong tonight. I feel like I’m doing things right. I feel like I don’t know and don’t need to know what comes next. I got some ideas. But I’ll let ‘em go right away if the right weird thing knocks. This is freedom. That’s what it really is.
Love the fright!
Alissa
http://picasaweb.google.com/foolissa/NebunelePokerNightFeb2908
It was a smashing success. Thank you everybody who helped make it happen, and those who came and made it fun!
]]>That said, there were some moments in it that took my breath away. At one point, there was an incredibly tight and bright green laser beam shooting directly into the ear of the main performer as she cocked her head, and words were projected on the back wall of the stage, one at a time, slowly at first and then faster and faster, pausing occasionally for a split second, apparently random but occasionally easy to make connections between. I was amazed at the ability of the brain to pick up so many of those words as they went flashing by so fast I could barely see them, but they made impressions anyway. I was overwhelmed with the sensation of mental tickling, my mouth was open, I felt like I was in the Matrix learning some new crazy mental skill, I was astonished. There was another beautiful moment at the very beginning when the woman emerged naked from a pile of flesh-colored, dripping goo (silicon? something crazy that oozed off the table in glops for the entire rest of the performance). An electric sword that burned whatever touched it, so that when the woman covered it in a folded-up sheet, a stripe was burned all the way through it so that when she picked it up and unfolded it there was a perfect, brown X on it, and she wore it like a cape while talking about the beheaded queens. Perfect circles everywhere. The black woman’s body being coated by the white woman in silver paint so that she danced with the lights off and we saw the glowing body in the near-dark and nothing else. These things and more filled me with wonder.
So when you have a joyful experience, even if the thing that produced it was not what you would call great art, how do you react? I decided in the moment of the curtain call that I’d much rather live in a world where I respond to my delight than to my critical mind, and I gave the clunky piece a standing ovation. Later, I felt slightly guilty for doing so. Should I really inflate the value of that piece of theatre by publicly lauding it, potentially increasing its value in the minds of the theatregoers around me and increasing the likelihood that mediocre theatre will be praised as exceptional? Am I contributing to a sort of creeping complacence around theatre, allowing it to die an ugly death because I don’t hold it to high standards that would demand better art?
But…I can’t choose sitting down with my dour critic’s mind, refusing to applaud when the child in me really wants to. And as a producer of theatre, I know how much pain and hope goes into even a terrible show, and surely my genuine joy can’t really be hurting anything?
Oh, I don’t know. What do you guys think? To deliver the unwarranted praise and be happy about it? Or to maintain a rigorous critical mind and, full of integrity, reserve my standing ovation for the rare piece that really changes everything?
Baffled by the ethics of having an opinion,
Alissa
The other nice thing was that the architecture of the capitol building (and the corporations building/office of the Secretary of State) was lofty and grand and white-marbled and gold-lettered and columned and beautiful. I know it’s naive, I know it is, but I walked in and felt a sense of greatness and accomplishment, and pride in what we flawed humans have made of ourselves despite enormous logistical difficulty. I mean, our government is messed-up and bureaucratic and inefficient and full of compromise, and is responsible for many horrible things, but at least it functions, and some stuff does get done. That’s not trivial when you’re representing millions of people who all disagree about what, exactly, should be done, and how. I felt, wandering under those high ceilings across those impeccably clean white marble floors, a bit like I feel when I walk into a cathedral–I may not agree with everything that goes on here, but god damn this reverent setting gives me hope and a sense of faith.
Crossing the campus of the capitol, though, Bret and I had to laugh at the old oak trees growing next to the pedestrian path. They all sported huge, unwieldy branches that would certainly have broken and crashed onto the sidewalk or overbalanced the trees themselves had they not been held up by serious and elaborate metal-and-concrete scaffoldings, permanently installed. How like a bureaucracy.
Rubbernecking with the best of ‘em,
Alissa
And that’s what I am doing right now with my little LA-born lemon. I cut it into tiny wedges. There’s lemon juice and sugar muddled all over the plate and my fingers, and my tongue is starting to smart from all the acid, halfway through. It reminds me of being eight years old. It reminds me of being twenty-one and drinking my first Lemon Drop. It reminds me of southern California sunshine, on this dreary Seattle chilly-wind Wednesday. It is an excellent way to put off the work I should be doing right now. It’s making my tummy feel unstable on the inside…but I love it, I can take it, sunny sunny vitamin C tearing my insides apart. Prana! Life! Fuel me, burn me, make me sharp and biting, make me fast, curdle the milk that was in the latte I had this morning, turn me inside out! Oh lemon. Oh, lemon.
Sweetly sour,
Alissa
1) a small lemon wrapped in a paper towel
2) a handwritten note on folded-up arty brown-and-gold paper.
It was sent by my friend Juniper, who wrote me a series of engaging and whimsical letters called “Dispatches from the Southland” a few years ago. She is the best letter-writer I know. In fact, in addition to the various missives I have actually received from her, there is one other letter she’s been writing me since…1996? that I have never seen most of. For a while, she claimed she was going to send it to me when it was finished, but I think the gig is up and I’ve finally figured out it will never be finished. She took pity on me and has been posting some of it lately on a blog called “Dear Alissa” (link on the sidebar if you’re curious. She’ll probably hate me for directing people to it. But it’s good! Be warned: she’s also been posting chapters from her novel there, which is also good, but agonizingly incomplete.)
Anyway. Back when she was writing me the Dispatches, she had developed hope about her recently-planted lemon tree. It had never borne fruit, but was starting to form flowers. But the lemons failed to materialize that year.
Now there are finally lemons! And since I was sort of peripherally involved in (well, at least kind of witnessing) the birth of the Lemon-Watching, she has decided to send me one. She wants to know what I am going to use it for.
This is a lemon with history! What should I do with it? How can I best use this lemon to glorify the name of the best letter-writer with whom I have had the pleasure of acquaintance and receipt of missives from, despite the shoddy frequency with which I returned them? I am accepting ideas for the next…one day. I want to use it while it’s still fresh.
About the lemon: It is bigger than a ping-pong ball, but smaller than a tennis ball. It is almost perfectly round, instead of lemon-shaped. Its skin is very smooth, not rough like grocery-store lemons, and it doesn’t smell very strongly at all. It is bright yellow, nearly gold on one side. As I understand it, it is the second lemon ever produced by a young tree in Los Angeles since it was planted three years ago in its current home. It glows a little on my dark wood-finished desk. It is too yellow to look quite like a full moon. There is a little inverted dimple on it, directly opposite from the place it was separated from the stem (which is faint green.) It weighs about the same amount as the pair of scissors I used to open the box that contained it. It will not be good forever.
]]>
I am disappointed. It turns out I am only a mid-level nerd. Juniper, where’d you learn to be so nerdy?
]]>http://picasaweb.google.com/foolissa/MedeaKnowsBest200702
Wheeee!
]]>I was blessed with an almost unfairly happy childhood here in Humboldt County, California. I was sustained by jolts of remarkable bliss, even ecstasy, so that even as a child I noticed and wondered at the profundity of my joy. I formed a theory that somehow the happy-chemicals in my brain were responding to some sort of unusual always-on stimulus, and figured I was biologically lucky to have such an excess of well-being. And of course I lived in a loving home in a beautiful part of the world, with enough money and enough time, and was successful in school and made good friends, and I’m sure all these things conspired to make me as bizarrely happy as I was.
As an adult on my own in the urban landscape of Seattle, with ups and downs that seem more within the range of normal human experience, with heartbreak and stress and angst and worry and loneliness and depression along with the fun and the joy and the love, I occasionally hark back to my pre-adolescent days of peace and enthusiasm and wonder what changed. On darker days, I think that all the gunk of life, all the baggage of failure and self-doubt and broken hearts that are the normal obstacles in a wearying adult life have so silted over and corroded my natural capacity for joy that it is irretrievable. That never again will I be capable of experiencing the simple, almost spiritual happiness of my childhood. That being grown-up means being necessarily complex and corrupted.
Except—I just took a 10-minute walk in the woods of my childhood. And the very first moment I stepped outside into the dewy, shining morning, peering into the sunlit mist of the shady redwood forest carpeted with ferns, the old joy bubbled up again instantly. And gradually, like a developing photograph, all the human-made follies of thought: that life can be bad or broken or free of wonder; that anybody is evil; that there are irrevocable mistakes that make life worse forever; that I am unworthy of success; that success is even important; all these follies faded and became transparent and were revealed as the filmy, substance-less constructs that they are. And like soap bubbles, they popped. And I was alone in the quiet woods of my childhood, realizing: it was not that I was innocent or un-jaded or free from the cares of the world that made me so happy here. It was that I had the great good fortune to occupy this magical place, these powerful woods of peace, and allowed them to have their effect on me.
I love Seattle, and I love the urban lifestyle, and I suspect I will be a city-dweller for most of the rest of my life. But it is good to remember that I was born a creature of the forest, and if I don’t return occasionally for a solitary moment in the trees, I will waste away into a terrible existence full of irrelevant cares. It is so easy, living in the city, to forget how little all those stressful things matter. For just a moment, taking in a redwood tree, it is obvious that we will live and die and the earth will go on, and my most massive strivings will melt back into the earth and out of memory, and that I lived at all will matter much more than all the things that filled my life. I cannot help but be part of the cycle. My most important work is being done already, without my lifting a finger. I’m okay. And the earth is turning along majestically. Damn, but we are lucky beings.
With gratitude and joy,
Alissa
This is my first time trying to say goodbye to somebody who I know will die soon. It is both a very special and a very awkward opportunity. I find myself really shy around him during the limited time he has energy to hang out and chat–I want to talk about the fact that he’s dying but I’m nervous about bringing it up. I want to know if he’s scared or resigned or annoyed or if he has regrets or triumphs or if he wants another glass of water. But I mostly sit there, round-eyed, trying desperately to think of something to say besides “How are you doing?” to which the answer, of course, is “terrible.” I make banal comments on the weather and compliment his house. I kick myself after leaving his room to let him nap.
He is frailer and smaller than I have ever seen him, of course, but he’s still the same man. I find myself soaking up his face and voice with total pleasure, just marking him down in my head, drinking him in–yes, that is my grandfather. That is the man who put me through college, who didn’t understand my decision to pursue theatre but who supported me every step of the way anyway, who told me not to wait another minute when I told him I wanted to start my own theatre company ‘in five years or so.’ We had that conversation three and a half years ago, and I have now been working on my theatre company for three years. To say that he had an influence on my life is a vast understatement. This is his face. This is his voice. His affection when I saw him the once or twice a year throughout my life was gruff but unmistakable. His first concern is for whether or not I have enough money, and then come questions about my theater and my love life. He is characterized by generosity, a lovable wit, a way of telling you things frankly that make you feel you are in his close confidence, a wry smile, a pleasure at being in charge and making sure things are done right. If he is at the table, he is picking up the tab. There is no discussion permitted about this. A desire to personally ensure that everyone is comfortable. This is his face, and this is his voice. Both are the same as they have always been, though his body is failing. (I am grateful that his mind is perfectly intact; he is still very much present, alert, and smart, and so this time with him feels worthwhile.) I wish that his approaching death did not strike me dumb the way it does, because I want so much to tell him over and over again how much I love him, and see in his face that he understands. I’m afraid to cry in front of him because I don’t want him to feel responsible for comforting me. I realize this is silly. I shed a few tears talking to his stepdaughter on the patio today, when I had escaped the house to read in the sun, but otherwise I’ve been hanging on to them for more private disposal.
The house is full of people–my grandmother’s children from a previous marriage as well as his own children and their families have all come to the house to lend support and bid farewell. Despite the somberness of the occasion, for me it is wonderful to see so much of the family at once, especially Joan’s children, whom I’ve never had the chance to get to know well. We eat, talk, clean up after ourselves, drink, occasionally weep unashamed but restrained tears. There’s lots of love in the house, and preemptive grief, and caution about treating each other well, the sides of the family that don’t know each other enough yet to be quite comfortable with all the messiness and emotion that comes down when somebody dies. So many people have a claim on this man, because he has loved so many.
The presence of so many people in their house seems both stressful and pleasing to my grandparents. This contributes to my shyness. I’m overwhelmed and a little full of unshed tears, but I keep being suffused with inexplicable little throbs of happiness and contentment. Christmas dinner was beautiful and wonderful. I am happy to be down here with everyone even for a few days, I’m very happy that I get to touch and talk to my grandpa one more time, and aside from my pernicious social awkwardness, I feel at peace with the grief coming on.
Oh, there’s more to type, but it’s late and I’m tired for once. Sometime someone remind me to write something about my personal fear of the coming indignity of other people overriding my own decisions “for my own good” when I reach this stage myself. Of course, in most cases, those upstarts will be right, and if I’m as together as Papa is, I’ll probably notice that myself and hopefully acquiesce gracefully. But since reaching adulthood, it sure has been nice to be in charge of my own life. I wonder what it’s like to start sacrificing some of that control again. I doubt it’s totally pleasant.
I am surrounded by sadness and love, and they fit together nicely. I hope you all are having holidays that are meaningful and full of goodness. Holy crap, every year I get another inkling about how important family really is. I have been occasionally slow, learning this lesson. But I’m getting it a little bit, finally. More next year, I bet.
xoxo
Alissa
I tried to figure out the name of that play I saw in college that inspired me so. I think it has the word “Requiem” in the title. I saw it at the UW between 1998 and 2000. But I can’t find a list of their old seasons online, and I looked at their slideshow of production photos but there weren’t any photos from that production. It was about painters who lived in the 19th? or early 20th century. There is a monologue in that show that I want to learn. But I don’t know the title or the playwright. I saw it with Adam, and later that month we fought about money, partially because of something I said to him that was about a conversation we had had immediately after the show. Ringing any bells, people who don’t know what I’m talking about?
(Sigh) it’s my personal Lost Play. I had a great moment watching it, an epiphany about being a woman, and I’m crushed that I can’t go back and look at it again. The information doesn’t seem too impenetrable…ooh, wait! Why don’t I just search on all play titles with the word “requiem”in them? There couldn’t be that many…
Huh. The internet tells me about four plays with “requiem” in the title…for a heavyweight, for a nun, for us, and for the innkeeper. None of those is the play I’m talking about. Shoot, maybe it didn’t have requiem in the title after all. Argh, I just did a search in various play databases for plays about painters and got a little overwhelmed.
So here’s what I remember…there’s this girl painter who wants to be taken as seriously as the boy painters. She enters a (men-only? maybe) salon contest, anonymously, with her painting of light. But her painting is derided as competent but frivolous, and the monologue I remember is her recounting her understanding of why…she had chosen shiny things to paint in her still-life, in order to capture various qualities of light, and had without thinking chosen objects that are considered feminine–a hairbrush, a necklace, a mirror. So that even though the judges did not suspect that it was a woman who painted it, her painting was considered less serious because of her womanly subject matter, and some dude who painted light coming off a haystack or something won the prize. And there was another bit in the play about women not being allowed to attend the life-drawing classes in school because there were naked people and it wasn’t appropriate…except that of course women were allowed to model, nude, in those same classes they were barred from studying in.
Anyway. Anyone know this play? Help! I’m going back to bed to try to sleep some more.
sleepy hugs
Alissa
Late update: Scofie, in the comments, totally showed off his superior ability to navigate the UW’s web presence. The play I’m talking about is Dream of a Common Language. Scofie, you’re a genius. Now I have to go read it and see if it’s as good as I remember!
]]>