big rainy questions and broadway shows

I have a relationship with my mailbox. I fear it as one fears a large body of water at night, which is to say I respect its awesome power, showing deference at all times by leaving it be, lest I upset the tender balance within. I can walk past for days, too daunted to open it and ,when I finally do, the mail spills out in clumps damp with hallway must.

In the belly of that beast is the constant reminder of my resistance to adulthood. Bills and notices out of sight are out of mind. If it weren't for Netflix, and my schoolgirl addiction to the West Wing, I might never turn that little brass key.

Last night I saw Next To Normal and was reminded, among other things, about forgetting. And sanity. Or, the tenuous grip thereon: to quote the first review in the Times, "The notion that personality is fragile, always on the edge of decomposition..."* First it's the mailbox and the bills, then it's all those lost years, and pretty soon—names and faces. Delusions and dementia. The province of anyone with anything worth forgetting.

Which secrets are we meant to let scab over and which must be dredged and mined before we fall apart? How many catastrophes can we suffer before we find ourselves making sandwiches on the floor?

Then come the sacrifices. The ones we make for the damned and the lost in our lives, with or without hope for their rehabilitation. Who is to blame for these wasted hours and broken hearts but ourselves? We make them anyway, who knows why, out of love? (Valor? Compassion?) It is the basic hand to flame response of the human heart. This hurts. I'll help. Ow. Until every last one of us have burnt and bandaged fingers.

In that moment of decision, do we forfeit the right to complain when our better tendencies take us for a ride we weren't ready for? Or may we layer on resentment until it patches over our wounds like kudzu?

Jeez, world. A little heavy for a Tuesday perhaps?

*Ben Brantley, April 16, 2009, New York Times Theater Review

three days of rain?

A Tom Waitsy kind of groggy drizzle. A cappuccino and a muffin kind of morning.

And everything's alright with me. This week, I'm worried about everyone else.

the best of you I like more than you think

I have been reading so much. In that way, solitude becomes me: my long commute provides the time and, these days, the inspiration seems endless. I suffer an addict's pull to the written word. Put a page in front of me and I will lose myself in it.

Evenings with the G.I.Q. are spent listening to TMBD fm, as he makes tea and pours wine and puts books and pictures before me in a parade of wonders of the world that ought to be shared. There are dark parts to both of us, dark parts we are not ready to share, but we have this conversation anyway in clippings of cartoons, in catalogues of art, and in the books passed between us, passages read aloud, movies seen (and slept through) in the muted darkness of the Film Forum. Dancing, I continue to fumble, but here I can hold my own.

This affair has been so much of the winter. Pressed up against the icy window of the Hill Country BBQ on 26th Street in December, running for three am trains in a flurry, spiriting champagne onto the PATH train on New Years Eve. And then last night, just when we thought we had cleared the gnarly grove of winter for good, the wind was back on our flanks and the tile floor cold again underfoot. The smell of wool has become a part of us.

The Spring could be good for us, melt the stories we still don't tell each other, coax the buds from my branches, warm the parts I keep on ice. Then again, it could not. But today there was an ease that buoys me. Home tonight, alone in my sweatshirt, candlelight and wine, I smell like him. Which is to say like Lever 2000 soap and garlic and musty paperbacks. And that is nice.

He excites my best sensibilities. And I notice I am listening harder, paying better attention.

waxing optimistic

Oh, exultant night of surprises. Oh, morning of uncharacteristic cold . . .

Oh city of my doing and undoing, where are you taking me?

Pleasantly exhausted today after closing La Na (again) last night. At three am, I came home to my still cold apartment and swapped the new rose for last Thursday's rapidly wilting one, carrying it to the kitchen trash, its leaves and petals in an anti-centrifugal freefall. It is a civilized touch, a rose for every lady at the milonga as she exits into the misty midnight. Something to remember by.

The dancing: a few new fellas, a few embarrassing moments with good leaders (as per the New Shoe Adjustment Phase) and a few surprises. My dear G.I.Q. gave me his most useful criticism to date and we spent a good two tandas laughing at my molinete ineptitude and enjoying the delirium of a week too long in closing. I have lightened up this week (lifting my hoop skirt of little black rainclouds) and perhaps it shows in our new found ease with each other. Lord knows how long it lasts, but disfruta el momento. Carpe the damn diem.

All things being in flux, who can worry at such a fever pitch? For the foreseeable future, I will most likely remain in the red, continue bumbling along with my hopeless taste in men—afraid to death of them like so many tropical bugs—and suffer from every young woman's chronic dysmorphia. But weeks will continue to tick by, whether or not they are enjoyed, whether you be ready or not, skinny or fat, rich or poor, whether or not the leaps are taken, the kisses stolen. In the words of the immortal Dottie . . . "you might as well live."

I'll be the one practicing turns around my desk chair, the one slowing down, squatting in the tepid moment till my fingers prune, smooching under scaffolding and eating my broccoli, because—goddamnit—it's good for me.

addendum

Then, you know, for all my talk of unconventional choices . . . I ended the evening alone on my couch eating Subway and watching American Idol.

straight up with a twist

Sometimes a martini takes three hours to go down, especially when you're going head to head, downing gin with fearless and underrated legend T.S. and having such a conversation as impedes normal motor function.

I had almost forgotten how passionate I am about theatre theory, and lit and life and making unpopular choices. Funny how easy it is to get lost on the seventh story of a gray-walled office building in New York, stuck in the stagnance of living paycheck to hopelessly acquired paycheck, forgetting what it is to make bold strokes.

Yeah man, I learned to tango—albeit poorly. I walked away from the machine that turns out the factory-issue networking actor wannabes (because I am incapable of promoting myself) and if that means I don't make a career out of bad productions just because it's a quote unquote career, so be it. There's no rule that says I can't produce my own work and sound my barbaric yawp in my own key and cadence. (Sorry, Walt, for the paraphrase.) And in the meantime, I will figure out a way to pay the bills that won't suck my soul out of my nose.

Sometimes it just takes a little "hell yeah" from a lady who once sat on stage in nothing but a bonnet as a naked Mrs. Blake over tea and newspapers.

weekend in review

yes. I didn't slip. Or fall on my butt.

but. With the debut of the shoes, there were wounds. I took a neat little chunk out of my left big toenail at the Saturday morning práctica, and spent most of the evening bleeding from the other in the wake of a poorly led run-in with another woman's stiletto. You learn fast, in open toes, to keep your feet on the damn floor.

yes. I saw the G.I.Q.

but. Said 'yes' to one too many bad leaders who kept finding a way (any way) to careen out of the line of dance and steer me straight into the very man I was hoping studiously to avoid. Mortifying.

yes. We danced.

but. Fatigued, tender-hoofed and battle-weary, I was not in top form. Nor was I emotionally neutral. These trials (bad leaders, bleeding feet and collisions with the love interest in the arms of an embarrassing partner) really dampen the mood. And I, in typical fashion, wore that right on my face.

yes. We talked.

but. Given the state of my countenance and my overall wariness, it was hard to channel the sort of coyness necessary to slog through the general mire of the sex situation (as Ms. Parker would have put it).

I was surly and removed and probably spoiling for the other shoe to drop. I made one valiant attempt to lambast myself when I thought I'd lost a twenty somewhere in my bra, but by the end of the night, my deer-in-headlights schoolgirl passive aggression had got the better of me and I could barely look at him. It was ugly awkward.

So, yes, we talked. But we didn't come to much. Things were said. Things remain unsaid. I was sure it was over, then I woke up in New Jersey.

So how was my weekend? How am I today? The correct answer is: I don't know.

For all my navel-gazing, beloved readers, have I even once gotten it right? Perhaps we ought to face the disconcerting truth that, when it comes to matters of the heart, I am lost in the dark.

In my innocence, I commit to the pursuit of truth. Which is to say: I will figure out what I want based on who I am and I will take the steps to acquire it. Maybe that means humiliating myself in the face of lovers and bosses and fairweather friends, but goddamnit, I'm tired of this. If I don't start asking for what I want, I can no longer whine when it doesn't happen.

Right? right.