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Madness madness, putting it all together in San Francisco and trying to make the show breathe. Our set is amazing. Our costumes are awesome. Our cast is extraordinary. The sound is making something of nothing. The lights are making our shifts make sense. There are plenty of moments still where as an actor I have no idea what I’m doing. I’m pleased with our last-minute rewrites and still sorting out how the ending comes together. We’re not in too much debt yet. Things are coming together. They’re coming. We have two days of rehearsal left until an audience sees a preview.

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.”

Okay YES this is totally ridiculous. But my friend Jana wants, more than anything else in her whole life, to be on TV. She’s auditioning online for this reality TV show–who wants to be Paris Hilton’s bff? And apparently she’s in the top 20 girls for votes, which means she has a good shot at getting on the show. But she’s well behind the leaders at the moment.

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

Mike asked me the other day if I liked horror movies. I mean, I do if they’re good, like anything, but there’s not a part of me that loves to be freaked out and that gets a big kick out of the genre. I love the adrenaline rush of roller coasters, I like standing on the edge of cliffs, I like standing on people’s shoulders and doing new things and meeting new people and being too honest about how I feel and being a beginner. That kind of fear feels like good, clean fear. Healthy fear. Fear that makes you better. Fear of dripping, oozing, lurking, shambling, malevolent monsters feels a little bit…less healthy. Or something.

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

Hey, photos from our poker fundraiser on leap day are here:

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!

I also went and saw a show with Bret on Thursday night called Hey Girl! It pulsed with all these intense, dreamlike images and expensive electric props, and it was supposed to address issues of the feminine image, I think. It wasn’t very good–as Bret pointed out after the show, it seemed to be stuck in the most shallow and obvious symbols and images, and failed to explore anything in a particularly involved way. It succeeded very well in pushing visceral buttons cheaply, though–a loud sound, a compelling trio of images, a violent, disturbing scene–and so it wrenched the gut in a sort of delightfully satisfying way, but without providing much real insight.

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

I had the super-cool opportunity to go to Olympia to hang out in the state capitol on Thursday. There was a bill up for debate in the state House and the Senate about renewing a hotel/motel tax that’s been a large source of arts funding in King County for the last decade or two, and a call to action in the nonprofit community sent us all scurrying down there to show up in support of the bill (which the hotels and motels, quite understandably, would like to die a nice quiet death.) Anyway, the experience of sitting in the legislative session was surprisingly awesome. I have this general notion of legislative politicians as being the doofy sum of their dorky/dumbed-down campaigns, and was pleasantly surprised to find out that in fact, our state government is run by people who seem reasonably competent and intelligent! Who knew? For each bill that was up for debate, the chairwoman called up testimony for and against, and then the representatives would ask perceptive and well-informed questions of those there to debate the bill. There was a woman sitting at the side of the room whose nameplate had the title “research analyst” and it appeared to be her job to answer all the informational questions about the content of the bills themselves. I kind of want her job! Actually, Mom, this would be an awesome job for you. She was there to know all the bills inside and out, anticipate and research circumstantial questions (”is one of the proposed sites of effect on the Indian reservation?”) and explain the information to the lawmakers in the room who don’t have time to research all that. Holy moses! What power!

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

When I was a kid, my friend Chrissy had a big lemon tree in her back yard. We had all the games about eating them without making faces, etc., down pat, but our favorite thing to do was get a ripe one, cut it into wedges, smother it with sugar, and eat it like an orange.

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

Today I received a small box in the mail. Its contents were

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.

Ok, so in order to combat the doubts cast on my Nerdliness by my embarrassing Nerd Score, I find it necessary to display some kind of Nerdly credentia. This should do it.

View my page on Nerdfighters

So much energy into gaining speed down the runway, engines grinding and swearing and panting and hollering, heavy effortful pushing that focuses so much on that drive forward, this heavy bird trying to run fast. And then—a flap drops, light—and we are airborne. Inside, people yawn and do crossword puzzles and meanwhile we are FLYING. Flying. Those Wright brothers and whoever else—I mean, holy cow, here’s something we can’t do and they freaking DID it! Left the ground. Not coming back. Freedom. Like fantasy. Man’s wanted to fly since he saw a bird. Hard to think that at that moment Evolution didn’t look up and go, with a satisfied nod, “My work here is done.” And what I think in the upward-rush-downward-press of that moment of liftoff is “I love, I love, I love. I love, and I am leaving the earth.” I want sex then, something naked and free and thrilling and hard. Flight! Think of it! We are all so jaded, we passengers. But the pilots know. Oh, they know the miracle and they hold it quiet in themselves while everything else goes on, the world, people running about. The pilots take people and put them in the sky. They know what it is they do. And then they bring us gently down again. And we, we put our magazines away and jumble inefficiently out the tiny exit, nodding at them as we fish out our cell phones. I will never get over this modern world. When I die and meet all those people in the afterlife who must be in such high demand I will hunt down Da Vinci and pull him aside and confide in him in a voice husky with emotion, a hoarse whisper because I won’t be able to manage a full voice, and I will say to him, “Leonardo,” I’ll say, “when I was in life, I FLEW.” And he will meet my eyes gravely, and the awe in mine will make his twinkle, and he will understand and be glad.