Domestic Blitz

Reflections of India

2011-12-01T15:02:00.000-06:00

I am back now, from another world. I discovered that the journey you plan to go on is not always the trip you end up taking.

We left Chicago in fine fall and arrived after more than 20 hours in a Mumbai "winter" night: nearly 80 degrees with smoke. Summer like I never had before.

Yes, it was real smoke, since thousands and maybe millions in that teeming Maximum City still cook by small real fire. The balmy air, the crowd, the smell. You aren't in Kansas anymore, Toto, that is for certain. And the smoke mixes with the smog and the thick air of 20 million hopes and dreams.

And so began our adventure. The plan was to get there, recover from the 11.5 hour time difference, check out some sights, get daughter situated in a Mumbai flat, hosted by my college buddy, and then I was to skeedadle to a hill station for a weeklong yoga and ayurvedic detox while she began her experiential study of Bollywood.

Maybe someday I will take THAT trip, but the universe intervened, and shortly after our arrival, my old friend got the call we all would dread. Sister in law was in hospice--after 9 years she had lost the battle with cancer.

Get on a plane and be with your family, said I--what else could my host do but leave us?

I was not about to leave my teenager alone in a flat in Mumbai, so cancel that detox--its time to immerse ourselves in the bustling big city and instead of a native, my child will have me as a guide--scratch that, will have me as a fellow explorer.

So here we are in an artist's garret in the heart of Kolaba, across the street from the much bombed Taj Mahal hotel--an architectural fantasy of scrolls and stone overlooking the harbor and the Gateway to India. Location, location.

Mumbai is seeped in its Raj Heritage and we were in the heart of it. Mumbai is Los Angeles Movie Stars and New York Moxie, with a pinch of Chi Town brawn, and a lot of Rio de Janiero favela thrown in and mixed in a very Indian masala. More than once I found myself thinking India is SOOOOOO Indian. It's just not like anything else.

Learning to navigate a large metropolis is always an improvisation in problem solving. I like to walk a city to get to know it. This will prove quite interesting--with a bit of Risk thrown in, since I gather most natives don't walk if they can help it....

Our inventory of tools: We had a centrally located tree top lair, airconditioned, with a fantastic view --stocked with an excellent library of books and DVD's, as well as food. We had 800 channels of cable. We had daily English language newspaper delivery--a life saver when the internet was not working. We had some support: a driver (when the car was not kaput or his family not sick), a personal assistant wizard magical person with perfect English who I never met but who could be called to translate-- BTW they do not speak English as much as we have been led to believe: a crash course in Hindi would have been a good investment for this trip, as would have been a personal stock of toilet tissue, a rare mystery I never got to the bottom of.....

We had a housekeeper coming in daily, and she sure could cook. And I could watch, so I picked up a number of recipes. The internet didn't work, but we were given a local phone. And so we set about to learn to get along in a new culture. That was a mixed bag, and the learning curve was steep.

There was a lot of seeing sights. We visited the caves on Elephanta Island. Out of Indiana Jones or Lara Croft, for sure. The "deluxe" ferry that got us there could never have passed my old harbor master's inspection.

India is a lesson in Functional Chaos. We Americans get a lot more done with far fewer people, but we don't need to keep so many people busy. I would be happy if a few less people were haranguing me to buy things or give them money--but I suppose I look like a big fat meal ticket walking down the street.

And we have sooooo much. If nothing else, I came away with a deep appreciation for how very rich this country I was lucky enough to be born in is by comparison. The concept of homelessness is irrelevant in Mumbai. Probably several million people would be classified as homeless by our standards. There was a family of 5 living in the street outside our flat--no box, no tarp, just right on the cobbles, outside the western union office where we went to pick up email on a computer from the 1980's. And the slums are like a human collage stacked up in every open space.

The food is amazing. I became a vegetarian. The people aren't doing so well, and the animals never do better, well with the possible exception of cows. So I couldn't bring myself to eat them. And the street dogs and cats broke my heart. There were thousands of them. At 4 in the afternoon, you had to be careful not to step on them as you traversed your path because they would stretch out for a nap on the cobbles. Oh, and the perfume of the city rising from the sunwarmed cobbles-- a city with few public toilets....you can imagine. It is a sensory overload.

But this is the land of Ghandi, and of art traditions thousands of years old, and some of the best stories ever told.
I made my pilgrimage to Mani Bhavan, yes I did. Highlight of the trip. See photo above. Birthplace of modern peaceful resistance. There would be no Martin Luther King without Ghandi. It was moving.

I took Kundalini yoga and chanted for change. I walked. and walked. Used up a pair of shoes and lost 5 lbs. I sweated. I absorbed.

I discovered a contemporary dance festival and a theater festival of new works. The National Center for the Performing Arts became my daily "work". I filled my head with new ideas, and the chai in the lobby for about 60 US cents wasnt bad either. I will miss those samosas they serve instead of chocolate bars at the concession stand. We saw some street theater too-- a tradition alive and well in India.

And all too soon, I leave my child, our host to return just after I fly away home to oversee the second part of her journey. I return to the American Thanksgiving table and to Black Friday and the culture shock coupled with Jet lag puts me in a surreal place. This will take quite a while to process.

Poem

2011-04-01T16:54:00.000-05:00

Don't think I have posted this one before.

Samsara
A Chess Game
of souls.
Recombining
Lifetime after lifetime
A limited series of templates
recycled endlessly
a thousand year life.

or this one:

the Mind
A sharp one
Is not a gift.
Better
to be
A Dog.
With no past
or future
But a bed
And bone.
Kind words.

A good Mind
Sees the subtle shading
of injustice and the
tragic nature of our paltry lives.
There is no peace
for those with vision.

Page for a day

2011-03-31T13:13:00.000-05:00

As a teacher, I believe in imparting lessons through complete immersion. And so I dragged my 8th grader, mandated to take the Illinois Constitution Test this year, and his outgoing little sister, to our state capitol yesterday to be Honorary Pages for the Day on the Senate Floor where they could get an up close look at how that document plays out "in real life". My son had begged for the opportunity--but that was before he learned he needed to wear dress pants, shirt and a tie for the gig. Whereas my girl was excited to wear a pantsuit a la Hilary Clinton, my son is most comfortable in his track suit. But off we schlepped on our first Amtrak adventure. Since it was cheaper on cash and Mom's energy than driving, I thought it was brilliant- but the journey got mixed reviews from my kids who might be a little too used to the Mom-mobile, also known as the "trailer" (for all the times we use it to get into wardrobe for shoots). We crashed in a Ho-Jo's (yes they still exist, and this one had a really comfortable bed) and were up and at 'em bright and early. Son got to borrow a spiffy jacket with a Page logo as pictured, and off they went to the Senate floor, to committee meetings, amidst the Charter School rally, and all the the fireman and paramedics in town to lobby. I got to poke around the historic Lincoln sites while they worked their running shoes off---LOVE the museum. Some highlights from die kinder: my daughter found out that politicians are funny--she thought they were all serious and dry, and is relieved to know that the folks making decisions have a sense of humor. My son discovered that the job of a Senator is really hard, and it's impossible to stay on schedule--tough lesson for someone with OCD, but he seemed to roll with it! Our senator is a warm hearted fellow, and Jewish too, which my kids loved--especially his story about the Obama Hanukkah party. He made the day fun, and his generous spirit is inspiring--my kids are fired up to work on his next campaign. He has great back-up too--the hidden and most necessary angel of our day was his legislative aide. This woman, calm, organized, endlessly helpful, was put to the test with the Gluten free Problem, and she went the distance TWICE to assure that Alec got lunch. She took the kids on a tour of the capitol, and my son noted that many parts are as beautiful as an art museum. This aidde, after a very long day--it looked like a 12 hour stint from the printed sheet---she goes home to sit and watch tv---NO--to serve on the schoolboard!!!! This lady has politics and helping her community in her DNA--and because of her, my kids got the life lesson that getting laws made is chaotic, messy, filled with meeting people and running up and down marble staircases and legislatures are made up of hard working good people. We were actually THERE when the piece of legislation that our family most cares about: the film tax credit extension, was debated and PASSED!!!! How cool is that? I was afraid that my kids were turned off to the legislative process after the ordeal getting the chicken ordinance passed in our town, but now they are much more interested in some of the laws that they saw passed, and one that did not pass. We had a thoughtful discussion on the way home about sometime the intent of a law is good, but it is not worded correctly or has unintended consequences that are bad.

I scored high for that theme based immersion learning experience.

I have returned

2011-03-25T10:24:00.000-05:00

I am back, dear Readers. I must admit reluctantly. As many of you may know, at the end of last summer, my husband was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Navigating the medical labyrinth and dealing with the adjustment to a new normal, well, it stunned me silent. It's not so much that I had nothing to say, it was just too painful to say it, and much too complicated to explain. Sometimes its just simpler to shut up. Silence was more comforting. But now we are on the down side of the hill, hurtling towards a future we never considered,and I am hanging on by my stubby fingernails, so its time to attempt to communicate with the outside world again.

It seems appropriate to post a poem, written by my son

The Roller Coaster of Life

Life is like a roller coaster
When you enter the line you are thinking of what is happening
Eye on the coaster
Mind racing

You get on the roller coaster

                     You're nervous
                          and scared

Fasten your seatbelt
and
                                  wait

The car JOLTS from the start
There's no getting off
You're along for the ride

You can see straight
But you never know what's coming

Or what is around the next turn

            and then
you get off just as fast as you got on

You think nothing more of it.
On to the next roller coaster

I am kind of hoping the next ride is a slower, easier one with nice water features.

On Why You Should Go to College

2010-10-27T11:46:00.000-05:00

We are in the thick of looking at schools, and I post this for all who ask the question WHY????

You asked me why you have to go to college. I thought about it, and while some of these answers may not make sense for a while, here goes:

If we find the right place, a college or university is one of the few and last fertile soils in this busy world where the life of the mind still can thrive. With all the fast paced media, and utilitarian racing about being efficient, there is something rich and innately beautifully and uniquely human in contemplation, dissertation, discussion and research. The right college will help you stretch mental muscles and develop new ones. You will be appreciated for your mind. I joke about the lack of respects for geeks, but so much of popular culture makes one feel like being an intellectual is a bad thing, and yet intellectuals are always what has moved civilization forward, and they are treasures not often valued in a market driven world.

College is a good and right place to meet people who think like you (Or NOT) where you can debate for long hours. In what is commonly called the real world, its hard to find compatriots, and easy to find ninnies who filibuster your ideas.

College can be a fertile environment to continue growing and finding out who you are (or who you are NOT, which can be just as valuable) Hopefully we all help you pick the right school (though the choice is governed by so many external factors I wonder if its just luck of the draw) and you will find it a good place to grow yourself.

College can be a place to explore a discipline or topic you never thought of before, a place to explore your own alternative realities where it won’t cost too much in terms of reputation and aggravation. You are supposed to be experimenting.

Finally, and this is the reason most people give, a bachelors degree is an entry ticket, in our twisted economy, to self sufficiency over time. It is not however, a warranty or guarantee, and it’s the least important reason to go. If all you needed was the piece of paper, that can be done on line. What spending the time and steeping yourself in academia will do is so much more than just a ticket to the next stage.

So look carefully, and look with your heart.

Rant on Race

2010-09-21T17:35:00.000-05:00

Recently some well meaning bureaucrat got some law passed that every student in my state has to literally fill out the race card. But me, I am a bit befuddled. Here is what I say:
According to Merriam Webster, the definition of the word Race is as follows:

Definition of RACE

1chiefly Scottish : the act of running

2a : a strong or rapid current of water flowing through a narrow channel b : a watercourse used industrially c : the current flowing in such a course

3a : a set course or duration of time b : the course of life

4a : a contest of speed b plural : a meeting in which several races (as for horses) are run c : a contest or rivalry involving progress toward a goal

5: a track or channel in which something rolls or slides; specifically : a groove (as for the balls) in a bearing — see roller bearing illustration

Origin of RACE

Middle English ras, from Old Norse rās; akin to Old English rǣs rush

First Known Use: 14th century

Now perhaps they want a description of racial characteristics:
definition of the word racial
—adj

1. denoting or relating to the division of the human species into races on grounds of physical characteristics

2. characteristic of any such group

3. relating to or arising from differences between the races: racial harmony

4. of or relating to a subspecies
But the definitions on the form they keep sending me do not ask for physical characteristics so I am not sure how to answer.

Because I do not understand the questions this form addresses based on the above definitions of classifications I am unable to answer this form based on the answers available.

Genetically, my children are a mix of Oriental and northern European genotypes. Without expensive genetic testing, I cannot give you specific percentages.

Culturally, my children are a blend of urban Midwestern with heavy Ashkenazi influences.

Geneologically, much of the records were lost in World War 2 on 3/4's of the family. We have good information on the Celtic tribal aspect of the family, and there is some evidence that there may be some native American DNA.

If its Ethnicity they want, it is easier. Definition:

eth·nic·i·ty

–noun, plural -ties.

1. ethnic traits, background, allegiance, or association.

2. an ethnic group: Representatives of several ethnicities were present.

Origin: 1765–75, for earlier sense
We pledge allegiance and identify ourselves to the following ethnicities: American.

I am not sure what we gain as a culture from this kind of idiotic bean counting. It might be helpful to know about student achievement in terms of income, or parental educational level--but then we would have to admit that yes, here in America, we have classes, and that maybe all folks are not created equal, but we have to do something to make them equal.

poem by Tess

2010-09-16T11:00:00.001-05:00

Bubbles

Everyone is a bubble,
Born, realised and popped.
Some float up high, hit a branch on a tree....POP.
Some fall down to the ground....POP.
Some fall faster than others but every bubble pops sooner or later.
When I see bubbles being blown
I think of newborn babies and
when they pop I think of the sad death of
Everyone close to me.

As the leaves turn and fall and as we turn for Yom Kippur, that's probably the best metaphor for our lives I can think of. Thanks, Tess.

Fuerza Bruta and me

2010-05-24T14:32:00.001-05:00

In the 1980's I was a performance artist in New York City. I spent a week's grocery money to see the opening of the Philip Glass piece, The Photographer at BAM. I also saw Pina Bausch and Sankai Juku condemning myself to eating out of dumpsters in order to see art that changed the game. I went to 24 hour long renditions of sections of Kei Takei's Light. I learned that art doesn't just hang on walls and theater doesn't have to tell a linear story. And I went to class many a weekday at the studio of Alwin Nikolais, the man who taught me that the people are not always the most important thing on the stage. He also taught me the sheer power of simple theater magic.

I moved to Chicago and began to experiment. I was a live art object late at night at nightclubs and in gardens. I created performance pieces that threw out most conventions of the theatrical relationship between audience and performer---there were no tickets, no seats, no programs, there were planned and unplanned audience members and occurences. Chance was one of our performers. Once we almost got arrested.

Then I got married, needed health insurance, and semi retired from experimenting. But last weekend, I went back, or should I say forward. At the last minute, I got tickets for Fuerza Bruta opening at the auditorium theater. The show was not on my radar. My life could have gone on much as it had before without it. But I did go. And it awakened in me the artist that has long been sleeping.

The show is clearly South American with an aesthetic and image base drawn from a cultural that has survived totalitarian regimes and the paranoia that brings with as baggage. The recurring image of the man running, running, running on the treadmill resonated deeply within me, especially when a wall shot out and slammed into him.

This kind of work does not have easy or easily verbalized meanings--it intersects with the image bank in your own brain, and your life, and evokes meanings that are not easy to speak. Trying to describe it to my husband I was reduced to Blue Man Group meets the ol Limelight at Cirque du Soleil and they travel to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Only he knows what I was blabbering about.

There is a scene where furniture, a sidewalk cafe, appears on the treadmill. The treadmill stops briefly and then starts up and the main character desperately attempts to hold the cafe in place but it dissolves in ever more painful ways.

Sooner or later others join him, on the treadmill for a while then literally falling off the edge. So many times my life is just like that.

I will not spoil the end, the stunning visual image. Everyone talks about the giant slip and slide over head, but for me, the primal dance on the ocean of mylar was more poignant and memorable.

Don't miss this show. And stay tuned for my next one.

Subcribers are Appreciated

2010-05-10T12:40:00.001-05:00

As a Subscriber, I get Appreciated. The audience is always in dialogue with an artistic organization, but a subcriber has a long term invested relationship. On Saturday last, my daughter and I got to reap the rewards of that long term relationship. We had the joy of watching the Joffrey Ballet take company class. I felt a little guilty blowing off my own work out to go, but this was an opportunity not to be missed.
When a dancer is on stage, it looks easy and effortless. It is the pinnacle of what the human body can attain. But these artists are decidedly human with bodies that will someday age. When the dancer is in class, you see that being a god or fairy is work, grueling hard work and you can see the strengths and the weaknesses. They don't always get it right. They are not always together. They are not always that kind of beautiful. But in the way that we broken and damaged souls are all the more beautiful for our flaws, somehow seeing the heart and effort is more moving than the show. At this the final company class of the season, it is morning, after a night of full out performing. I see the bodies are cold, achy.

My friend was amazed at their attire--no pink tights and black leotards! A dance company at company class looks like a group of skinny refugees from a badly stocked and highly picked over rummage sale. Footwear ranges from mismatched sox to down booties to truly ratty ballet slippers in a host of colors and materials.

Some dancers carry in their coffee in Duncan Donuts carry out cups. Some have water bottles. Some wear entire wardrobes of layers and avoid smacking into the giant duffel bags below the bar. I explained to my companions how, in a company class, everyone has a place at the bar--its a territory, and there is an unseen hierarchy. You dare not take a higher ranked dancer's place. It is fascinating to watch how little is demonstrated. They speak in code. Ballet code.

Company class is like daily mass for priests. Its the ritual that holds the world together. You may be hung over or injured or nursing a fever, but your entire known universe will fling apart at the seams if you don't go to class. Something about the regimented order of plie to tendu to degage keeps the earth spinning on its axle and allows you to go on. I have been retired for almost longer than my career lasted and I still want to kill something if I miss dance class. Nothing works right if I don't go to class. Once you have been a dancer, it lives in your body,and your body cannot live without it.

I could have sat in that theater and watched class for the rest of my life. Don't worry Dancers. I will be back next year.

Special thanks to Linda's Iphone for the pic!

Why Subscribe

2010-05-04T20:31:00.003-05:00

It's that time of year when you get the glossy begging brochures: fork over the dough for our fabulous new season!!!! They send you several, each spaced over some scientifically designed interval. And in an age where my belt is tightened to the last notch, I do. I send in the grocery money, or charge it on my Mafia Rate single credit card. In some data aggregation database, I am an ideal cultural consumer, since in the end I subcribe to the ballet, the opera AND to the symphony. I am highly educated which makes me a likely target--but alas I am poor, which negates the rest. So why do I subscribe? Well, for me its a bit like why fundamentalists tithe. I put my little pennies where my passions lie and where my heart lives. I could wait and hope for free tickets. I could get discount tickets through one of the many outlets where unsold seats go, or pine for industry nights. But in the end, I really really love the opera and the ballet and the symphony and I want them to be there when my kids grow up. Even if I don't particularly love everything in the series, I believe we need to support Art because it deserves to continue,whether its my taste or not, and its not like I am chucking my retirement fund on conceptual art--you might say when it comes to subscriptions and cultural investing, I am a fiscal conservative.
I look at it like I do my back garden. I must tend our fair city's cultural garden and my little cheap seats subscription at the back of the house because, I hope, I am putting a little miracle grow on the magnificent harvest of future artistic endeavors. When you subscribe, you provide a base of support for the artists--its money in their bank they can count on, so they can afford to experiment. Yes, that means that occasionally you will see a train wreck on stage, but mostly you are rewarded richly because it forces you to make time for something you love and it doesn't get lost in the busy-ness of living. Once you have kids and dogs and a
mortgage and a job, you don't spontaneously do ANYTHING, so you have to carve out time and make a commitment to getting out of your rut. I get out of my rut, really breathe and come to life, sitting in the back of the house, watching talented performers practice their craft. I will wear thrift store clothes and forego my second passion, travel, in order to be there. So subscribing is the very least I can do. When you love something, you have to take care of it.
Love to hear what you have to say. Click here to leave a comment.

Anniversaries

2010-04-27T11:36:00.000-05:00

I am bad about anniversaries. We always seem to be so broke in time for them, my beloved used to be working on many of them,and it seems unseemly to make a big deal out of surviving and not driving each other crazy. I guess when most folks have been married 20 years, maybe they throw a big party, or go out someplace romantic for dinner. But we are so decidedly unconventional. So after 20 years,of good times and bad, we grab one of my oldest friends from the airport--someone who knew me when I was not yetfully formed, someone from halfway round the world who passes through once every few years, and I forced my ornery children who know my most recent history, and we all DINED together, worlds and times mixing like a ride in a TARDIS, at a fun place like Chicago's Province, a place that is green from its walls to its cuisine. A dining experience that puts our money where our mouth is in our shrinking world.

Dining, as I always say, is what makes us, as a species, civilized. And on a purely personal level, its also what makes up the scrapbook of memories in my life--my absolute best memories have always had a meal involved--whether its our yearly insanity of Cinco De Mayo at our family haunt, Las Palmas,or the Easter Brunch at Va Pensiero I recently blogged about. I have some mellowed and beloved memories of stellar Thanksgiving dinners, of Passover Seders, of my sister in law's beloved Very British Christmas Dinner with Yorkshire Pudding. Think about your best times, and I bet somewhere in there, there is a memorable meal.

I do not actually remember the meal at our wedding---I was too strung out and exhausted to have eaten it. I do remember the meal we had on our first honeymoon--- a drive to Michigan with the old dog and the new dog, and pasta at a roadside dive where the sign boasted Its A Boy. We now have a house out there and we still call the place Itsaboy.
When we came into a windfall, we took another honeymoon---to Spain. I remember a wonderful seaside cafe where we ate Langostinos (lobster) but the BEST meal we had was at a campground on the sea where we ate a chicken we bought from a roadside rotisserie and drank wine we had picked up from a monastery with a huge line outside.
When we opened the bottle we knew why---and almost drove 60 kilometers back to get more.

It was so fitting to share the occasion of arriving at two decades together at table with people who can see the long telescope of the lives we have made. My friend watched wide-eyed as my child slurped oysters. We have "unusual" children with wide ranging pallets which is befitting the offspring of artists, I suppose. When you are in a party of 5 instead of a party of two, it really BECOMES a party, and you can order whatever you want to try, knowing someone else will most likely help you finish it. So we sampled and tried and ate off each others plates and talked and laughed. It was fun to find out, after nearly 3 decades of knowing each other, that my friend and I both love lamb with guilty pleasure--which got eye rolls from the kids. And it was rich oh so rich to watch my mate of two decades teach his children how to prepare an oyster, a delicacy that will, I am afraid, always be lost to me. The chef sent us out champagne, and we toasted to each other's long lives and future.
All too soon, the evening came to an end. The city of Chicago complied with the occasion and gave the streets we walked out onto a lovely sheen from the rain. In the film biz, its called a Wet Down--- a picture perfect shiny evening. We dropped my pal at his hotel, kids passed out in the back.
I cannot believe it has been 20 years. Life goes by so fast. Appreciate it, and try not to dine alone. Thank you my world traveling friend, for making us mark the occasion in such a memorable way.

Arts Education

2010-04-15T13:18:00.000-05:00

As school districts across the state slash and burn their budgets as their ships sink in this perfect storm of property tax caps and state budget crisis, the first barrel to go overboard is arts programming. I for one would like to see consultants, administrators and 5 kinds of standardized testing walk the plank, but unfortunately, in our collective race to the bottom, that will not happen. I know how bad its getting, because at the Arts Magnet school in my town, my daughter is getting a substandard arts experience--the arts classes are not integrated into the overall curriculum, they don't have them every day the way one would have reading or maths, and they are severely underfunded. The PTA steps up and so do I, but what about all the kids who don't have artist parents with the means to pay for enrichment?

I was cleaning out my files and found the state of Kansas' 1995 Guidelines for Program Development in Music. It made me cry. My daughter is on grade level according to their rubrics, but only because I sink thousands of dollars a year into private lessons, music concert subscriptions, and parking costs to take her to our privately funded choir performances. The music program described as the standard for public education in this document is a dream deferred for 90% of the schools in my state, which is not Kansas.

Music is the language of our souls, and what will happen to a society which does not teach this language to its children? We are starving our children not only with the horrible food that passes as school lunches, but in the arts starved curricula we provide them---there are no "nutrients" for their spirits.

In an age which demands creativity and metathinking, the unenriched curriculum will have dire economic consequences for the next generation. But more than economic poverty, I fear the kind of disaffected, disconnnected, small minded poverty of imagination that is like a virus in some of our youth. It's because in the banquet of life and art and mind, we aren't feeding them anything with true energy in it.

And so I will pick through this Kansas Document and try to create my own little OZ,here, with my programs and my habits, to make sure the children I am responsible for are dining at the finest banquet of arts and mind. I want their imaginations to grow FAT with ideas and inspirations.

poem

2010-04-14T18:20:00.001-05:00

There is no precious
Anymore
Just stuff
In barrels, boxes, crates
Organized
And More
And more
So much more
And so cheap that
No one cares,
Overflowing
Abundance
Yet, but
Destitute.

We hoard because we
Want.
There is no need
Except the need like a hunger that is
Never
Satisfied, still chewing on the inside
And swallowing, black hole
Down the gullet, grind
Down that satisfaction till it’s a
Skinny
Starving
Never sleeping
Desire.

Let it go.
Let it go.
Make a space for something new and small.
Open
Give up the
Clutch and Cling.
Clean the slate
So you are New and
Possible.

More will always come your way.

Identity Crisis

2010-04-12T16:13:00.000-05:00

This wild west Blogosphere has me in a pickle. I mean WHO AM I? As a blogger, am I a member of the media, with the responsibilities of impartialism and fact checking that come with being a journalist? Am I an educator, explaining odd things? Am I a pr person whose primary responsibility is to promote products and experiences? Am I Consumer Reports for my demographic profile? Am I a kind of focus group of One? Or am I simply a memoir writer, who gives personal opinions and recounts what has happened to me, a storyteller?

As this new social media/blogoworld/tweet/youtube world evolve I don't think many of us really know who we are, or how we fit in, or what our mission is. I have some friends who consult about all this, and some who have turned their entire lives into product placement ops, and some who tweet constantly and frankly, I am exhausted by it all. So much information---so little time. I think its like any new technology where it takes us a while to figure it out, but meanwhile, I feel unsettled. I have landed in an alien environment and am not sure what the rules are.

I attended a twitter party, meet up, trade show thingy which was wonderful, but its clear how confused I am because even after I went to the event, I am not sure what to call it.

It was like a trade show for me, since I learned all kinds of things, like you can get amazing pretty cupcakes at some Cinnabons, and Garret Popcorn should be my gift to all foreign visitors now that Frango mints are NOT made here anymore. I also had a lengthy conversation about Energizer batteries. I learned that rechargeables DONT NEED TO BE COMPLETELY drained any more which is a huge relief in a house where stuff practically feeds on double A's. And I also learned about a great contest they are having for kids making videos that I will feature on Mamamedia. I signed up to be a lab rat for breast cancer, though I HATE that they call the project an army. I went home with gorgeous gifts---not sure what it says about me that I really really really wanted the schlage lockset but the day was a bad neglectful mommy day for me, leaving my kids to work out their schedule and practice independence with some spectacular system failures, so I felt guilty taking things. I won a raffle prize and didn't pick it up, because I just don't deserve STUFF. Of course, the eBay folks did give me a beautiful Label maker so I can organize my stuff--though my kids will probably walk off with it. I didn't know eBay did classifieds, so that's something else I learned. I like learning about all this stuff in one swoop, and getting a glass of Mr. Chardonnay while I am studying. And eventually someone will want to know something about something I have learned---my readers, you know this. How many of you have asked me, what's the best whatever, whatever? Being the quirky,demographic anomaly that I like to think I am, I like discovering things, and taking my time to get to know them and forming an opinion about them.

I think I feel more comfortable as a storyteller. So until further notice, lets just stick with that. And I need to get back to being a poet.

Best Birthday Ever

2010-03-24T17:11:00.000-05:00

It started a month ago: What do you want for your birthday, mom? It's kind of a joke actually, because every year for every holiday I ask for exactly the same thing.
A Clean House.
My mom got savvy a while back and started booking our old housekeeper to come in every year for my birthday and for the winter holidays. It's easy and always the right color and fit.

The sad thing is, I am serious. It IS what I really want. Its hard enough for me to figure out what I want, when the family has so many needs. And I certainly don't usually dare ask for what I want. Not getting it hurts too much. Still when I look in my heart, what I really want is a clean house. A clean house means I am free to read a book or do something interesting. A house already put together means I can move on, and not be weighed down by the the Awful Should Do's. Every week I finish a full week at work and have to come home and put in another 20 hours just keeping our house from being a health hazard.

But this year, something was different. Maybe this birthday is a big enough number that I can hear the clock ticking. I know the show does not go on forever. And maybe this year, I don't just want a clean house, I NEED a clean house. My world, organized.

And so I asked. But I didn't ask my family. I framed up a little email request, and I asked my dearest girl friends to help me. It was really really hard to ask-- I had the thing on my computer for weeks before I dared to mail it. I am not the one who needs things--I have spent a lifetime in the counter role: the one who rescues and fixes.

I have no problem accessing professional help when I need it. But asking a friend for a favor is really hard for me. Perhaps it is the pioneer stock, the midwestern ethic--it is a mark of one's strength to go it alone. But for my birthday I gave myself the gift of asking.

And so they arrived, in sweats and jeans, ready to roll up their sleeves, and roll em up they did. After 3 hours, I called them off, and we ate lasagna with a celebratory glass of wine, and surveyed their gift: a completely reorganized and decluttered front room, and a kitchen wall of appliances suitable for a photo in a lifestyle magazine. I felt lighter than air, happy, as I took the garbage bags to the trash and loaded the cast offs into the Amvets donation box. A morning of work did not give me an entire house, but it started a process of paring down, of unblocking my chi, of lightening my load, and this process is long overdue in my life.

As this birthday is solidly in middle age, I come to grips with all the things I might not have time for, but there are many things I chose not to have time for: toxic people, stuff that no longer serves me, and patterns that hold me down. The gift of time that my friends gave me was so precious and will last forever--and it will never need dusting.

At the end of my birthday weekend, my youngest daughter asked me, as I ask each of my children each year on their special day, Was it a Good Birthday? It was, it was.
THANK YOU.

Wearin' O The Green

2010-03-17T10:43:00.000-05:00

My people are more Celtic Scottish than Irish, and in the end, if I felt like forking over the bucks for DNA analysis, probably more Ancient Russian tribal with its Asian roots and Teutonic embellishments, but on St. Pat's everyone within striking distance of Chicago is Irish. And so we wear our glowing green, and I paint on Shamrocks and don my ridiculous hats. And I sip a Jameson and read some McCourt in a quiet place.

I have been to the Emerald Isle thrice. It always feels like home. I feel like I am on a very long road to get back to a flat in Galway, or a cottage on the western coast, where fairies might live amid the moss, and the lilt of the speech and the sadness of the tunes gets into my very bones and feels like my own heartbeat. The Irish are a race of tale tellers, and there is something quite old and tribally, limnally very human about them.

So lift a glass to me homeys today.

Elegies

2010-03-11T12:05:00.000-06:00

Last week, on facebook, my neighbor found out she had lost an entire branch of her family tree in a fiery crash on a highway in Israel. I am not certain that is the best use of social media, but I also understand the impulse of wanting to get the inconceivable horrible piece of information out as painlessly as possible, and not wanting to tell the horror over and over again. My friend is still stunned. How could this happen--how could your cousin put his wife and two young kids on a plane to visit family and just never come back. In an instant, in an instant, three generations gone. What do you DO with that kind of a loss? I lost my father that way--in the seventh grade, I went off to school, he went off to work, peck on the cheek,and he dropped dead of a heart attack. Gone. I never said goodbye. I never told him how very much I loved him. And still, every day I miss him. Life is that fragile. We don't think about it every moment of the day, because we would go mad, but in a sense, we remain aware of this tragic fact of existence. We live, we die, and sometimes the transition happens in a second, and there is no time for proper passage.

I attended a class of sixth graders this week introduced to the poetic form: Elegy. It was clear that the poem read as an example of the form got to the kids in a way that a typical educational level lecture never could.

And it was equally clear, that many of these children had sustained significant losses. It is not possible to live as a human on this planet for more than a couple of years without suffering painful, altering loss--whether it is to lose your grandmother, a family pet, or your favorite stuffed animal. One of my children has sobbed over growing out of a favorite shirt---I am losing my childhood! I was told. How many mamas miss the babies we once held--bewildered by the grown people they become? Our existences will be marked by loss. Gain as well, but also irreversible loss. My daughter always becomes very distant and cold towards her pets when they get older---if you call her on it she breaks down racked by crying----she doesn't want to love them so much because they are going to die.

Pets can be especially hard,since their lifespans can be short. I did the same exercise that the students in the class did, and wrote this:

The Last Dog

We ran so many forests
Woody and I.
His golden coat shimmering
In afternoon dappled light.
His big grin and tongue lolling.

Now the trees do not call me so much any more,
Without his peppy bark
Urging me onward.

There are other dogs running with me now,
Butterscotch and chocolate brutes

But not retrievers.

I love them also,
But I have not forgotten
My feathered golden friend with deep sad eyes
My boon companion

The thing I have been unable to convince my daughter is that to hold back love is to miss the good part of the tragedy of our fragile and always too short lives. That the loving itself is the payoff, and the compensation for the pain of the loss. You
lose the experience of the person in your daily life but you never lose the memory of having loved.

Be sure to speak that love to those in your life, because you never know when the ongoing narrative of a life will come suddenly to an end. Just make sure the story is as filled with love as it can be and SAY that love. For those left behind,
especially if there is no chance to say goodbye, it is the gift that we are left with.

And remember. They have not died until the last person who remembers them has died.

Some poems

2010-03-08T13:46:00.000-06:00

Ode to my aging technology

My poor mobile phone
Held together with duct tape
Old enough to be obsolete,
Pre Blue Tooth,
A Dinosaur in my pocket--
Hands free is a quest on Ebay.
But, it works.
And in these days when I squeeze each nickel
Into a thin dime,
A newer phone
Is stubbornly
Out of My Price Range.

Alas, the hands free lobby has triumphed again,
forcing purchases in the name of Safety
They have rendered my phone illegal for much of my day.
Those who pass these ridiculous,
confusing, patronizing laws
Have never juggled three children, six activities, a strictly limited budget
And a traffic jam.
They sit upon their priviledged thrones,
Issuing edicts for us peasants.

Response to the National Arts Index

Sometimes,
Transformation takes time.
And Marination.
Being moved
May happen in a lightening bolt
or like True Love
Sprout
and dig in
Embellish and tangle
Over years.

Trust the process.

On the coming of spring

I am reborn
At the tipping point
Each Equinox
A New Year
The fog lifts
The abyss recedes.

I am Gandalf
After White
Blue eyes, sharp, renewed,
And with powers
Not Witnessed
In my grey
Incarnation.

Ideas pop
Connections swirl
As if the
Inner Physics
Leapt
A Quantum Level

Days grow longer
Sun is golden
Melting the blue
of Ice
Too long
Earth bound.
Soon Green
Soon Warm
Soon, Spring.

Damnation of Faust

2010-03-01T17:12:00.000-06:00

Why you need to see this opera. For ME. Way back another life time ago, I created work that did not necessarily have a narrative through line. I used the best music I could find. I would throw imagery out there--striking imagery made with human bodies. Some of that imagery was drawn from media, because at the end of the last century, and now surely in this one, as a people we have developed a common vocabulary of images that serve as a kind of shorthand to narratives: the line of coffins, a soldier with a weapon. A pregnant woman clasping the flag folded from her beloved's coffin. In my case, it was a woman crumpling to her knees, sob emanating. It was her scream from the floor. Or the other one: people in mist filled boxes pushed around by robots.I would repeat the images, a leitmotif as it were. And I would leave the audience to find meaning--which would frustrate more conventional consumers. I trust audiences. I have always found that our minds will pull it all together and find a story that somehow intersects with who we are and what we care about. We can be moved by a story that cannot be told in words.

To move us, and force us to see the world in a new way--that is the job of a contemporary art work, be it a photo, a painting, a happening in a loft, or in this case, an opera. It is refreshing and wonderful that in a time where we all feel depleted, weighted down with what a friend calls poverty mind, that a so called bastion of the status quo takes a risk, and pulls out the playbook from the most contemporary performance work there is, and puts it out there to resonate. There are some traditionalists out there having a problem with a beetlejuice Brander--but I see a man decayed by his lifestyle. That vision drills into my brain. And come on, those Rat Dancers, it brings something sleazy and depraved and exploitive into the mix, even if you are not sure what it is. This show has to sit with you a while. The music will rock your socks off and I giggled to see it listed in a hip publication next to totally au courant music choices like ticketmaster Uber Concerts. This show could totally play BAM, and I love that it could draw a new generation into the hallowed halls of Wacker Drive. But go, spend the money and get a ticket. Because this show is going to stick in your eyeballs. You are going to think about it for years. You are going to find yourself downloading the tunes. This show takes my venerable beloved grandma and puts her in my daughter's generation.

And we need to get out there and support LIVE ART. Just like we need to spend more for REAL food, we need to put our money and our bottoms where our belief system lies. If you want there to be a place where your body can vibrate to the vocal and artistic equivalent of the Olympics, you have to support it with your presence.

Don't miss this show.

Fantastic February

2010-02-23T13:14:00.000-06:00

Ordinarily, February is one of those dud months. Drags by. But this year its just been one party after another. It began really with our Superbowl Junk Food holiday. We hosted two exchange students for the night for an authentic American evening curled up in front of the boob Tube, with a big dog in your lap. Our guests are from China, which does not really have a Dog Tradition. Our pooches managed to win them over. And they loved our Junk Food Buffet. Big contest for Best Advertising.
Then it was Chinese New Year, with nice healthy dumplings and fortune fish, rushing right into Greek Food Night(could NOT manage a canadian menu) in honor of the Opening of Olympics (another night around the telly, maybe not so good to be couch potatoes WATCHING athletes)

All those Olympics shined a light on our house sport of speedskating, and there were some 5 am ice times for tv promotions that kind of scrambled my head. We are NOT morning people. But it sure makes the snowy cold grey days of winter speed by in a kind of fatigued blur. Oh, don't let me forget Valentines Day which turned into a film festival with a lot of red dye staining the counters when we made our first red velvet cakes. Think I will pass on that one next year. Many doilies died for our loves.

Next up: Laissez Les Bon Temps Roulez, and we beaded up, donned our masks, and went over to Dixie to celebrate Mardi Gras where I got my yearly Hurricane and hubby cracked off a tooth under a crown, so we could add going to the dentist to the to do list. Boo Hoo. Jambalaya is hard to eat on one side of your mouth.

Funny moment the next day. My son thought they put HOT ASHES on your head for Ash Wednesday. He felt sorry for everyone with smudges. "Thats gotta hurt" he said......

And FINALLY an opera in the house--so rehearsals ate up another batch of winter doldrums. You will completely regret it if you don't see Damnation of Faust. Hot show. But its really funny to look at our daily calender and see DAMNATION on the to do list.

We are coming in to the final stretch of the busiest February on record, with a Shakespearean competition, then the final race of the speedskating season where WE are the hosts and finally PURIM. I will reprise my annual role of Esther and have tea with the small ones at Ye Olde Preschool. Haman Taschen---mmmmmmmm.

You can hibernate through winter, or OverActivate. Planning on getting organized in March--putting the costumes away and unblocking my Chi. May you survive the snowstorms and SAD. Spring is coming, you just can't tell.

Slow Food

2010-02-01T11:21:00.000-06:00

Yesterday, in a bit of stealth political work, I dragged one of my children and a girlfriend to the Annual Meeting of Slow Food Chicago. I had heard about the slow food movement years ago, and have been a practitioner (without being a zealot) for as long as we have owned land in Michigan. Once you have eaten produce lovingly harvested by your neighbor, the farmer, there is no going back. I have this philosophy that says that breaking bread is the fundamental act of civilization, and though,in practicality, I fall short of my ideals, I remain committed to mealtime as a sacred moment. In our house, slow food might be genetic--I have at least one child who was born a Slow Food devotee---even as a baby, this one did not eat, she dined.
I have been slipping Slow Food concepts into my programs (a practice which often makes me the laughing stock of my staff) for the last two years. But when you are prosyletizing to the unconverted, one must be subtle and kind. And hauling my compatriots to an hour long power point presentation was underlined by the heart of the movement, Food, which is always the way to make a convert. The Food. Artisanal cheeses that were Happiness on your tastebuds. And honey that was sunshine and summer on the tongue. Jasmine tea that warmed my soul. Slow food might be a part of my spiritual and religious identity--we are, truly, what we eat, and when what you eat is so unbelieveably beautiful, it makes you have faith in higher powers. I have come to want to "infect" the public education system with Slow Food. I think if kids sat together and dined, it would forge a community spirit like nothing else. Can growing and eating food be educational? I was reading some student reflections on a local garden and it makes me think that there may be no more authentic lesson plan than to grow and consume your own food. In incorporates literacy, math, science, social studies, and something so lacking in the world of youth today: connectedness.
So today, for me, choose something beautiful and delicious for a meal. Eat it slowly and mindfully. And find pleasure in this most basic act.

Elixir

2010-01-21T13:23:00.000-06:00

So I crawled out of my winter funk and took the metra down to a dress rehearsal at the Lyric yesterday. Life is ALWAYS better with opera. You know the music will be good. But how could such a big ol institution know that after being up all night with a kid with the stomach flu, exactly what I needed was an overdose of sunny Italy, some tight physical comedy, the golden tones of Nicole Cabell flirting with the boys. And the FABULOUS steampunk vision of Alessandro Corbelli as The Doctor Dulcamara with his big ol horse and wagon out of Dr. Parnassus. They need to sell that hat at the gift shop--everyone would want one. Look out Johnny Depp.

Ok, Ok, going to a movie is cheaper or you could hibernate with something off of Hulu, but crawl out of your frozen lair, throw on some polar fleece and get to the Lyric. I know a bunch of budgetarily challenged opera fans have broken down and given up and are heading out to the cinema to get their opera fix with them new fangled Met things (and it IS a way to see the competing Tosca versions), but I am hoping the lure of live theater brings them in again when they are off unemployment and back on a payroll. And if it warms up its so fun to dress up and just waltz about the golden lobby and feel so fancy.

Elixir made me feel like going home and having a lovely giggly glass of wine and smiling, no matter what life throws at me!

Musings on Shopping

2010-01-12T10:24:00.000-06:00

When I was a girl, shopping was an idle pastime. We would go to some suburban downtown and poke around a favorite store. Betty's sticks in my mind. There was no real agenda, and I don't remember having much money (and I saved all that I would earn--all my kids know how I was able to spend a summer backpacking around Europe on babysitting and birthday money)

When there was a big occasion, your mother would take you to try on dresses and then you would have lunch somewhere. As teens in the 70's we discovered malls. Mom was not invited. We scoped for boys, ate fries in the food court, and tried on makeup at the department store counters.

Then I grew up and went away for college. Shopping became an ordeal of necessity--find a kid with a car and trade favors for a ride, or get on a bus for an hour to get to the mall and then trundle it all back. Shopping became a chore, not a way to while away the time I did not have.

Then I went off to New York for grad school and shopping became an adventure. I rediscovered the thrill of the browse: Soho on Saturday, street vendors in Alphabet City late at night on the weekends(before New York got cleaned up), window shopping on Fifth Avenue, Korean deli bar poking around on Broadway, or getting LOST in Strands Bookstore in the Village. I never bought much, but I acually got addicted browsing. Then, I finished school and moved to downtown Chicago, and sometimes I would just wander through stores looking at Stuff to clear my head. I would still travel to ethnic neighborhoods for the adventure, but when I set up a grown up household, somewhere in there, shopping stopped being a form of amusement and once again became a task on a large list of things to be accomplished: find a lamp for the reading area, get a throw rug for the bathroom to replace the one the cat destroyed. I even had a few jobs where shopping, or procurement, was a JOB. I got paid for the ability to source and obtain strange items for a reasonable price. This was a handy skill to have in an artistic career---and to this day I can find artistic inspiration in a hardware store.

Now the internet makes procurement so much easier. The ease has made me forget how much work SHOPPING can be. And the predominance of internet procurement in my life means that I have totally fallen down and forgotten to teach my kids how one shops(except thrift shops, antique stores on vacation and rummage sales--I have taught my kids how to Scavenge, not Shop). My sister in law had picked up the slack with a yearly ritual of an outfit and a lunch, but the demands of her own kids and full time job took that off the table. And so, I found myself last weekend, at an upscale mall with my youngest. I needed a winter coat, and I should have known that if I could not find it online, it probably does not exist(orange down, with inside pocket, under $100) but in the interest of connecting and introducing my child to a tradition, off we went. My daughter LOVED the day of being an only child with mama. She is a clothes horse, fashion maven and wanted EVERYTHING. But she now knows now that I am the pickiest shopper in the known universe, and I am not sure if she will ever shop again with me. We never found the coat I need. But she scored buy one get one free leg warmers, a Snoopy tee shirt on massive sale, and yet another Ugly Doll, on half off. (How man Ugly dolls does a girl need---as many as she can get!) She loved the way Nordstroms wrapped her package, and she compared and contrasted the ambiance and product mixes at the various stores. We liked Lord and Taylor. Kinda hated Macy's, which looked like the store had been raped. And we started late, so lunch turned into French Onion Soup and a pint of Guiness at the pub for dinner. Not a bad day. Not sure I will do it again, but though I bought nothing, I brought home a lot.

New Year

2010-01-04T18:44:00.000-06:00

The day before the old year ended, I finished out a journal. I have been journaling since high school, and it always feels literally like the end of a chapter when I finish out a book--they are filled with poems, sketches, essays, the flotsam and mental jetsam of an overactive mind.
By the time I finish, the book is worn, pages are dog eared and stained, crunchy with use. Some of the ink may have run, the pencil may have smudged. I never plan when they should end. I just run out of pages. And then I must select a new book. It's exciting to crack it open and smooth the pages, all empty and waiting. I always pick a special pen to start a journal.

And so, this new year and a new journal begin. Of late, its not as big a deal, because after misplacing one journal, and leaving another in a different state, I have taken to having overlapping journals, which will drive some doctoral student nuts if I ever become famous, but since that is so entirely unlikely, I don't worry about it.

I do like to read through an old journal as an end of year ritual. I just randomly flip through a book. I try to guess the year. I like touching base with where I have been. Last year, before my daughter went off to Germany by herself (well, without a family member--she was part of a horde of teens) I reread my old travel journal from when I bummed about Europe one summer over two decades ago. Very little of my core has shifted, even as gravity takes its toll on the shell.

My other big ritual for the turn of the year is to pull out a tarot deck. I find them endlessly interesting for the free associations they pull out of cobwebby corners in my head. This year, I kept gettingthe World. Hmmmm.

Oh, and I take a big ol hot bath. Wash away the old, spoil myself for the new.

Here's to rituals. And newness.

The Tree

2009-12-15T08:57:00.000-06:00

When I was a kid, the neighbors across the road had a Christmas tree farm. Every year, my dad would go up to their farm in November and help them harvest the trees. He would return, tired, on a Sunday, with our own glorious tree--part of his payment
for the work--which he started taking one year after he had been out of work for a while in the recession of the 70's.

The Tree was Dad's Thing.

He would meticulously wrap it in lights, including bubbler lights that he had gotten from his granddad. He would teach us how you have to lay under the tree and look up through the branches in a darkened house at night, breathing in the piney scent, and watching the lights twinkle.

Mom would holler comments from the kitchen and change the records that would accompany tree decorating sessions: Nat King Cole, Bing Crosby, the New Christy Minstrels, the Smothers Brothers. My dad had worked at Columbia records so we were deep in vinyl.

One spring day, seven days after my thirteenth birthday, my father dropped dead at work.

It was an impossibly difficult year and as we surmounted the hurdle of
each holiday without Dad for the first time, and we all dreaded Christmas the most. We could not even bring up the subject of the tree.

Yet there on our front stoop one December morning was a tree, bagged and waiting. Somehow my brothers, aged 11 and 10, and I got that tree into the
stand and decorated. For YEARS afterwards, a tree continued to arrive on the doorstep every year. Dad's memorial tree.

And so I always have a tree--it must be live or there is no point to it (although I find the blue or silver or white trees impossibly retro since those were the kinds my grandparents had) When I was a starving artist in a tiny New York apartment, the tree was moth eaten and small and dragged down from Harlem.

I cannot conceive of December without a tree in my house. This made life quite complicated when I married a nice Jewish boy from New York. He found
my December ritual of hunting down and killing a tree quite amusing when we were dating. But it was quite another thing to drag him to tree farms once we had
pledged our troth and were keeping a mostly Jewish home.

It's my tree, he doesn't ever have to touch it, and yes, we hang dreidles on it. He didn't have to lift a finger the year I was a week and a half away from giving birth
to our first child and had my girlfriend come to the tree farm---I could not get close enough to the ground with my huge belly so she had to do the honors, but
I got that sucker into the stand, belly or no.

It's a little wierd I know to do a havdalah baby naming for your third child with an everygreen behind the rabbi. I make fabulous latkes,and the best matzo balls in the family, but I gotta have a tree.

Nowadays my trips to the woods have become mad after work dashes to the Home Depot. I switched to lightweight balsam trees because I found you could carry a baby
in one hand and the tree in the other.

My children now help and can tell the story of each ornament."This nutcracker came from my boyfriend the year I stage managed the Nutcracker at the Morris Civic Auditorium in South Bend." and "This was the cake topper for my fourth birthday". "This we got the year we got the cat."

I let the kids camp out in sleeping bags under the tree.

The evergreen tree is not a Christian symbol, btw. It is a very old, deep and pagan symbol of the regeneration of life. Before the Romans came crashing through the northern lands co-opting every tradition they could find (because they knew that hearts and minds must be won as well as lands) the Northern Tribes brought evergreens into the house with the hope that the sun would return from wherever it was going, earlier and earlier each day. In the frightening, freezing dark days of solstice, the smell of pine was the symbol that life would continue, spring would come again, and the light would return. Ashkenazis come from the land of cold winters, so maybe pine sniffing in the dead of winter is part of the cellular memory of any tribe that made it through a cold winter. I have come to love and crave the smell of latkes frying and the quiet glow of the menorah.

But I gotta have my tree.

For me the tree and the stories we tell of it are the symbols of hope that my father will live on in my memories of his children and the grandchildren he did not live to see.

The tree is my fathers yarzheit.

Hanukkah Gift Ideas

2009-12-09T11:05:00.000-06:00

Yesterday, I did an interview with Channel Two about regifting. The reporter was shocked that I regift, shop my own belongings, and dumpster dive and thrift shop for gifts for ALL occasions. But passing on gifts is a green and generous tradition. We also believe in No Presents at our house. If you have never read the book Three Cheers for Catherine the Great by Cari Best, lay a hold of it, and find out what a No Present is---a gift of self.

For those of us who are checkbook/credit card challenged for this eight days of light, I offer you some ideas for "conceptual" gifts(some from my house, some from the other speedskating moms last night at the rink) Gift certificates for highly valuable priviledges: there is the Get out of Jail card---for a grounding, for chores when you don't want to do them or don't have time. There is the You Pick the TV Channel today card. There is the I do your Chore for you card--which is transferable. There is the You can Borrow Anything from my Closet card. Even my son wants one of those so he can wear his dads weapons to the ren faire.

One of the moms wraps up a 10 or 20 spot and has the kids walk over to the computer and choose a charity to give it to. Since I don't even have one of those "spots" this year, one night will be mitvah night and each child will choose a charity that we as a family will volunteer for.

We have been talking a lot about needs versus wants at our house, and I will be buying some Needs with Want Flair and wrapping them in lovely paper. For example, we have foregone breakfast cereals for healthier and cheaper hot cereals. But each child will get a box of their FAVORITE sugar laden breakfast cereal for the holidays.
We have blown through a lot of sox since sandal season, so I have been trolling the dollar stores (and thrift stores) for really fun ones--toe sox, pirate sox, and dreidel sox!!!! There have been some fights over the Neutrogena, so everyone gets their Very Own bottle. Hope my kids don't read my blog for a week.

And can I just say thank you for whoever decided that fried potatoes would be the traditional dish---gluten free, vegetarian and CHEAP.

I just love the Eight Nights of Hopeful Lights.

Thanks! I needed that

2009-12-04T15:12:00.000-06:00

As many of you know, I am in a state of despair about our broken education system. I do the Debbie Downer pretty much timed with every school board meeting and the fact that they are slipping a meeting in to raise our taxes AGAIN--sneaking it into the holiday season when my family is mulling the Christmas Hanukkah dilemma and no one has time to pay attention to board meetings has me seeing RED.

But then,in a little brown wrapper, it arrives in my mail. Close Encounters of the Third Grade Kind by Philip Done and this funny, poignant memoir of teacher and school gives me just a thimbleful of hope. I have children now that no longer love school, despite good grades and a well regarded system. I would read chapters aloud to them at bedtime and we all spent a little minute wishing they could have days like Mr. Done seems to have.

See, I said to my kids, teachers love and care for their students. And Done is not a starry eyes Teach for America recruit. He is a seasoned old fart who knows what he is up against and comes back every year, because this is what he was born to do.

I come from a family of teachers. I was an artist in the school, tough schools, for a decade. I did everything for a certification as a teacher except the final exam, because even then I was depressed about the soul deadening factories that schools had mostly become. I just couldn't spend my life there. Of course the irony is that I became a bureacrat and I send my kids there---but life has a lot of black humor in it!

I have heard from those that have read both that Done's first book is better constructed, but I found this to be a perfect holiday ho ho, for those of us who need a little good news, a belly laugh and a tear or two. It is not great literature, but it is an easy quick read that reminds one of the small jewels that lie in the everyday and ordinary. And it gave me that thimble full of hope that schools can be magical and transformational.

The Holiday Arts Roundup

2009-11-23T16:07:00.000-06:00

Ok, so every year everyone calls and emails me about this time and asks: What should I take my kid to see? So to save you time, I present the Holiday Performance Round Up for the Chicago Area.

The first thing you have to figure out is WHY are you going to see something. As a mom who favors EXPERIENCES over OBJECTS, I think going to see shows and movies during the holidays is more calorie conscious than my usual eating myself silly at some party, and its more ecological than driving around and then waiting in horrible crowds and lines to buy stuff I really don’t need and will neverget put away. So I go to a show as a way of being festive and green, and having fun with my kids. But don’t go see the Nutcracker because you feel like you HAVE to. Going to a show should be a transformational event, a memory, a gift, so you have to pick the right ones and pace yourself carefully.

Here in Chicago we are blessed with the cream of the crop of tip top professional productions: the Joffrey Ballet’s Nutcracker which is as good as NYCB (sorry George) and is in the Auditorium Theater, a space that is more magical than any venue in the United States. But if your child cannot sit through 2 plus hours of formal ballet, don’t spend the money yet. Ditto on the Goodman Theater version of A Christmas Carol. If you have older kids who can appreciate great acting talent and Broadway quality production values,crack open the piggy bank and forego something else and go. If you have kids that bounce on seats (and kick the one in front of them) and don’t know the difference between a movie and a live show, wait another year at least.

There are plenty of community theater versions of Nutcracker and Christmas Carol to go to at a theater near you. Look for abridged versions. And it’s best to go to the one that is most convenient---great if you know someone in the cast, or that’s not too expensive so if your kid spikes a fever two hours before the curtain you don’t want to murder them, and you can gift the tickets to some last minute mom in need of a break without resenting the recipient too much…. There are even interactive play along versions of holiday classics now---my daughter created Evanston’s Dance It Yourself Nutcracker and there is a fun one at the Cultural Center on Washington and Michigan Avenue. And of course, this year, we have a new MOVIE version of A Christmas Carol!!! And speaking of movies—our family has always had a holiday tradition of cuddling up with a nice warm bucket of popcorn and enjoying all types of cinema. Can’t recommend It’s a Wonderful Life enough--- after 20 years I still cry. And you really can watch A Christmas Story every year. There is something reassuring and comforting about watching the same stories over and over. I still read Patricia Polacco’s The Tree of the Dancing Goats, and The Hanukkah Guest from Eric Kimmel (whose Hanukkah Goblins are also staples at our house), and now Lemony Snicket’s Latke That Couldn’t Stop Screaming every darn year to my kids who are way too old for bedtime stories….So drag Elf and A Charlie Brown Christmas out (or get it in Blu Ray, or OMG dig out the VCR you kept for history) and gather round. My kids still call it the Abdominal Snowman who scares the misfit Toys on that retro 70’s animation of Rudolph. We know all the lines, all the songs, and we LOVE that. This year's holiday releases do not suck. We are looking forward to Wes Anderson adapting Roald Dahl!

But back to the live performances—and non denominational ones. Head off the beaten path and over to Victory Gardens for The Snow Queen. For some reason Blair Thomas’ puppets and the score have captured my kids’ imagination and it’s a new holiday tradition, complete with playing the CD to fall asleep. And then there is the Redmoon Winter Pageant, my personal holiday tradition. They always surprise me with some visual feast—I leave sated, and completely unable to explain what I just saw with words.

If you are going to bundle up and schlep somewhere, make it a true holiday highlight. Create some tradition that goes with the show—cocoa afterwards, or driving by the windows on State Street on the way home, or maybe you have a cookie hidden in your purse. Some folks like dressing up—I have kids who HATE anything itchy so we let you wear pajamas to a show (under your coat) if you want. Nice pajamas of course. Ladies, if you want to wear a tutu or tiara--do it.

Do whatever it takes to make being together special, warm and memorable.

Mama's Movie Night takes on the Grandma of em all

2009-10-12T15:32:00.000-05:00

When times are hard, the arts tend to get all retrospective, and nostalgia is this season’s trend. Film companies appear to be heading for the vault and reissuing anniversary editions of iconic classics. Weekend before last, we celebrated the 70th anniversary of Dorothy and Toto.

Then the folks at Disney sent an army of us bloggers the Diamond Edition of Snow White to examine, just in time for the October 6th rollout. I’m pretty careful about my freebies, preferring to pick my way through popular culture on my own, but as a media educator, the chance to write about the very first full length animated feature ever made was too great for my film buff household to pass up.

The eagerly awaited DVD/Blu Ray boxed set arrived, and we ceremoniously gathered round for what in our house is known as Mama’s Movie Night. Last week I had my long suffering students, I mean children, sit through Alexander the Great with Richard Burton. Next week we will be looking at Garbo. But this week we harkened back to their grandparents’ day, and it’s Snow White on a cold Saturday night. We watched the DVD version, since our friends who have a Blu Ray had a previous engagement. We have not invested in the newest technology---we still watch old VHS versions of many films, and times are hard in our house---which in a way makes us pretty similar to some of the folks watching Snow White when it first came out.

I don’t mean to be picky, but when I told my kids we were getting the Diamond Edition, my daughter expected a really nice box. And I agree---if you are peddling an artwork as groundbreaking as Snow White, it should probably get something with a little more preciousness than the usual plastic portfolio tucked into the stand by the grocery checkout. I wish the presentation of the discs had carried a sense of the jewel sitting on the shelf. But I can see from the Disney website we got the low end addition. LOL. Maybe I will make a pretty jewel encrusted case for my daughter, who is now inspired to do a vintage Disney birthday party....

It is so hard to convey to a media saturated child of the 21st century what a ground breaker this movie was. Back then, stories were heard, not seen. Masses huddled in the dark and folks must have been awed and moved by this lusciously colored version of a childhood tale. I could not give my children the eyes of children from the 1930’s—I had their highly sophisticated eyes accustomed to hundreds of visual images a day. But I wanted to know how this work would measure up to its filmic offspring: Pixar and Studio Ghibli.

The old girl held her own.

My youngest liked the old fashioned simplicity of the images and got really into the backgrounds. My tween boy was most taken with the dwarves—the rest he maintained was a “Girl Story”. We are all still wondering how they did the water in front of the dwarves house. Both kids noted that the DVD was “clearer” than our old VHS version. I can’t wait to impose on our friends and see the Blu Ray now.

And then my kids drifted off to dreamland and I stayed up to the wee hours picking through the bonus features. The most fun was the audio commentary they pieced together with ol’ Walt himself, and you get to hear the arduous struggle of trying to invent the technology as they went along.

When you look at the previews (which I usually hate), its an eye opening to get such a graphic, side by side look at how far Disney animation has come. And we absolutely adored the sneak peak of the upcoming feature The Princess and the Frog. Disney, who ordinarily never shows its back side or inner workings, shows six minutes including sketches and chunks that are not yet colored. One can see the process of creating the finished product. We LOVE that, and now can’t wait to see it. So if the main purpose of the release was to drive traffic to other Disney properties, it has accomplished its mission.

But in the end, here’s the takeaway for families that are not studying film: Snow can still provide you with a nice night of family entertainment. We got to talk about what entertainment was like back when my children’s grandparents were young, and we got to see where all those songs came from and we sang along. I caught my self hi ho-ing off to work this morning! My children have heard many of the Grimms tales, so the scary and unPC bits of the actual tale did not pull them up short---and they are clear that this was a story From the Olden Days. So if you are looking for an updated snazzy trip down nostalgia lane, you could do worse than the animated feature that started it all (and the reason why studios thought the Wizard of Oz was a bankable project).

And if you are not into nostalgia, the Chicago International Children’s Film Festival opens in about a week and a half, and you could see where film will be going next! We are all lined up for the new Wallace and Grommit…..

Opera and the DSM

2009-10-06T14:43:00.000-05:00

I have been spending WAY too much time with therapists of late. I know because I sat through the tragedy of Faust and kept seeing mental illness instead of characters! The soldiers all clearly had PTSD and Marguerite had one nasty case of post partem depression. Execution seems a bad way to treat a new mom who has clearly lost her marbles, so we have progressed a bit as a civilization since this tale was inked.

I started to think of all my favorite operas and I realized that if we had better psychiatric care in the last few centuries, we wouldn't have any decent plots! If SSRI's had been invented before booze, where would the human race and classic tales be then, I ask you? Prozac nations don't do awful things to their families and lovers, and where's the drama in that?

But maybe that's an important point--we all struggle through our human condition as generations have in ages past. The passions, the pain, ultimately death--which is often untimely, are common to all--although most of us can't sing our way out in an unwavering aria.

Sometimes, especially when its been a hard week, I find a trip to the opera is so cathartic. It's an escape, yes, where I can lose myself in the sumptuous staging or the unlikely fantasy of throwing oneself off a rampart after a little music that rocks me to the core (can't wait for Tosca, can I?), but it also is cleansing in a way that deep true emotion is. Truth become the underlying vibration, an aura in the air. Someone always loves something too much at the opera--whether its Faust who loves youth, or Mephistopheles (my daughter and I disagree---I totally would have signed a deal with that guy, she thought he was creepy) who loves to capture another soul in his stable. And Siebel who loves Marguerite. Haven't we all loved something too much and badly. Regrets and wasted lives are much more palatable and nuanced at the opera than on the front page. Fenger High School needs a Gounod to steep us in that tragic tale.

And I await the operas that tell stories where women are not the pawns of men. But that will have to be a new generation of tale tellers. Get to work folks, I NEED you. I just can't wait for the rest of the Lyric Season, where I can escape the parking debacle and the state budget woes and immerse myself in times that were REALLY hard.

I know I have heard grumblings about all the old chestnuts pulled out for the season from some other opera fans, but times are hard and we need to revisit the old beloved tales, and we need opera to be here in 5 and 10 years so I appreciate that the scions of culture have belt tightened a wee bit to keep on keeping on.

See you at the Civic.

Transcience, transitions

2009-10-06T14:26:00.000-05:00

In ancient times, this was a scary time of year, as the sun died. Today in the parking lot, a woman died. You stop still, and take stock.

This morning,on the radio, Jude Law was talking about playing Hamlet and how the character could have been a great king, but life beat him down. I could relate--I have been taking that beating of late. It can twist you and snuff out the flame of dreams and inspiration. Course, I have not resorted to murder just yet.KIDDING.

But then I got a call to talk about dancing the repertoire of Isadora Duncan as part of a talkback after When She Danced at the TimeLine Theater--a play about Duncan towards the end of her life. My inner artist awakens.

And so I share what I wrote after a lecture at the Goethe Institute by a fascinating artist named Raimond Hogue--he served as Dramaturg to Pina Bausch. And for those of you who want to know, YES I missed the Merce show last weekend AND the the Links Hall 30th---the laundry needed doing, there was no food in the house, and someone in our collective lives has to make sure the home is made or we will all be Home Less......

Tribute to Pina and Merce.

Is that all there is?
If that's all there is, my friends, then let's keep dancing
Let's break out the booze and have a ball
If that's all there is…..Peggy Lee

I am supposed to be at this very minute writing up bill payment forms and a grid for next summer’s space useage at my very bureaucratic arts admin day job.

I am supposed to be at this very minute running three children around to various activities so that I can be a good mother and they can grow up to be exceptionally wonderful.

I am supposed to be at this very minute productive and cheerful and at the height of my powers.

And I am at this very minute, here and now,

Standing Still.

Because Life is passing me by.

I was so promising and talented and then the kids and the mortgage and the ever changing and often crappy health benefits and the leaky roofs and the furloughs and the downsizing and the disappearing pension act and cancer and auto immune thingys and you know it never quite comes out the way you planned

But I still have dreams.

See I saw Pina and Merce and Alwin and Martha and Hanya, and I breathed the same air as they did. We lived at the same Time.

I learned the dances of Isadora from someone who learned from someone who learned from her,

And I know

You do not stop dancing because you grow old. You grow old because you stop dancing.

And as that hoofer Patrick Swayze said in Ghost: You take all the love with you when you go.

You take all the dances.
And if you are lucky,
Others keep dancing them.

Because all there is IS the kids and the aging parents and digging out the car in February and the school permission slip that the cat threw up the hairballs on.

And this only moment

and I AM dancing.

Still

Is that all there is?
If that's all there is, my friends, then let's keep dancing
Let's break out the booze and have a ball
If that's all there is…..

My daddy dropped dead of a heart attack on his lunch hour at the age of 36. It's made me more cognizant than most that we are here such a short time. We never know when it will be our time. Be. Here. Now. Love. Live.
Dance.

There is nothing more you can do.

Back to School blues

2009-09-18T11:50:00.000-05:00

We are SO back to school. I’ve gone from leisurely coffee by myself in the morning to being shot out of a cannon into a civil war each day. At our house, Back to School is one of those Through the Wormhole experiences where summer sun kissed children must get beamed up Scotty and reconstituted as school children who must be assessed and tested and must fit precisely into the labeled and classified system. We are not doing so good with it this year. Some of my children may have become Aliens.

Far away in another galaxy, my children went to a progressive private school. They LOVED school and couldn’t wait to get there every morning. They bemoaned weekends and holidays. They may have been slow to get out of bed, but they were Fired Up and Ready to Go. But we live on Earth now, and my youngest is drawing hearts and flowers on the calendar where there are days off. She is counting down to the first day she does NOT have to go to school. We’ve already had the first “Mom, I’m too sick to go to school” day---its so early for the psychosomatic tummy aches and head aches that are a household specialty. And my almost teenaged son was blasting Pink Floyd’s The Wall one night:
We don't need no education
We dont need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teachers leave them kids alone
Hey! Teachers! Leave them kids alone!
All in all it's just another brick in the wall.
All in all you're just another brick in the wall.

Now I would hate to deprive my children of the universal youth experience of Hating School. And I am completely certain that whatever job they end up getting will require them to take standardized tests monthly to determine what species they are and what their benefits and compensation package should be---in fact, I plan on putting their ISAT scores on their resumes---oh wait, the school does not just give those to you, I forgot. You have to hunt them down and capture those little meaningful numbers.

In its infinite wisdom, our school district has already started the standardized testing, a mere three weeks into the year. My kids have not even figured out the names of all their classmates and teachers yet, and this is a district that lost our preregistration forms turned in last July TWICE. Not sure I trust them with the data.

We sat over a fire last weekend looking up at the stars. I looked at my children in the glow and wondered what each of them will become. I realized that probability is high that one or more will have a career that does not exist yet. Five years ago, who could be a professional blogger? Or a social media consultant?

I am not sure that testing them like lab frogs will help anyone’s kids fill the positions we are going to invent. Most of the innovators whose biographies I have studied did not do so well in the normal schools of their time. Frank Lloyd Wright and Margaret Mead were homeschooled.

Maybe a small piece of me hopes, in this back to school season, that my kids don’t fit easily into the cookie cutters created so neatly for them. You know the Below Standards, Meets Standards, Exceeds Standards slots. Because I don’t think the MAP tests can assess the wonder of looking at the moon or the innovation of talking about the resort you would build there. They aren’t looking at my standards which measure the fascination with a song and the tenacity to keep working until you find the melody and then the harmony on the keyboard. I do know that right now, the things that light my kids up and capture their hearts, minds and souls are not the things they are finding in school. Their love of opera, fascination with films, empathy for living things, understanding cooking and sewing and their places in human culture—they have found those things on my time. I know that a parent is supposed to be a teacher, but I am sad that they don’t like the time they are spending with formal education.

I reconcile myself to the fact that this is the gig though, and start plotting our adventures for another weekend. I just hope the school system does not do too much damage to their love of learning.

welcome to the island of America

2009-09-02T11:52:00.000-05:00

One of the few news stories that got through to us on our recent backwoods vacation was the detention of a Bollywood superstar at a Newark airport most likely because some typist can’t spell.

Shah Ruhk Khan’s recent experience with our official US welcome committee sent shock waves through our house. We are film freaks and Bollywood is on our passion list---last year we watched Om Shanti Om instead of the Oscars. If you are not a big follower of the genre, let me put it this way: How would you react if the Beatles were on a suspected terrorist list because of a typo? Can you imagine Brad and Angelina and their multinational brood questioned for 66 minutes at an airport? For a huge chunk of the world outside our myopic borders, Mr. Khan is bigger than Elvis. And I think he’s a better dancer, but we could argue on that.

It’s a little bit wonky, but if you managed to read through Richard Florida’s work, you will get his point that economic prosperity flows where diversity and creativity thrives, and as Mr. Khan’s experience showcases, this country has been in a creative lockdown for years. We don’t track the flight of artists, but I know film production is fleeing our borders with frightening speed, and with it go the really good jobs that kept me and my colleagues afloat. When you are making movies, you go wherever the box office gold WANTS to go. And there’s the struggling music industry: more than one music festival has had to substitute a headliner last minute because a major, well-known artist has trouble getting a visa. I think it’s really sad and bad for long term economic recovery that it’s nearly impossible for interesting creative folks to get here without jumping through innumerable hoops. I mean I know Art is a Hammer with which to change reality, but famous folk are easy to keep an eye on.

My kids are growing up in a global economy and culture—they have Facebook friends and email pen pals on multiple continents. I am frustrated that the education system only requires them to master a single language--even developing nations require at least 2. The planet is shrinking---but the only way to really be global is to go there whereever there is and have them whomever we designate as them come here. We need to meet, converse and exchange ideas and art with the world. And we need to understand where everyone is coming from, so the worst thing about the fact that the biggest Bollywood movie star in the known universe was treated as he was, was the fact that the folks detaining him had no real idea of who he was. His face is instantly recognizable to at least twice as many folks as the US population. We cannot build our security if we isolate our selves and teach our children a single language: our own. Talking to ourselves about ourselves is not relevant or helpful. We cannot be safe in a world if we don’t know who our neighbors are.

Horse Camp 09

2009-08-04T11:39:00.000-05:00

Just got back from the land of a thousand mosquito bites. Year 11 of our equine tradition, and what a year of change! The original members of our band have mostly moved on to college, high school, jobs and opera gigs (though my eldest made it back for 2 lessons and a stunning fall from a horse after a jump!!!!!) We completely changed the format which FREAKED out my habit bound kids. We kicked off the week with a visit to Pierogi fest in Whiting Indiana (surrealistic Kitch in a land that time is leaving alone in the shadow of steel mills refineries and casinos) then on to Michigan where we took LESSONS instead of the same old camp hang out for hours around horses and get dirty format, and we were at new stable where everything happens outside. Good thing we had the new 80 sunscreen. We tried WESTERN saddle. We tried JUMPING oh my god. And I got to spend a week with TWEENS. Next year, I need to get some little ones back in the mix because the social jockeying and nascent hormone thing got to be a bit much.

The menu was just plain weird---with vegetarians and foodies and celiacs as the predominant eaters, we did Indian food and falafel and pesto. Not a chicken nugget to be found. We watched classic films, not movies. We went to a French Market. My kids may never recover. After a decade of doing the exact same thing, all this new stuff was truly shocking.

My favorite new thing was Christmas in July at the South Bend Silverhawks baseball game. Note the adorable Jewish girls flanking Santa in his surfing shorts---this picture was taken right before the skies opened and lightening flashed and we got to enjoy our very first RAINED OUT game!!!

I also got to enjoy a new thing: NO DOGS for three days. Ah, peace! I could have used some adult company and a happy hour, but I had enough caffeine to get me moving and I did get to read 1.5 novels. I made it to the top of Warren Dune without panting. We still picked and ate blueberries, although at a new berry patch, and we still went bumper boating and go carting and bought too much tooth rotting candy at the 5 and dime, which is miraculously still there (many businesses are not)

In the end, it was perfection, though I am waiting for the welts from the poison ivy to show up!

Angela's list

2009-07-07T14:10:00.000-05:00

Every spring, before I am swamped by impending summer insanity with my job’s Frantically Busy Season, I make my infamous list. I also make this list every year before the Holiday Season Tsunami swamps the family. On this list, I write
That Which Is Essential.
The necessity for The List dear friends, is Yoga Mama’s lesson for this month:

Before you get lost in the overwhelming schedule of trying to have it all and do it all and losing your mind, before you crash and burn with your inner gears in overdrive, before you are sunk in the sea of overblown expectations and bound at the ankles by limited time and resources, you must, on a clean sheet of pristine paper, stake your claim to your touchpoints which will moor you in a state of zen equilibrium, while all those around you spin their wheels in the muck of mediocrity.

The summer list is simply what I MUST do to have the Best Summer Ever and it can’t have more than 15 things on it. Much of the list now falls into the category of tradition, so its not hard to put it together. This year’s list
1. go to the Renaissance Faire
2. eat a picnic at an outdoor concert
3. go to Super Dog
4. watch sunset at the beach
5. eat fresh picked fruit
6. go to a big screen movie on a really hot day and eat popcorn for dinner
7. see an outdoor movie
8. mostly give up driving
9. drink coffee in a garden
10. grow tomatoes
11. read 5 novels
12. socialize with a neglected friend

I have to say, I am one week into July and I have checked off most of this list. There are things on previous lists that were so delicious that they become habits, kind of the background noise of contented existence: grilling out, watching classic films, making pesto whenever there is a fresh crop of basil. You will notice what is NOT on the list: I do not write “clean out the garage” or ”reorganize the filing cabinet” or “fix the busted ceiling”---those items require internal and cash resources I lack at this time and they would bring me no sensual pleasure. And with summer here the briefest of sweet seasons, I need my list to be In the Moment, to refresh my spirit and renew my soul, not beat me up for being the dysfunctional broken Human that I am.

My family
Is more Druid
Than Hi Tech,
Tracing the seasons
With our traditions and
Gatherings
At Certain times
With Specific people
And rituals
To which we must adhere
Lest the universe comes undone.
We go to Bernies
To declare independence
And I must bring the corn.
We gather beneath
The Blinking Hot Dogs
To welcome
The Spirit of Summer.
We ride the horses
At Dawn
To initiate the novices
We don our Elizabethan Garb
To Wallow in the dust
To endcap
A solstice Season.
Twitter and facebook may link us
But our traditions
Make our world revolve.

How an WNBA game is a little like a CSO concert...

2009-07-02T11:56:00.000-05:00

If you know me well, you know that I’m not exactly the target demographic for sales pitches for sports team season tickets. I’m the type to subscribe to opera and theater and not the Women’s NBA ---but I understand and appreciate the innate drama of sport, and I think it’s important for my kids to take in everything—even if they spend a big part of the pre-game/pre-show hollering how boring its going to be. In the past week I extracted my kids from the idiot box watch, shoved them into the mini van and headed to a Chicago Sky game. And I have to say: after actually attending a game, the overall experience is a LOT like, in terms of family entertainment, going to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s kids series. First of all, when you head on out to either the CSO or the WNBA, what you will witness, fundamentally, is a spectacle of mastery. You will see humans who have spent a very big chunk of their lives perfecting their craft, and these folks are the very best of the best. They have survived grueling auditions and draft picks, and they have to stay really good to keep working. Their skill brings them a small celebrity and a living wage—the two operations are not the star studded overblown mass consumed celebrity of say the boys NBA, but true devotees know who they follow and love, whether its Jia Perkins or, in my families case, soprano Joyce DiDonato.

For the Chicago Sky team, like the CSO family series, a choice has been made to gear the show/the game to be the Ultimate Family Experience. At CSO you’ll find a musical instrument petting zoo. At Chicago Sky you will get two mascots, a magician and free airbrush tattoos. At the CSO they push musical literacy, at Chicago Sky, with the help of a corporate sponsor, they push reading and regular literacy. Both venues have percussion—the Chicago Sky drumline is definitely more danceable than the kettle drums at CSO. Both venues have interactive art booths, and both have Take Aways---though the CSO could learn a lot from the WNBA about those lovely lovely sponsors who laden the audience with ever desirable Cool Stuff. Not sure how I would feel about the musicians tossing tee shirts into the house, but maybe coupons for music lessons?

And the venues: the UIC pavilion and Orchestra Hall feel up close and personal, perfectly sized and close to the action, even if you are in the balcony. Both have enough potties for itty bitty bladders. And both feature nearby parking—so important when you are squiring extra kiddies to the Event, or have to carry a sleeping child back to the car at the end. The WNBA though, has way better food---cocoa and cookies can’t compete with dippin dots and Chicago Dogs.

But at the end of the day, you can’t go wrong with a family or group outing to either the WNBA or the CSO. Happy Experiences!

poem for a hot day

2009-06-24T11:30:00.000-05:00

Summer, after solstice
shows up
As if on contract,
Warmer than a womb.

Clothing, routines
Drop to the floor

We sip Pinot in the garden
smelling leaves,
watching moonflowers bloom
in slutty slow motion.

Movin On

2009-06-17T16:32:00.000-05:00

Tis the season of transition. In our house its been chock full of culminating events, final parties, award thingies, final gatherings and two weekends of recitals. I am keeping the paper goods out just in case I have forgotten a celebration—we are ready for a party at a moments notice. And of course this is a month of new people, new situations, growing up. My youngest played Bach from memory. My oldest got on a plane to go to Europe without a single family member. And I survived my first day of running 8 day camps at once. Every one who works for me can quote my science fiction speech on transitions—you know how in all science fiction when you move from one space time continuum to another, you can come apart molecularly, and how we have to be the heroes and make sure that all time travelers make it to the other side? But this is the season when you close the chapter on one thing and turn the page to another. And that brings me to another one of Yogamamas Rules of the Universe.

The Rule of Transition
All transitions are important. They must be marked with ritual and some kind of food—the food needs to repeat so that every time you do the transition you want that food. The beginning of summer at our house is Super Dogs and a milk shake. I also like to mark them with smells---hairspray for ballet recitals, the spirea flowers on the piano for that recital, the stinky sox of the baseball playoffs…you get the idea. All transitions should be attended by Significant Persons—who can be friends, folks you pull off the street, or ship in from distant lands. All transitions should be marked—on the calendar, in the journal, the blog or the email. And all transitions must for better or worse, interrupt the flow of daily life. You need to be disrupted before you come through the wormhole on the other side.

Every last day of school, my poor husband has to eat three different and separate meals out so that each kid gets a date with him. He gains 5 pounds before the end of the day.
Every first Friday of the first week of camp after we have to drink a margarita on my front porch. After the piano recital we have to invade a local restaurant and destroy it with rice all over the floor due to the young age of several siblings. So wherever you are I hope you are enjoying your transitions in the vortex of the year.

Movie Musings

2009-06-02T13:30:00.000-05:00

When my oldest child was 2, we took her to her first Big Screen Movie: Toy Story, by then unknown Pixar, an animation upstart. It was Thanksgiving weekend, and it took 25 minutes down country roads to get to the vaudeville house that the little town of Niles had converted into a cinema—the Ready 4. I remember that ten dollars got all three of us in and the works in terms of sodas, popcorn and South Bend chocolates. That theater has long since closed, but I can still take my family of 5 to the movies for under $20 out there in the country. Going to a movie in the city requires cashing in a savings bond and forget the eats unless you are in a top tax bracket. So we almost never go any more, weighing carefully which are the must see Big Screen, and which will work on the Big TV. But going back to that very first movie experience……. She turned around as the credits rolled and, eyes wide, said That Was A GREEEEEAAAT movie. And it was. At two, with no more experience (Sesame Street, Bananas in Pajamas, Disney Songs videos) than any two year old media savvy kid, she instinctively knew that this was a classic. And it has stood the test of time—it was the first movie she downloaded on her iPod.

Pixar is now owned by Disney, and is still turning out classics. We very uncharacteristically went to see their tenth, the new UP on its first day of release here, the whole entire family. WHOA. I still thing that Wall E may be a more important film due to its political message, but my kids are all making our dogs do DUG voices, and you can’t really quote WALL E since it goes so long without any dialogue. It was a wonderful family experience, and I am sure we will buy the DVD so we can keep sharing. As the music guys say on their show—it’s a buy it not a burn it.

And that one time two year old with great taste in film recently had her first short screened at a film festival and is eyeballing film school, and she is trying to participate in her third international film festival—this one in India. Ok, ok, it probably helps that your mom is a sometimes media teacher, and I am not sure how much weight one should give to those early experiences because I am a firm believer that kids pop out pretty much formed and its our job as parents to put what they need in front of them, but it has been interesting to watch her taste in media develop. We made the mistake a couple of years ago of buying tickets to the wrong theater when Disney released the Miyazaki film Spirited Away a few years ago---we wanted to take the whole family to the dubbed version, and ended up having to read subtitles to our 2 pre readers for 3 HOURS—we were NOT popular with the people sitting behind us. But my then 11 year old was suddenly WILD for Miyazaki and to this day prefers to see the film in the original language with subtitles. I learned something important with that error. You should just expose kids to the good stuff, to the real stuff, to the unusual stuff. They don’t HAVE preconceived notions. They are sponges ready to soak it all up.

In the end film is a way to tell stories. And storytelling is part of the deepest aspect of our humanity, from when we began as a species to paint on walls and to grunt out tales around the fire. We are hardwired to get it, if its done well, even with subtitles. In the end though, the story told must be a good one. It must resonate within our lives and help us bring meaning to our lives, because we all walk around, desperately trying to find meaning.

As I coped over the weekend with the ongoing and slow personal but universal tragedies of mortality and the economy, heightened intensely by taking in a theatrical adaptation of Gogol’s Overcoat (the Russians are way better at the human tragedy and existentialism than the French), I thought that the existential reality of human life is tragic—we die and we are aware that we die. That completely sucks. And all the beauty and love and goodness are more intense because we die. Some days, it just hurts so much to live with that. But that’s the mirror side of the tragedy. Live we must. And tell the tale.

As I told my sister in law, after dropping off her kids which I had whisked away to Michigan and the carnival and mosquito bites and poison ivy and sibling battles—

It is not what really happened, but the Tale We Tell After, and how we tell it. So live, and tell good stories.

Relative Poverty

2009-05-13T14:02:00.000-05:00

We are driving to school
My daughter, from way in the back of the minivan, pipes up:

Mom, are we poor??

It’s been a week of meals made solely out of potatoes and condiments, of saying no, we can’t do that because we don’t have the money, no, you can’t go see the movie your friends are going to, no we can’t sign you up for gymnastics this session, no, no, no. In the face of us not being able to afford what ALL her friends have,how do I explain to an eight year old that compared to ninety per cent of the planet, the fact that she as a girl, will receive an education, the fact that we have a flush toilet and clean drinking water, the fact that she has shoes on her feet and a lunch in her bag makes us wealthy, blessed.
Do I tell her that her life expectancy is double what it would be were she born into a family in Northern Afghanistan and that is a fantastic bit of karmic luck? Sure, she has to share a bedroom, but its (mostly) heated in the winter. Her toys come mostly from rummage sales, but she has barrels full of them. No we are not poor. We still eat three meals a day and we have a roof over our heads, and increasing numbers of Americans can’t say that.

But compared to where we used to be, when she was in private school and we went on family vacations and went out to eat, and got gifts for the holidays, and she could have any breakfast cereal made, well, yes, we have had to cut back. Wayyyyyy back. Compared to when she could take dance AND gymnastics AND soccer, we have had to eliminate all non-essentials. The hardest for me to give up back then was the cleaning lady, but that was almost 2 years ago—our recession got the jump on the National zeitgeist. I don’t mind the generic rot gut coffee and dinners of starchy foods as much as I mind the condition my house has fallen into without a weekly miracle worker. This month we are about to give up the health club, having a land line telephone and my own beloved ballet classes. I feel good about being vegetarian by necessity and how much less I am driving. I love my new outdoor clothesline that is so green and makes the clothes smell like spring air. Not feeling so good about turning the heat off on April 15th because we can’t afford the gas bill, and I prefer to turn it off before they shut me off. (It’s been cold in Chicago this spring) If my husband does not find work soon, we will have to give up even more: summer camp and possibly the therapists and then step down on everyone’s meds, because the copays and deductibles are decimating the bare bones budget we have.

This world I am living in is almost beyond my comprehension. I have a master’s degree from the Ivy League, have worked hard every day since I was eleven and I HAVE A GOOD JOB with a decent salary, and we can’t afford to live in this community on what I make. My husband’s entire industry seems to have evaporated over night and despite obvious talent that is universally admired, he cannot get paid to do what he does best. All the rules we were taught, that we lived by, have changed. I have just given up trying to figure it out, and I just now try to get through each day. Without spending any money.

The one thing I can never get used to is the shame. I cannot bear the embarrassment of not being able to cut it. In a land where the prevailing attitude is you pull yourself up by your bootstraps and that the economy rewards those who are smart and do a good job, the implication is that if you can’t afford it a) you are lazy, stupid and morally suspect or b) you don’t deserve it. So we quietly just do without, because asking for help is just too hard emotionally. It is to admit you are an abject failure.

It is especially difficult when you live in an economically diverse community like I do. There are mansions a few blocks from my house, and I know that my condo neighbors look with green envy on my big yard. Teachers at school keep asking for $6 here and $12 there for field trips and gifts for a volunteer, not knowing that we literally have no money in our house til next Thursday payday, and all that is probably spent at this point with the bills that are past due.

We just don’t have it. My kids can’t go on the field trip or the overnight or sign up for after school programs because we don’t have the money in a world that assumes that we have the money. We can’t go out and we hardly dare invite folks over because the cupboard is bare. We are not poor enough to qualify for scholarships and I am too embarrassed to ask for help. I also refuse to think of myself as poor. It is mortifying in this culture to Not Have it. I grew up as the least well off child in a wealthy neighborhood—and that’s why I started working when I was eleven. Instead of being subject to the horror of social ineptitude because I could not afford to go to the movies with my friends or shopping at the mall, I just could always say, I’m working. I swore, like Scarlet O’Hara, I would never be in that situation again, and nor would I subject my children to the shame and embarrassment, and well, here we are—and I just can’t get over it. We do not dare discuss the realities of class in this country, in this culture, but I feel so intently that I have been consigned to a completely different universe form the one I was living in just 3 years ago. I have falled several rungs down in the American ladder of classes, and there is almost no vocabulary even to discuss this.

And I never do answer my daughter’s question from the back of the van. Because I just have no words to talk about relative poverty to a second grader. I have no pithy platitudes that will make this better. I don’t have good answers for this. And so I stay silent.

Poem

2009-05-05T11:31:00.000-05:00

I find I am growing hard
Not calcified like age
But protective crust like pearl
To protect the soft
Value inside.

I am craggy as a cliff
Unyielding and coiled protectively
About these unhatched eggs
I must defend with back and snarl
With cold hearted, clear eyed, Real.

It is so difficult to get on with it.
To get up and keep slugging.
I want to pull the covers up
And stay in soft numb sleep
To dream,

And not to face the mounting
Bills, Reality, its rapacious teeth
Tearing at the dreams and hopes.
I am letting go, saying goodbye
To soft silly wants.

Get food on the table;
Make the mortgage by a hair;
No, No, No keep practicing denial
Look away from pretty things
To keep the longing away

Unplug the feelings of loss and pain
So they cannot overcome,
Putting one step after the other
Taking things off the list
Getting through the day

Slipping down the slope
Of class and privilege—the having
Trying not to look back at what
Past Tense, I had. Trying not to uphold
The former standard

Trying to be grateful that at least
It is not
All gone.
Being hard, being lean.
It has to count for something.

Day of Remembrance. And contemplation

2009-04-21T16:34:00.000-05:00

I am having a tough time this month with dinner conversation. The news is so complicated. Trying to explain the economy, or why Blago does what he does and is indicted (try explaining Grand Jury to an 8 year old) but Mayor Daley can lease off the parking meters and nothing happens to him. See we have spent years and lots of temple dues involving my kids in moral and ethical education so my kids really want to believe that the person making the most money or the person in charge DESERVES to be in the position they are in. They totally get the idea of justice. They want the world to be fair. Just. Righteous.

But then about when they grow a prefrontal cortex capable of abstract thinking, you have to explain to them how the world really works. The world ISN’T fair. Things rarely work out the way they are supposed to. Evil exists and goes on for a while before it is stopped. Good should but does not always win. Good people are not always the ones in power—I learned this at an early age in the world of work. I have worked since I was 11. I can count on one hand the number of good bosses I have had. Some were well meaning but incompetent, some were certifiably insane, some were just mean spirited. Mostly what I learned is do a good job anyway, no matter where you find yourself. We want to believe that the folks in power are better than we are, smarter, better, something, and that makes the fact that they can control us ok. But then you find out that mostly, they were just luckier. They may have been born higher up the food chain, they may have gotten more lucky breaks, they might be a man or a better color, or born prettier, so they get a better deal than you.

Grimm’s fairy tales are very good at the truth of this. Children in those tales survive truly horrible ordeals by being clever, or getting lucky by meeting a (usually magical) help mate. It always helps if they are nice people—being kind to the ugly old crone pays off. But those magical help mates are pretty sparse these days. Unfortunately, in real life, spoiled brats often lead privileged lives. Some bad people lead very nice lives.

And then there is the Holocaust. Today is Yom Hashoah, the day of remembrance for the millions of Jews, gays, people with disabilities, gypsies and people who just tried to help. My family attended the opening of the new museum in Skokie, dedicated not only to telling the story of what happened but to challenge us not to let it happen again. And we watched the Hallmark Hall of Fame about Irena Sendler. Even Elie Wiesel told us you cannot really answer the question why. Why is the world the way it is? I don’t have answers, and my children are full of questions.

Best to discuss the weather at the dinner table.

My face

2009-04-13T14:28:00.001-05:00

I did not think about it much.
Twas a fine one.
Attractive enough
To get modeling gigs
When my mind was not adequate
To pay the bills
In my artistic youth.

I never spend time
Looking in mirrors and am
Known to go to work
With Racoon eyes
Not noting that the mascara
Left circles in the bags
Under my exhausted eyes.
Not a big one for makeup
Or treatments,
My face was just a way
Of looking out at the world.

Even as gravity
And the slow march of time
Took their toll,
I did the sunscreen and alpha hydroxy
And ignored my face,
Until a cellular improvisation
Furrowed the doctors brow
And a piece needed to come off
Of my Vermillion Border.

The potential of cancer
Is never welcome news
But the alteration of a face
I have gone so used to that
I can take it for granted
Toppled my gyrometer
And made me self conscious and cringing.

All may be well—
A skilled surgeon’s hand
Focused its work on my flesh.
And if the cells are malignant
I would certainly rather them gone,
But
But
I now no longer
take
my face
for granted.

Update: Scar is hardly visible, but I cannot whistle.

Snippets On Post its

2009-04-02T16:39:00.000-05:00

Found while cleaning out my winter purse
stuck on the bottom near the pennies.....

The Parent as Sisyphus.
Halfway up the hill you discover
It is an Egg
Not a rock
That you are rolling
And it hatches
With claws and teeth
And just when you think
It will roll back onto you,
The Beast
Flies Away
*******************************

Good Read

Suddenly, the book appeared.
It was more than 50 years old,
and the tale it told was absolutely necessary
At that moment.
We could not remember
Ever owning
The Book before.
We argued: it was purchased at a house sale
Handed down,
Borrowed.
It bore a library pocket from
Trinity Texas.
Yet, tellingly, it also bore
An address sticker from my childhood home
Indicating ownership of decades.
But I had never seen it before,
never read it.
How did it arrive in the pile by my bed,
and
What compelled me out of the blue
To fish it out
and finally read it?
Sometimes the universe
is trying so hard to get through to us.
In all things, timing is essential.
For it was only at the moment
When I finally opened The Book
And began reading,
That I was ready
For its story.

Real Estate advice

2009-03-30T15:56:00.001-05:00

Almost two decades ago, my new husband and I took our entire nest egg, gifted us at our wedding, and bought 14 acres with two buildings: an overgrown garage with rotting walls and a stained mattress inside, and a hideous 1950’s concrete block “cabin” done up in harvest gold and avocado shag that was slowly mildewing, out in a drained tamarack swamp two hours from the city where we worked as freelance artists. We were one of those high risk mortgages—no visible means of support. We had no first home in the city where we worked, and this was a real fixer upper but we were young and we had a vision. Strike that we were young and we were stupid. We didn’t know wells and propane tanks. But there was a stand of white pines where the wind whistled through the trees and a big meadow perfect for bonfires. There was a field of periwinkle. There was a view from the back that went on for miles. There were cows next door.

We have never ended up fixing up that shack in the woods. Underemployment, big medical bills, kids and a steady stream of muddy dogs kept putting it off, and in the course of almost two decades, our second home has become our real home. With real estate values in a tailspin, this is either the best time ever or worst time in history to buy a little dacha, a Ferienhaus, or as my grandma would say, a coliba of your own. For us, buying our little place in the woods was one of the best decisions we ever made, but NOT because it was a good investment. We may never know if it was or not because we are not likely to unload it in my lifetime. I would hock my left kidney before I would ever give up the land where all my kids learned to walk and catch snakes, where we’ve eaten Thanksgiving dinner with a revolving crew of artists, friends and family for 18 years, and where every one of our long string of pets is buried.

Those marshy acres are our true home. We have seen shooting stars and a moon so bright it casts your shadow, we’ve lost a necklace of baby teeth, read books, shot off explosives for 4th of July and New Years, and gone to sleep by the light from a jarful of fireflies. It’s become the place I go when I meditate. It’s the place we always go back to. We have grown up, grown close and are growing older on those acres, and if I’d tucked the money into a mutual fund, I surely would have tapped it by now to pay bills. And if I’d put it in a 401k—hah! It would be gone.

Forced to jam our loud family and all the animals into a tiny house with one iffy bathroom and no tv reception, we must get along in a way we aren’t required to in a house with a phone and internet hookups and reliable hot water.

Nature and weather has a more profound effect here, regularly knocking out power. We are constantly reclaiming the place from mice and infestations of biting ladybugs and stink bugs. But we spend major holidays there and as the memories telescope out, the place summarizes our lives.

So buy a second home, but not as a financial investment. Buy it as a spiritual down payment on the memories that make up your memoir.

Birthday thoughts

2009-03-18T16:23:00.000-05:00

It’s my birthday this week. There was a lovely fruit tart at work but otherwise, I forgot the occasion entirely, or lost it or something amid all the theatrical productions, weather gyrations and general overcommittedness of the last few months. And to be honest I am so much more excited about it officially being spring, than about me being reminded of being older. I accept the aging process as normal and natural and I am on speaking terms with it—I am just not entirely ecstatic about being reminded of my mortality. It’s been a week of facing the cold hard fact of the long slow slide into the end of a life as my mother in law goes in and out of ICU. I do not think her story is ending, but we are coming to the last chapters and what shall they be? And I look at my hopes and dreams and plans and I mean OF COURSE I am not living my perfect life and following my bliss—I can barely get the laundry done and we need milk and cereal AGAIN. I can’t figure out Twitter or Facebook in its reconfigured state and that’s enough to make me feel like an old dinosaur. I am running out of time to live the life I dreamed of living while I am still physically capable of doing so, but it’s on hold right now because I need to figure out where our living expenses are coming from next month. That’s another reason to overlook a celebration. I can’t afford carry out sushi even! I feel like I have been on hold for years, just solving the crises that keep popping up like dandelions in the green expanse of my wonderful plans. You dig one out and six more pop up. So you pull all your resources together and avert disaster and try to breathe a sigh of relief and the friggin economy falls off a bloody cliff. I haven’t read a novel in months—I seem incapable of writing poetry and the only sketches I ‘ve done are of the garden I can’t afford to plant. Grumble Grumble.

Life is hard. Looking at the human condition, I don’t know where I got the chutzpah or stupidity to think it was going to be some fairy tale for me. Jobs are lost, economies tank, hot water heaters die and need immediate replacement. Look at the damn salmon I try to eat once a week for Omega 3’s. If they aren’t eaten as eggs, or splayed out on a ball of rice for sushi, or salted as lox,(and we aren’t the only species wolfing them down) they get to rip their skins off swimming upstream to keep the species going and they don’t even get to see their babies. And I got lucky enough to be born in the developed world. I don’t suppose raising kids in Darfur is a bundle of laughs this year. Jesus I am glad I am not a mom in Gaza. Or anywhere where there are landmines-- I hate loud noises.

So my gift for myself is gratefulness. Every day for the next month I will write out 3 things I am grateful for. Because when you think about it, the good stuff outweighs the bad. Last night there was a cold Guiness waiting for me at the end of a long St. Patrick’s work day.
So today’s list: I am grateful that I can smell the world again as the earth warms. I am grateful that my kids are healthy TODAY (no fevers yippee and seasonal allergies haven’t hit yet). I am grateful to be alive. Happy Birthday to me.

Life at the Opera

2009-03-11T09:13:00.000-05:00

Last night the Uber Understudy Super (me) finally got to put on a wig and costume and get onstage. As we arrived at the theater we saw a memo announcing that our favorite yearly event at the Lyric, the end of season company party, has become the latest casualty of the deepening recession. It feels like our family reunion just got cancelled—every year we gather with choristers and stagehands, dressers and makeup artists, security guards and supers—folks we have worked with, and folks my children are growing up with, and in the glittering lobby of our favorite place, we lift a glass, and make a Sundae at the make your own bar. And while the Lyric is faring better than some opera companies like Baltimore , it is not immune to shrinking endowments and curtailed corporate contributions. But even more than in the good times, we NEED opera in the bad times. One because it is cathartic to weep over the tragedy of Manon and Lulu and be grateful you are not them. Two, because a Mozart song spiel is the ultimate diversion when your kids college fund has just melted into thin air, and three, because sometimes music really is better than food. But the real reason why Opera is so important right now is because it is important to be part of something timeless, to experience something that has been around giving people pleasure for hundreds of years. Opera has survived wars, epidemics, panics, bank runs, the great depression, revolutions. It will be with us in some form or another when these storm clouds blow over, and it tells our human story the way nothing else can. It feels right to be a part of a river of common experience that flows back into time the way sitting in an opera house and listening to these amazing sounds does. I have done my part to continue the tradition, charging my cheap seats of a yearly All the Operas subscription in the back of the upper balcony even though I have no idea what we are going to do if my husband doesn’t scare up some work soon. We may be hungry, but we’ll be at the opera.(Of course, I have always bought tickets instead of food--in grad school I ate ramen and stolen bread for a week after spending my entire grocery budget on great seats to opening of The Photographer at BAM) And this year the end of year party will be potlucks in the canteen at closing shows for the dedicated volunteers that supers are, and I will hand make my good bye tokens instead of purchasing them. And we will all cross our fingers that the scions of industry and powerful people that run the world figure a way out of this pickle before we all look like the rabble that opened the season with Manon. But come fall, I will be back: back stage if there are super roles, back balcony if there are not, ready to experience Heaven and Hell the way only the Lyric can dish it up.

Our Guild

2009-03-10T10:40:00.000-05:00

My daughter, theater star.

Centuries ago, a family would pass on their business or trade the way folks inherit property today. Though the fashion appears to have fallen out of favor, more than a trace of it remains in our house. Our family biz is not retail or politics but the thespian craft and we are more akin to a service trade. We are like the vaudevillians, starting them young. In utero in fact---I have pictures of all three on stage slowing me down prior to birth—in our house you very nearly are born onstage. And you sure as heck spend most of your first year being lugged about rehearsals. As soon as you can walk you are clear about upstage and downstage and having lived life stage left or stage right, my kids can be confused by mere mortal directions.

I have never pressured the kids to be in theater— in fact its sort of opposite--they resent that I have not buckled down and gotten them agents (they have full page resumes and get paid to work, which when you are 8 should make you pretty happy) I am known to skimp on headshots and they don’t get to audition if I don’t like the script. But I think they really like working hard at something and seeing the results—and getting applause. For them its much easier and more logical than what happens at school. And the social life filled with people with all kinds of backgrounds, of all different ages and types, makes for a lively circle of friends.

While a school and performance schedule are easily arranged, organized sports leagues are not compatible with theatrical careers FYI. And I am not much disturbed by this. I got to do a side by side comparison of being a sports parent and a stage parent in the last week. On Saturday, I spend the day in a freezing cold ice rink, using what was left of my voice to cheer on my speed skating husband and children. The event went on for over six hours and required the participants to get in skates, and out of skates, and eat all manner of prepackaged foods. Two days later, I am back stage chaperoning the same charges (minus the husband) at the opera. You only have to get them into costume once. You still have the prepackaged foods in the form of heat and eat dinners in the canteen. But I was warm. And surrounded by opera singers, SINGING. And it was only about a 3 hour commitment. And did I mention I was warm? I could sit on a nice chair, and not a freezing cold metal bench. I will take stage mom over sports mom in a heartbeat. And so we survive the biblical rainy season, the pending mud season and the longest coldest snowiest winter in the last several decades by burying ourselves in the making of theater and grand opera. Not bad. Not bad….

Posse

2009-03-06T13:43:00.001-06:00

I have served on committees with a wonderful woman who died recently after a six month battle with cancer. Our kids went to elementary and middle school together, at a nurturing private school. At the visitation and funeral, every single family from that class that graduated from eight grade a full six months ago was there. They showed up. That’s what my people do, even if you aren’t close friends. You just show up when what is needed is bodies in pews. Not everyone in our fast paced cyberworld still does this, but lo--these kids and their busy families came from the city and far flung suburbs, left their 2 dozen different high schools and got there. We had not seen each other since graduation night last June, but there on that cold winter day, they gathered around their classmate whose mom died the week of finals. We brought baked goods. We cried. We were There. It was a moving visual on the concept of community that is so in the news right now. One of the benefits we got from paying all that tuition money was a posse, and now that I am too broke to buy that little perk for my family and especially for my kids, I am going to have to build one at home. It’s that team thing, or as my writing mentor Susan calls it Tapping in to the Network, a recent post on Chicago Mom’s Blog.
(Shameless promotion here, I also will be blogging there)

How do you build a posse? You actually map out time in your planner for socializing, just like I finally had to mark in 3 hours a week for Being Creative. OMG, is that pathetic or WHAT? So in that Build a Posse time what kinds of activities will I plan? Potlucks and ice cream socials, field trips to the batting cages and beach, rocket building and launching days. Sleepovers. I know most of my day job consists of creating little communities for the kids I am paid to entertain and I guess I had hoped this would just “happen” for my own children, but I see now that fostering a sense of people belonging to one another and being there for one another takes time and effort. Duh. I am a little slow to the pickup on some of this. We are beings hard wired to be part of a pack, and with all our technology and staring at screens, we have lost touch with this reality. So now I see that one of my essential tasks is to get In Touch. Sharpen that pencil and take out that planner and start blocking out time for the Posse.

Living the music

2009-02-19T11:53:00.000-06:00

As many of you know, about 8 years ago, my eldest child got our family into opera. She was a super in a production of Susannah at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, and she fell in love, and got us all involved TOO. We are an opera family the way Sarah Palin is a hockey mom—it defines us and determines our schedule. Up until this season, my main contribution has been to subscribe to the season and serve as a chaperone to my Super Kids, (Supers are Extras, or live props, in an opera—non speaking, non singing roles). But this year, my daughter INSISTED that I audition with her to be a harem girl in Mozart’s Abduction from the Seraglio. I got the part—as understudy to all the shapely babes half my age. Ordinarily understudies get to hang out in rehearsals on a chair, but due to the large size of the super cast, and everyone’s schedules, some nights I am doing two and three parts, covering various positions for missing harem girls and Turkish women. The other night, I got the opportunity of a lifetime. In the end of the act one we have a scene, lovingly known as Harem Girls Gone Wild. After being dragged about on a rope through the scene, we are hauled onto the stage in the middle of a melee, and our guards drop our rope. Chaos ensues. One harem girl flings herself onto the back of our captor—Osmin, and holds on tight as he finishes singing and brings the curtain down.

Since I sub in often at the last minute, there were no introductions of us lowly supers. I knew the part, ran across the stage and flung myself onto the back of one of the best bass singers in the world: Andrea Silvestrelli. Trying not to interfere with his voice as a tried to figure out how to act this part and not fall off, I hung myself over his shoulders and wrapped my legs around his waist and then got the shock and thrill of my life. I have never hugged the speakers at a rock concert, but I imagine that would be close to the physical sensation of hanging off the back of a world class singer. His voice rattled my very bones. It filled up my entire molecular structure. It was like I plugged directly into the music. It was utterly unlike anything I have ever felt in my life. Silvestrelli is a giant of a man—we first met him when he was Fasolt in Das Rheingold, when we did like 6 operas in 5 months and lived at the Lyric. He is also a darling—nicest guy EVER. It lasted probably sixty seconds, the act ended, I jumped off and he turned around to see who I was (I am sure I weighed more than the regular girl) and I just smiled and said Hi! I am the New Girl. I mean after that—I could barely speak. I could still feel the vibration standing by myself.

It would be an amazing way for deaf people to come to know opera if the just could hug a singer while an aria came forth. A trained voice feels so different than a garden variety human voice. And that bass—it was like being hooked into the power source of the earth.

It has been an amazing week—I highly recommend immersing oneself in art to get through the winter doldrums—between watching a wonderful dress rehearsal of Cav/Pag at the Lyric to seeing last night’s recreation of Le Sacre de Printemps at the Joffrey to hearing music from the broad back of an opera star, I have hardly noticed the new snow fall and the biting wind chill. I am on a cloud, in a world of my own making……

Picture credit: Production design photo from Lyric Opera of Chicago

Oxen

2009-02-13T18:32:00.000-06:00

Spring poked her little head out last week and gave us a tease. Kind of strange to get a 60 degree day at the beginning of February. All kinds of surreal goings on—for example, they are giving us these personality tests at work. Someone went to some conference and got religion and now we are all having to do these questionnaires like the ones in the magazines in the grocery store check out line. By answering these questions we will unlock the fundamental secret of our budget challenged universe. This management tool will allow us to look beyond spending freezes, job eliminations, the fact that every single upper level manager took early retirement, and we will reach A Happy Workplace which will allow us to Create the Most Liveable City in America.

Now I am not exactly sure how some scoring system thought up by a bored housewife and her mother back in the middle of the last century is going to do all that, but at this point, I will try anything. Not much else from federal bailouts to pundit prognostication seems to be working. For myself, I am looking at Tarot cards and my Chinese Zodiac. I am a Metal Ox. In a way, I kind of knew that. I am the workhorse, sherpa personality, plugging away until its finally done. It is well and fitting that this is an Ox year. We need all hands on deck, putting their shoulders to the plow. We are going to need all the oxen we can muster. We are in one big pile of pickles and wishing, dreaming and knowing your personality type is not going to dig us out of this one. In addition to an Everest of elbow grease to get our economy out of the crapper, we are going to need no small measure of luck: We need to pull some good cards in this poker game. But I suppose we also need a pocketful of wishes and dreams to give us something to shoot for. And some sort of vision to yank us out of our snowdrifts into a future.

I pulled the Page of Cups while thinking about the economy, and that’s not exactly a hard edged How To practical card. Message from the Universe! Hang on to intuition and childlike wonder! So channel your inner Ox and let’s get cracking!

Unspeakable Tragedy

2009-02-04T16:04:00.000-06:00

A child from my community died today. An unspeakable, unimaginable tragedy has occurred. A mother sent her child to school and he ended up dead.

The facts that are known are that he was found "unresponsive" yesterday in a bathroom. A bathroom in a school that my daughter went to last year. The police say that there is no evidence of foul play. School administrators say no other child is in danger.

How do they know?

My child’s therapist tells me that 10 year old boys almost NEVER hang themselves—jump in front of trains, throw themselves off buildings yes, but hanging takes a lot of planning. So we will wait and find out what happened.

We may never find out why.

In almost every sci fi book, movie or tv show, when it is time for the characters to go from one planet to another, or one time zone to another, there is a transition: Beam Me Up Scotty, Enter the Stargate and fall through the wormhole in space, Dr. Who and his Tardis (Time and Relative Dimension in Space). Whenever you transition, it is always a bit dangerous—there is always the episode or incident where something happens as you transition and you fail to materialize or show up on the other side. In this episode, everyone goes to heroic lengths to get you back and whole on the other side.

Children’s lives are full of Transitions. From home to school, class to playground, from home class to gym class, out of school to home again, or extended care program.

We need to pay attention to the transition almost more than the destinations, because its in the transitions that most space travelers get lost. The school systems here are not so good at this. My children, sensitive as rare tender aliens, have found this to be so. We have had a few occasions where they failed to attend or notice. I have screamed like a bloody banshee. And like Cassandra, I warned them.

My children find the school lunch rooms to be their worst a nightmare—a district wide answer to the vast chaos of deep space. You could lose an entire race of beings in that madhouse.

Some children have a tough time navigating the G force of so many transmigrations in a day—their home ship may not be the big safe order of an Enterprise, or they may be aliens unaccustomed to our atmosphere. Maybe they do not speak our language. We may never know why this child did not make it through the wormhole to the other side.

When we are having trouble getting around in the galaxy, we need a Yoda and the Force to help. It is time to figure out what that looks like for our community. Maybe parent guides at transition points? I am good at questions, a little spotty on answers, but at this point I will try anything.

As I keep saying we are so worried about the numbers of what is going on in the class on the paper that we are losing sight of the actual spiritual, emotional, social, precious irreplaceable child. Even though I do not consider myself to be wise, and I certainly do not have the ears of Yoda for it—I volunteer here and now to be a Jedi Master for all the children in my town. I will pay attention to the transitions. I will keep my eyes and ears open

Blago for dummies

2009-02-02T14:07:00.000-06:00

My relatives and friends who have not seen the blood sport that Chicago politics has always been are mystified by the theater that was our former Governor who may be joining the traditional retirement home for our former governors: behind bars. They have heard the tapes and wonder how he can go on national television with a straight face and claim he has done no wrong.

The thing you need to understand is that Blago truly believes in his soul that he has done no wrong. If ever the FBI were to tape our Cook County Board President, Todd Stroger, or the phone calls of the current Da Mayor, they would hear conversations remarkably similar than the ones transcribed in the New York Times. Mr. Blagojevich knows, just as George Ryan did, that EVERYONE does it (remember your teenager feeding you the same line about staying up after curfew?)

Illinois has a very unusual political training ground. You see, here in Chicago, politics is a coliseum worthy affair. Bring on the Lions, and the biggest meanest guy wins. Most everything gets decided in a back room, constantly revised ethics policies aside. There is blood and gore and drama. All is fair in hiring and government contracts. Blago forgot that you get by with a little help from your friends, and by the end he had nary a one, but a man who married into the machine that is Chicago politics learned early on that it is true if you say it is. Especially if you keep saying it on national tv in interviews timed for the news cycle.

We like to believe this cannot exist in a democracy—that My Way or the Highway Despotism only exists in banana republics and failed African democracies (There is No Cholera in Zimbabwe Mugabe) so it’s a little weird that Rod the Hairdo got legally (???) elected twice. But money talks in politics and he who has the most usually wins, even if you are electing the first Black president. So here we have, in real life, a rise and fall of epic proportion, another act in the ongoing circus that is our unique brand of politics, and something to take our mind off the fact that the state has a multi-billion dollar shortfall. Makes me feel all warm inside.

Butterfly and the Bush Era

2009-01-13T09:58:00.000-06:00

Last night I attended my first performance of the Puccini Opera classic Madam Butterfly. I had long wanted to see this chestnut—and see where those so familiar tunes fit into a story line. The tale ripped my heart out, but I left the opera house to go out into the blizzard struck at how a story that was first told 108 years ago remains as fresh today as ever. And it’s more politically relevant than it ever was, because when it first opened in 1904, it may not have seemed as politically incorrect as it is today.

How Puccini captured the American arrogance and the way we blithely ignore and exploit a native culture then move on thinking its ok to say I am sorry and this will torture me all my life is nothing short of genius. As I listened to the soundbites of George Bush and his final press conference on the drive home, I can hear BF Pinkerton and his final song. A montage of Madoff, and Cheney, and Condi Rice runs in my mind as the marriage takes place. Meanwhile, one hopes that Iraq will not commit Hari Kari as we move on to our next “wife,” Afghanistan.

I was physically ill with disgust and déjà vu as Sharpless stood by and merely wagged his head as Pinkerton committed statutory rape with full public pomp and circumstance. It was all right at the end of the 19th century to screw children. We are still doing it if the body count is even half way right. And so, in the way that great art does, the work resonates and sends ripples out into my mind and life. I said to my startled children that Madam Butterfly needs to be required viewing as part of military training. My kids think I’ll have a tough sell on that one, but maybe we could get the modern remake, Miss Saigon, on the curriculum.

Parallel Universes

2009-01-09T09:47:00.001-06:00

You never have to go that far
From Home
To find a foreign country.

Some of us are born into them.
Our families
Never sure of the language
Or currencies
The means of exchange.

And some of us migrate
Into them.
Fleeing our familiarity.

But most of us
Ignore them.

Parallel universes going on
As our lives unfold in droll dullness

Same and safe in regularity.

The bodega or Asian market
In the mini-mall,
The other language publication
Sold side by side with the Tribune
Worlds unto themselves
Foreign lands
Under our noses
In our neighborhoods, next door.

Learning to Dance

2009-01-08T16:04:00.000-06:00

As promised. more on Dance education:

I think it is a great tragedy of our modern times that an enormous percentage of people walk around every day thinking they cannot dance. That concept is absolutely implausible and untrue. Everyone knows how to dance before they are born. On a molecular level everything is dancing, protons and electrons bumping about in the disco of space. Even rocks, not known for their tangos, are, on a very basic level, dancing. It is our nature to dance by whatever means necessary, with whatever parts we have, and so, everyone can do it. Everyone knows, in their bones, how to dance. Of course, many folks don’t really speak to or listen to their bones anymore, unless they are complaining too loud to hear anything else.

Not everyone or everything does it, Dance, well. To be a good dancer you have to hook into the universal rhythm, relax and find a groove. There are an infinite variety of grooves—we have given names to some of them: waltzes, disco, tangos, salsas and such. But there are grooves in the sound of waves on the shore, or monkeys chanting.

And to be an EXCELLENT dancer you need to find the groove and move with Style, that ineffable something that makes others want to watch you and do what you are doing. Rocks do not have style unless you get to their molecular level. But we humans have evolved and trained in some pretty spectacular styles: ballet for one, Russian Folk dance and West African dance for some others. And don’t forget Irish Step Dancing.

But not everyone loves dancing (though this is very difficult for me to understand because it is such a primal joy, our first communication). I think some of us are socialized to avoid dancing because we are self conscious. Others have misinterpreted our lack of, or struggle for, Style and made us feel bad about the search. Some of us are physically awkward. Some of us hear different rhythms than the ones the rest of us are hearing and when we move to that groove we appear out of synch and we are made to feel foolish when we move out of synch with the crowd.

But none of that means that you don’t know how to dance.

Our society has reached an interesting spot, vis a vis our conceptual relationship with our bodies. Rather than focusing on function, on the getting from here to there or the accomplishment, physically, of the task, we get hung up, obsessed even, with the appearance of our physical shells. We spend billions modifying and enhancing a shell that will essentially be outmoded and turning to dust in a century. All this focus on the appearance of the body and its unattainable conceptual ideal, and lack of focus on the utility or joy of being in a particular shell means that some of us, instead of spending money trying to fight nature, need to relearn the joy of dancing.

We're fools whether we dance or not, so we might as well dance. ~Japanese Proverb

To dance in space is to learn the measure of a distance. To not step on a partner and measure a pattern through a room helps our mind conceive of geometry and dimensionality. As we move through space, our kinetic intelligence is activated, causing neurons in parts new parts of the brain to get busy and wake up. When teaching dance to children in early childhood programs I can see almost immediately who is a visual processor, who is an auditory processor and who is a kinetic processor. But even if we have a dominant way of processing stimuli, we can learn other ways—and that is why dance education is so important.

Dance is a language we all begin with. As Martha Graham said: Dance is the hidden language of the soul. She also said: Dancing is just discovery, discovery, discovery.

In a classical education from the Renaissance forward (and possibly before) dance was considered an essential subject. Royals, nobles and when they could afford it, even the middle class, contracted with dancing masters to assure their offspring were well schooled in the steps of the day. One could not advance in society without mastering the form. And master it they did. You don’t hear of Kings moping about muttering, I can’t dance, back then, no way. Dancing was the grease on the skids of politics. Dancing was the link up for getting good alliances. Ah, but dancing has fallen from favor. (Though I hear there are a heck of a lot of inaugural balls being planned in two weeks) What we are left with is some desperate shrugging meant to attract a mate, no steps removed from the mating dances at the local zoo. It is time to bring back all the forms, all the Style that we humans have invented over the years. And it is time for those of us afraid of ridicule to realize that everyone else is so busy about how they look that they are paying no attention to how YOU look. Breathe and move. To whatever music is in your head. We all need to learn to dance in as many ways as possible. Just put on your music and boogie. Martha Graham again: • Nobody cares if you can't dance well. Just get up and dance. Great dancers are not great because of their technique, they are great because of their passion.

So finally, I give you the thoughts of Friedrich Nietzche who said:
"We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once."

Getting an Education

2009-01-06T18:42:00.000-06:00

This is a long one so hold on to your horses (or in my case dig out the reading glasses!)

I have been raging about my school board again.

I don’t know where to put my rage…… The ninnies on the school board did a holiday run around and gave our inept superintendent a contract extension and a raise on top of a raise while we were all out caroling and making sugar cookies (in my case slurping down latkes and spinning dreidels) and watching our retirement funds self destruct-- meanwhile the teachers union issues a report that teacher morale is the lowest on record. Based on the constant turnover over of teachers and principals I could have written that report. Now they want to raise our taxes and take out a 20 million dollar bond issue. It is an absolute financial policy of the school administration to drive anyone with money into the private schools because it saves them gobs of money and if you say any of this in public they will lob the charge of racist (and several other nasty things) at you. And have our test scores gone up –well it depends on which test you are looking at. The elementary school district puts out press releases saying how great the improvements are, and the high school issued statistics that one in 7 kids show up completely unprepared for the work there…..and the scores on the one test calibrated for the college tests shows that less than half have any chance of getting a high enough score to get an ACT score that will get them into a state school. It reminds me of that shell game they do on the subway.

Oh for the days when we could afford private school and I could blithely ignore all this and send in my tax check and feel like I was doing my part for public education in America. Now my kids are in the system and it’s really really scary. My kids went from being really into learning and loving school to feeling like they are in prison.

But are they getting an education? And in what?

They are learning what it is like to be a part of a mindless bureaucracy. And I hope they are doing a pretty good job at navigating it. I mean that’s a life skill. They have gotten really into outside indicators of success, even though I really don’t know what the grades mean.

What I think of as a good education is being exposed to the great ideas of being human. The fact that two of my elementary school children have been beaten up bad enough to be able to come home says there is a little problem there—one of the great ideas is Do Unto Others What You Would Have them Do Unto You—but maybe my kids are more on the heros journey and learning Survival Through Adversity.

Some basic math would be nice so you can figure out that Bernard Madoff is too good to be true—yes, one definitely needs to understand economics. I also think you should know how to get from here to there, preferably navigating a crappy transit system like our own so geography (and problem solving—heroes journey again) is important. You need enough science to cook a decent meal and know why something is inherently unhealthy before you put it into your mouth. And enough science to theoretically grow food.
You need to know how to make things, basic things like sew a pair of pants and how to nail boards together. You never know when the economy will crash and you will have to do these things, and working with one’s hands gives a person great pride and happiness. You should have a basic appreciation for music and know some musical structures and forms because music is about one of the most fantastic things that humans have ever invented and you appreciate what you know and understand even more. It is a crime that kids today know rap and not Mozart, Beyonce and not Puccini. The Chinese listen to Puccini, and to stand and hear an opera singer makes you believe that humans really can accomplish anything. Given how much film has influenced culture, you better get a pretty good media education, including history and forms, and all the European Educational Ministries are with me on that one. We haven’t caught up. And in this world economy you are hopefully not only looking at American films—education should include learning to love subtitles.

I think everyone should learn to dance, but I will save that one for another post.

If you can’t draw, at least learn to appreciate art because it will help you when times are tough. And of course, in our house, you better know good theater from bad and how to make it, but maybe everyone doesn’t need quite so much of an education in that.

It is a great tragedy of the current era that the amount of time dedicated to history has shrunk so drastically in order to prepare for the dang tests that seem to be the way we take the measure of our child. There is no other discipline that is so important as history because we cannot know where we are going until we know where we have been. We are lost without history. You cannot understand the world you live in until you look at how it became that way.

I do not give a whistle about Language Arts and Literacy. I care about Poetry. And I want to know what good books you have read lately and Why You Thought They were Good. I want to know what characters have made you laugh and which have you wanted to murder. I want to know what plots you thought were believable.

I am completely clueless about the math my kids bring home—the new math, the new new math. Two of my kids get it and feel good about it. My other child does not get it (neither do his parents) and we all feel awful.

I had this epiphany the other day. Math is a language but if you do not want to speak it and it does nothing for you—why do we force it? Maybe everyone who CAN do calculus doesn’t have to. I mean I hate administration, but I am good at it and I’ve been pigeon holed there and it has eaten my real life. My brilliant gifted child is talking about going to trade school. And that may be ok. The most important thing is to be lit up about the life you lead, about the world around you. We can’t let school get in the way of education.

A good education becomes part of who you are, just as a bad one does. I just can’t say right now what kind my kids are getting. And here is a totally radical statement from a bleeding heart liberal: it is a crying shame that education ISNT a free market. If everyone in my town who has grown disgusted and left the system (we have the largest Homeschool chapter per capita in the state) things would change pretty quick, yes they would.

Quick show of hands out there—is there anyone who LOVES the school their kids are in? If you are in private school put your hands down.

I thought so.

Boundaries

2009-01-05T15:18:00.000-06:00

I am having trouble compartmentalizing my life—knowing where work leaves off and my own time begins—it seems like it’s all one unruly ball of tangled yarn. Supposedly, this means I am a true cultural creative, part of the new highly productive economy. Ha! It feels like a bit of a brain fry. I am so productive that I dream about my job, only sometimes my dreams are uncannily like nightmares. More on that in another post.

Test question: When I am in a museum with my kids previewing an exhibit and observing their reactions to see what developmental level it fits so I know if it would be a good field trip (I am famous for good field trips) is that a work or a personal activity? Next question: When I am rehearsing the out loud reading of a new picture book at bedtime to see if it will work with our story time on our school’s out program, or making my teen read a novel to see if her age group gets into it, or trolling Facebook to see what her friends are talking about to keep my youth programming relevant is that job related, or my own time? Final bonus question: When I frantically spend the weekend learning a new technology so I can teach it the next week to my charges, does that count as work?

My workplace is very traditional. They actually have a punch clock that you punch in and out of. Very 1950’s. Working at home is pretty frowned upon—we used to have an absolute stated policy against it, but now I am not so sure. I do know that any hours outside the confines of my office are pretty much looked at as my own time. As municipal employees, folks need to know when we are On the Clock so you are not a ghost payroller and Wasting Taxpayer Dollars. But when you love your work, you are never truly Off The Clock. It’s a part of who you are. You are always thinking about how to make what you do BETTER. Well in my case I am fairly obsessed with it. Ask my staff. But it’s one thing when a sanitation worker is off the clock—its kind of hard for him to do his job when he is not on the truck –but my job is to help teach and raise everyone else’s kids and that happens all the time and everywhere. I am very aware that out in public with my kids, I am not just a mom, but potentially your child’s teacher or camp director. It definitely colors what I do. And I know that I stopped separating my life into boxes labeled work, home, mine, theirs, when I started to answer my cell phone the way I answer my office phone. My husband will tell you that I have completely lost the ability to get away from my job until I reach the point of collapse.

But given that what I do that pays me is totally infused into who I am, when I bang up against the old fashioned 9 to 5 punch in punch out work concept, I just get into a brain pickle. I have no idea how to fill out my time sheet and account for my hours. As I move into the new year with a resolution to work smarter so I can have some time to say, read a novel (be still my beating heart) I have absolutely no idea what that means! And of course, the novel I want to read is actually research for one of my camps this summer….
It would be nice to have more time with my own kids. I discovered to my dismay that after 11 hours with everyone else’s kids, I was done with being with children, seeking stimulating adult intellectual conversation, and my kids had to fend for themselves and hang out with Dad over break. I wonder if its that way for other care workers.

So I sit with my boundary building materials, and no idea where to put the fence.

New Years Rocking Eve

2008-12-31T09:43:00.001-06:00

Oh we are a bunch of party animals, if being a bear in hibernation counts. We will throw a few logs on the fire, steam up some Maine lobsters because they have become, like petrol, ridiculously inexpensive and our vegetarians will eat these gluten free crustaceans. We will pop a bottle of poor man’s champagne: Prosecco, and we will curl up around our new tv set for a year end film festival with the dogs trying to squeeze into our laps. (Although the teen is lobbying for a BBC sci fi fest)

As the wicked witch says just as she melts: What a World, What a World!

I have in mind all the people I love as this year turns, in Mumbai, recovering from shock and sadness, in Israel, newly up in flames, in Athens where they also have problems, in Burgundy and Ireland and Finland and England and Berlin and Amsterdam, all over these sort of united States, and my sweet site director now a Peace Corps volunteer, celebrating with no running water or electricity in Malawi, Africa. It is an amazing thing to be alive where I have friends literally across the planet, and where I can type out a letter that they will get in their email box in a few seconds. It is stunning that I can carry a communication device so my children can find me where ever I go, including, with a lot of time on the customer service help desk, anywhere in the world (theoretically). If we can maintain connections and communicate across the globe, there is hope that we can learn to live together. It is but a slender fragile hope, but there it is.

I lift a glass to all of us, to a fresh new year and all the mistakes we will make in it on our way to making the world a better place. We step off into the future not knowing what it holds, but moving forward anyway. Say goodbye to all the lessons and history and big juicy everthingness of 2008.

Cowabunga, 2009!

After Christmas Blues

2008-12-26T11:09:00.000-06:00

Christmas has come and gone.

The glittering diversion that makes winter bearable is now over, the wrappings recycled or burned, our unwrapped trophies stacked beneath the tree. The holidays are not completely past: we still have a few warm candle-lit nights of Hanukkah left, and there’s New Years Eve, a decidedly low key affair in our house, and then winter settles in for good, with bone chilling cold, beautiful but difficult snows and endless grey days. Spring is a long way away. We awoke today with a coating of ice on everything. I decided not to risk driving, but fell three times walking and taking the train to work. The headline on the paper this morning was Too Many Accidents to Count…….

I need the holidays to face the winter. I need all that expectation and bustling to bear the darkness that clutches at my heart, and to force me to get up in the morning. Those twinkling lights hold the abyss at bay. Was this the holiday I wanted it to be? Never! We ended up with part of the family in one location, the dogs and my husband in another, and after trying to make everyone happy, in the end, I made everyone unhappy. Santa’s low budget offerings were not particularly well received, and I am a complete failure at bringing my family to an understanding of the principal of gratitude. Actually, after Christmas, I usually feel like a complete failure at everything. The expectations are too impossibly high, and Hallmark, I ain’t. But I self medicate with spirits and chocolate and I manage to get out of bed each morning which is counter to every instinct in my body. I am part bear in temperament and inclination and I could be perfectly happy taking to my bed for the next quarter.

Whenever I am faced with an unwinnable task: trying to create a lifetime of memories for my children when I am working 60 hour weeks in the summer, or trying to fulfill the overly hyped visions of sugarplums that make up everyone’s holiday expectations, I clutch a checklist like a lifeline. The checklist is the 10 or 15 things that have to happen, that must be fulfilled for me to get a passing grade for the season or event. It’s my rubric. For example, last summer we had to eat a picnic outside, go to an outdoor concert, have Horse Camp, eat at Super Dog, see fireworks, eat ice cream and swim in Lake Michigan. I got it all done, so in my mind, I got a passing grade. I did NOT exceed expectations and this was not an honor roll summer, but in the end, I passed. This year’s holiday season included the following assignments: Latke party, live tree, home made gifts, some family baking event (this I delegated—note the Gingerbread fantasies, including a fish house) see our cousins, be with people who are important, donate, sing carols. We are not totally done with the holidays, but I have completed my assignments.

I have forgotten to put things like SLEEP on this list. I did not get my traditional holiday nap done as I was running around, and I sure feel it today. But some days, the human condition is such that you get by, by the skin of your teeth, by the accumulated guilt of your tribe, by the checklist that becomes your driving force, your talisman, your mentor to get you through. Whatever it takes, whatever it takes.

Holiday Entertaining

2008-12-05T10:54:00.000-06:00

I wrote this and sent it out two years ago, but in these frugal times, I think it deserves repeating.

The Ten Laws of Modern Entertaining. Or the things Martha Stewart is not going to tell you because none of us keep stylists on our payroll.

1. Carry out served on good china is suitable for company, any company from your boss to the Queen of England. Just make sure it’s good carry out.
2. Carry out served on paper plates makes you a “spontaneous hostess” and saves cleanup time (invest in cute disposeables)
3. She who dies with the most yardage wins. Collect patterned fabric, tablecloths and schemata where ever you can find it---it will cover a multitude of sins. If its not machine washable throw it out when you spill on it. Ethnic textiles are so in and can be found in dollar bins at the local everything store.
4. If one plate is not going to match, make sure none of them match. Same with glassware; that’s called eclectic table settings.
5. If the bathroom, the room you cook in and the space where you are dining are clean, you can have company over. (This could mean having a picnic in the living room if like me your dining room is full of your work-at-home projects) Only light the pathways to the rooms you want people in and its ok to disconnect the light bulbs in the rooms you do not want anyone to see.
6. You are allowed to only serve dessert if that’s all you can muster. Or only serve hors d’oevres—just make sure the guests know before they come so they do not eat your centerpieces from hunger.
7. If the house is a total disaster and it’s above 55 degrees Fahrenheit, you are allowed to serve an “al fresco” meal. If it’s below 60 degrees, though, I would burn something. Bonfires are “quaint”
8. If the house is a total disaster, turn off all the lights and only use candles. Claim a power failure. Its “atmosphere”.
9. If you are not going to have time to change between the meal preparation and the guests arrival, wear all black to cook in and add a dashing accessory when the doorbell rings. Scarves are not a good choice unless you find one that does not show stains. I like metal for accessories myself.
10. It’s supposed to be FUN to have people over to break bread and converse.

As you can see, on the spectrum of hostessing, I fall towards the slatternly end of the scale. But everyone has a good time, so go figure. While it is wonderful to go to a sit down dinner on fine china in gowns and tux, my style is chili and beer while the kids fight over Halloween candy, or fried potatoes by the poundful at our annual latke fest. And if you are totally broke and still want to party, remember the potluck!

Happy entertaining.

End of year letters

2008-12-02T19:49:00.000-06:00

Every year, I am supposed to sit down about now while digesting our fabulous smoked all natural specially ordered free range turkey or sipping on my three day to make it turkey carcass soup which tastes like love and tradition and getting through the long cold winter in a bowl, and I am supposed to write the family holiday letter.

I hate this task. It strains my writing ability. I hate feeling like a publicist for my family. The last few years have had a bunch of nasty bumps in them, bad hands dealt in the card game of life and long about now when its dark by 4pm and cold and I have to chisel my car out (the doors have frozen AGAIN) I am not all sweetness and gratitude.
I hate plastering a smile on. I hate having to spin my own life.

Don’t get me wrong--I am grateful, really. And blessed. I thank the universe that I do not live in the 9th ward, still in a trailer after three years. I am not living in a hotel room in California after my house went up in flames. I am not standing in a line at a shelter for my turkey soup. No one in my immediate circle is in stage 4 cancer (that was last year). I have my lovely spacious dilapidated house to ramble around in and for now it is heated. I have a job when multitudes don’t. I have a partner and 3 artistic creative beautiful kids and a zoo full of animals. The angel of really bad stuff passed me by and I am breathing a sigh of relief. We hung on, and in our way, we triumphed. We were in many many shows,--we all managed to get into at least one opera this year. We went to Berlin. We did Horse Camp and American Revolution Camp and Pirate Camp. We went camping and to Mackinaw Island. We ate a pie we will never forget. We went to Florida and California for Bat Mitvahs and danced with the family.

It was not easy. Some of our gifts were given, and many were earned. We did not always get what we wanted but we learned what we needed. Sometimes you have to stop denying the ugly parts and stare them down. So instead of the letter I give you my honestly Angelas List of 2008. We had:

1. People who care about where we are and keep calling so many times to ask us when we are coming home until we just stopped answering the phone.
2. Food that is so exotic and delicious everyone is afraid to try it even though its vegetarian AND gluten free and really really healthy—oh and prepared with love.
3. Lots of animals that love you more than anything and chew up everything you own because they are so upset you are not there but they are so cute you kind of get over it.
4. So much art and creativity that you can’t even walk through the room and everyone is talking at once and whatever you need we have or we can just whip one up.
5. Health insurance. With big deductibles and copays and its all costing a fortune but everyone is happy to see us because we have it, we actually really really have it and we can get the care we need.
6. Way too much to do because we are interested in everything and we could add just one more sport/theatre/art thing to our lives because Angela will do anything in the universe to get out of the dead end, soul shattering task of doing housework which no one ever appreciates anyway because they immediately mess it all up.
7. Really good thrift stores which if you are pack rat are really dangerous things to walk into but its so nice to get a cashmere sweater for a dollar that you just love it anyway.
8. OCD and ADD and drama and sturm and drang and all kinds of labels which we are kind of learning to ignore or get over or reframe or get beyond.
9. Music, and beauty and laughter and friends.

Ok? I hope that the beautiful mess that is your life is rolling along without too many trainwrecks….Our family puts the Fun in Dysfunctional.

Thankful to be here, now

2008-11-25T10:58:00.000-06:00

Last week, as she reached for the milk, my teen’s wrists gave a glimpse to my husband and me that all was not well in her adjustment to high school.

She was not happy to be discovered, and bitterly decried our lack of comprehension at “how things are” and shrieked at me “you were NEVER a teenager.”

But I was, oh I was.

An anorexic and bilumic teen who often thought of suicide. It is impossible to explain to someone suffering their own angst of adolescence with the confusion and joy of the known world on her desktop what it was to be young in the 1970’s, when your father has dropped dead within days of your 13th birthday and your mother and you are from different planets, and no one is self actualized and we don’t have SSRI’s and you are trapped in a world where no one understands you and how much living hurts. I was supposed to be the responsible one, and there were only a few really gifted teachers who reached out for me and caught my own free fall back then. It is bitterly ironic that I cannot share this with my own child in a way she could hear it so that she could know that I have been through the abyss and survived.

I have danced with thoughts of self destruction and death through the years. A survivor of date rape by 20, of ransacked apartment and attack by hatchet by 25, of betrayal and identity theft by 30 and subsequent bankruptcy both financial and spiritual, I have not always been handed the best hand in the card game of life. A family problem with serotonin makes those black times blacker, but I only know that now. Somehow an inherent sense of life and the chronic inability to kill or get rid of anything (evidence: my garden) including myself drove me forward through those times and I am still here. A fantastic tolerance for pain also helps. But most of all, I believe, in some wacky way that I was lucky, the universe was looking out for me, and someone sympathetic, the right person to listen, was always there in the nick of time. There is grace in my fellow humans.

Life is not kind. It is as likely to kick you in the teeth as hand you a flower. It is not fair or gracious, that is our job as the humans. To achieve anything you will have to work your ass off, and you still may end up in the soup kitchen line. But maybe I can stack the deck for my daughter and make sure those listening people are there even if I have to pay them. Maybe I can sprinkle our lives with people are truly present, who are listening and paying attention.

The one thing that not offing yourself gives you is the secure knowledge you can hang on by your bloody fingernails until it passes. When the fairies pass out gifts at births that might not be the one you would pick, fame, beauty, wealth and a good singing voice being higher on the wish list. But when the proverbial poop hits the fan as it invariably will, I will take the tenacity to go on living in the face of all evidence to the contrary. And if you hang on, there will be jackpot day; sunrise, a toddler’s giggle, the soft snuggle of a baby rabbit, the smell of gardenias in the wind, the flavor of Belgian chocolates. Life is a gift, and it is a great tragedy that my beloved child is having such a hard time enjoying that some days now. She is not the only member of my extended clan with that difficulty, and that in its own way, is our human condition.

As you feast and are grateful for that feast, really be with the people you are with and enjoy.

A song from when I was a teen, I used to sing this one at guitar mass.—Seals and Crofts, 1973
Life, so they say, is but a game and we let it slip away.
Love, like the Autumn sun, should be dyin' but it's only just begun.
Like the twilight in the road up ahead, they don't see just where we're goin'.
And all the secrets in the Universe, whisper in our ears
And all the years will come and go, take us up, always up.
We may never pass this way again.
We may never pass this way again.
We may never pass this way again.

Dreams, so they say, are for the fools and they let 'em drift away.
Peace, like the silent dove, should be flyin' but it's only just begun.
Like Columbus in the olden days, we must gather all our courage.
Sail our ships out on the open sea. Cast away our fears
And all the years will come and go, and take us up, always up.
We may never pass this way again.
We may never pass this way again.
We may never pass this way again.

So, I wanna laugh while the laughin' is easy. I wanna cry if it makes it worthwhile.
We may never pass this way again, that's why I want it with you.
'Cause, you make me feel like I'm more than a friend.
Like I'm the journey and you're the journey's end.
We may never pass this way again, that's why I want it with you, baby.

We may never pass this way again. We may never pass this way again.
We may never pass this way again. We may never pass this way again

slumber parties

2008-11-18T15:40:00.000-06:00

We reached another milestone. An 8th birthday. You become eligible for slumber parties in our house once you have achieved 8. I have no solid developmental reason for this, aside from the fact that at that point they usually understand basic hygene and are less likely to wake me up at 3 am sobbing to go home. So, my youngest had a sleepover for her 8th. I clearly have become absent minded since I had completely forgotten how exhausting it can be for the PARENTS. My son’s last batch of sleepovers was known as Camp and it was handled by young, fit men who are not old and senile like me. I will need a weekend in a spa with 10 hours of uninterrupted sleep to recover from the next one….. First of all, there is no sleeping at a slumber party. It’s too darn exciting to do something boring and mundane like sleeping. I made my best effort to get them all to sleep at a decent hour, but being in a room with all these girls wiggling and squealing assures that most of the kids do not settle down. Ever. I literally read bedtime stories in a soothing voice for over an hour. My own child passed out after 10 minutes, but the others held on until nearly midnight, which is decidedly past MY bedtime. I could barely keep my eyes open, the words blurred before me, but all those kids will get A’s on their reading logs this week because I plowed through two entire chapter books. With expression.

Then morning comes, and despite the blankets I had placed over the windows to black out the lights, the first one woke up at 6 am—and promptly tickled her compatriots into joining her in the new day. I lay in my bed listening to the shrieks of joy (I hope) unable to rise thinking dark murderous thoughts. But the risk of awakening a foul mooded teen also in the house was too great so I went on duty. Two cups of espresso banked the lack of sleep hangover. Waffles were had, games were played, suitcases packed then our young partiers were returned to parental units. Except I still had my overly tired birthday girl who promptly fell into post party blues. It was a very very very long Sunday. I had spent the entire previous day as the emotional punching bag for before mentioned moody teen at the opening of the high school fencing season so emotional reserves were gone, as was my sense of fun about this parenting gig. I faced the errands, laundry and week prep that is part of our Sunday routine with the enthusiasm of a condemned prisoner.

Not enjoying the mom thing…need a break…. I can’t wait to get to work on Monday so I can get away from everyone needing me, and needing more of me than I have.

Musings prior to an election

2008-10-30T13:44:00.000-05:00

Lately, having an internet connection and a rudimentary understanding of economics has given me a window to a slow moving train wreck that I just knew was coming. Like my husband’s cousin noted, this is probably worse than 9-11 but because its taking so long to happen it does not feel so bad. We all know life has changed.

In the way that you slow down and stare at bad car accidents, watching the news the last few months has that same kind of voyeuristic horror. I have had to just stop myself, and remind myself that I come from folks who have survived wars, pogroms, tuberculosis, near starvation. This is not as bad as it can get. The fact that I have a decent roof over my head and a stocked refrigerator means I got nuthin to worry about, though worry and stew I do, like a dog with a bone.

Life is hard. Whether you are a salmon swimming upstream to spawn and die, a tree trying to grow on a rock, or a parent in the 21st century trying to juggle the demands of competing bureaucracies, living is a struggle. Which makes sense,now that we know that everything really IS related to everything, on a microscopic level, getting energy, replicating, existing and dying are never easy. Advertising and some musicals try to tell us there is an Easy Street, but I am not sure they exist where I am at. So you put your head down and your shoulder to the grindstone.

I have always known how to cut back and make do. Most of my clothes are used. I don’t pay retail and I know how to do without. I keep cars a decade and drive in a fuel efficient manner common with grandmas. This annoys the heck out of the guy behind me who will need a break job every three weeks the way he drives!

I know how to sew, cook, and don’t mind meals of noodles or potatoes. Our camping vacations won’t help the economy much, but they are fine by me. I do get tired of repeating to my children “no, we can’t afford that” like a broken record, but I was doing it before it was fashionable.

There is a lot to be said for the new frugality. I talked my kids into seeing how long we could go without heat. My husband is complaining but we made it through a few freezing nights without turning it on. It’ll be November 1 in a few days and we find that if we keep the doors closed, the house will stay about 59 degrees. We bundled on blankies and wear hats to bed and we are toasty. It’s become a badge of honor to tough it out. I know my family can pull together and get it done. And we put off getting that bill we can’t pay for a while just a little longer.

And in the end, the tough immigrant stock that this nation is made up of, well, we will pull together and get it done. We will work our way out of this cesspool of an economic debacle. We will fix the damn schools with NO help from the government, because its our KIDS for god’s sake. The housing market will tank for a while because we don’t have the salaries to support the inflated prices, but we will move over and make room for our foreclosed family and friends. We will work more soup kitchens this winter and donate more food to the food bank. We will work our tails off to pay off the 700 billion dollar debt that our esteemed leadership got us into, and so will our kids. We will do with less and hope for more. We will conserve energy because the stuff costs too much in dollars and economic destruction. When your ancestors traversed a bombed out Europe, or crawled out of the concentration camps, you know how to keep going and make a better world for your children.

So get out there and vote, because We are the Change that needs to happen.

Gone Digital and Quit

2008-10-27T12:04:00.000-05:00

So we got our coupons for our discount for a digital converter box. You have to use them in 90 days—and so they expire in about a week. I had ordered some before but we lost them for 4 months and they were no good so we had to order them again—what a nightmare.

We dutifully went out and bought the boxes and of course no one sells them for what the government reimburses, so you will be out a chunk of change—found out the cheap ones don’t have the plugs in them, went our and got those, and then spent quite a while hooking them up. There is NO WAY my mother will be able to do this. My in-laws will definitely have to hire a someone, or get cable on all their tvs. If you are currently unemployed or underemployed, hang up a sign in the grocery store and offer to figure out these stupid things (every one of them is different) and install them for the technically challenged. A whole new cottage industry will be born. It took both my husband and I working together over 45 minutes to get the thing up and running and I HATE IT.

I just have to thank the tv industry for hanging itself. I have been meaning to cut back on my watching time and this finally weaned me completely. The pixallation and breakup of the image when I turned the bedroom light on, or my cell phone rang makes you want to heave your set out the second floor window.. The fact the the PBS station didn’t even come in until I went down and got a length of tin foil to rig up an antenna defeats the whole point of having a tv in my bedroom. The fact that every third word dropped out until I thought I was going to go CRAZY…...

FORGET IT. I shut off the tv and picked up a novel.

I see this digital conversion thing will be an immense boon to libraries, radio broadcasters and DVD sales, since the only thing my analog tv is now good for is as a playback screen for DVD and video. I feel bad for the television industry and any poor sucker trying to get its message out to the public, but this definitely heralds the end of broadcast television.

Slumming

2008-10-23T13:51:00.000-05:00

I have not set foot in a Catholic Church except for the odd tourist visit or funeral/wedding for at least a decade. I grew up a 5 mass a week singer in the choir Catholic, went to a Catholic University. Then I married a nice Jewish boy whose mother told me I was completing the work of Hitler. And my parish priest told me if I didn’t have a nice Catholic wedding and raise nice Catholic children, then 1) he couldn’t attend my nuptials even as a guest and 2) my children would all be bastards. I never have been able to make other people happy. Anyway, all my bastards have nice Jewish identities and I make a mean matzo ball, the best gluten free latkes in the Midwest, and I can welcome in the Shabbat bride with the best of them, in case anyone is interested. We’ve given up most red meat so my brisket is irrelevant at this point, but as shiksa wives go, I pass for a tribal member. I set up a tree each year because I have to, and it’s a yarzheit for my father—and we go to my brothers house for most blatantly Christian holidays.

But last night, I raced over to my neighborhood Catholic Church to join the choir for Holiday Pops at a fancy schmantzy downtown venue. The chance to sing in a SATB choir of 120 was just too good to pass up. Plus I get to see my buddy Linda who talked me into it.

I love to sing in a choir. When you are part of an ensemble, you crawl inside the music in an up close personal way. And when you get it, when you find the groove when you are singing in harmony with that wall of sound, you hook into this vibration that just makes your molecules happy. I hang out a whole bunch at the opera and I just love it there, but listening is not the same total body experience that singing and listening at the same time is---because to be a good choir singer, you have to fit in to the crowd perfectly. When you are working at blending you are completely alive using all of your senses at once—thinking, hearing, seeing, feeling, --well maybe not taste, except during breaks: this choir has home baked treats at breaks!

I have never been a choir leader—I follow the strong singers where ever they lead most of the time, until I know the music like my own heartbeat and one of the strong ones is out sick—then I step up and hold my own. And I can barely read music. But I can let the sounds take over my body, and then I can hit it and really contribute. Come to think of it, choir is a metaphor for a lot of organizations I have been in. Stumbling along on intuition and chutzpah and doing an okay job and contributing. It would be nice if government was more like a choir.

So for the next two months I have my guilty pleasure, slipping back to my roots of long ago and singing Christmas carols that are buried in my limbic brain in four part harmony.

Revenge of the Nerds?

2008-10-17T18:36:00.000-05:00

My preteen is standing, nearly naked, atop a heap of clothes he has yanked from his drawers and rejected upon the floor.

MOM, he wails, THESE MAKE ME LOOK LIKE A DORK. Everyone makes fun of me because I dress like a dork. These clothes are NOT cool.

He picked out these clothes. Plain athletic wear, nary an uncomfortable seam or fastener, the entire pile. They were bought and paid for with hard earned money, money which I no longer have. So new clothes are not an option.

So I stand back, load my information shotgun, and fire. Because, you see, whenever we fail miserably as parents, my son threatens to leave and become a waif on Bill Gates' doorstep, hoping to be adopted by my son's vision of the perfect dad.

Dude, say I, are you aware that growing up, Bill Gates was a dork? And most fashion mavens agree, he is still a dork? Most of the freshman class of Harvard is made up of Dorks (He says that’s his goal for college though I think that may be a long shot). MIT and University of Chicago—loaded with dorks. Every single Nobel Prize winner? Yup, a dork. And Warren Buffet? A dork.

You know who wasn’t a dork? You know who everyone thought was their friendly cool guy? George Bush.

My son, I opine, in the end, Dorks through history have advanced humanity from caves and invented Iphones. It is good to be a dork.

I leave him, half dressed to contemplate this skewed world view. From a mother who retaliates by blasting sopranos singing in Italian when neighboring speakers rattle my windshields at stoplights (this was my eldest child’s idea—Blast Opera! She cries,being quite happily, a dork)

But as I walk down the hallway, I wonder, when did being smart and rule abiding become an anathema? And I realize, it’s always been that way. At least since the dark ages when I was in school more than 30 years ago. From the moment you enter the school system, being the smart kid will exact a heavy price. Smart kids will be ostracized, beat up. Aside from the scholarship money, there is no advantage to winning the science fair. Oh, the principal may shake your hand, but NO ONE will sit with you at lunch. Sheer animal strength will get you celebrity status, athletic prowess will elevate one to a godlike pedestal, but if your kid is ranked a grand master in chess they will be at best ignored, at worst pulverized in a little trafficked corner of some hallway. The peer pressure to be “like everyone else” includes NOT being smarter, or gifted in anything intellectual. You see this in No Child Left Behind. They don’t call it All Children will Excel. And resources are all to bring the bottom up, not help the best and brightest speed ahead. In fact, precociousness and intelligence are a social liability in the classroom—the teacher sends you to the library or needs you to help the other kids, which singles you out and makes you a Dork or teachers pet—a fate worse than excommunication. So the pressure to be dumber than you are is huge.

We are a culture that does not just devalue intelligence—we denigrate it. And that is what has brought this nation to its current pickle. Sinking to the lowest common denominator dilutes all that is good and right and causes the Dow to sink 900 points in a day. If America wants to drag itself out of the pit we have fallen into, if we don’t want to end up like the Romans, well it better be All Dorks on Deck. We need everybody to be smarter and better. We need armies of teacher’s pets, honest smart folks working at banks and financial institutions. And we need some super duper dorks to invent the next Internet which will provide us with opportunities and business models and jobs we cannot even imagine at this point.

The populists rant against Elitism, but you know what, the fastest growing economies in the world don’t have that prejudice. They sink a lot of capital into their smart folks and it pays off in spades. We can't even give smart kids free rides to college--other countries send their smart kids to our schools and foot the entire bill.

So our only hope is Dorks. Now if I can just sell that idea to an 11 year old boy, trying to fit in……

Saying Goodbye

2008-10-06T12:26:00.000-05:00

Requiem for a Very Good Rabbit

Before my shower and cup of coffee yesterday morning, Mr. Moustache left us for the herb garden in the sky where all good bunnies go. He had certainly seen better days, our softest half lop eared boy of crayon and candle chewing. Left blind from the warning nip he got from the retriever when he foolishly tried to steal a training biscuit, we also suspected he was deaf. His medical bills ate our vacation.
But he was one happy rabbit, and still stupidly trying to eat out of the dog bowl. He had a predilection for chewing very expensive water color paper, and electrical cords. If you can’t see dangers and you are a rabbit, you don’t worry about anything, and you pretty much trust that everything is good, especially when delicious foods show up magically in front of your nose on a regular basis. We felt sorry for him, but he never felt sorry for himself. I learned a lot from that rabbit.

We found him under a parked car in a tony neighborhood five or six years ago, so he lived a good run in rabbit time years. Since someone kept taking down our FOUND RABBIT signs, we suspected he was an abandoned easter present. We got him before a lively retriever did and he never learned a healthy fear of big dogs.

He is one of our few pets who just up and died, preventing us from having to make the decision to euthanize him. He had a horrible to watch seizure and then he was gone. We spent several hours on the internet trying to figure out why, but my vet friend told me, sometimes these things happen, and she rarely sees geriatric rabbits. They don’t get that much time in our world.

This morning I missed him so, always expectantly waiting in the kitchen for breakfast. Our new baby rabbit will help ease the loss, but will never replace our beloved boy.

September

2008-09-19T14:23:00.000-05:00

Every September I have this incredible ANTI squirrel urge—instead of wanting to pack away everything for the long winter, I have this insane need to clean out my life, unload baggage and organize. It could be that it’s a corollary to needing to get the winter clothes down from the attic, and I have to sort of finish the project. It could be the sheer terror of being trapped in the house for the next 6 months with all my accumulated STUFF. Whatever the seed of this urge, I go with it.

I was going through drawers and found the old VH-C’s of family vacations when my teen and preteen were very small. In sorting through them to determine which ones to have digitally copied, I found myself in a kind of joyous memory lane. Oh my god, my preteen son as a Prince at two. The video of the chicken pox. These things are priceless.

And there in a forgotten drawer I found my big rocks.

You know the lecture that says your life is like a cleaned out peanut butter jar. Figure out what the big rocks are so you put them in first because if you fill up your life jar with all the minute annoying pebbles of grocery buying and laundry doing you will never be able to fit the big rocks—two small children discovering tidal pools—into the space that’s left.

The big rock in our family is TRAVEL. Getting away from our daily lives and exploring. Being with one another. It is in these times that we find each other. And these last few years it was the first thing we cut when trying to balance the household budget. But whats the point of a house if we don’t know and love who we are living with. We wanted the bigger house to accommodate the bigger family, but I would WAY rather have a shack and vacations than a nice house and stay put.

And I suddenly realize how guilty I am of not making those big rocks a major priority. It is too easy to get caught up in the sand of life as it buries you—the permission slips and where are the ballet slippers and who forgot to pick up milk.

I suppose this is why I am such a dreadful housekeeper. There is just not enough time in my life to read a chapter of Charlotte’s Web to the kids—we are at the part where Charlotte dies and that is going to devastate all of us, and bring us up close and personal to the tenuousness of living---and get the kitchen floor swept and mopped up. I hope my epitaph reads: She lived a wonderful life. She kept a very messy house……

Exercise

2008-09-12T15:42:00.000-05:00

Last week, all the kiddies were at last back at school I could return to my weekly exercise –an art form certain to rapidly grind out my prearthritic hips and shorten the lifespan of my Achilles tendon. This addiction to this exercise form is crazy, and delicious. You see, after three months, I am back in

ballet class.

Two mornings a week, I walk out on my husband.

Yup, I leave him, and the children and our veritable zoo. I pack everybody’s lunch, find my son a weather appropriate outfit and spend 20 minutes finding his glasses, then grab my coffee and walk out the door.

I ABANDON them all.

I am going to ballet class.

At 8 bloody am.

Real ballerinas do NOT go to 8 am class. They go to class every day they can, but at a civilized hour like 10am. Of course, I am not a ballerina.

Now I am a former professional dancer. MODERN dancer. Avant garde modern dancer, the kind that rolls around on the floor clad only in corn starch for an art installation. I never took ballet twice a week during the dozen years I had my own company. I studied with Hanya Holm, one of the founders of American modern dance. I took class five days a week at the Nikolais studio in New York. Ballet was not my cup of tea—the only Nutcracker I was ever involved had me backstage calling cues, and I still don’t know or really care about the difference between Ecartee and Effacee.

But now that I am way over 40, with a desk job, I no longer see the hard lines dividing movement forms. I don’t see the difference between schlepping loads of laundry up and down three flights of stairs in my ramshackle Victorian and doing Stairmaster. So when I found out that a real dance teacher gets up to my health club twice a week at the crack of dawn to teach real dance to a bunch of middle aged women, that was good enough for me. In fact, it’s better than good. It’s my religion.

A few of the women doll up in chiffon skirts or artfully cut tee shirts. Me, I wear Yoga Wear, the black cotton knit stuff that goes from Ballet to office by throwing a sweater on top. I need to do ballet class between carpool set up and a 9:15 standing weekly staff meeting, so everything better multi-task.

We are a motley lot, the Ballet Babes of the early am. The middle aged regulars, and the steady crop of young professionals with an ever evolving bevy of students sprinkled in. This is a ballet class at a health club. There is no dress code. There are jazz shoes and sox and my signature bare feet with wildly colored toenails. I always get there late and have to do plies in the corner and jump in. The combinations are long and complicated. They prevent Alzheimers, dammit. Our abs are soft from baby bearing and office gigs, our minds are slow from humdrum ordinary concerns like grocery lists, but for an hour twice a week, we sweat like prima ballerinas and we strive, oh god we strive, for better turn-out. We know, because the teacher tells us, that Ballet is the new Black. That everyone should and will be doing this.

I check my overcomplicated life at the door and go back to a time in my life where I measured success in how high I could kick my leg. I face my aging self in floor to ceiling mirrors, all the places I have fallen short of ideals exposed. I move forward (and sideward and backward) I try to retain my flexibility. I try to fight gravity and get better. And really, isn’t that what we all should do.

So get moving. Find a ballet class and rediscover what you knew at 7—that everything, including you, is beauty-full at the ballet. It is WAY cheaper than HRT or therapy…….

Living and learning

2008-09-12T08:51:00.000-05:00

In keeping with our family theme of more to love and more to feed, we recently took the plunge and offered to host a foreign exchange student for the school year. It was a daunting task and we literally turned our house upside down to make it happen. I was so proud of my kids and their willingness to host a complete stranger. We want to do our part for world peace and understanding. My kids really thought through how to make someone new feel comfortable, and for some of us, the task really pushed us out of our comfort zones and required us to give up some entrenched habits and be mindful. Unfortunately, it did not work out. For some reason we were not a good match--our guest was seeking a Typical American Household, and it was clear from the very start she was not thrilled with our brand of Family. I am not sure what Typical American Family is, and I had a sneaking suspicion that we were not such a construct, but now I know unequivocally that we are not. As a way of working through our pain and grief and sense of failure that it did not work out (being rejected by an exchange student hurts as much as being jilted by a lover) we offer what we wish we had said if we knew then what we know now……

A Brief Introduction to our household.

Welcome to Mildred. That’s the name of our house. The car is named Blue. Our other house, in the country is called DOG HAVEN. Names are carefully chosen for their connotation. In the appendix (and elsewhere on this blog) you will find a more thorough explanation of Mildred and her idiosyncrasies, and there will be sections on Blue and Dog Haven, but here is what you need to know to live happily ever after here with our off-beat family of overachieving artists. We are NOT in ANY way mainstream or Typical. We are charmingly unique. In some places that translates as a little nutty.

1. Mildred is a zoo, since a core value in our family is the sanctity of life. All life. While I really don’t LIKE spiders, flies and bugs, I respect their right to exist. I allowed rats, albeit the kind you can dress up in Barbie clothes, to live with us. My tolerance for life forms also goes for weeds, so our garden is a little overgrown. I completely lack the cold-hearted ruthlessness necessary for good gardens. We adopt lost, abandoned animals with amazing regularity. The children also temporarily adopt toads, snakes, and insects that are unusual. All the pets become beloved members of the family, and if you take some time to know them you will find out they are lovely personalities. We never give up on people or animals who are a little “different”.

2. There are a lot of us here. There are not enough bathrooms for the number of teenagers and allied persons living here most of the time, so bathroom usage during peak hours is limited to 5 minutes unless you are using the smaller ones. I know it seems really awkward, but if you are going to take a two hour bubble bath, you need to announce it to the household in a large voice, and you need to do it in off peak hours. This is kind of communal living and we have to be aware of everyone else. Sometimes this is a bummer. Sometimes it is good preparation for life on a crowded planet.

3. We are a tight knit group that actually shares interests and hobbies like performing in operas, speed skating, soccer, film. We have an extended family of folks you can turn to when you want to strangle someone you live with... We have a schedule that looks like a military maneuver spreadsheet to make sure every member of our rambling group gets to do all the things they want and need to do. We support the development of passions. We do not waste time and we do A LOT. (Some people think too much!) We are always interested in what you are up to and you need to alert central scheduling (that’s Angela) as to your whereabouts and estimated times of arrival, keeping in mind she works for the city so you have to observe curfew and applicable laws regulations and policies. She really wants a clock like Mrs. Weasley in Harry Potter so she just knows where all her family is and that they are safe. Safety is an issue in a diverse community, and some pretty bad things have happened to some members of our family so we know that better safe than sorry is a good operations motto.

4. We love books and movies. We have so many of them we use them as furniture. We keep up on current events. We believe in the arts and a life of the mind. No one would call us intellectuals, not here in the Midwest anyway, but we like smart conversations and good debates. Some of us are brainy nerds.

5. We value experiences over stuff, but we are pack rats. (It is actually genetic, which makes it worse, since a lot of the cool stuff we have we inherited from parents who couldn’t get rid of it either) Mildred is what in the education world is known as an enriched environment. What looks like clutter is actually a museum quality collection of art books and many pieces of primitive art, a costume collection rivaling many theater companies, and enough arts supplies to run a small arts school. And in between all that is clutter. But Central Scheduling would rather take you sailing than clean the house, which after all will just get dirty again.

6. Mildred is old which means things are always breaking on her. We try to look at her good points. We are not rich, so keeping time and gravity at bay sometimes takes a little while. The good news is that it makes you behave very very green.

7. We love a bargain. We are famous for dumpster diving (free) thrift shop and tag sale trolling (really cheap), and hitting the off-beat stores that charge low low prices. This allows us to acquire more cool stuff which is not helping with number 5.

8. We all talk at once. Loudly. This is normal. We actually email each other, if we need to get important information to one another. We are not mind readers. Communicate by any means necessary: email, cell phone, smoke signal, sign language. With this many people and their different ideas, it is important to keep the lines of communication OPEN. Never EVER lie. Someone always catches you. Honesty may be painful but it works. We can all handle it.

8. We love electronics, gadgets and the internet, but house rules say NO SCREENS when the weather is good. We still believe in tasting touching hearing seeing and feeling the world unedited by content developers. We live in an area where weather is too often bad….and what’s more, we value experiences which means you have to get out and have them!

9 We have an extensive social network. We get out, we host parties. We bustle. Someone in this house knows someone who—we are connected.

10. We are tolerant of diversity and special needs. After all, some members of our family have what are often called disabilities. We accommodate quirks to the best of our ability.

11. We are Very Dramatic. Really Dramatic. And Drama always finds us!

12. Everyone tries to connect in the morning—we are not morning people and it takes liberal doses of caffeine to pull off these breakfast free for alls, but it is a huge chance to check in. We NEED to check it. And everyone tries to connect before we go to bed. In between its CRAZY! We attempt to gather for a real old fashioned family dinner on Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights.

13. We really love each other, and in the end we are really there for each other. Through thick and thin. And if you live in Mildred and become one of us, that goes for you too.

Welcome to fall!

2008-09-11T09:19:00.001-05:00

Fall is here.
In our family we know that fall has arrived, not because the shiny new sneakers are in the locker, or because the fresh pencils and reams of filler paper have arrived. No, at our house we know its fall because we are in an Opera! This year we have kicked off the fall season by being in TWO! We dash downtown eating dinner in traffic not because I am a soccer mom, but because I am a Super Mom—mother and chaperone to the supernumeraries. This is our French Fall as both of my elder children are in operas sung in that language. This year my son gets to play a page to a main character in the opera Manon by Massenet. And my daughter has finally transitioned into adult roles and will be a priestess for The Pearl Fishers, a Bizet bit of exotica. Yes we still have homework, but it’s so much more fun to do it backstage listening to sopranos send chills down your spine or having your entire body surrounded by the sounds of the Lyric chorus than sitting at our kitchen table. The local library does not have crazy genius directors running about barefoot screaming FLUTTER PEOPLE, FLUTTER!!!!!! to distract you from a thorny math problem. Just like commitments to sports, being in Opera makes the kids very efficient by necessity. Opera is not really a kid friendly world, so they are also learning to navigate an environment that demands professionalism from everyone involved. My children have learned so much at the Lyric: how everyone from the supers to the wig folks to the makeup people are all an integral part of making the show happen. If anyone is out or fails to do their job well, it ripples through the whole operation. I wish I could teach this lesson to my colleagues at my day job!

Why do I devote such a huge chunk of my life to the opera? How can I face a 7 hour day of chaperoning a rehearsal after a week of overtime? One, it keeps my kids away from mind numbing screens and exposes them to a whole bunch of music in a way that allows them to come to love it. Once you have listen to the overture to Barber of Seville twenty times, you need to have that score in your life—it becomes part of your hard wiring. It’s something we do together as a family—and how cool is that! Also, I could be stuck at an ice rink cheering on hockey. Instead, I get to stand backstage after shepherding my charges to their entrances and watch while some of the most talented artists of my time ply their craft. I am telling you, it does not get any better than this. I am most at home in a theater and now my kids are too. Talk about imprinting!

So check us out onstage at the Lyric opera this season where my regular supernumeraries are entering a fantasy world of drama and music.

Summer vacation

2008-09-02T16:52:00.000-05:00

I have been away a while. I am back. I was on summer vacation....
Remember summer vacation?
For our family, it was supposed to be a two week togetherness extravaganza to Quebec or the Grand Canyon or some equally memorable place. But school bureaucracies, exorbitant gas costs, and pressing work commitments shortened it to 5 days, a tent, a minivan and two dogs and a very slim budget—can you say canned food?

Here is what I remember:

Never EVER go camping with dogs. Especially not neurotic shelter dogs on anti-anxiety meds. Especially not escape artists with sensitive stomachs. I for one will never forget the quaint town where we stopped for lunch and the dog got diarrhea all over the front seat. Thank god the only store in town was a hardware general store with sanitizing wipes and old fashioned cleaning supplies. Getting dog crap off of your phone charger probably qualifies as a never to be forgotten experience. My children learned several new swear words which they have been practicing. In public.

Never EVER go camping with a snarling teenager. You can only hear I HATE CAMPING four hundred times in a day. On the four hundred and first rendition, you want to run over your child with a backhoe. I have a diva daughter whose idea of camping is spelled H-I-L-T-O-N or S-P-A. Being trapped in a mini van on a camping trip was, in her world, child abuse. She was completely lost without internet access and wandered adorable seaside towns looking for wifi like a junkie looking for a fix.I will always remember wondering what planet she is currently on.

Never EVER go camping with three children who after 4 hours in a car together absolutely hate each other and scream this sotto voce in front of 40 people while hitting each other at a charming village where you are trying to find a lunch spot that serves gluten free meals and SOMETHING vegetarian that does not include cheese or fish and has nothing fried. By the way, in this universe, in the Midwest, this does not exist. You need Dr. Who in his tardis to find an alternative universe where this is an option. I will remember to pack more food in the future.

Never EVER go camping after putting in two months of 12 hour days. You are too tired to think straight so you forget essentials like MATCHES to light the fires you need. You can’t remember ENGLISH so you stay stupid things. My son says cute things like “Buy me a piece of paralyzed wood for a souvenir” (He meant petrified, but the idea of a paralyzed tree kept me laughing for days) or how about “The allergy pill is stuck in my sarcophagus (esophagus)”. I said things like “if you take the last cup of coffee I will murder you.” And I said this in front of people who then backed away looking at me funny. They are going to remember me!

Never EVER go camping in a region where rain is a remote possibility. The Walmart tent WILL leak and after four hours in wet clothes you can feel your flesh mold. Who cares if the plants and farms need it—when you camp, water from the sky is your enemy.

Pie saved us. Cherry pie from a farm stand that melted in your mouth and was so good you cried. It made you think of all that is good about summer, and sand and rolling hills and sunny skies. We drove 50 miles out of the way with $4 a gallon gas to buy another one because pie really could save us. There was also an apricot that was the epitome of apricot, and then there were Bubble Gum Plums—I am not making this up, they tasted like bubble gum and I bought them at a farm in Berrien County Michigan. There was a loaf of sourdough bread bought on the side of the road that was everything a loaf of bread should be and we ate it in 5 minutes flat groaning with pleasure, except for the gluten free celiac who looked at me with death in his eyes and made me promise to take him to the Gluten free bakery when we got home so he could experience joy in a loaf of bread TOO.

We ate fudge on Mackinac Island, collected Petoskey stones which now litter the bottom of my mini van, swam in a NEW great lake, Lake Huron which was clear with a muddy bottom, saw the Bridge that is featured in the graphic on our license plate and got enough sand in my doors to ruin them, and well, we survived. We brought home stories we will tell, and memories.

On the way home we bought a rabbit. An adorable six week old Dutch Bunny from a 4-H’er at the county fair. Because I always need a little more love and one more mouth to feed.

Two poems

2008-07-25T10:09:00.000-05:00

My children
Aliens
Who came
So wanted
Welcomed
Bidden
Still foreigners
We do not speak
A common tonge
So I must listen
For vibrations
To ascertain
What it is
They need.
Feeling along
For evidence
Or cues
Never knowing
If I extend the peace
Or declare
WAR
When all I wanted
Was to give them
A home
And set them
Free.

The Math of Keeping House
8 rooms
2 baths
Basement and garage
Many many closets
Junk drawers
Baskets like eddys
Of stuff.
Each week these must be
Sorted, put back
Together.
How much life
Times to hold it
Together
To clean, organize, infuse
With the Energy of
Home
But I am just passing through
The hours—
This week 60 hours at work
An hour and a half to prepare
Serve
Eat
Clean
The Meals
2 Hours in procurement
The hours soon in
Negative balance
But days MUST balance
You cannot run in the red
Without bartering your future
And so something
Must be subtracted
The numbers, like a universe
Eventually collapsing upon itself
In a zero sum game.
The numbers
3 hours to clean out a closet
Detail a car
Reorganize 2 kitchen cabinets
Write a poem
Take a nap
Read a book
Go to a languid lunch with a friend
You can create a world in 3
Short
Hours.
But oh to wrest those
3
Short
Hours
From the tangle of the routine
To have and to hold
Precious fleeting and
Never to come again.
The math of life.

Untitled poem

2008-07-22T11:00:00.001-05:00

I think in this country
There is a conversation
About Class
That we are not having.

Oh, the race one
And the gender one
We are sometimes
Having
In a kind of side swipey way.

A conversation that is not going well
And getting us nowhere.

But we like to believe
Here in the land of the Free
That folks are Poor
Because they don’t Apply Themselves,
And everybody
Can be
A Self Made Man.

It’s a secret
That folks on the bottom know
And a few obscure academics
Can back up with facts:
Your zipcode and parents income
Are the better than a palm reader
In predicting your future.

Recently,
to the comfort of pundits
and Rapacious Haves,
And politicians
far removed from reality
Many of us were Passing
As Having.

We turned our houses into cash machines
And bought the snake oil
Of No Money Down
In the days of Pre Approved Credit
At Mafia rates.

But the Days of Not Having
And paying the piper are upon us,
They were long overdue.
Now, we watch in horror as 401K’s
Free fall with the
Market turned Bear.
We leave our steel albatrosses starving by the road,
Unable to sate their gas tanks.
We should have known when we began
Putting Food in their metal maws
That the party was over.

We are no longer Passing
As Having,
As the lines at the shelter and food pantry grow
And the foreclosures flood the market
And folks let the pipes freeze
And do without.

This is a nation that has seen hard times
I have no doubt there will be something
Left of us
When we come off this hard road.
But we need to stop believing
that folks who have fallen
on Hard Times
Are second class citizens.
We need to unpack the hidden backpack of privilege
That Having gets at the gate when they arrive.
We need to start living
As though we are all Related
Because we are
Family.

Life cycle events

2008-07-03T15:45:00.000-05:00

I missed a wedding this month. Schedule got too overloaded, work buried me, after working 60 hours I just could not drive 4 hours. I don’t usually miss life cycle events….. Lord knows I have been to a prodigious amount of funerals in the last month, especially when I am so young. I much prefer weddings.

My clan has enjoyed a number of memorable weddings and quite a number of them “stuck”. One of my FAVORITE weddings was when my uncle got hitched. I was fairly young at the time—he was only 8 years older than me, maybe I was in my early teens, and my uncle was living something of an alternative lifestyle with a shared house out on a levee my aunt and others in the family did not approve. The wedding occurred at a small country church, and I thought my aunt to be looked unbelieveably beautiful in her absolutely perfect cotton white summer dress. Well maybe there was some polyester in it somewhere. That dress has become something of an icon, bell sleeved, empire waist, A-line 70’s—defining a time and a period, which they keep bringing back in retro fashion lines and in movies like Across the Universe. The good ole’ days.

I remember the wedding cake—there may have been petit fours, I remember the punch and getting sugared up in the church hall. I remember the Indiana suffering heat, which even today can knock me flat, and I supposedly grew up in it. And then, what I most remember, is we had to go down a bunch of rural roads and park our car and get on the bed of a hay hauler while a tractor drove us up a washed out road to the party at an old farm house set way back from the road. The ride was bumpy and kind of like a carnival ride, and the party was a baseball, play in the overgrown grass affair. I think my folks called the place “Tick City” but I remember none of us kids got ticks, and I know it was a totally fun afternoon, completely child friendly. Must have been good energy because the happy couple are still together, and some fancier shindigs resulted in all kinds of fractured families. Getting together is easy. Staying together is the work of a lifetime.

Getting married is jumping off a cliff into a great adventure. Parts of it will be wondrous and happy. Parts of it will break the hearts of all involved. Married folk get to know each other better than any body, and yet look at each other across a table sometimes and wonder who the hell that person is sitting there. Life has a way of sanding off the edges. Bend, or you will break. A person ends up doing a lot of things they said they would never do—good things and horrible things. It’s part of the ride. Cherish each other and spend a moment each day appreciating.

And then I went to another funeral, this for a man who clearly lived life fully then dropped instantaneously dead after never being sick in his life. It’s the stuff of legend. He never got the chance to become a burden on his family, just gone, stunningly, achingly gone. He luckily had lived a complet and loving life and left with no regrets, and one hell of a legacy. What amazed me was that this guy retired a few years ago and an army of his colleagues showed up. I was joking on the ride home that if I keeled over tomorrow, I doubt if the folks I work with NOW would take a day off to memorialize me, let alone the folks I worked with on my last gig. So I really thought about how I would want to be remembered. Definitely want to be crispy fried, name on a plaque in a children's library next to the OLD books....

The cycle of life is so completely visible to me. Its hard to get mundane at a time like this. But laundry must be done, AGAIN, and groceries must be procured. The most exciting thing in my life is a new refridgerator…..and that says volumes about where I am at right now.

Poem for passing on

2008-06-23T11:21:00.000-05:00

Last Summer, I wore black
For Cancer
Waking the dead was awaited.
My widows weeds left
Unboxed at the seasons change
Standing at attention
In the closet
Waiting for the hushed room
The rituals of passing and bereavement.
This summer began with a mother’s
Departure.
Not a surprise but a slow slide
With a horrific degenerative monster.
Death here was embraced in the end
As a release.
But of late, passings have been sudden
Unanticipated. Witnessed.
Hearts ceasing to beat in an instant.
We are stunned. Unblacked.
I wore orange to a visitation
Waking the dead in what I was wearing
To live.
No time to prepare for the grief.
Instead a room filled with surprise
Our stunned, dazed looks
Searching for answers.
Is this change connected to our
Grief in a world at war,
Endlessly battling terror and no
More at peace for the effort?
Are too many of our hearts broken
For lack of goodness?
And must the good among us
Depart so suddenly?
I cannot say for certain
If it is better to go when the body
Is eaten away by black cells grown awry,
Or preferable to pass in the middle of a sentence.
I do know that for those of us
Left on this side,
Neither option is desireable
In a season when all is growing and green
And flowering.

At last, hubby comes home!

2008-06-14T13:51:00.000-05:00

While you were gone….

The dog ate 6 Barbies, Barbies Dog,and Ken, a My Scene Doll, a batting glove, the garbage can, two dog food bins, the rabbit food bin and all the food in it, a bowl of guacamole, three stuffed animals, three faces of stuffed animals leaving the bodies behind to traumatize the owner, one wooden garden clog, the padded strap of a backpack, a leather leash, and he tipped over the trash and spread it at least once a day. There was more, but I have blocked it out.

We traversed a spring soccer season, a baseball and a softball season. Mercifully, you will see the championship baseball game and softball goes on forever so you can stand outside and cheer. So many transitions and celebrations and there was one missing and we all felt it so keenly.

You never know the big space you take up in everyone's life til you step out of your place for a long enough while to be missed. To be needed. It is a Wonderful Life.

WELCOME HOME HONEY. Isn’t it great to be needed and appreciated?

I honor all the women of the world who have to keep doing this every week, whose husbands are not home yet, who have no husbands, whose husbands will never return.
5 Weeks and I am off the deep end. How do y’all manage????

poem found while cleaning out my purse

2008-06-06T10:33:00.000-05:00

Mothers Day 2008

We have never been good
At Hallmark Holidays
The Supposed To Ones.
In this family,
We are skilled
in the obscure
the Take it on the fly
the Off the beaten path
Days of Awe and celebration.
The Junk Food Buffet
Superbowl Sunday holiday.
More mainstream
We do do
Matzo and Passover
Ham and Easter.
Holidays for us
Need Special Foods
Need Rituals and tradition
Acknowledgement and gratitude.
And then again
Following the herd
Is not our cup of tea.
So today we have no
Overblown floral arrangements
Or four dollar cards with
Electronic Voices.
No jacked up brunches
With weak mimosas.
Just a simple awareness
Of Spring
And Time passing.
A Mother is a Mother
Even on her day:
Do your homework,
Clean your room,
Stop annoying your sister,
Take a shower,
Don’t waste water,
Be a good person,
No, mother has no day off
For good behavior.
Because building the next generation
Is a full three shifter.

Week 4 as a Single mom

2008-06-03T14:06:00.000-05:00

I hath not blogg-ed for many a day. Pour quoi?
Ohhhh.
Well my husband rode off into the sunrise on May 5th to go work for 5 weeks in the middle of nowhere in Iowa. I did not realize there were places in the continental US without cell service, but when I need to vent he is conveniently out of bars….I count myself lucky—he is not on a 15 month tour in Iraq and he is the one doing all of the shooting (photography) on the job. But when you have built a life and a schedule with two drivers and responsible (for the most part) adults and are suddenly down to one, the pins start coming out of the chassis and you start falling off the road. In the last week, basically our life backed over me. It began when the cat went into renal decay and needed to go to the animal emergency room and spend the weekend in kitty intensive care. I said I would never put needles in my pets, and how many times do I need to learn from the universe that we all in life need to do things we never would do and we do them because the alternative is worse. So I am stocked with Sub Q fluids and she is eating again. The wonderful puppy we adopted turns out to have an anxiety disorder that we are fighting with two kinds of medication, an animal behaviorist (shrink for dogs) and daily training and desensitization sessions. Luckily, having a kid with obsessive compulsive disorder is good training for working with neurotic dogs. I had him neutered so I could send him to doggy daycare, and now he is taking out our knees and all the china with the Elizabethan collar. I called in reserve troops to help me make it through—Grandma and Grandpa from New York arrived just in time to see the piano recital, spring soccer, baseball, softball and ballet recital. We were gearing up for the 8th grade graduation and Grandma fell on the sidewalk and bashed herself up a bit. So mornings begin with meds for kitty, dog, grandma and I start eyeing the whisky bottle as a pick me up in the coffee—which I have to keep buying since after getting everyone out the door in the morning I realize I have spaced breakfast again. I am supposed to be taking care of myself but I can’t even remember who I am, I am so busy getting things done. I will get drunk and have a nervous breakdown when I have the time……..

Today I had to handle an IEP meeting by myself. A lonely place but it went really well. I hate being Cassandra. I see the future sometimes and its not me being negative. I have been through enough that bad things don’t scare me, and unlike many, I have not found avoidance and denial to be a particular useful coping strategy. I am strong, I can take it, I face it head on and contingency plan.

The hardest thing is never having any time to hear myself think, to sit down and sip a coffee, to have a meaningful conversation, to read a novel. I think of all the single moms I have known and I am in awe. I will grow accustomed to this, I know, but the learning curve is steep and none too pleasant. I salute you solo moms!

Birthday poem

2008-05-19T15:00:00.001-05:00

For Eric on his 50th

At the age of 13
A Jewish Male
Comes of Age
But there is NO
Ritual for achievement
Of Middle Age
A half a century
Of Experience
And
Hard Earned Wisdom.
In a culture
That Denies
The Very Act
Of growing Older
A people that does not
Stand and face
And get to know
Births Twin
Death.
There are no traditional greetings
No standard blessings
For five decades
Of a Beautiful Life.
In Biblical times,
Surviving so long
Was sign itself
Of God’s favor.
And so,
From one who
Is following
Shortly behind,
And a Catholic
I offer
The Sheheheyanu
Blessed are you Eternal One
Who gives us Life
Keeps us strong and
Brings us to this time
Amen.

Practice

2008-05-13T16:51:00.000-05:00

Practice
Makes perfect
In all that you do.
Yoga,
Soup,
Penmanship
Kindness.
You must make a space
Wear a groove
In your life
So that the
Yoga or soup
Is as thoughtless
And Essential
as Breathing
and even breathing
Needs practice.
Living is a practice.
To do it well,
You must
Do
It every day.
Practice
Moves what
You are Trying
To Become
Into
Who you are.
So you can
Just Be
And even
Just Being
Takes Practice.

When I was a chipper young dancer with big ambitions, in New York, just off the bus from Chicago, I marched myself in to the Alwin Nikolais dance studio and paid my money and started Advanced Dance Class. There stood the man himself, a piece of American theatrical history before me and I awaited his genius. To my shock and disappointment, we began one hour of
WALKING.

I thought, I did not uproot my entire life to come live in New York City to learn to friggin WALK. I am here to DANCE.

Was I a silly little girl. In the beginning level classes, which I should have started in, they only make you walk as a warm up. You see, beginning students don’t do it very well.

It is only when you master your craft that you can walk across a room and MEAN something.

When a truly great dance artist walks across a stage, it can move you to tears.

It would not be for another two decades that I would learn how to do this, and I am still trying to master standing still.

Aging Well

2008-05-05T09:41:00.001-05:00

Last week, for work, I had to go to a mini conference for senior citizens. I usually hang out with the other end of the spectrum and am far more likely to be dealing with teething than osteoarthritis, but hell, I am not getting any younger, and my boss did not want to go, and I thought I might learn a thing or two. Having had to diaper my daughter and my grandmother at the same time several years ago, I have a pretty good idea of the circularity of human existence.

But as I sat in a room full of my elders, I was pulled up short by the contrast of our current national obsession with birthing and the absolute silence about the other end. I have read poetry and literature and comedy about mothering and babies. Who is asking the questions:
How will I grow old?
What is the process of dying?
Who is writing the literature of THAT?

It’s a universal experience and no one really talks about it, except as it shows up in the service of other narratives. I am sure we will get around to it when we stop denying that its going to happen. There is a lot more money to be made by denying that something that happens to everyone is going to happen. By staunchly trying to defeat the process of dying we spend gazillions on research and panaceas and snake oil and afterlife. But sooner or later they will figure out a way to market aging and dying and then we will hear a lot more about it. But cynicism aside—how will I grow old? Will I rage rage against the dying of the light, against the wrinkles and sags and pouches, or will I settle in to my well worn self and become the person I am supposed to be? Since we have spent so much time denying or avoiding the fact that folks get old, we haven’t figured out what to do with the millions who are inconveniently not staying young. We don’t really have the social structures and webs of community these days meant to weave them into our fast paced life. If you never got on to the information superhighway, what backwater are you left in? When our history is still walking around talking to us, how to we curl up and read it? Contemplate the lessons, reflect on how if affects us?

How will I grow old?

TEAM

2008-04-28T14:19:00.001-05:00

Your team

Ok, at the request of several friends, I present Rule # 3: You have a team. Whether you like it or not, you are NOT a solo act. And whether you pick em or not, you are part of a team—whether it’s the dysfunctional group of cubicle dwellers you hang out with at work, or the people who by fate or realtor machinations call your street home, unless you are a hermit in a cave on a mountain top in Nepal, you are part of a community.

It is better to choose your team instead of letting it happen to you. Pick people who you can rely on, whose taste you trust and whose energy uplifts you and does not drain you. Always take first round draft picks—the folks that have talent and brains and skill that can benefit your ongoing operation. Don’t be a martyr and get into victim mode dragging around a team that weighs you down and slows you to a crawl. If you need to, create farm teams of folks you have your eye on to move to your majors. Farm team helps you with the teacher appreciation lunch, the majors help you bury your mother. Make sure your team includes offensive and defensive players—offense takes you shopping when your wardrobe makes you look like an old lady, defensive players tell you to leave the second piece of cake alone and help you start a walking club. Build a big team, one with lots of bench strength. Even the best quarterback can get injured and be out for the season, so always have team members in the wings.

Which means you have to devote part of your life to recruiting, caring and feeding team members. When you are working 60 hour weeks for the last quarter and your laundry has not been done since you brought last season’s clothes down from the attic, the last thing on earth you want to do is host a dinner party to wine and dine your recruits, or go to that book group when you could be taking an evening long bubble bath. But you have to do it. It’s the best investment you can make in winning the game: also known as holding your life together. Trust me: take the Team seriously in your life.

Puppy spring

2008-04-21T11:04:00.000-05:00

Since we moved in together 19 years ago, my husband and I have been a 2 dog family. At one point we were a two dog, two cat, two turtle, two rat, snake, rabbit and hamster family, but there was a fall when many of amphibians fled, and natural attrition got us down to one of most things, none of a few others.

Well, last weekend we went back up to two dogs. I fought it, being totally overwhelmed on a good day, since we had to put our beloved Sonya to sleep the weekend before my first child’s bat mitzvah sixteen month ago. I tore my rotator cuff falling down the back stairs to take her out in the last months of her life. After that I enjoyed the relative sanity of raising a single puppy who was supposed to grow to 50 pounds and instead tips the scales at 70. And my husband WANTED him to sleep with us. He is mellow and sweet and a gem. But my son needs a project, and life was just too calm. Our single dog was acting old and sleeping all day, so we trundled down to a local shelter, and prepared to fall in love. It took several visits. And they come check out your house. Which was not clean and had a rabbit running around and there's the cat with the shady understanding of the concept of Litter Box. But it was clear we like animals and tolerate some questionable behavior.

Getting a dog is upsetting the apple cart of organization in your life. Getting a puppy is like having children—if you really thought about it, you would never ever do it. Getting a lab/hound mix is just patently insane, but if you are ok with spending a year having everything chewed up, you end up with the best friend you always wanted.

Every animal that lives with us was rescued. We never really pick them, they find us-- we allow a slit of an opening of acceptance of another sentient being in our lives, you know—Mom says yes—and they see that sliver of light and go for it and move on in to our hearts. I thought we would get a boxer or a dachshund—but there in a crate at the shelter was a set of sad brown eyes disturbingly similar to another pair of eyes that I miss—Sonya’s sad soulful eyes. If this pup, named Houdini for his natural ability to escape, turns out to be a Vizsla like she was, he will be a cuddly escape artist able to gingerly remove food from counter tops. He will chew expensive items that cannot be easily replaced. He will make more work for me. He will drive us mad and cost us a fortune. And we will love him beyond all reason. My children will sleep on him and tell him their troubles and get into pickles and mud fests with him. Because getting a dog is like having children, there is no logic or sense to it, but your life is never the same in a positive way, when you take that leap of faith and say.
YES.

Musing on schools

2008-04-18T13:00:00.000-05:00

Watching my completely dysfunctional school district at work, I have come to the following conclusion: You need 4 things to have a good school and these four ingredients are probably necessary for any good organization.

First, you need a vision of the good school you want. This vision has to be perfect in your mind and you should be able to taste, smell and hear it in your minds eye. You must create it first in your head. Now, you might be a school board member, the superintendent, a teacher, a parent—any stakeholder, in the end, each of you needs this crystal clear vision for the enterprise to work—and for it to be great, everyone’s vision will need to be congruent with everyone else’s vision. And so you need the second thing.

The second thing you need is a supportive community. Here is the tricky thing—most of the time you don’t get that at first. If you are beginning from scratch, your organization is being created to solve a problem, so the community might be fractured or fractious, might be dysfunctional, disengaged. In any event, you’ll have to suss out the problem and then get the vision and only then begin the community and get them all to buy into the vision. In the school business, everyone is always working on the curriculum the curriculum the curriculum. But until you have a community, a curriculum is only a lot of pretty words on a paper. A vision does not come into the world without the hard work of the people, and the people are your community. And if you are coming into an existing school/organization it means someone left, or a vacancy was created so that a big problem can get solved. So you better be sure in that case that everyone agrees on that vision as you begin to build the community.

The community is the food of the school. Everything falls apart without it. Before you fix the curriculum you MUST fix the community and bring the people together. Dictators never figure this out, and this is why they ultimately fall.

The third ingredient of a successful school is passionate teachers. You can actually go pretty far without the first two if you have a bucket load of this third ingredient. But you will not be able to sustain it. And you can’t attract new batches this essential ingredient if you don’t have the first two. Money might help, but it won’t give you anything long term, since good teaching is too hard if you don’t love what you do.

Finally, the last ingredient, the whipped cream on the top, is lovely raw materials. Don’t have any money—who says they have to cost? Imagination can be got for free. Some of the best art projects I have ever taught we done with objects plucked from judicially selected trash heaps (I only dumpster dive the best neighborhoods). Great literature, fresh pencils—these are not costly, but they are rich. You can’t grow a mind in barren soil, and raw materials fertilize the intellect.

So simple, four ingredients, and in the end so hard. When I look at my own community, I see no clear vision—goals yes, mission yes, but no VISION. The community is more like warring camps. We have a number of passionate teachers but many of them will retire in the next 5 years. And some schools have great raw materials. It breaks my heart, because in the end, my child will have all of these things because I build them into her life outside of school. But no matter how many of my tax dollars go to the school, it will not give them any of the four essential ingredients.

The Second Rule

2008-04-14T15:00:00.001-05:00

It will all work out.

Sometimes you are involved in a project that has more arms than an octopus, more teeth than a mad nasty monkey, and the whole experience just feels like waiting for the train wreck to happen. At times like this, you need to invoke the second rule of everything.

Given that the universe is always moving towards chaos, this second rule of everything makes no sense whatsoever, but I have seen it work time and time again. If you move forward with an open heart and faith, or at least a fervent prayer, that it will all be ok, somehow it will all work out.

Now it may work out because you don’t sleep for three days, and you are buzzed on double shots of espresso, or you burn out your transmission trying to get there to make it work out. It may work out because you have pressed every one of your relatives into service and promised your spouse sexual favors into the next millennium. You may spend the rent money on some emergency tablecloth purchase or you may alienate all your friends and bankrupt your favor bank for years into the future to get it to work out, but the pieces will all fall together, more or less.

I recently volunteered to help out with two projects relating to my children’s lives. I discovered that volunteerism in my community is in an anemic state. “Help out” turned into doing two massive projects all by myself in a week when I was already pushed to the wall at work and at home. Help out, which in my mind is phone calling, emailing and delegating,--you know, pitching in with a team, turned into frantically shopping, setting up massive rooms of complicated projects, cajoling teen helpers to do their half baked helping with lots of loud socializing, and hours and hours of my own labor when there was no one to delegate to—and all this when I really needed to be grocery shopping and doing laundry since the fairies quit at my house ages ago due to the lousy working conditions. What’s the song in the Musical WICKED, No Good Deed Goes Unpunished….. in any event, I spent a few anxious hours and a sleepless night stewing over being overwhelmed and envisioning impending disaster, then jumped off the cliff of what the hey with an innate trust in my improvisational abilities. I just started saying It Will All Work Out, over and over under my breath like a crazy old lady and took Deep Cleansing Breaths when I felt like smashing my own head against the wall—when it was all spinning dangerously towards entropy and the crash was about to come……., and in the end,

It All Worked Out.

It was not great. I was not necessarily proud of my efforts. I was not as pleasant as I wanted to be. Perhaps I relied to much on Mr. Chardonnay and the aspirin in big quantities to calm my nerves and quiet the stress headache…. But it was fine.

I have seen this Rule work with massive festivals pulled off with virtually no staff. It has worked when my media camp had all its equipment stolen and the main teacher quit three days before it opened. It worked for my daughter’s bat mitzvah. And though I have left the world of storefront theater behind being too old for the drama off stage, many major works of art come out of near train wrecks.

You cannot use this Rule too often though. You will get sick, the train will crash, bankrupted favor banks will foreclose on you.

But when the co-chair of the school fundraiser backs out on you or the caterer skips out on your bosses important impress his bosses meeting, when the main actor gets into a car wreck an hour before you open and the critics are in the lobby, close your eyes, calm yourself and chant, It Will All Work Out, then call every resource you have ever known into your corner and come out swinging.

kidneys and oz and tv's, oh my!

2008-04-10T10:14:00.000-05:00

You know, its been one of those weeks.
I think I have had a nervous breakdown but I am just too busy to bang my head against walls and drool. I am talking to myself and forgetting everything.

My aged cat and my 7 year old daughter both have not completely identifiable kidney problems which means the cat is pissing on all manner of weird objects: a jewelry box left on the floor, the clean basket of towels—ok, they are all square with absorbent surfaces, ok maybe it could be a litter box…..and the kid is going every 15to 20 minutes.

This morning I forgot an important first thing in the morning meeting because I had to get son to track practice (oh my god are there any more spring sports????) and get a FIRST MORNING URINE MIDSTREAM sample out of a 7 year old. You have to really love your children to let them piss on you before you have had your coffee in the morning. Really love your children. Yes.
Then I had to race the specimen to the lab, since it had been stressed that freshness was critical to a proper diagnosis. And when your kid is going to the bathroom 40 times a day you want them to tell you what is causing it. You want someone to make it stop. Please.

And its only Wednesday.

While racing to the lab, I discover my car is almost out of gas—I am trying this experiment and only putting in $20 bucks a week and just not driving when I am out of gas. Some days this is not a good idea.
Every week $20 fills up less and less of my tank. I think the oil execs just wake up every morning and throw darts at a board with prices on it and decide, ok today gas is $3.59 a gallon. Every time I fill up the price has gone up 5 or 10 or 25 cents. I don’t know about you but the run on gas prices is messing with my head. It reminds me of the Wizard of Oz. When you are little and you first see the film, ok the flying monkeys give you nightmares. But when you are a little older the most distressing thing is the scene where Toto pulls back the curtain and you see that the Wizard is really just a lost pathetic man, and there really is no one who will give you brains or a heart and you have to do it all yourself. It’s the end of innocence, and the Anti-cinderella. No handsome prince will rescue you and get you out of the mess you are in. I wanted there to be smart people running the place, but I learned the hard way when my dad died right before I was a teenager that sometimes the people in charge bug out on you, but hope springs eternal that there is someone up the line who is smarter and wiser than me and they are running things....

I feel like that kid watching the Wizard be unmasked now. There is absolutely no one in charge and the people in Power have messed this up so bad that no one can fix it. The President, the congress and Lord God the messed up Judicial branch are all sad little lost men with good special effects. I wish I knew how to tap my ruby slippers and get myself outta here and back to Kansas.

And its like ten days to Earth Day and I am trying so hard to live sustainably. In my world that means buying less stuff (good idea when you are broke, right?) which means owning less stuff which means storing less stuff—you get the picture. The problem is the whole economy is going to hell in a handbasket because its built on us idiots buying lots and lots more stuff.

So now we aren’t buying enough (because our real incomes have actually gone down in the last few years and the boondoggle of using our houses as cash machines came apart) so the latest government brain fart:

Make all our tv’s obsolete.

Hit us where we live, in the boob tube. Does anyone have a concept what millions of tvs in landfills is going to look like? On February something next year all our pictures turn to snow.

A brilliant evil plan cooked up I am sure by Sony, Panasonic and LG. They will have banner first quarters next year as we frantically replace 30 million tv sets.

The heartbreaking thing is that no one is going to replace the sets of those who have been left out of the digital revolution: the poor, the infirm and the developmentally disabled, for whom tv is a major connection to the world.

I just can’t see nursing homes in my state, which came in 51st in the nation is caring for the developmentally disabled, trundling out replace their myriad sets that have been donated over the years—not when they can’t find or afford decent direct care STAFF.

Next Christmas, when you are looking for something charitable to do, donate a converter box or two to your favorite sheltered worksite or group home………

Dear Teachers

2008-04-10T09:59:00.000-05:00

I believe we have reached a point in our mutually respectful relationship where we need to "check in" with some vocabulary words.
Spring
Break
I think we can agree on the first one. Although everyone believed it would never arrive this year, Spring represents the time period when the weather warms again, the marking period is over or nearly over. While I do have some arguments with the calendar committee that decided that spring will occur next year sometime in the middle of April which is much too--a calendar that flies in the face of the longstanding tradition that spring, and therefore the airline blackout period, begins with the vernal equinox, I think we have no problems coming to consensus on the concept of Spring.

The misunderstanding, mistranslation as it were falls with the word BREAK. Turning to Webster, my go-to on all things word, I see that Break means all manner of violent and abrupt separation and disruptions. For example, "To discontinue Abruptly, interrupt, suspend." There is also "to scatter or disperse(that sounds like private school breaks where kids go skiing in the alps and off to places where you need your passport) and to come to an end, to dismiss."

In any event, a Break, spring or no, is a big deal and all parties and I be you needed it after the winter of respiratory ailments and endless snow storms and days off we just survived. I know I was not happy that I could not pawn my kid off on you this entire last week. In any event, I need to quibble with the idea that any child would Ever In a Million Years do assigned work on a BREAK. The have been dismissed, dispersed.

A child sees no advantage whatsoever to doin any sort of school work when there is no school. Not being a certified professional, despite my exalted position of my "child's first teacher" and the designated imparter of "family values", I have no training in how to do some of this new fangled homework if I even happen to locate them somewhere on the bottom of my car next to the moldy lunchbox in the minivan my husband parked in the airport lot awaiting their return from Spring Break. (I have to work on all school breaks)

My children are blithely willing to accept consequences for their lack of academic interest this week and given how little we parents see our actual children on a normal week, I am not willing to play homework cop when I payed for all these enriching activities on Spring Break.

So let us agree that if it is Spring, and it is a break, that all of us are OFF.

april fools day

2008-04-01T20:01:00.000-05:00

The blustery March Wind blew in last night- a Northeaster.

Of course, it’s April. Spring has been late this year.

My house sounds like a ship when it blows—beams creaking as though we are on a choppy sea. It gives me comfort that my ship is warm and dry after more than a hundred years moored in this spot.

The birds were singing—it’s been so long since I have heard that! when I left the house this morning at the crack of dawn, off to my Spring Break camp where I am locked in a room with 30 kids for 9 hours a day. The new state of child rearing. I am well paid to bring up others children even as I neglect my own, because childcare shifts are always more than 8 hours to accommodate the parents work schedule……
We hiked to the library yesterday past enormous rain puddles. We compared and contrasted the buds on various bushes and trees and we saw the aftermath of a spectacular car crash. It was an exciting walk, if not all that poetic. It is mud season. I am still waiting for green amongst the brown and black.

It is spring break week, which means while my kids are home shredding my house because I can't afford childcare other than my work at home husband, I am locked in a room with 30 or so kids whose parents can’t get the week off, running a highly enriching program which decimates me and the rooms we are in by the end of the week. I roll out this lovely classroom, art studio from a closet, completely turning a bare conference room into a stimulating creative environment for a theme based exploration of something that appealed to me way back when the copy was due last fall. My hubby will be ready to divorce me by Friday without liberal applications of alcohol and frantic homecooked meals which I have to cook after standing on my feet for 9 hours. Last year I wore a pedometer—11,000 steps and I never left the first floor of the building. When I run around after kids, I really run around. But I like to believe I hand em back at the end of the day at least as tired as I am…..

My laundry won’t get done this month.

Spring break is an archaic and quaint idea when 75% of parents of both genders are working. You only get 2 weeks a year off and you need one of them for the last week in August when school is out and NO ONE has a program you can sign your kids up for. ( I can’t find one single staff person so I am not going to run a program)And you need one week for Christmas. If your kid gets sick or your mom in Cleveland needs surgery, well you are plumb out of luck if you have used up your weeks and you don’t work for a company big enough to entitle you to FMLA. I have to say—keep all those breaks so I can continue to earn a fine living raising your kids for you. But really, isn’t it time to Reinvent the wheel?

My Bat Boy

2008-03-21T16:05:00.001-05:00

My son talks non-stop. A steady stream of words from the moment he wakes up, until we parents collapse in bed, mentally overdrawn, long before he goes to sleep still mumbling and making weird noises. Its as if his verbal facility is on overdrive. It is incessant, a word that now has a head pounding visceral quality I never understood so completely before. It is unrelenting. There are questions, running commentary, syllabic babbling and singing. He asks questions and does not wait for answers before verbalizing again.

I know in my heart that all this sound is about how his brain is wired, not so much about driving me insane. I am trying to think of it as a child’s form of echolocation—he is trying to find a slippery world that keeps morphing and changing, a world full of dangers we cannot see. Like a bat in the dark he is trying to locate his world.

His anxiety is catching, maybe it’s the lack of light as we wait for spring, but the abyss has been lurking round my corners. Once I am not insanely busy, I start to be able to see the ghosts. Maybe my son is a Geiger counter as the seismic waves begin their rumble. Maybe he is just more sensitive than others and he is feeling the global angst in an era of global warming, MRSA and crashing economies. I mean, in all honesty, how can one assure and comfort a child and tell them it will be all right? Will it? Most of the time we are hair from disaster.

When you have stared into the black hole of the human condition, how do you pull back from that edge and do Disney?

I hold on to a few scraps of grace and hope I don’t go over the cliff. Sun in fall leaves. Snow drops poking through mud. Fresh snowflakes. Toddler giggles. Rossini and Tchaikovsky. That’s it. In the end that’s just it—that’s what you get.

And still my child is talking talking as though the sound of his voice will keep the monster of chaos at bay. Like the small child who talks loud in the hallway to scare the monsters away……

advice from your yogamama

2008-03-13T16:42:00.000-05:00

Ok that’s it, I can’t even look at my sweaters and winter blacks (tneck with yoga pants) for another minute. I have a jones for pastel colored frocks, and gauzy blouses. I wanna see the earth poking up green. I got cabin fever, and I need a heavy dose of spring. If I have to don my winter coat one more day I will scream. Where are the snowdrops I visited in Berlin’s spring, back in February?

I want a Spring that has sprung. I want to go from snow drift to 50 over night –I want it all sunny and to have hope again. All us gray ghosties that have been hibernating in our houses will get out and about. Once again my streets and sidewalks would be crowded and children’s voices could be heard on the block again. For six long months we have been bundled in parkas and now, now, now, we need to be free.

If I hadn’t spent the weekend in Los Angeles, warmed by the 70 degree days, maybe I would not feel this desperation. Walking along Venice beach as the sun was sinking into the Pacific, I could smell the world again. So coming back here to ground frozen into chunks put the lid back on my sensory world. I hadn’t really meant to spend a mere 3 days in La La Land for a family life cycle event but, you know, we are the people who Show Up. Life cycle events are NOT vacations, they are whirlwind marathons of invading hordes who bear a DNA connection to you. You SEE your relations, as in visually, though depending on the speed and number of events, what you usually manage is a series of shared memories of mutually attended affairs with logistical conversations and soundbites over cocktails. We savor the memories and look at the fabulous pictures and it tides us over until the next time we manage to be in one state/nation. In the end, going west gave me extra hours, since I got up at 5 am each day, and Mission Accomplished. The west coast web of friends and relations is well woven and healthy.

Much to my children’s disappointment we did not buy any souvenirs of our non-vacation. I think my new rule is you have to be away at least 5 nights before you need another piece of stuff to “remember” it by.

Another rule of mine is if the clan is gathered, you must take it upon yourself to gather all the gnarly children together with an elder and make sure a picture is taken. This is a thankless task. No one will appreciate it until at least one of the people in the picture has died. You must, in this day and age REMEMBER TO PRINT THE PICTURE. In this digital age it is so much more fun to email them all over the planet and post them to a blog, but you will deny a future youngster from the unadulterated joy of paging through an album or leafing through a box of crumbling photos on a rainy day and tracing the connection of family through the lift of a smile, or angle of a nose. I have a 10 year old computer that has a bunch of baby pictures I can’t access without the help of a very expensive service bureau. HEED MY WARNING. Print the good ones. Throw them in an acid free box and tuck them away for a decade or so. Trust me, you will thank me.

So Over Winter, Please?

2008-03-03T10:28:00.000-06:00

These are the dark days of winter that try my soul. I am on my third cold of the season courtesy of a seven year old who brings home strange and exotic viruses to gift me. They have had strep and scarlet fever in her classroom and from the sound of my coughs I would not be surprised in the least to hear that pertussis is rampant in the hallowed halls of her public school. And they keep having holidays and early release days so these typhoid Mary’s and Moes can spread their viral load into the community.

My yard has turned into a swamp and my garage is surrounded by a moat which must be waded through each time you wish to toss out the trash or get in the car. It is all predicted to freeze tonight and we are to get another load of snow on top of what will be an ice rink. My back gate will freeze into the rink and we will have to either climb the fence or use the front gate, and slither around to the back….

I am told it will take a relandscaping job of very expensive proportion to prevent this from recurring. And so, in bad winters, we are doomed to this ridiculous dance of water in its various forms…..

My sense of humor went into hibernation two weeks ago. It is March, and I want snow drops and bulbs peeping through the wet ground. I want to see the ground, not the brakenish liquid coating the icy tundra that is my yard. When the tax bill came for this plot of earth and I looked out upon my “estates”, I could only laugh an evil cackle. Let the assessors come now and tell me what this bog is supposedly worth. I did manage to chisel several drains out of the ice so hopefully, before the freeze hits, some of it will drain.

These are the times when you put your head down and keep walking. One foot in front of the other, to get through. You set your jaw and your course, and continue. And in a brilliant bit of luck, we get to escape for three days to the land of lost angels for a family gathering. I would have preferred the kind of trip where you just leave the grey swamp and come back when the flowers are blooming, instead of getting to feast at spring then go back to the dungeon, but mentally, I think the break will refortify me. And maybe I will get to read a novel on the endless airplane ride.

I have been losing myself in the opera. With two kids appearing in two productions, I am there most nights. Somehow, being backstage is almost more comfortable than being at home, mostly because I think the black of the backstage, waiting to go on, is my home. I actually like the rehearsal process more than performing. I like the making of it. Digging deep and perfecting the piece with the partnership of the audience is a rush, but the part that really makes me feel most alive is in rehearsal when all the parts are starting to come together and you can see the show in your minds eye, just before it becomes real in front of you. Its like being a wizard, theater magic is. You have an idea in your head and you gather the ingredients of your spel, in this case good collaborators,and hopefully a nice production budget, and then you all alacazam, abracadabra do your work and viola, it comes alive. Opera is the last system of true royalty where caste determines status and role. There are the stars and you walk about in awe of them and do not approach without permission. They have their dressers and wig folk—like the ladies in waiting and retinues of kings. There are the knights: stage hands who make the world appear and evolve. Us supers are the peasants, allowed momentarily to bask in this rarified world.

Ballet is quite similar. I reprint below my story from being a ballet super last year.

Everything is beautiful at the ballet?
When I was 17, I made a life list in my journal. My father had dropped dead when I was 13. He was 36. For some reason I thought I too would die young and I figured I had about 20 years left. I wanted to climb Kilamanjaro. I wanted to be on the cover of a magazine. And towards the top of the list, I wrote: APPEAR WITH A MAJOR BALLET COMPANY.

Last week, seeing as I am still here, as a 46th birthday present to myself, I finally ran away from a government desk gig, my home, my family and mountain of dirty laundry and schlepping kids to classes and tutoring and went off to perform in a grand classical, world famous ballet with armies of villagers on stage. It was Romeo and Juliet. It was the Opera House.

Despite my background as a retired modern dancer, I did not perform a single dance step. I was a supernumerary, which is a very big word for a person who serves as live scenery. Live scenery in a 40 pound dress with enough velvet and brocade in it to cover my sofa. Topped by a 10 pound hat that was about 8 sizes too small for my head. We were to tilt our heads back and arch, which results in the hat ripping hair out of your head in deference to gravity. We were to walk up and down a rickety set of stairs onto a shaking platform to get into position—do it quickly despite the nails dramatically and acoustically ripping the train of the period garb, and the platform wobbles so that it threatens to pitch you into a sword wielding throng….My part: Elegant Lady. I learned Elegance is excruciatingly painful. Rumor has it that the Elegants in the New York production all see a chiropractor once a week…..I looked absolutely stupendous in my Renaissance concoction and took many photos. Good thing that pictures don’t have smell though—since this costume has been worn by hundreds in the decades before I donned it, and had body odor before I even put it on. This costume had been to Japan and Mexico—around the world. It would be packed in a box, still dripping with my sweat, and shipped on to the next location as soon as I shed it at the last performance.

Supers are hired, ostensibly, because they fit the costume. This is obviously an inexact science since two people had to compress my ribs so they could lace up the back. Breathing is a bit hard, of course. For our suffering we are paid enough to buy nosebleed seats so that our families can come watch us. No comps. No discounts. We are to provide our own makeup, shoes, tights in specified colors and headgear of various types, which proves difficult to access given the fact that between a full time job, getting kids off to school and all the ballet rehearsals and shows, I have zero time to shop. We beg, we borrow, we make do.

But we are IN the ballet, close enough to see through the men’s tights to their tattoos. I can tell you the brand names of their dance belts. We know whose swords broke off bits on stage. We rated booties. We know that the advertised lead characters never appeared as advertised. We breathed in second hand smoke from the most famous dancers of our time, and were splattered by the sweat of an international cast of cultural athletes. We compare and contrast artistry, interpretation, and physique. We immerse ourselves in the score, coming to love it like a family member. I now know the MacMillan choreography as well as if I had danced it (that is if I could dance it). I fell in love with the Mercutio character and mourned the savage waste of youth, and it made me think of Iraq . I was transformed. I was seventeen again and ballerinas are not humans but unearthly fairies and I wish I was one, though that train left the station before I was born. I never had the knees or feet of a ballerina.

We begin to smell bad, as we sweat beneath the stage lights and brocade. The week is long. So many shows. I read three novels waiting, and taking the train back and forth.

At the opera, where my children have been supernumeraries for the past five years, supers are the lowest human on the food chain, but at the ballet, we are no longer human. We are dirt. We are given no information, expected to know things we have not been told, ordered about, fired summarily. Hints of the gulag and soviet style are evident everywhere, but I suppose that’s to be expected in an art form that reached its pinnacle in Imperial Russia. In America, half the ballet companies were founded by displaced Russians and the dysfunctional family bloodlines and behaviors remain.

I crouch in corners watching pas de deux practice and I secretly spy on company class. I am in a kind of sadomasochistic heaven, perhaps. I have stepped inside my favorite movie of all time: the Turning Point. Baryshnikov isn’t here, but its clear everyone is still sleeping with everyone else. They are young and exotic, speaking other languages in the elevator. They are coming off months of touring. We lowly supers are never to speak to them. I cast my eyes downward when passing, lowly animal that I am.

At the end of the week, I know I looked beautiful and elegant and earned every dime in my check. I am happy to go home to my kids and laundry and do groceries. I do wake in the middle of the night, humming the march in the ballroom scene, but otherwise I am fully recovered.

Next on my list is the Grand Canyon.

RE-entry

2008-02-22T16:53:00.000-06:00

You go away on vacation. It could be a weekend, a business trip, or in my case ten glorious days in an artsy fartsy European city remembering oh yes, I am a creative person capable of all manner of things and a wanderer in my heart. And then, you come home. And its all familiar, but the weight of the tasks at hand, the lunches, breakfasts, dinners, snacks, all healthy and inexpensive, what, and kids and my rehearsal schedule and the mail and the shopping and the laundry and the housecleaning and.... it just buries you. You look around at all the pieces of your life and start to wonder what you need to get rid of. One week of living simply out of a backpack is a very good way to get down to what is important. And I am finding it hard to put away the lenses I was using in Germany to look at the world. I had a really small footprint there, and I was so rich. But meanwhile, I am missing a permission slip, two birthday invitations, and my husband and I are handing off children like batons in a kind of marathon relay to the weekend.......

Car Trip

2008-02-07T14:01:00.000-06:00

As my eldest and I get ready to go on a big trip (see the link with our trip blog) I am reminded of our fall travels. I am always telling my kids, sometimes you win when you just show up. My youngest is now the state champion in her class for long track speedskating because no one else from our state made it to the competition! Anyway, I am reprinting an essay from our last travels:
CAR TRIP
I have discovered one of the secrets of life: you basically get a high score if you just show up. Birth, weddings, funerals, all the big transitions, well, you just can’t phone it in or cover it in an e-mail. Bottom line, whether you are the protagonist or your garden variety witness, you just gotta be there. Forget the clothes, the manicure, the nice car. Just get there and BE.

So last weekend, I shoehorned 5 kids and my girlfriend/copilot into the mini van and drove 9 hours to the wilds of upper New York for the most ancient of rites of passage: A Bat Mitzvah. I have barely seen this girl in years, this angel who took the bimah with confidence and soulful artistry and transformed, yes truly transformed before my very eyes like a magic trick and took me along with her. But before I could be transformed, it was my job to show up. Now you need to know, showing up may not be the easiest thing you ever do: I HATE TO DRIVE; I took 2 days off of work and left my house (and my husband) in a condemnable state; one of my children is obsessive compulsive and cannot deal with anything new or different Ever, No Matter What, never, and the rest of the kids in the car needed to do a bucket load of mandatory homework which they proceeded not to do for 18 hours in a car with Nothing to Do. Along the way we hit something quite large on a stretch of middle of nowhere highway in the pitch black. I have come to decide it was not a bear. More likely an exploded semi tire that took out a piece of my front bumper. We nearly ran out of gas. We saw Niagara Falls and Lucille Balls hometown and the oldest billboard in America. We ate way too much really great food. We got very little sleep. We bought pumpkins at a farm with a view of fall color splashed mountains in the background. We bought orange hats. We swam in the tiny hotel pool and made waffles at the continental breakfast. We talked and played cards and drank espressos and wine with people who have known us too long to be impressed with our habitual bullshit and who already know our life stories so we can cut to the chase. We told stories. We packed an inordinate amount of living in a few short days. We caught up.

We showed up.

When you show up you get paid back in memories that you don’t have to file and that never fall in value like my IRA did last week. When you show up it’s the best there is.

Another daughter of our hearts has been ushered unequivocally into the rapids that lead to grownup. She knows she has friends shooting the rapids with her. And we adults, a lusty band of imperfect but fabulous Characters got to bask in the unseasonably warm fall sunshine and the love and the tolerance of one another before we were back, after 9 straight hours of interstate driving, to the piles of laundry, the bills, the car body estimate, and the soul deadening day gig……I learned I have a friend I can road trip with, and that’s a deal you can take to the life bank.

May you have many opportunities to show up.

Holidays

2008-02-07T09:30:00.000-06:00

My children have been out of school for two snow days so far, a day when the furnace at school blew up and before this shortest of months ends, they will be out for a conference day, for a presidents day and for mid-winter break???? In the spirit of gratefulness, I will consider each and every one of these days-at-home a Holiday, and you can never have enough of those.
We are a family of many holidays, because life is simply too short not to celebrate.
If a month has a decided lack of ready made days of remarkableness,
We make them up.
This week alone, we have Super Bowl Sunday, Mardi Gras and Chinese New Year
And a Snow Day!!!
A bumper crop I would say.
All requiring Special Foods, ritual activities and traditions To Be Followed.
On Super Bowl Sunday, you must eat specially selected junk foods,
And leave the room during the Game not the Commercials.
Mardi Gras sees the consumption of small crustaceans and the wearing of heaping quantities of beads.
Chinese New Year is firecrackers and dim sum and a hold in the hand dragon.
Snow days necessitate the building of a snowman, hot chocolate and the parent on duty blowing their stack...
But we have other, less noticeable holidays
Last day of school, and first meal at Superdog,
Custer Street Fair Mojito night
And The Most Fireflies in one evening Night.
There is the Renaissance Dinner which is celebrated on a cold winter night when you think Spring will never ever come and you are bored out of your mind
And there is the end of camp season barbecue.
We gather with people we like,
We celebrate.

Recession

2008-02-04T14:16:00.000-06:00

Like most who are feeling the pain of this economy, we did not go broke. We did not experience some tragic catastrophe that radically changed our class and income level in a short time span, no, we are ever so slowly sliding down the ladder of comfortable, and O.K., to struggling, almost without noticing the descent. My husband's business partner stole some money, the lawsuit began gnawing at our lifestyle. My salary stopped keeping pace with inflation, the tax reassessment was stunningly larger than anticipated. Technology reorganized our business and made expensive capital improvements essential with little steady work in sight. Insurance costs and deductibles soared. Gas prices, heating costs, the cost of a gallon of milk all increased. I cut back, let the sitter and the cleaning lady go, stopped getting milk delivered. We gave up meat and then gave up organic food. I stopped buying new and began to troll the half price days at the thrift stores. Kids lessons petered out. I have to say, our lack of consumption is making me very Green. I am forced to be incredibly creative. My family and I have to work together as never before. We work harder and wait for the wind to change.
I know that discretionary income allows you to solve problems--it would be so nice to buy dinner ready made instead of facing the same 4 ingredients which everyone has already told me they hate. In a country where the Have A Lots flaunt it daily in every media there does not seem to be any sort of benefit to being a Have Enough. I doubt I am the citizen all these adverts are geared to. I am just trying to get by...

Rule of One Thing

2008-02-01T16:55:00.000-06:00

someone reminded me about my rule of one thing, for those snowdays when you are trapped in a house with a bunch of kids and all hope of getting your list done flies out the window (or lies buried under a stack of soggy snowpants)

The Rule of One Thing

About 14 years ago, in the midst of the biggest theatrical project of my life, a commissioned from scratch look at the Don Juan myth from the woman’s perspective, a musical written by the actresses, I had my first child. No problem. I thought I would bring the baby to rehearsals. I thought she would grow up with my dance company. Nobody told me about colic. Nobody mentioned that leaking breast milk down the front of your opening night cocktail dress is totally uncool.

Nobody told me toddlers chew on theatrical electrical cording and don’t want to sit through mama’s rehearsals. Nobody told me how much a new person is a totally new person completely uninterested in following my agenda.

That baby is a womangirl now, and nobody told me that in the garden of children I would end up with an orchid, not a daisy, and that she would be dragging me to Berlin in the middle of winter to support her career as a film maker. And silly me, I gave birth to two more of these marvelous martians and I am still figuring out what planet I am on and trying to learn to breathe the air here and figure out the languages and customs.

I have been trying to figure out for the last 14 years who the heck I am today, this minute, because that’s about all the coherence I ever get—one cotton picking minute. It seems like just about every day is a big life transition: first tooth, first day of school, first bully, first date…Its all so much. And I will tell you the one thing that helps me when it starts to be toooo much. It’s the rule of One Thing. All you have to do today is one thing. Pick it. It could be making the holiday cookies for all the teachers. It could be the laundry. It could be sitting and sipping the coffee instead of losing the cup until its cold or worse, moldy. (Today its getting the plumber to come out again because if I have to go one more day having to empty a bucket every time someone flushes the toilet, I am going to go insane) Caress and love that One Thing. Revel and enjoy your One Thing. Make sure sometimes the One Thing is getting together with a friend (check, did that Friday) and sometimes its reading a great book, (check, did that on November 22). And try to make most of your One Things just to be with this person you brought into the world. And realize that someday the house will be too quiet and it will stay too clean, but by then you will be too old and tired to care….

Having children is a form of surfing. You have paddled out to the Big Wave. You cannot control it. You cannot hang on to it. You can only ride it until it passes you by and spends itself upon a distant shore. It will wash over you and set you spinning. You will learn to surf the crest of it. Cowabunga!

May you have a lovely one thing today

winter blues

2008-02-01T15:02:00.000-06:00

My inner curmudgeon
Has scuttled out
Of his
Dark
Hole.
Into the grey light of every day
And is flagrantly living in the open.
Drawn forth by
the Bleakness and
Interminability of
this winter.
My heart chills,
My mind dulls,
Ice Crystals form on my better judgement.
Talons of misery
Lock on
To vital organs like hope.
Crankiness flows in every vein.
I speak in snarls and moans.
A permanent frown anchors my jaw.

My inner curmudgeon
Has eaten, buried or bludgeoned
My ever hopeful self
My sunshine self
My wish I was again self.
I am a crusted black splattered snowdrift.

The kids are out of school AGAIN because no one can get anywhere. It took well over an hour to get dug out enough to get to work (my job knows no SNOW days). I am so far behind I can see my own butt running backwards. I am soooo over winter now.